Where the awe of worship mingles with the throbbing of delight.
The austere grandeur of San Zenone turns the soul inward upon a range of meditations which a Puritan need not disclaim. The nave terminates in one double flight of steps leading up to the second, most modern church, which is raised above the first and terminates in a pointed tribune; and another double flight which leads down to the vast vaulted crypt, with its pillars and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the Ampelopsis quinquefolia, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times: the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand, whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among the rude sculptures of the porch called The Chase of Theodoric: the dogs have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider. Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees the trace of German ideas—at any rate, of Northern thought—everywhere in the mediæval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being extremely unequal in size: the span of the largest is about a hundred and sixty feet. The mass, the irregularity, the strength of these piles, the dark river hurrying below, give the spot a grimness not often found on the sunny side of the Alps. The castle has been altered by many successive hands of course, for the history of Verona, like that of most Italian principalities, is the old story of the house out of which one devil was driven by seven worse ones: to Eccelino succeeded the Delle Scale, soon to become as bad as he, and be driven forth by the Visconti of Milan, who in their turn were expelled by the envious, despotic Venetians; and each as they came and went added and took away something of the beauty and might of the town.
But there is a gayer side to Verona than any which we have yet recalled. It was here that we first made acquaintance with many lively humors of Italian street-life which we had not met with in the more northern cities. Here we first noticed the eternal cooking in the open air, the roasting, frying, frizzling which are for ever going on, the people stopping at every few yards to eat macaroni, chestnuts, and Goodness knows what other nameless messes, until we began to wonder whether anything were cooked and eaten at home. Here too I saw the drollest and most charming bit of harlequinade between a rascal boy and an old woman carrying a heavy vessel of water. He popped out from under an archway and struck her a light tap on the shoulder with a bit of hollow cane: she turned round, but he had flown through an open window. On she trudged, and out he came as lightly as he had gone, and following her on tiptoe tickled the back of her neck with his wand: round she turned again, but he was gone too quickly for my eyes this time. She set down her ewer and stared in every direction, muttering curses: he came running swiftly down an alley, seized the ewer, and with every respectful demonstration of relieving her of the burden darted off with it in another direction. She hobbled after him, raining maledictions: back he came with a pantomime of courteous surprise—What! she did not wish to be assisted?—and set the vessel on a high ledge, whence she had much ado to lift it down. As she did so, splash! half the water was spilled: then her tormentor went through a dumb show of sympathy and sorrow until the crone seemed like to burst with fury. At last he broke into a fit of shrill laughter, the first sound he had uttered, made a macaronic gesture, and capered off with the airiest gambols and antics, like a very devil's kid. A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the fun was over as if we had been at a play.
In one respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large a part of the pleasure of being in Italy, fine weather adds so indescribably there to the beauty of even the most glorious works of man, that to have seen them only under a dull sky is like having seen a human countenance without its smile. Perhaps at another season we should not have thought the streets so melancholy: perhaps even in our admiration we did not pay full justice to
L'eccelsa, graziosa, alma Verona.[A]
Sarah B. Wister.
[A] The lofty, gracious, kindly Verona.