Pictures
from
Italy
by
Charles Dickens
3
Charles Dickens
Pictures From Italy
by
Charles Dickens
THE READER’S PASSPORT
IF THE READERS OF THIS VOLUME will be so kind as to take
their credentials for the different places which are the sub-
ject of its author’s reminiscences, from the Author himself,
perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably,
and with a better understanding of what they are to expect.
Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many
means of studying the history of that interesting country,
and the innumerable associations entwined about it. I make
but little reference to that stock of information; not at all
regarding it as a necessary consequence of my having had
recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should
reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my
readers.
Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave ex-
amination into the government or misgovernment of any
portion of the country. No visitor of that beautiful land can
fail to have a strong conviction on the subject; but as I chose
when residing there, a Foreigner, to abstain from the discus-
sion of any such questions with any order of Italians, so I
would rather not enter on the inquiry now. During my twelve
months’ occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found that
authorities constitutionally jealous were distrustful of me;
and I should be sorry to give them occasion to regret their
free courtesy, either to myself or any of my countrymen.
There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all
Italy, but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed
paper devoted to dissertations on it. I do not, therefore,
though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expa-
tiate at any length on famous Pictures and Statues.
This Book is a series of faint reflections—mere shadows
in the water—of places to which the imaginations of most
people are attracted in a greater or less degree, on which
mine had dwelt for years, and which have some interest for
all. The greater part of the descriptions were written on the
4
Pictures from Italy
spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters. I
do not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any de-
fects they may present, for it would be none; but as a guar-
antee to the Reader that they were at least penned in the
fulness of the subject, and with the liveliest impressions of
novelty and freshness.
If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader
will suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in
the midst of the objects of which they treat, and will like
them none the worse for having such influences of the coun-
try upon them.
I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors
of the Roman Catholic faith, on account of anything con-
tained in these pages. I have done my best, in one of my
former productions, to do justice to them; and I trust, in
this, they will do justice to me. When I mention any exhibi-
tion that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not
seek to connect it, or recognise it as necessarily connected
with, any essentials of their creed. When I treat of the cer-
emonies of the Holy Week, I merely treat of their effect, and
do not challenge the good and learned Dr. Wiseman’s inter-
pretation of their meaning. When I hint a dislike of nunner-
ies for young girls who abjure the world before they have
ever proved or known it; or doubt the ex officio sanctity of all
Priests and Friars; I do no more than many conscientious
Catholics both abroad and at home.
I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and
would fain hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so
roughly, as to mar the shadows. I could never desire to be on
better terms with all my friends than now, when distant
mountains rise, once more, in my path. For I need not hesi-
tate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake I made,
not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between myself
and my readers, and departing for a moment from my old
pursuits, I am about to resume them, joyfully, in Switzer-
land; where during another year of absence, I can at once
work out the themes I have now in my mind, without inter-
ruption: and while I keep my English audience within speak-
ing distance, extend my knowledge of a noble country, inex-
pressibly attractive to me.
This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would
be a great pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means,
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Charles Dickens
to compare impressions with some among the multitudes
who will hereafter visit the scenes described with interest
and delight.
And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my reader’s
portrait, which I hope may be thus supposititiously traced
for either sex:
Complexion Fair.
Eyes Very cheerful.
Nose Not supercilious.
Mouth Smiling.
Visage Beaming.
General Expression Extremely agreeable.
CHAPTER I
GOING THROUGH FRANCE
ON A FINE SUNDAY MORNING in the Midsummer time and
weather of eighteen hundred and forty-four, it was, my good
friend, when—don’t be alarmed; not when two travellers
might have been observed slowly making their way over that
picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter
of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained—but when an
English travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh
from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave
Square, London, was observed (by a very small French sol-
dier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the gate of the
Hotel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.
I am no more bound to explain why the English family
travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting
for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week,
than I am to assign a reason for all the little men in France
being soldiers, and all the big men postilions; which is the
invariable rule. But, they had some sort of reason for what
they did, I have no doubt; and their reason for being there at
all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair
Genoa for a year; and that the head of the family purposed,
in that space of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless
humour carried him.
And it would have been small comfort to me to have ex-
plained to the population of Paris generally, that I was that
Head and Chief; and not the radiant embodiment of good
6
Pictures from Italy
humour who sat beside me in the person of a French Cou-
rier—best of servants and most beaming of men! Truth to
say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in
the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no
account at all.
There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris—as
we rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf—
to reproach us for our Sunday travelling. The wine-shops
(every second house) were driving a roaring trade; awnings
were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging, outside the
cafes, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking of cool
liquids, later in the day; shoe-blacks were busy on the bridges;
shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro; the
narrow, up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River, were so
many dense perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured
night-caps, tobacco-pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy
heads of hair; nothing at that hour denoted a day of rest,
unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family
pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab; or
of some contemplative holiday-maker in the freest and easi-
est dishabille, leaning out of a low garret window, watching
the drying of his newly polished shoes on the little parapet
outside (if a gentleman), or the airing of her stockings in the
sun (if a lady), with calm anticipation.
Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pave-
ment which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling
towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough. To
Sens. To Avallon. To Chalons. A sketch of one day’s pro-
ceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is.
We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very
long whip, and drives his team, something like the Courier
of Saint Petersburgh in the circle at Astley’s or Franconi’s:
only he sits his own horse instead of standing on him. The
immense jack-boots worn by these postilions, are sometimes
a century or two old; and are so ludicrously disproportion-
ate to the wearer’s foot, that the spur, which is put where his
own heel comes, is generally halfway up the leg of the boots.
The man often comes out of the stable-yard, with his whip
in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out, in both hands,
one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by the
side of his horse, with great gravity, until everything is ready.
When it is—and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it!—
7
Charles Dickens
he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them
by a couple of friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed
by the labours of innumerable pigeons in the stables; makes
all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his whip like a mad-
man; shouts ‘En route—Hi!’ and away we go. He is sure to
have a contest with his horse before we have gone very far;
and then he calls him a Thief, and a Brigand, and a Pig, and
what not; and beats him about the head as if he were made
of wood.
There is little more than one variety in the appearance of
the country, for the first two days. From a dreary plain, to an
interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a
dreary plain again. Plenty of vines there are in the open fields,
but of a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but
about straight sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, every-
where; but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer
children than I ever encountered. I don’t believe we saw a
hundred children between Paris and Chalons. Queer old
towns, draw-bridged and walled: with odd little towers at
the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask
on, and were staring down into the moat; other strange little
towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and in farm-
yards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof, and
never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all
sorts; sometimes an hotel de ville, sometimes a guard-house,
sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank
garden, prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extin-
guisher-topped turrets, and blink-eyed little casements; are
the standard objects, repeated over and over again. Some-
times we pass a village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging
to it, and a perfect town of out-houses; and painted over the
gateway, ‘Stabling for Sixty Horses;’ as indeed there might
be stabling for sixty score, were there any horses to be stabled
there, or anybody resting there, or anything stirring about
the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the wine inside:
which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with every-
thing else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though
always so old as to be dropping to pieces. And all day long,
strange little narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bring-
ing cheese from Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the
whole line, of one man, or even boy—and he very often
asleep in the foremost cart—come jingling past: the horses
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Pictures from Italy
drowsily ringing the bells upon their harness, and looking as
if they thought (no doubt they do) their great blue woolly
furniture, of immense weight and thickness, with a pair of
grotesque horns growing out of the collar, very much too
warm for the Midsummer weather.
Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with
the dusty outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the in-
sides in white nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof,
nodding and shaking, like an idiot’s head; and its Young-
France passengers staring out of window, with beards down
to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their
warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National
grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passen-
gers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of
sight in no time. Steady old Cures come jolting past, now
and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches
as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle
about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they
feed, or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more
laborious kind, or representing real shepherdesses with their
flocks—to obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and its
followers, in any country, it is only necessary to take any
pastoral poem, or picture, and imagine to yourself whatever
is most exquisitely and widely unlike the descriptions therein
contained.
