Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup—a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.
The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This Theatrum orbis miraculum was built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand spectators; at a later fête it held only ten thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium.
DUCAL MANTUA.
In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge:—
Manto was she: through many lands she went
Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
A little. When from life her father passed,
And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
Long time about the world the daughter cast.
Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
Benaco called....
And Peschiera in strong harness sits
To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
There all the gathered waters outward flow
That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
And down through, pastures green a river go.
As far as to Governo, where, its quest
Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
But far it has not sought before a plain
It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
And lived, and left her empty body there.
Then the sparse people that were scattered near
Gathered upon that island, everywhere
Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
They built their city above the witch's grave,
And for her sake that first made dwelling there
The name of Mantua to their city gave.
To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures,—"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."