Every one knows the route; over the Maremma, between the sea and the mountains. Peaks of Carrara clouded to the north; ruins of Ripafratta frowning over the crags; "vines, olives, precipices." At last you see a neat little town, boxed up in four neat walls, with rows of trees on the ramparts and towers looking over the trees; it is just like the mediæval town in the background of a triptych. Silk-mills there are, but not in evidence—at least, so it was twenty years ago.
As we drove up to the gate that afternoon the Customs officers turned out, and we laughed when the coachman shouted: "English family! Nothing to declare!" and the officers bowed, unquestioning. "So much nicer, isn't it?" said Ruskin, "than being bundled about among trucks and all the hideous things they heap round railway stations"; and in a few minutes we were in front of the Hotel Royal of the Universe. Signor Ruskino was expected; family and servants were at the door; everybody shook hands. The cook was busy with the dinner, I think; for when we had seen our rooms—he took the plainest of the tall, partitioned suite with rococo decorations, palatial but tarnished—"First," he said, "I must go and see the cook"; and so away to the kitchen.
He was patient of life's little worries; but he liked a good dinner when it was there. I remember the serviette full of crumbly chestnuts, and the Hermitage—afternoon sun meanwhile beating through half-shut persianes in dusty air, and a peep of greeny-blue hills over the square—Ruskin lifting his glass for a birthday toast. There was a certain damsel, whose own folk called her the Michaelmas goose; he put it more prettily: "Here's to St. Michael, and Dorrie, and All Angels!"
Then he went out to see Ilaria.
She was an early flame of his. He must have seen Ilaria before 1845, but it was in that eventful year he fell in love. Ilaria was, of course, the marble Lady of Lucca; but falling in love is not too strong a word.
The Forty-five in the nineteenth century had its Rebellion almost as full of consequences as the Forty-five of the century before. The raid of Prince Charlie opened up the Highlands, and gave us Ossian and Scott and Romanticism; little else. The raid of John Ruskin, in 1845, for the first time wandering free and working out his own thoughts among the Old Masters and mediæval ruins of Italy, started the whole movement which made British art decorative and philanthropic. There were others helping, but he led the way; and it was in that Forty-five that he "went up the Three Steps and in at the Door."
The passage in which he first described Ilaria is almost hackneyed. "She is lying on a simple couch with a hound at her feet.... The hair is bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is set and quiet; there is that about them which forbids breath; something which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both."
Who or what the lady might have been in the flesh he hardly seems to have cared; at least he never dwelt on the story. She was daughter of a Marquis of Carretto, and wife of Paolo Guinigi, chief of a powerful family in Lucca. In 1405 she died. In 1413 Paolo was building that palace with the tower, now a poor-house, from which he ruled his fellow townsmen with a rod of iron. She never saw the arcaded palace, and the frowning, machicolated tower; she could never have had part or lot in the tyranny of his later rule. We often read in history of a woman keeping within bounds the nascent fierceness of a man who—losing her—let himself go and became the scourge of his world. But in all his pride Paolo remembered the pretty wife, untimely lost.