You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you
generally do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six
bells upon the horses—twenty-four apiece—have been ring-
ing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so; and it has
become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of busi-
ness; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner
you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the
long avenue of trees through which you are travelling, the
first indication of a town appears, in the shape of some strag-
gling cottages: and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over
a horribly uneven pavement. As if the equipage were a great
firework, and the mere sight of a smoking cottage chimney
had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and splutter, as if
the very devil were in it. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Crack-
crack-crack. Crick-crack. Crick-crack. Helo! Hola! Vite!
Voleur! Brigand! Hi hi hi! En r-r-r-r-r-route! Whip, wheels,
driver, stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo!
9
Charles Dickens
hola! harite pour l’amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack;
crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack;
round the corner, up the narrow street, down the paved hill
on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump; jolt, jog, crick,
crick, crick; crack, crack, crack; into the shop-windows on
the left-hand side of the street, preliminary to a sweeping
turn into the wooden archway on the right; rumble, rumble,
rumble; clatter, clatter, clatter; crick, crick, crick; and here
we are in the yard of the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or; used up, gone
out, smoking, spent, exhausted; but sometimes making a
false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming of it—like a
firework to the last!
The landlady of the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the
landlord of the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the femme
de chambre of the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and a gentle-
man in a glazed cap, with a red beard like a bosom friend,
who is staying at the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or, is here; and Mon-
sieur le Cure is walking up and down in a corner of the yard
by himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black
gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella
in the other; and everybody, except Monsieur le Cure, is
open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening of the car-
riage-door. The landlord of the Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or, dotes to
that extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his
coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and
boot-heels as he descends. ‘My Courier! My brave Courier!
My friend! My brother!’ The landlady loves him, the femme
de chambre blesses him, the garcon worships him. The Cou-
rier asks if his letter has been received? It has, it has. Are the
rooms prepared? They are, they are. The best rooms for my
noble Courier. The rooms of state for my gallant Courier;
the whole house is at the service of my best of friends! He
keeps his hand upon the carriage-door, and asks some other
question to enhance the expectation. He carries a green leath-
ern purse outside his coat, suspended by a belt. The idlers
look at it; one touches it. It is full of five-franc pieces. Mur-
murs of admiration are heard among the boys. The landlord
falls upon the Courier’s neck, and folds him to his breast.
He is so much fatter than he was, he says! He looks so rosy
and so well!
The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of
the family gets out. Ah sweet lady! Beautiful lady! The sister
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Pictures from Italy
of the lady of the family gets out. Great Heaven, Ma’amselle
is charming! First little boy gets out. Ah, what a beautiful
little boy! First little girl gets out. Oh, but this is an enchant-
ing child! Second little girl gets out. The landlady, yielding
to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches her up
in her arms! Second little boy gets out. Oh, the sweet boy!
Oh, the tender little family! The baby is handed out. An-
gelic baby! The baby has topped everything. All the rapture
is expended on the baby! Then the two nurses tumble out;
and the enthusiasm swelling into madness, the whole family
are swept up-stairs as on a cloud; while the idlers press about
the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch
it. For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so
many people. It is a legacy to leave one’s children.
The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for
the night, which is a great rambling chamber, with four or
five beds in it: through a dark passage, up two steps, down
four, past a pump, across a balcony, and next door to the
stable. The other sleeping apartments are large and lofty;
each with two small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like the win-
dows, with red and white drapery. The sitting-room is fa-
mous. Dinner is already laid in it for three; and the napkins
are folded in cocked-hat fashion. The floors are of red tile.
There are no carpets, and not much furniture to speak of;
but there is abundance of looking-glass, and there are large
vases under glass shades, filled with artificial flowers; and
there are plenty of clocks. The whole party are in motion.
The brave Courier, in particular, is everywhere: looking af-
ter the beds, having wine poured down his throat by his
dear brother the landlord, and picking up green cucumbers—
always cucumbers; Heaven knows where he gets them—with
which he walks about, one in each hand, like truncheons.
Dinner is announced. There is very thin soup; there are
very large loaves—one apiece; a fish; four dishes afterwards;
some poultry afterwards; a dessert afterwards; and no lack of
wine. There is not much in the dishes; but they are very
good, and always ready instantly. When it is nearly dark, the
brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers, sliced up in
the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another of
vinegar, emerges from his retreat below, and proposes a visit
to the Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon
the court-yard of the inn. Off we go; and very solemn and
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Charles Dickens
grand it is, in the dim light: so dim at last, that the polite,
old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble little bit of candle
in his hand, to grope among the tombs with—and looks
among the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is search-
ing for his own.
Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior ser-
vants of the inn are supping in the open air, at a great table;
the dish, a stew of meat and vegetables, smoking hot, and
served in the iron cauldron it was boiled in. They have a
pitcher of thin wine, and are very merry; merrier than the
gentleman with the red beard, who is playing billiards in the
light room on the left of the yard, where shadows, with cues
in their hands, and cigars in their mouths, cross and recross
the window, constantly. Still the thin Cure walks up and
down alone, with his book and umbrella. And there he walks,
and there the billiard-balls rattle, long after we are fast asleep.
We are astir at six next morning. It is a delightful day,
shaming yesterday’s mud upon the carriage, if anything could
shame a carriage, in a land where carriages are never cleaned.
Everybody is brisk; and as we finish breakfast, the horses
come jingling into the yard from the Post-house. Everything
taken out of the carriage is put back again. The brave Cou-
rier announces that all is ready, after walking into every room,
and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing is left
behind. Everybody gets in. Everybody connected with the
Hotel de l’Ecu d’Or is again enchanted. The brave Courier
runs into the house for a parcel containing cold fowl, sliced
ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands it into the coach;
and runs back again.
What has he got in his hand now? More cucumbers? No.
A long strip of paper. It’s the bill.
The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning: one
supporting the purse: another, a mighty good sort of leath-
ern bottle, filled to the throat with the best light Bordeaux
wine in the house. He never pays the bill till this bottle is
full. Then he disputes it.
He disputes it now, violently. He is still the landlord’s
brother, but by another father or mother. He is not so nearly
related to him as he was last night. The landlord scratches
his head. The brave Courier points to certain figures in the
bill, and intimates that if they remain there, the Hotel de
l’Ecu d’Or is thenceforth and for ever an hotel de l’Ecu de
12
Pictures from Italy
cuivre. The landlord goes into a little counting-house. The
brave Courier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand,
and talks more rapidly than ever. The landlord takes the pen.
The Courier smiles. The landlord makes an alteration. The
Courier cuts a joke. The landlord is affectionate, but not
weakly so. He bears it like a man. He shakes hands with his
brave brother, but he don’t hug him. Still, he loves his brother;
for he knows that he will be returning that way, one of these
fine days, with another family, and he foresees that his heart
will yearn towards him again. The brave Courier traverses
all round the carriage once, looks at the drag, inspects the
wheels, jumps up, gives the word, and away we go!
It is market morning. The market is held in the little square
outside in front of the cathedral. It is crowded with men and
women, in blue, in red, in green, in white; with canvassed
stalls; and fluttering merchandise. The country people are
grouped about, with their clean baskets before them. Here,
the lace-sellers; there, the butter and egg-sellers; there, the
fruit-sellers; there, the shoe-makers. The whole place looks
as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the curtain
had just run up, for a picturesque ballet. And there is the
cathedral to boot: scene-like: all grim, and swarthy, and
mouldering, and cold: just splashing the pavement in one
place with faint purple drops, as the morning sun, entering
by a little window on the eastern side, struggles through some
stained glass panes, on the western.
In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little
ragged kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of
the town; and are again upon the road.
CHAPTER II
LYONS, THE RHONE,
AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
CHALONIS IS A FAIR RESTING-PLACE, in right of its good inn on
the bank of the river, and the little steamboats, gay with
green and red paint, that come and go upon it: which make
up a pleasant and refreshing scene, after the dusty roads.
