In Verona the very gutters are of white marble. Balustrades, window-sills and hitching posts are all of white or coloured marbles. Verona is luxurious, if not magnificent, and its architecture is marvellously interesting and beautiful, though frequently rising to no great rank.
The great Roman Arena, so admirably preserved, is surrounded by the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The contrast between yesterday and to-day at Verona is everywhere to be remarked. Its old Arena and the Visconti gateway seen by moonlight look as ancient as anything on earth, but the cafés with their tables set out right across the Piazza, with a band playing on a temporary platform, set up on trestles in the middle, and electric trams swishing around the corner, are as modern as Earl’s Court or Coney Island, without however many of their drawbacks.
Verona is a city of marble and coloured stone, of terraces and cypresses and all the Italian accessories which stagecraft has borrowed for its Shakesperean settings. The cypresses planted around the outskirts of Verona are said to be the oldest in Europe, but that is doubtful. They are, some of them, perhaps four hundred years old, but on the shores of the Etang de Berre, in old Provence, is a group of these same trees, less lean, greater of girth and denser of foliage. Surely these must have five hundred years to their credit according to Verona standards.
Verona is one of the cities of celebrated art where the authorities control one’s desire to dig about with a view to discovering buried antiquities, even in one’s own cellar or garden; much less may one sell an old chimney pot or urn.
Recently a Signor and Signora Castello, who owned an ancient house in Via del Seminario, sold the magnificent red marble portals and two balconies without permission from the Government. They were fined two thousand five hundred lire each, and ordered to replace the objects of art.
After a long chase the Verona police discovered the articles in a warehouse where they had been temporarily deposited previous to shipping them abroad.
The balconies are of the same epoch as the famous one said to have been the scene of the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. “American collectors keep off” is the sign the Verona police would probably put up if they dared.
CHAPTER XVII
THROUGH ITALIAN LAKELAND
THE lake region of the north is perhaps the most romantic in all Italy; certainly its memories have much appeal to the sentimentally inclined. Indeed the tourists are so passionately fond of the Italian lakeland that they leave it no “close” season, but are everywhere to be remarked, from Peschiera on the east to Orta on the west. Seemingly they are all honeymoon couples and seek seclusion, and are therefore less offensive than the general run of conducted parties which now “do” the Italian round for a ten pound note from London, or the same thing from New York for a couple of hundred dollars.
It is the fashion to revile the automobilist as a hurried traveller, but he at least gets a sniff of the countryside en route which the others do not.