Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.

by Various

There was one among those early martyrs, a beautiful young maiden, named Giustina, whose life and death were full of such heroic loveliness that in later times a mighty church was raised in her honor near the spot of the sacrifice. The bones of all her fellow-martyrs were collected and buried in a vault within the edifice. It is a great gray pile, cold and solemn and austere, that rises dark behind the brilliant groups of the fair. On either side of the great staircase crouches a stone monster, some mysterious symbol of the early faith. Tradition gives them the names of the paladins Roland and Oliver. The one clasps the figure of a crusader between its mighty paws—the other, some mystical four-footed creature. They look down upon the merry crowds with solemn unwinking gaze, large-eyed and mysterious. They seem to put the old riddle of the Sphinx to the traveller who pauses by their side to watch the surging waves of human life that beat against the broad stairway of the church. The seal of the centuries is on their broad brows. They have looked down upon battle and tournament, upon success and defeat, upon life and death.

The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic Orlando or Gerusalemme, with undertones of mirth and satire. There the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse, towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when the Prato echoed with the noise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and the terrible Visconti of Milan—all have left the traces of their iron tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes, and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues, and the boys lie on the grass and play at morra or sit for hours with their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups.

SANTA GIUSTINA.

Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the Carraras. The old Italian chronicles are written with such sublime and pathetic simplicity that human life after centuries rises up before us with all its warm joys and sorrows, delights and agonies. We see him first, this gallant Francesco, as a youth returning home in triumph from a victory over the Scaligeri of Verona, welcomed by his old father, the lord of Padua, there on the Prato, amidst the rejoicings of the people. Then we see how, when Padua had fallen into the hands of the Visconti, the old Francesco was kept a prisoner at Monza. His son, Francesco II., was also held in bondage by the Milanese, but his proud heart revolted at the thought of his slavery, and he compassionated the sufferings of his country, for the Visconti were hard, stern rulers. He asked permission of the Visconti to reside in Asti, which lay near the frontier of the Milanese territory. A little later he quitted the town, disguised as a pilgrim and accompanied by his wife and two servants, under pretext of visiting the shrine of Sant' Antonio at Vienne in France. The emissaries of the Visconti follow him to Avignon, where he treats with the pope in person and by letter with other influential personages. Having obtained promises of assistance, he returns to Italy by way of the coast. Moneyless, friendless, dreading arrest at every step, burdened with a sick wife, Francesco knocks at the gate of Genoa. The haughty city favors the Visconti, will have nothing to do with the wanderer, and threatens him with the dungeons of the ducal palace. So they follow the coast down to Pisa, the wife almost dead with fatigue and privation, for they are often obliged to walk all day, and no peasant is bold enough to offer them assistance. At last, one of their servants, by much diplomacy, procures a miserable nag and a shaky market-wagon filled with straw, and in this state the outcast rulers of Padua drive up to the gates of Pisa. They are refused admittance, and wander sorrowfully on. Outside the town they chance upon a deserted hovel. How these princes praise God for his goodness, for now Madonna Taddea can have a night's rest on the straw in the corner! One of the servants steals back to the town and bribes a shopkeeper to sell him bread and meat and wine. They build a fire and warm their poor weatherbeaten limbs, and are right merry in a desperate, reckless way. With the morrow they take up their march, and at last reach a friendly city, where the wife rejoins her children. Francesco is provided with men and arms to enable him to attack his native town, which is ready to welcome him back. He assaults the city one midnight, surprises the Milanese, is welcomed by the Paduans with the old shout, "Viva il Carro!" and at dawn is encamped in triumph upon the Prato. He ruled for a long time wisely and well, for he had known the discipline of life, and had hungered and thirsted like the lowest of his subjects. How he must have laughed, this stately soldier banqueting in his palace-halls, at the thought of the night when he had been so thankful for that bit of bread and drop of wine snatched from the grudging Pisan! And Madonna Taddea, a blooming matron, surrounded by her children, laughed with the tears in her eyes, and told them how one of their number had come near being born not in a manger like our Lord, but in the open fields.

But a terrible fate hangs over this princely house. Francesco is accused by the Venetians of violating a treaty, and war is declared against him. The flower of the Venetian army, led by the bravest of the Venetian generals, is sent against Padua. There is a long, fierce struggle. In spite of famine and plague, Francesco holds out to the very last, but one night the Venetians scale the walls and build their camp-fires on the Prato. Francesco, with his two sons, Jacopo and Francesco, is loaded with chains and carried to Venice, and lodged in the dungeons of the ducal palace. There is the mockery of a trial in one of those great painted rooms, but there is only one opinion with regard to the sentence that will be pronounced against them. It is a terrible sight, the proclamation of that judgment to the prisoners, nearly blind, wan and half dead in their cells under the canal. When the executioner prepares to read the fatal document one of them rushes at him and throws his stool at his head. When the day of execution comes they embrace one another, and Jacopo writes a letter to his wife, which the tenderness and sorrow of the chronicler have handed down to us, bidding her pray for his soul and love their children. Then they are placed upon wooden chairs in their several dungeons, with their backs toward the door. The executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies, wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.

PRATO DELLA VALLE.

We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades. Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms, stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end by buying a life of Sant' Antonio for the old mother who has stayed at home among the olives, and a clay pipe for the old father taking his holiday rest on the doorstep by her side. They form bright pictures against the open archways of the palaces beyond, through which the young green of the gardens gleams in the sunlight. There is an air of mystery and reserve about these broad gateways which contrasts well with the honest, gaudy street-life under the arcades. One of these palaces may be Baptista's, and within the unwelcome wooers of his daughters may be feasting with him or sauntering arm-in-arm through the young leafage of the garden, flouted by saucy Kate and shunned by sweet Bianca.