But, unless you would like to dwell on an enormous plain,
with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in the
distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and unless
you would like to pass your life without the possibility of
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Charles Dickens
going up-hill, or going up anything but stairs: you would
hardly approve of Chalons as a place of residence.
You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons:
which you may reach, if you will, in one of the before-men-
tioned steamboats, in eight hours.
What a city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling, at certain
unlucky times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds! Here
is a whole town that is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky;
having been first caught up, like other stones that tumble
down from that region, out of fens and barren places, dismal
to behold! The two great streets through which the two great
rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name is Legion,
were scorching, blistering, and sweltering. The houses, high
and vast, dirty to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly
peopled. All up the hills that hem the city in, these houses
swarm; and the mites inside were lolling out of the win-
dows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and crawl-
ing in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp
upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge
piles and bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or
rather not dying till their time should come, in an exhausted
receiver. Every manufacturing town, melted into one, would
hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it presented itself to
me: for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities of a for-
eign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries
of a manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would go
some miles out of my way to avoid encountering again.
In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of
the day: we went to see the Cathedral, where divers old
women, and a few dogs, were engaged in contemplation.
There was no difference, in point of cleanliness, between its
stone pavement and that of the streets; and there was a wax
saint, in a little box like a berth aboard ship, with a glass
front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to
say to, on any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey
might be ashamed of. If you would know all about the ar-
chitecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions,
endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr. Murray’s
Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to
him, as I did!
For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the cu-
rious clock in Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small
14
Pictures from Italy
mistake I made, in connection with that piece of mecha-
nism. The keeper of the church was very anxious it should
be shown; partly for the honour of the establishment and
the town; and partly, perhaps, because of his deriving a per-
centage from the additional consideration. However that may
be, it was set in motion, and thereupon a host of little doors
flew open, and innumerable little figures staggered out of
them, and jerked themselves back again, with that special
unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in the gait, which usu-
ally attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work. Mean-
while, the Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and
pointing them out, severally, with a wand. There was a cen-
tre puppet of the Virgin Mary; and close to her, a small pi-
geon-hole, out of which another and a very ill-looking pup-
pet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw accom-
plished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and
banging his little door violently after him. Taking this to be
emblematic of the victory over Sin and Death, and not at all
unwilling to show that I perfectly understood the subject, in
anticipation of the showman, I rashly said, ‘Aha! The Evil
Spirit. To be sure. He is very soon disposed of.’ ‘Pardon,
Monsieur,’ said the Sacristan, with a polite motion of his
hand towards the little door, as if introducing somebody—
’The Angel Gabriel!’
Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down
the Arrowy Rhone, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a
very dirty vessel full of merchandise, and with only three or
four other passengers for our companions: among whom,
the most remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced, garlic-eat-
ing, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red
ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there
to remind himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce,
ties knots in his pocket-handkerchief.
For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the
first indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance. Now,
we were rushing on beside them: sometimes close beside
them: sometimes with an intervening slope, covered with
vineyards. Villages and small towns hanging in mid-air, with
great woods of olives seen through the light open towers of
their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the steep
acclivity behind them; ruined castles perched on every emi-
nence; and scattered houses in the clefts and gullies of the
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Charles Dickens
hills; made it very beautiful. The great height of these, too,
making the buildings look so tiny, that they had all the charm
of elegant models; their excessive whiteness, as contrasted
with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy green
of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of
the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charm-
ing picture. There were ferries out of number, too; bridges;
the famous Pont d’Esprit, with I don’t know how many arches;
towns where memorable wines are made; Vallence, where
Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing at every
winding turn, new beauties into view.
There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge
of Avignon, and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an
under-done-pie-crust, battlemented wall, that never will be
brown, though it bake for centuries.
The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the
brilliant Oleander was in full bloom everywhere. The streets
are old and very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by
awnings stretched from house to house. Bright stuffs and
handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood,
old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring
daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was
very quaint and lively. All this was much set off, too, by the
glimpses one caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of
quiet sleepy court-yards, having stately old houses within, as
silent as tombs. It was all very like one of the descriptions in
the Arabian Nights. The three one-eyed Calenders might
have knocked at any one of those doors till the street rang
again, and the porter who persisted in asking questions—
the man who had the delicious purchases put into his basket
in the morning—might have opened it quite naturally.
After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the
lions. Such a delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north,
as made the walk delightful: though the pavement-stones,
and stones of the walls and houses, were far too hot to have
a hand laid on them comfortably.
We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral:
where Mass was performing to an auditory very like that of
Lyons, namely, several old women, a baby, and a very self-
possessed dog, who had marked out for himself a little course
or platform for exercise, beginning at the altar-rails and end-
ing at the door, up and down which constitutional walk he
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Pictures from Italy
trotted, during the service, as methodically and calmly, as
any old gentleman out of doors.
It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are
sadly defaced by time and damp weather; but the sun was
shining in, splendidly, through the red curtains of the win-
dows, and glittering on the altar furniture; and it looked as
bright and cheerful as need be.
Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which
was being executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil,
I was led to observe more closely than I might otherwise have
done, a great number of votive offerings with which the walls
of the different chapels were profusely hung. I will not say
decorated, for they were very roughly and comically got up;
most likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in
that way. They were all little pictures: each representing some
sickness or calamity from which the person placing it there,
had escaped, through the interposition of his or her patron
saint, or of the Madonna; and I may refer to them as good
specimens of the class generally. They are abundant in Italy.
In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of
perspective, they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books;
but they were oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of
the Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours. In
one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which
a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch,
to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked
up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure
at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of wash-
ing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bed-
stead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her
to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the inconve-
nience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had
not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees
in one corner, with their legs sticking out behind them on
the floor, like boot-trees. Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind
of blue divan, promised to restore the patient. In another
case, a lady was in the very act of being run over, immedi-
ately outside the city walls, by a sort of piano-forte van. But
the Madonna was there again. Whether the supernatural
appearance had startled the horse (a bay griffin), or whether
it was invisible to him, I don’t know; but he was galloping
away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or com-
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punction. On every picture ‘Ex voto’ was painted in yellow
capitals in the sky.
Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan
Temples, and are evidently among the many compromises
made between the false religion and the true, when the true
was in its infancy, I could wish that all the other compro-
mises were as harmless. Gratitude and Devotion are Chris-
tian qualities; and a grateful, humble, Christian spirit may
dictate the observance.
Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes,
of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a
noisy barrack: while gloomy suites of state apartments, shut
up and deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the
embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither went there, to see
state rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common jail, though
we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst
the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars, high
up, and watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the
dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.
A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black
eyes,—proof that the world hadn’t conjured down the devil
within her, though it had had between sixty and seventy
years to do it in,—came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which
she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands, and
marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told us,
on the way, that she was a Government Officer ( Concierge
Du Palais a Apostolique ), and had been, for I don’t know
how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to
princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstra-
tors; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant,—
had been born there, if I recollect right,—I needn’t relate.
But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil
I never beheld. She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her
action was violent in the extreme. She never spoke, without
stopping expressly for the purpose. She stamped her feet,
clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes, ham-
mered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now
whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked
as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-
like way with her forefinger, when approaching the remains
of some new horror—looking back and walking stealthily,
and making horrible grimaces—that might alone have quali-
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Pictures from Italy
fied her to walk up and down a sick man’s counterpane, to
the exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.
Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle sol-
diers, we turned off by a gate, which this She-Goblin un-
locked for our admission, and locked again behind us: and
entered a narrow court, rendered narrower by fallen stones
and heaps of rubbish; part of it choking up the mouth of a
ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is
said to have done so) with another castle on the opposite bank
of the river. Close to this court-yard is a dungeon—we stood
within it, in another minute—in the dismal tower Des
Oublettes, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by an iron
chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out
from the sky which now looks down into it. A few steps brought
us to the Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition
were confined for forty-eight hours after their capture, with-
out food or drink, that their constancy might be shaken, even
before they were confronted with their gloomy judges. The
day has not got in there yet. They are still small cells, shut in
by four unyielding, close, hard walls; still profoundly dark;
still massively doored and fastened, as of old.
Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on,
into a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room: once the
chapel of the Holy Office. The place where the tribunal sat,
was plain. The platform might have been removed but yes-
terday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan having
been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition cham-
bers! But it was, and may be traced there yet.
High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering
replies of the accused were heard and noted down. Many of
them had been brought out of the very cell we had just looked
into, so awfully; along the same stone passage. We had trod-
den in their very footsteps.
I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place in-
spires, when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not
her skinny finger, but the handle of a key, upon her lip. She
invites me, with a jerk, to follow her. I do so. She leads me
out into a room adjoining—a rugged room, with a funnel-
shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright day.
I ask her what it is. She folds her arms, leers hideously, and
stares. I ask again. She glances round, to see that all the little
company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws
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Charles Dickens
up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend, ‘La Salle de la Ques-
tion!’
The Chamber of Torture! And the roof was made of that
shape to stifle the victim’s cries! Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us
think of this awhile, in silence. Peace, Goblin! Sit with your
short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of
stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out again.
Minutes! Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock,
when, with her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle
of the chamber, describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel
of heavy blows. Thus it ran round! cries Goblin. Mash, mash,
mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash,
mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs. See the stone trough! says
Goblin. For the water torture! Gurgle, swill, bloat, burst, for
the Redeemer’s honour! Suck the bloody rag, deep down
into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you
draw! And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with
the smaller mysteries of God’s own Image, know us for His
chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount,
elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal:
who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness,
dumbness, madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never
stretched His blessed hand out, but to give relief and ease!
See! cries Goblin. There the furnace was. There they made
the irons red-hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake, on
which the tortured persons hung poised: dangling with their
whole weight from the roof. ‘But;’ and Goblin whispers this;
‘Monsieur has heard of this tower? Yes? Let Monsieur look
down, then!’
A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face
of Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-
door in the wall. Monsieur looks in. Downward to the bot-
tom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower: very
dismal, very dark, very cold. The Executioner of the Inqui-
sition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also,
flung those who were past all further torturing, down here.
‘But look! does Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?’ A
glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin’s keen eye, shows Mon-
sieur—and would without the aid of the directing key—
where they are. ‘What are they?’ ‘Blood!’
In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height
here, sixty persons: men and women (‘and priests,’ says Gob-
20
Pictures from Italy
lin, ‘priests’): were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the
dead, into this dreadful pit, where a quantity of quick-lime
was tumbled down upon their bodies. Those ghastly tokens of
the massacre were soon no more; but while one stone of the
strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon
another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to
see as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.
Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that
the cruel deed should be committed in this place! That a
part of the atrocities and monstrous institutions, which had
been, for scores of years, at work, to change men’s nature,
should in its last service, tempt them with the ready means
of gratifying their furious and beastly rage! Should enable
them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no
worse than a great, solemn, legal establishment, in the height
of its power! No worse! Much better. They used the Tower
of the Forgotten, in the name of Liberty—their liberty; an
earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the Bastile
moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many evi-
dences of its unwholesome bringing-up—but the Inquisi-
tion used it in the name of Heaven.
Goblin’s finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the
Chapel of the Holy Office. She stops at a certain part of the
flooring. Her great effect is at hand. She waits for the rest.
She darts at the brave Courier, who is explaining something;
hits him a sounding rap on the hat with the largest key; and
bids him be silent. She assembles us all, round a little trap-
door in the floor, as round a grave.
‘Voila!’ she darts down at the ring, and flings the door
open with a crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light
weight. ‘Voila les oubliettes! Voila les oubliettes! Subterra-
nean! Frightful! Black! Terrible! Deadly! Les oubliettes de
l’Inquisition!’
My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into
the vaults, where these forgotten creatures, with recollec-
tions of the world outside: of wives, friends, children, broth-
ers: starved to death, and made the stones ring with their
unavailing groans. But, the thrill I felt on seeing the accursed
wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shin-
ing in through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory
and triumph. I felt exalted with the proud delight of living
in these degenerate times, to see it. As if I were the hero of
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some high achievement! The light in the doleful vaults was
typical of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in
God’s name, but which is not yet at its noon! It cannot look
more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a
traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down
the darkness of that Infernal Well.
CHAPTER III
AVIGNON TO GENOA
GOBLIN, HAVING SHOWN Les Oubliettes, felt that her great Coup
was struck. She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon
it with her arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.
When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house,
under the outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little his-
tory of the building. Her cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted
by small windows, sunk in the thick wall—in the softened
light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little counter by
the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household
implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a sober-
looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with
Goblin,) knitting at the door—looked exactly like a picture
by Ostade.
I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of
dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened
from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given me
the assurance. The immense thickness and giddy height of
the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the
great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frown-
ing aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and won-
der. The recollection of its opposite old uses: an impreg-
nable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place
of torture, the court of the Inquisition: at one and the same
time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood: gives
to every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and imparts
new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of little,
however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the dun-
geons. The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of
noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk,
and common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering
from its dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and
something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the sky
22
Pictures from Italy
for the roof of its chambers of cruelty—that was its desola-
tion and defeat! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to
rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the
light in all the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sun-
beams in its secret council-chamber, and its prisons.
Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from
the little history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite
appropriate to itself, connected with its adventures.
‘An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of
Pierre de Lude, the Pope’s legate, seriously insulted some
distinguished ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge,
seized the young man, and horribly mutilated him. For sev-
eral years the legate kept his revenge within his own breast,
but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification at last.
He even made, in the fulness of time, advances towards a
complete reconciliation; and when their apparent sincerity
had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in this pal-
ace, certain families, whole families, whom he sought to ex-
terminate. The utmost gaiety animated the repast; but the
measures of the legate were well taken. When the dessert
was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the an-
nouncement that a strange ambassador solicited an extraor-
dinary audience. The legate, excusing himself, for the mo-
ment, to his guests, retired, followed by his officers. Within
a few minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced
to ashes: the whole of that wing of the building having been
blown into the air with a terrible explosion!’
After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with
churches just now), we left Avignon that afternoon. The heat
being very great, the roads outside the walls were strewn
with people fast asleep in every little slip of shade, and with
lazy groups, half asleep and half awake, who were waiting
until the sun should be low enough to admit of their playing
bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road. The
harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses
were treading out the corn in the fields. We came, at dusk,
upon a wild and hilly country, once famous for brigands;
and travelled slowly up a steep ascent. So we went on, until
eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within
two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.
The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep
the light and heat out, was comfortable and airy next morn-
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Charles Dickens
ing, and the town was very clean; but so hot, and so in-
tensely light, that when I walked out at noon it was like
coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp blue
fire. The air was so very clear, that distant hills and rocky
points appeared within an hour’s walk; while the town im-
mediately at hand—with a kind of blue wind between me
and it—seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing off a
fiery air from the surface.
We left this town towards evening, and took the road to
Marseilles. A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close;
and the vines powdered white. At nearly all the cottage doors,
women were peeling and slicing onions into earthen bowls
for supper. So they had been doing last night all the way
from Avignon. We passed one or two shady dark chateaux,
surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool basins of
water: which were the more refreshing to behold, from the
great scarcity of such residences on the road we had trav-
elled. As we approached Marseilles, the road began to be
covered with holiday people. Outside the public-houses were
parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards, and
(once) dancing. But dust, dust, dust, everywhere. We went
on, through a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with
people; having on our left a dreary slope of land, on which
the country-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always star-
ing white, are jumbled and heaped without the slightest or-
der: backs, fronts, sides, and gables towards all points of the
compass; until, at last, we entered the town.
I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and
foul; and I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and
disagreeable place. But the prospect, from the fortified
heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks
and islands, is most delightful. These heights are a desirable
retreat, for less picturesque reasons—as an escape from a
compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great
harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of
innumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot
weather, is dreadful in the last degree.
