A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

The Greatest of the Venetians.

Nothing in all the strange history of Venice interested us so much as the career of Fra Paolo Sarpi, "the greatest of the Venetians," as Dr. Alexander Robertson well calls him in his striking biography of that illustrious thinker and man of action. An ecclesiastic whom Gibbon calls "the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent"; a mathematician of whom Galileo said, "No man in Europe surpasses Master Paolo Sarpi in his knowledge of the science of mathematics"; an anatomist whom Acquapendente, the famous surgeon of Padua, calls "the oracle of this century"; a metaphysician who, as Lord Macaulay says, anticipated "Locke on the Human Understanding"; and a statesman who saved Venice from the domination of the papacy—it is no wonder that Dr. Bedell, chaplain of the English Ambassador to Venice, should have said that he was "holden for a miracle in all manner of knowledge, divine and human." "As a statesman, the great Republic of Venice committed all its interests to his guidance, and he made its history, while he lived, an unbroken series of triumphs; in an age when the papacy lifted high its head, and rode roughshod over the rights of kings and peoples, he forced Pope Paul V., one of the haughtiest of Rome's Pontiffs, to his knees, and so shattered in his hands the weapon of interdict and excommunication that never again has it served the interest of a wearer of the tiara. Constitutional government everywhere owes something to Fra Paolo; and modern Italian history is the outcome and embodiment of the principles he laid down in his voluminous State papers. He was stronger than the papacy, for, in spite of the hatred, persecution and protest of Pope and Curia, he lived and died within the pale of the church, enjoying the esteem and affection of its clergy, performing all his priestly duties, and receiving, as the Senate wrote in its circular announcing his death to the courts of Europe, 'Li santissimi sagramenti con ogni maggior pieta.' And he was stronger than the Republic, for immediately after his death it began to succumb to papal domination, and to totter to its fall."

We visited the Servite Monastery, where he lived, the bridge where he was set upon and stabbed by the Pope's hired assassins, and where his statue now stands, and the grave in the island cemetery of Venice where his body rests at last after all the strange adventures and removals made necessary by the ghoulish malice of his foes.

December 10, 1902.

Bologna, the Fat.

The business activity of Bologna is in sharp contrast with the stagnation and decay of Venice. It is a brisk and handsome city, with well-paved streets, flanked by arcades like those along the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Bologna has an unequalled number of these colonnades. They are so continuous, indeed, and afford such perfect protection from the sun in summer and the rain in winter, that it is more nearly possible to dispense with umbrellas here than in any other city in the world. The greatest of these covered ways is the portico which winds up the mountain just outside the city, by an easy gradation, to the costly church of the Madonna di S. Lucca, which, as its name indicates, possesses an image of the Virgin said to have been the work of Saint Luke. There are no fewer than six hundred and thirty-five arches in this colonnade, and they command lovely views on either side, as one ascends; but the view from the church, at the top of the mountain, caps the climax, combining, as it does, Alps, Appennines, Adriatic, plains and cities. It is from the arches of this long colonnade up the mountain that one gets the best impression of Bologna's towers. They are very numerous, and many of them are out of the perpendicular. In fact, there are more leaning towers here than in any other city in the world. But, unlike "Pisa's leaning miracle," these are not beautiful. They are imposing only in the grouping of a distant view, being nothing but quadrangular masses of ugly brown brick, with no ornaments, no windows, and indeed no known uses, the object for which they were erected being now an insoluble mystery.

Bologna has important manufactures of silk goods, velvet, crape, chemicals, paper, musical instruments, soap and sausages. We made full trial of the last two mentioned commodities, and found them excellent. But Bologna, while vital and modern, is not lacking in the matter of antiquity and literary and historical interest. It boasts the oldest university in the world, founded in 425 A. D. In the thirteenth century it had ten thousand students, and it still has over a thousand. In front of the University stands a statue of Galvani, holding a tablet on which he is exhibiting the famous frog legs. But it is said that "his wife was the real discoverer of galvanism, having laid some frogs, which she was preparing for soup, beside a charged electrical machine; and it was she who observed the convulsion in the frogs which she touched with the scalpel, and communicated the discovery to her husband, who repeated the experiment at the University."

December 15, 1902.

The Flower of Fair Cities.

Florence! "City of fair flowers, and flower of fair cities!" Second only to Rome itself in variety and wealth of historical, artistic and literary interest, home of Dante and Boccacio, Machiavelli and the Medici, Galileo and Amerigo Vespucci, Savonarola and Fra Angelico, Cimabue, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini—what can one do in a letter like this but merely name them and pass on, hoping for a time of larger leisure to say at least a word concerning the most illustrious of them?