The village of Arqua shows Petrarch's tomb, sung, together with its site, by Lord Byron[152]:
"Che fai, che pensi? che pur dietro guardi
Nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai,
Anima sconsolata?"
The poet's country.
All this country, within a diameter of forty leagues, is the native soil of the writers and poets: Livy[153], Virgil[154], Catullus[155], Ariosto[156], Guarini[157], the Strozzis[158], the three Bentivoglios[159], Bembo[160], Bartoli[161], Bojardo[162], Pindemonte[163], Varano[164], Monti[165] and a crowd of other celebrated men owe their birth to this land of the Muses. Tasso himself was of Bergamasque origin[166]. Of the later Italian poets, I have seen only one of the two Pindemontes. I have known neither Cesarotti[167] nor Monti; I should have been happy to meet Pellico and Manzoni, the parting rays of Italian glory.
The Euganean Hills, which I crossed, were gilded by the gold of the setting sun with an agreeable variety of shapes and a great purity of outline: one of those hills resembled the chief pyramid of Sakkarah, when it imprints itself at sunset on the Libyan horizon.
I continued my journey at night through Rovigo; a sheet of mist covered the earth. I did not see the Po, except when crossing at Lagoscuro. The carriage stopped; the postillion summoned the ferry-boat with his bugle. The silence was complete; only, on the other side of the river, the baying of a dog and the distant cascades, with their treble echo, made answer to his horn: the proscenium of Tasso's Elysian empire, which we were about to enter.
A ripple on the water, through the mist and the darkness, announced the coming of the ferry-boat; it glided along the towing-rope fastened to boats at anchor. I reached Ferrara between four and five o'clock, on the morning of the 16th; I alighted at the Three Crowns Hotel: Madame was expected there.
Wednesday 17.