There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets;
with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and
shirts of orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps,
great beards, and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed En-
glish hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses. There were the
24
Pictures from Italy
townspeople sitting in clusters on the pavement, or airing
themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up and
down the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were
crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking
up the way, constantly. In the very heart of all this stir and
uproar, was the common madhouse; a low, contracted, mis-
erable building, looking straight upon the street, without
the smallest screen or court-yard; where chattering mad-men
and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at
the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant
into their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry
them, as if they were baited by a pack of dogs.
We were pretty well accommodated at the Hotel du Paradis,
situated in a narrow street of very high houses, with a
hairdresser’s shop opposite, exhibiting in one of its windows
two full-length waxen ladies, twirling round and round:
which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and his
family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pave-
ment outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by,
with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we
went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent
man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs
stretched out before him, and evidently couldn’t bear to have
the shutters put up.
Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of
all nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds:
fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of
merchandise. Taking one of a great number of lively little boats
with gay-striped awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns of
great ships, under tow-ropes and cables, against and among other
boats, and very much too near the sides of vessels that were
faint with oranges, to the Marie Antoinette, a handsome steamer
bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbour. By-
and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy ‘trifle from the Pantechnicon,’
on a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occa-
sion for a prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stu-
pidly alongside; and by five o’clock we were steaming out in the
open sea. The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served
under an awning on deck; the night was calm and clear; the
quiet beauty of the sea and sky unspeakable.
We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along,
within a few miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its
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Charles Dickens
place) nearly all day. We could see Genoa before three; and
watching it as it gradually developed its splendid
amphitheatre, terrace rising above terrace, garden above gar-
den, palace above palace, height upon height, was ample
occupation for us, till we ran into the stately harbour. Hav-
ing been duly astonished, here, by the sight of a few
Cappucini monks, who were watching the fair-weighing of
some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to Albaro, two
miles distant, where we had engaged a house.
The way lay through the main streets, but not through
the Strada Nuova, or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous
streets of palaces. I never in my life was so dismayed! The
wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the un-
accountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Ital-
ian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon
the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more
close than any in St. Giles’s or old Paris; in and out of which,
not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils
and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect ab-
sence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall,
or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before; and
the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly con-
founded me. I fell into a dismal reverie. I am conscious of a
feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins’ shrines
at the street corners—of great numbers of friars, monks,
and soldiers—of vast red curtains, waving in the doorways
of the churches—of always going up hill, and yet seeing ev-
ery other street and passage going higher up—of fruit-stalls,
with fresh lemons and oranges hanging in garlands made of
vine-leaves—of a guard-house, and a drawbridge—and some
gateways—and vendors of iced water, sitting with little trays
upon the margin of the kennel - and this is all the conscious-
ness I had, until I was set down in a rank, dull, weedy court-
yard, attached to a kind of pink jail; and was told I lived
there.
I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have
an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa,
and to look back upon the city with affection as connected
with many hours of happiness and quiet! But these are my
first impressions honestly set down; and how they changed,
I will set down too. At present, let us breathe after this long-
winded journey.
26
Pictures from Italy
CHAPTER IV
GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS of such a place as Albaro, the suburb of
Genoa, where I am now, as my American friends would say,
‘located,’ can hardly fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and
disappointing. It requires a little time and use to overcome the
feeling of depression consequent, at first, on so much ruin and
neglect. Novelty, pleasant to most people, is particularly de-
lightful, I think, to me. I am not easily dispirited when I have
the means of pursuing my own fancies and occupations; and I
believe I have some natural aptitude for accommodating myself
to circumstances. But, as yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes
and corners of the neighbourhood, in a perpetual state of for-
lorn surprise; and returning to my villa: the Villa Bagnerello (it
sounds romantic, but Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by):
have sufficient occupation in pondering over my new experi-
ences, and comparing them, very much to my own amuse-
ment, with my expectations, until I wander out again.
The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expres-
sive name for the mansion: is in one of the most splendid
situations imaginable. The noble bay of Genoa, with the
deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched out near at hand;
monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted all
about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds,
and with strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides,
are close upon the left; and in front, stretching from the
walls of the house, down to a ruined chapel which stands
upon the bold and picturesque rocks on the sea-shore, are
green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in par-
tial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on
a rough trellis-work across the narrow paths.
This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very nar-
row, that when we arrived at the Custom-house, we found
the people here had taken the measure of the narrowest among
them, and were waiting to apply it to the carriage; which
ceremony was gravely performed in the street, while we all
stood by in breathless suspense. It was found to be a very
tight fit, but just a possibility, and no more—as I am re-
minded every day, by the sight of various large holes which
it punched in the walls on either side as it came along. We
are more fortunate, I am told, than an old lady, who took a
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Charles Dickens
house in these parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in her
carriage in a lane; and as it was impossible to open one of the
doors, she was obliged to submit to the indignity of being
hauled through one of the little front windows, like a harle-
quin.
When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come
to an archway, imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate—
my gate. The rusty old gate has a bell to correspond, which
you ring as long as you like, and which nobody answers, as it
has no connection whatever with the house. But there is a
rusty old knocker, too—very loose, so that it slides round
when you touch it—and if you learn the trick of it, and
knock long enough, somebody comes. The brave Courier
comes, and gives you admittance. You walk into a seedy little
garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens;
cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked
marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with
a vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great
Methodist chapel. This is the Sala. It has five windows and
five doors, and is decorated with pictures which would glad-
den the heart of one of those picture-cleaners in London
who hang up, as a sign, a picture divided, like death and the
lady, at the top of the old ballad: which always leaves you in
a state of uncertainty whether the ingenious professor has
cleaned one half, or dirtied the other. The furniture of this
Sala is a sort of red brocade. All the chairs are immovable,
and the sofa weighs several tons.
On the same floor, and opening out of this same cham-
ber, are dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bed-rooms:
each with a multiplicity of doors and windows. Up-stairs are
divers other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and down-stairs
is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange contriv-
ances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical labora-
tory. There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms,
where the servants in this hot July, may escape from the heat
of the fire, and where the brave Courier plays all sorts of
musical instruments of his own manufacture, all the evening
long. A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim, bare
house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of.
There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the
drawing-room; and under this terrace, and forming one side
of the little garden, is what used to be the stable. It is now a
28
Pictures from Italy
cow-house, and has three cows in it, so that we get new milk
by the bucketful. There is no pasturage near, and they never
go out, but are constantly lying down, and surfeiting them-
selves with vine-leaves—perfect Italian cows enjoying the
Dolce Far’ Niente all day long. They are presided over, and
slept with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son; two
burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and feet, who wear,
each, a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a red sash, with a relic,
or some sacred charm like the bonbon off a twelfth-cake,
hanging round the neck. The old man is very anxious to
convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently.
We sit upon a stone by the door, sometimes in the evening,
like Robinson Crusoe and Friday reversed; and he generally
relates, towards my conversion, an abridgment of the His-
tory of Saint Peter—chiefly, I believe, from the unspeakable
delight he has in his imitation of the cock.
The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you
must keep the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would
drive you mad; and when the sun goes down you must shut
up all the windows, or the mosquitoes would tempt you to
commit suicide. So at this time of the year, you don’t see
much of the prospect within doors. As for the flies, you don’t
mind them. Nor the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose
name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to that
extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily,
drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness. The rats
are kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean cats, who
roam about the garden for that purpose. The lizards, of
course, nobody cares for; they play in the sun, and don’t
bite. The little scorpions are merely curious. The beetles are
rather late, and have not appeared yet. The frogs are com-
pany. There is a preserve of them in the grounds of the next
villa; and after nightfall, one would think that scores upon
scores of women in pattens were going up and down a wet
stone pavement without a moment’s cessation. That is ex-
actly the noise they make.
