Milan’s hotels are of all sorts and conditions, but with a decided tendency towards the good, as is fitting in so opulent a country. Bertolini’s Hotel Europe takes a high rank, at corresponding charges, as for instance four francs for a “box” for your automobile. The Touring Club Italiano endorses the Albergo del Cervo, where you pay nothing for garage and may eat as bountifully as you will of things Italian, real Italian, at from two to three francs a meal. One of the most amusing things to do in Milan is to lunch or dine in one of the great glass covered galleries near the cathedral, and one feasts well indeed for the matter of four francs, with another couple of francs for a bottle of Asti. These great restaurants of the galleries may lack a certain aspect of the next-to-the-soil Italian restaurants, but they do show a phase of another class of Italian life and here “Young Italy” may be seen taking his midday meal and ordering English or German beer or Scotch or American whiskey. He shuns the Italian items on the bill of fare and orders only exotics. You on the contrary will do the reverse.
Pavia, thirty odd kilometres south of Milan, was ever a rival of the greater city of to-day. Pavia is a tourist point, but only because it is on the direct road from Milan.
Pavia was the Lombard capital from 572 to 774. Its old walls and ramparts remain, in part, to-day and the whole aspect of the town is one of a certain mediævalism which comports little with the modernity of its neighbour, Milan, which has so far outgrown its little brother.
Pavia’s Certosa, on the road from Milan to Pavia, is its chief architectural splendour. Of that there is no doubt. It is the most gorgeously endowed and most splendid monastery in all the world, founded in 1396 by one of the Visconti as an atonement to his conscience for having murdered his uncle and father-in-law.
A Venetian, Bernardo da Venezia, was probably the architect of the Certosa, and brick work and superimposed marble slabs and tablets all combine in an elegance which marks the Certosa of Pavia as characteristic of the most distinctive Lombard manner of building of its epoch.
Within the city itself still stands the grim Castello, built on the site of the palace of the Lombard kings. The present building, however, was begun in 1460 and completed in 1469. It formed an ample quadrangle, flanked by four towers, two of which alone remain. The inner court was surrounded by a double cloister, or loggia; in the upper one the arches were filled in by the most delicate tracery in brickwork. The whole was crowned by beautiful forked battlements. In the towers were deposited the treasures of literature and art which Gian Galeazzo had collected:—ancient armour; upwards of 1,000 MSS., which Petrarch had assisted in selecting; and many natural curiosities. All these Visconti collections were carried to France in 1499 by Louis XII and nothing was left but the bare walls. One side of the palace or castle was demolished during the siege by Lautrec in 1527; but in other respects it continued perfect, though deserted, till 1796, when it was again put into a state of defence by the French. They took off the roof and covered the vaultings with earth; and when the rains came on in autumn, the weight broke down the vaultings, and ruined a great part of the edifice. It has since been fitted up as a military barracks. The great ruined gateway, once entered by a drawbridge crossing the fosse, is still the most imposing single detail, and the great quadrangle, with its fourteenth century arcades and windows, “a medley of Gothic and Bramantesque,” is striking, although the marble and terra-cotta ornaments are much dilapidated.
François I’s famous mot: “all is lost save honour,” uttered after the eventful battle of Pavia, will go down with that other remark of his: “Oh, God, but thou hast made me pay dear for my crown,” as the two most apropos sayings of Renaissance times.
One has to look carefully “under the walls of Pavia,” to-day for any historical evidence of the fatal day of François I when he lost his “all, save honour.” Du Bellay has painted the picture so well that in spite of the fact that four hundred years have rolled by, it seems unlikely that even the most superficial traveller should not find some historic stones upon which to build his suppositions.
Pavia’s great University flowered in 1362, and owes much to the generous impulses of Galeas II, who founded its chairs of civic and canonical law, medicine, physics and logic. Galeas II was a great educator, but he was versatile, for he invented a system of torture which would keep a political prisoner alive for forty days and yet kill him at the end of forty-one.
If one returns to Milan via the Bridge of Lodi he will have made a hundred kilometre round of classic Lombard scenery. It possesses no elements of topographic grandeur but is rich and prosperous looking, and replete with historic memory, every kilometre of it.