I HAVE recorded the Traveled American girl’s experience in the Venice we mourned at leaving after eight days’ sojourn. In the parlor of the Hôtel Brun, in Bologna, we met the Average Briton, a spinster of linguistic and botanical tastes—artistic too, as presently appeared—who was “stopping overnight,” in the city.
“Where there’s nothing to be seen, me dear,” she asserted to a countrywoman of her own, in our hearing, “unless one has a fondness for sausage. You remarked that they made a course of Bologna sausage at the dinner-table. Ex’tror’nary—was it not? We thought it quite nasty. But Bologna is a filthy old town—not a show-place at all. Nobody stops here unless obliged to do so. We take the early train for Venice. Ah! there is a wealth of art there!”
“Will you walk?” asked Caput of me, so abruptly that the A. B. lifted her eye-glass at him.
The sidewalks are arcades, protected from sun and rain by roofs supported upon arches and pillars. The shops were still open; the pavements alive with strollers and purchasers. A cleanly, wide-awake city it looked to be, even by night, and nowhere that we saw, dull or “filthy.”
“I lose my patience at the contradiction of fools!” ejaculated my escort, unnecessarily, his demeanor having already spoken for him. “That of sinners is a bagatelle compared with it. I will take you to-morrow, first to the University of Bologna, one of the oldest institutions of learning extant. A University founded more than seven hundred and fifty years ago,—if not, as some declare, established by Theodosius in 425, and subsequently restored by Charlemagne. There were often, as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eight, nine, ten thousand students in attendance at once in the various departments, especially in the law-schools taught by the ablest jurists of Europe. In anatomical research and discoveries, the medical department gained almost equal fame. Galvani was a professor here, and from the Bolognese University the knowledge of galvanism spread over the civilized world. You should be proud to know that there were women-professors in this faculty centuries before ‘advanced ideas,’ and the ‘co-education of the sexes,’ became fashionable jargon in America.”
“I have heard of Novella d’Andrea, the Hypatia of the fourteenth century—fabled to have been so beautiful that she was obliged to sit behind a screen when she lectured.”
“Upon Canon Law! The story is true. Inerius introduced here the study of Roman law, and Novella was its able and eloquent expounder. Laura Bassi received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University about 1700. She was Professor of Mathematics and Physical Science. Madame Manzolini, in the same century, taught Anatomy. Clotilda Tambroni, Professor of Greek, died in 1817. The character of the branches studied and taught by them is the most remarkable thing. Belles-lettres and modern languages would seem more natural.
“Bologna has produced nothing worthy of note except sausages! Yet the king of linguists, Mezzofanti, was, likewise, a professor in this University. Eight popes were born in Bologna, Benedict XIV. among them, and other men far more eminent in their day and in ours, such as Manfredi and Aldobrandini. In the Bolognese Accademia delle Belle Arti are the very best paintings of a school that owes its name to the city. Had that woman ever heard of Francesca Francia, Guido Reni, Domenichino, or the three Caracci? Or, of the museum of Etruscan curiosities in the University Buildings? Of the two Leaning Towers of Bologna? Or, the Campo Santo? Sausage, forsooth! I hate a fool!”
“So did Mr. F’s aunt!” said I, at this climax. We both laughed, and the Average Briton was dismissed for pleasanter topics.
I was almost afraid, after this philippic, to hint that the Leaning Towers, seen by the morrow’s light, were unfortunately like two overgrown factory chimneys, canting tipsily to one side. They are of grimy brick, devoid of ornament, and seven hundred and seventy years old. Ugly, unfinished and useless, they impart a rakish, dissipated air to an otherwise respectable quarter. The junior of the twain, and the shorter, by one hundred and thirty-four feet, exceeds the greater in obliquity. A century since, its inclination was eight feet southward, three feet eastward, and it is said to have persisted in its downward tendency during that hundred years. Its taller mate leans but three feet out of the perpendicular.