The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-
shore, was dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the
Baptist. I believe there is a legend that Saint John’s bones
were received there, with various solemnities, when they were
first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses them to this
day. When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are
29
Charles Dickens
brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they
never fail to calm. In consequence of this connection of Saint
John with the city, great numbers of the common people are
christened Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is pro-
nounced in the Genoese patois ‘Batcheetcha,’ like a sneeze.
To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a
Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is
not a little singular and amusing to a stranger.
The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them,
whose walls (outside walls, I mean) are profusely painted
with all sorts of subjects, grim and holy. But time and the
sea-air have nearly obliterated them; and they look like the
entrance to Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day. The court-
yards of these houses are overgrown with grass and weeds;
all sorts of hideous patches cover the bases of the statues, as
if they were afflicted with a cutaneous disorder; the outer
gates are rusty; and the iron bars outside the lower windows
are all tumbling down. Firewood is kept in halls where costly
treasures might be heaped up, mountains high; waterfalls
are dry and choked; fountains, too dull to play, and too lazy
to work, have just enough recollection of their identity, in
their sleep, to make the neighbourhood damp; and the si-
rocco wind is often blowing over all these things for days
together, like a gigantic oven out for a holiday.
Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the Virgin’s
Mother, when the young men of the neighbourhood, having
worn green wreaths of the vine in some procession or other,
bathed in them, by scores. It looked very odd and pretty.
Though I am bound to confess (not knowing of the festa at
that time), that I thought, and was quite satisfied, they wore
them as horses do—to keep the flies off.
Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour
of St. Nazaro. One of the Albaro young men brought two
large bouquets soon after breakfast, and coming up-stairs
into the great Sala, presented them himself. This was a po-
lite way of begging for a contribution towards the expenses
of some music in the Saint’s honour, so we gave him what-
ever it may have been, and his messenger departed: well sat-
isfied. At six o’clock in the evening we went to the church—
close at hand—a very gaudy place, hung all over with fes-
toons and bright draperies, and filled, from the altar to the
main door, with women, all seated. They wear no bonnets
30
Pictures from Italy
here, simply a long white veil—the ‘mezzero;’ and it was the
most gauzy, ethereal-looking audience I ever saw. The young
women are not generally pretty, but they walk remarkably
well, and in their personal carriage and the management of
their veils, display much innate grace and elegance. There were
some men present: not very many: and a few of these were
kneeling about the aisles, while everybody else tumbled over
them. Innumerable tapers were burning in the church; the
bits of silver and tin about the saints (especially in the Virgin’s
necklace) sparkled brilliantly; the priests were seated about
the chief altar; the organ played away, lustily, and a full band
did the like; while a conductor, in a little gallery opposite to
the band, hammered away on the desk before him, with a
scroll; and a tenor, without any voice, sang. The band played
one way, the organ played another, the singer went a third,
and the unfortunate conductor banged and banged, and flour-
ished his scroll on some principle of his own: apparently well
satisfied with the whole performance. I never did hear such a
discordant din. The heat was intense all the time.
The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on
their shoulders (they never put them on), were playing bowls,
and buying sweetmeats, immediately outside the church.
When half-a-dozen of them finished a game, they came into
the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water, knelt on
one knee for an instant, and walked off again to play an-
other game at bowls. They are remarkably expert at this di-
version, and will play in the stony lanes and streets, and on
the most uneven and disastrous ground for such a purpose,
with as much nicety as on a billiard-table. But the most
favourite game is the national one of Mora, which they pur-
sue with surprising ardour, and at which they will stake ev-
erything they possess. It is a destructive kind of gambling,
requiring no accessories but the ten fingers, which are al-
ways—I intend no pun—at hand. Two men play together.
One calls a number—say the extreme one, ten. He marks
what portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or four,
or five fingers; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at
hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many
fingers, as will make the exact balance. Their eyes and hands
become so used to this, and act with such astonishing rapid-
ity, that an uninitiated bystander would find it very diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to follow the progress of the game.
31
Charles Dickens
The initiated, however, of whom there is always an eager
group looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity;
and as they are always ready to champion one side or the
other in case of a dispute, and are frequently divided in their
partisanship, it is often a very noisy proceeding. It is never
the quietest game in the world; for the numbers are always
called in a loud sharp voice, and follow as close upon each
other as they can be counted. On a holiday evening, stand-
ing at a window, or walking in a garden, or passing through
the streets, or sauntering in any quiet place about the town,
you will hear this game in progress in a score of wine-shops
at once; and looking over any vineyard walk, or turning al-
most any corner, will come upon a knot of players in full
cry. It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw
out some particular number oftener than another; and the
vigilance with which two sharp-eyed players will mutually
endeavour to detect this weakness, and adapt their game to
it, is very curious and entertaining. The effect is greatly
heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of
gesture; two men playing for half a farthing with an inten-
sity as all-absorbing as if the stake were life.
Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to
some member of the Brignole family, but just now hired by
a school of Jesuits for their summer quarters. I walked into
its dismantled precincts the other evening about sunset, and
couldn’t help pacing up and down for a little time, drowsily
taking in the aspect of the place: which is repeated here-
abouts in all directions.
I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides
of a weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed
a third side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden
and the neighbouring hills, the fourth. I don’t believe there
was an uncracked stone in the whole pavement. In the cen-
tre was a melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it
looked exactly as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster,
and afterwards powdered. The stables, coach-houses, offices,
were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted.
Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their
latches; windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled
off, and was lying about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken
possession of the out-buildings, that I couldn’t help think-
ing of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as
32
Pictures from Italy
transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again. One
old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green
eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came
prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the
moment, that I might be the hero come to marry the lady,
and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he sud-
denly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tre-
mendous tail, that he couldn’t get into the little hole where
he lived, but was obliged to wait outside, until his indigna-
tion and his tail had gone down together.
In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in
a nut; but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they
had gone, and that was shut up too. The house: a wander-
ing, echoing, thundering barrack of a place, with the lower
windows barred up, as usual, was wide open at the door: and
I have no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and
gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only one suite of
rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of
these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura
lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and
quaint, with avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and
statues, and water in stone basins; and everything was green,
gaunt, weedy, straggling, under grown or over grown, mil-
dewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy, creep-
ing, and uncomfortable life. There was nothing bright in
the whole scene but a firefly—one solitary firefly—showing
against the dark bushes like the last little speck of the de-
parted Glory of the house; and even it went flitting up and
down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and
describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking for the
rest of the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!)
what had become of it.
IN THE COURSE OF TWO MONTHS, the flitting shapes and shad-
ows of my dismal entering reverie gradually resolved them-
selves into familiar forms and substances; and I already be-
gan to think that when the time should come, a year hence,
for closing the long holiday and turning back to England, I
might part from Genoa with anything but a glad heart.
33
Charles Dickens
It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems
to be always something to find out in it. There are the most
extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can
lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!)
twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the
most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in
the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly,
mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the
view at every turn.
They who would know how beautiful the country imme-
diately surrounding Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather)
to the top of Monte Faccio, or, at least, ride round the city
walls: a feat more easily performed. No prospect can be more
diversified and lovely than the changing views of the harbour,
and the valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and the
Bizagno, from the heights along which the strongly fortified
walls are carried, like the great wall of China in little. In not
the least picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen
of a real Genoese tavern, where the visitor may derive good
entertainment from real Genoese dishes, such as Tagliarini;
Ravioli; German sausages, strong of garlic, sliced and eaten
with fresh green figs; cocks’ combs and sheep-kidneys,
chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces of
some unknown part of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried,
and served up in a great dish like white-bait; and other curi-
osities of that kind. They often get wine at these suburban
Trattorie, from France and Spain and Portugal, which is
brought over by small captains in little trading-vessels. They
buy it at so much a bottle, without asking what it is, or
caring to remember if anybody tells them, and usually di-
vide it into two heaps; of which they label one Champagne,
and the other Madeira. The various opposite flavours, quali-
ties, countries, ages, and vintages that are comprised under
these two general heads is quite extraordinary. The most lim-
ited range is probably from cool Gruel up to old Marsala,
and down again to apple Tea.
The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thor-
oughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are
supposed to live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here
and there a kind of well, or breathing-place. The houses are
immensely high, painted in all sorts of colours, and are in
every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of repair. They
34
Pictures from Italy
are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses in the
old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris. There are
few street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part,
looked upon as public property; and any moderately enter-
prising scavenger might make a fine fortune by now and
then clearing them out. As it is impossible for coaches to
penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded
and otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many pri-
vate chairs are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and
at night these are trotted to and fro in all directions, pre-
ceded by bearers of great lanthorns, made of linen stretched
upon a frame. The sedans and lanthorns are the legitimate
successors of the long strings of patient and much-abused
mules, that go jingling their little bells through these con-
fined streets all day long. They follow them, as regularly as
the stars the sun.
When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova
and the Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer
day, when I first saw it underneath the brightest and most
intensely blue of summer skies: which its narrow perspec-
tive of immense mansions, reduced to a tapering and most
precious strip of brightness, looking down upon the heavy
shade below! A brightness not too common, even in July
and August, to be well esteemed: for, if the Truth must out,
there were not eight blue skies in as many midsummer weeks,
saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when, looking out
to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of deep
and brilliant blue. At other times, there were clouds and
haze enough to make an Englishman grumble in his own
climate.
The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some
of them, within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke! The
great, heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier
over tier: with here and there, one larger than the rest, tow-
ering high up—a huge marble platform; the doorless vesti-
bules, massively barred lower windows, immense public stair-
cases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and
dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers: among which
the eye wanders again, and again, and again, as every palace
is succeeded by another—the terrace gardens between house
and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves of or-
ange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
35
Charles Dickens
thirty, forty feet above the street—the painted halls,
mouldering, and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners,
and still shining out in beautiful colours and voluptuous
designs, where the walls are dry—the faded figures on the
outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and
flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and
here and there looking fainter and more feeble than else-
where, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a
more recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching
out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is,
indeed, a sun-dial—the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small
palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble ter-
races looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and
innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street
of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming
with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked
children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, alto-
gether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so
noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and low-
ering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a sort of
intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and
look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the
inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the plea-
sure of an extravagant reality!
The different uses to which some of these Palaces are ap-
plied, all at once, is characteristic. For instance, the English
Banker (my excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in
a good-sized Palazzo in the Strada Nuova. In the hall (every
inch of which is elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as
a police-station in London), a hook-nosed Saracen’s Head
with an immense quantity of black hair (there is a man at-
tached to it) sells walking-sticks. On the other side of the
doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress
(wife to the Saracen’s Head, I believe) sells articles of her
own knitting; and sometimes flowers. A little further in, two
or three blind men occasionally beg. Sometimes, they are
visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart, but who
has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respect-
able, well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk
into the ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially,
up a flight of cellar-steps to speak to somebody. A little fur-
ther in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the
36
Pictures from Italy
day; or they may be chairmen waiting for their absent freight.
If so, they have brought their chairs in with them, and there
They stand also. On the left of the hall is a little room: a
hatter’s shop. On the first floor, is the English bank. On the
first floor also, is a whole house, and a good large residence
too. Heaven knows what there may be above that; but when
you are there, you have only just begun to go up-stairs. And
yet, coming down-stairs again, thinking of this; and passing
out at a great crazy door in the back of the hall, instead of
turning the other way, to get into the street again; it bangs
behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome ech-
oes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house)
which seems to have been unvisited by human foot, for a
hundred years. Not a sound disturbs its repose. Not a head,
thrust out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows, within
sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement faint of heart,
by suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub
them up. Opposite to you, is a giant figure carved in stone,
reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial
rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of a leaden
pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down
the rocks. But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than
this channel is now. He seems to have given his urn, which
is nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a
sepulchral child, ‘All gone!’ to have lapsed into a stony si-
lence.
In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but
of great size notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are
very dirty: quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and
emit a peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese,
kept in very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the
houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the
City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it
has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a
crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in
the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of
any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation:
looking as if it had grown there, like a fungus. Against the
Government House, against the old Senate House, round
about any large building, little shops stick so close, like para-
site vermin to the great carcase. And for all this, look where
you may: up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere: there
37
Charles Dickens
are irregular houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling
down, leaning against their neighbours, crippling themselves
or their friends by some means or other, until one, more
irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you can’t see
any further.
One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is
down by the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being
associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of
our arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind. Here, again,
the houses are very high, and are of an infinite variety of
deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses have) some-
thing hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its
frowsy fragrance on the breeze. Sometimes, it is a curtain;
sometimes, it is a carpet; sometimes, it is a bed; sometimes,
a whole line-full of clothes; but there is almost always some-
thing. Before the basement of these houses, is an arcade over
the pavement: very massive, dark, and low, like an old crypt.
The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has turned quite
black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts of
filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously. Beneath
some of the arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta es-
tablish their stalls, which are by no means inviting. The offal
of a fish-market, near at hand—that is to say, of a back lane,
where people sit upon the ground and on various old bulk-
heads and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to dispose
of—and of a vegetable market, constructed on the same prin-
ciple—are contributed to the decoration of this quarter; and
as all the mercantile business is transacted here, and it is
crowded all day, it has a very decided flavour about it. The
Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods brought in from
foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold and taken
out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
also; and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at
the gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks
and Ladies. For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known
to yield to the temptation of smuggling, and in the same
way: that is to say, by concealing the smuggled property be-
neath the loose folds of its dress. So Sanctity and Beauty
may, by no means, enter.
The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the im-
portation of a few Priests of prepossessing appearance. Every
fourth or fifth man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk; and
38
Pictures from Italy
there is pretty sure to be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic
inside or outside every hackney carriage on the neighbouring
roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more repulsive
countenances than are to be found among these gentry. If
Nature’s handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth,
deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed
among any class of men in the world.
Mr. Pepys once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in
illustration of his respect for the Priestly office, that if he could
meet a Priest and angel together, he would salute the Priest
first. I am rather of the opinion of Petrarch, who, when his
pupil Boccaccio wrote to him in great tribulation, that he had
been visited and admonished for his writings by a Carthusian
Friar who claimed to be a messenger immediately commis-
sioned by Heaven for that purpose, replied, that for his own
part, he would take the liberty of testing the reality of the
commission by personal observation of the Messenger’s face,
eyes, forehead, behaviour, and discourse. I cannot but believe
myself, from similar observation, that many unaccredited ce-
lestial messengers may be seen skulking through the streets of
Genoa, or droning away their lives in other Italian towns.
Perhaps the Cappuccini, though not a learned body, are,
as an order, the best friends of the people. They seem to
mingle with them more immediately, as their counsellors
and comforters; and to go among them more, when they are
sick; and to pry less than some other orders, into the secrets
of families, for the purpose of establishing a baleful
ascendency over their weaker members; and to be influenced
by a less fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to
let them go to ruin, soul and body. They may be seen, in
their coarse dress, in all parts of the town at all times, and
begging in the markets early in the morning. The Jesuits
too, muster strong in the streets, and go slinking noiselessly
about, in pairs, like black cats.
In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades congre-
gate. There is a street of jewellers, and there is a row of book-
sellers; but even down in places where nobody ever can, or
ever could, penetrate in a carriage, there are mighty old pal-
aces shut in among the gloomiest and closest walls, and al-
most shut out from the sun. Very few of the tradesmen have
any idea of setting forth their goods, or disposing them for
show. If you, a stranger, want to buy anything, you usually
39
Charles Dickens
look round the shop till you see it; then clutch it, if it be
within reach, and inquire how much. Everything is sold at
the most unlikely place. If you want coffee, you go to a sweet-
meat shop; and if you want meat, you will probably find it
behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps, in
some sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity
were poison, and Genoa’s law were death to any that uttered
it.
Most of the apothecaries’ shops are great lounging-places.
Here, grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours
together, passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand,
and talking, drowsily and sparingly, about the News. Two or
three of these are poor physicians, ready to proclaim them-
selves on an emergency, and tear off with any messenger
who may arrive. You may know them by the way in which
they stretch their necks to listen, when you enter; and by the
sigh with which they fall back again into their dull corners,
on finding that you only want medicine. Few people lounge
in the barbers’ shops; though they are very numerous, as
hardly any man shaves himself. But the apothecary’s has its
group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with
their hands folded over the tops of their sticks. So still and
quiet, that either you don’t see them in the darkened shop,
or mistake them—as I did one ghostly man in bottle-green,
one day, with a hat like a stopper—for Horse Medicine.
On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting
themselves, as their ancestors were of putting houses, in ev-
ery available inch of space in and about the town. In all the
lanes and alleys, and up every little ascent, and on every
dwarf wall, and on every flight of steps, they cluster like
bees. Meanwhile (and especially on festa-days) the bells of
the churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known
form of sound, but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle,
dingle, dingle: with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle
or so, which is maddening. This performance is usually
achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes hold of the
clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle
louder than every other boy similarly employed. The noise
is supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but
looking up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these
young Christians thus engaged, one might very naturally
mistake them for the Enemy.
40
Pictures from Italy
Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous. All
the shops were shut up, twice within a week, for these holi-
days; and one night, all the houses in the neighbourhood of
a particular church were illuminated, while the church itself
was lighted, outside, with torches; and a grove of blazing
links was erected, in an open space outside one of the city
gates. This part of the ceremony is prettier and more singu-
lar a little way in the country, where you can trace the illu-
minated cottages all the way up a steep hill-side; and where
you pass festoons of tapers, wasting away in the starlight
night, before some lonely little house upon the road.
On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in
whose honour the festa is holden, very gaily. Gold-embroi-
dered festoons of different colours, hang from the arches;
the altar furniture is set forth; and sometimes, even the lofty
pillars are swathed from top to bottom in tight-fitting drap-
eries. The cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo. On St.
Lorenzo’s day, we went into it, just as the sun was setting.
Although these decorations are usually in very indifferent
taste, the effect, just then, was very superb indeed. For the
whole building was dressed in red; and the sinking sun,
streaming in, through a great red curtain in the chief door-
way, made all the gorgeousness its own. When the sun went
down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a
few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small
dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective.
But, sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a
mild dose of opium.
With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for
the dressing of the church, and for the hiring of the band,
and for the tapers. If there be any left (which seldom hap-
pens, I believe), the souls in Purgatory get the benefit of it.
They are also supposed to have the benefit of the exertions
of certain small boys, who shake money-boxes before some
mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usu-
ally shut up close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose
an image and some flowers inside.
Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small
house, with an altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also
for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory. Still further to stimu-
late the charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plas-
ter, on either side of the grated door, representing a select
41
Charles Dickens
party of souls, frying. One of them has a grey moustache,
and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken
out of a hairdresser’s window and cast into the furnace. There
he is: a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for
ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire,
for the gratification and improvement (and the contribu-
tions) of the poor Genoese.
They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to
dance on their holidays: the staple places of entertainment
among the women, being the churches and the public walks.
They are very good-tempered, obliging, and industrious.
Industry has not made them clean, for their habitations are
extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sun-
day morning, is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s
heads. But their dwellings are so close and confined that if
those parts of the city had been beaten down by Massena in
the time of the terrible Blockade, it would have at least occa-
sioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.
The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so con-
stantly washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every
stream and ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the
midst of all this dirt, who wears them when they are clean.
The custom is to lay the wet linen which is being operated
upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat
wooden mallet. This they do, as furiously as if they were
revenging themselves on dress in general for being connected
with the Fall of Mankind.
It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at
these times, or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby,
tightly swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous
quantity of wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or
finger. This custom (which we often see represented in old
pictures) is universal among the common people. A child is
left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is
accidentally knocked off a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is
hung up to a hook now and then, and left dangling like a
doll at an English rag-shop, without the least inconvenience
to anybody.
I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the
little country church of San Martino, a couple of miles from
the city, while a baptism took place. I saw the priest, and an
attendant with a large taper, and a man, and a woman, and
42
Pictures from Italy
some others; but I had no more idea, until the ceremony was
all over, that it was a baptism, or that the curious little stiff
instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the course
of the ceremony, by the handle—like a short poker—was a
child, than I had that it was my own christening. I borrowed
the child afterwards, for a minute or two (it was lying across
the font then), and found it very red in the face but perfectly
quiet, and not to be bent on any terms. The number of cripples
in the streets, soon ceased to surprise me.
There are plenty of Saints’ and Virgin’s Shrines, of course;
generally at the corners of streets. The favourite memento to
the Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting, representing a peas-
ant on his knees, with a spade and some other agricultural
implements beside him; and the Madonna, with the Infant
Saviour in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud. This is the
legend of the Madonna della Guardia: a chapel on a moun-
tain within a few miles, which is in high repute. It seems
that this peasant lived all alone by himself, tilling some land
atop of the mountain, where, being a devout man, he daily
said his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for his hut was
a very poor one. Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to
him, as in the picture, and said, ‘Why do you pray in the
open air, and without a priest?’ The peasant explained be-
cause there was neither priest nor church at hand—a very
uncommon complaint indeed in Italy. ‘I should wish, then,’
said the Celestial Visitor, ‘to have a chapel built here, in which
the prayers of the Faithful may be offered up.’ ‘But,
Santissima Madonna,’ said the peasant, ‘I am a poor man;
and chapels cannot be built without money. They must be
supported, too, Santissima; for to have a chapel and not sup-
port it liberally, is a wickedness—a deadly sin.’ This senti-
ment gave great satisfaction to the visitor. ‘Go!’ said she.
‘There is such a village in the valley on the left, and such
another village in the valley on the right, and such another
village elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to the building
of a chapel. Go to them! Relate what you have seen; and do
not doubt that sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect
my chapel, or that it will, afterwards, be handsomely main-
tained.’ All of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite
true. And in proof of this prediction and revelation, there is
the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia, rich and flourish-
ing at this day.
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Charles Dickens
The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can
hardly be exaggerated. The church of the Annunciata espe-
cially: built, like many of the others, at the cost of one noble
family, and now in slow progress of repair: from the outer
door to the utmost height of the high cupola, is so elabo-
rately painted and set in gold, that it looks (as Simond de-
scribes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great enam-
elled snuff-box. Most of the richer churches contain some
beautiful pictures, or other embellishments of great price,
almost universally set, side by side, with sprawling effigies of
maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever seen.
It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the
popular mind, and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but
there is very little tenderness for the bodies of the dead here.
For the very poor, there are, immediately outside one angle
of the walls, and behind a jutting point of the fortification,
near the sea, certain common pits—one for every day in the
year—which all remain closed up, until the turn of each
comes for its daily reception of dead bodies. Among the troops
in the town, there are usually some Swiss: more or less. When
any of these die, they are buried out of a fund maintained by
such of their countrymen as are resident in Genoa. Their
providing coffins for these men is matter of great astonish-
ment to the authorities.
Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent
splashing down of dead people in so many wells, is bad. It
surrounds Death with revolting associations, that insensibly
become connected with those whom Death is approaching.
Indifference and avoidance are the natural result; and all the
softening influences of the great sorrow are harshly disturbed.
There is a ceremony when an old Cavaliere or the like,
expires, of erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to
represent his bier; covering them over with a pall of black
velvet; putting his hat and sword on the top; making a little
square of seats about the whole; and sending out formal in-
vitations to his friends and acquaintances to come and sit
there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal
Altar, decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose.
When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of
death, their nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into
the country for a little change, and leaving the body to be
disposed of, without any superintendence from them. The
44
Pictures from Italy
procession is usually formed, and the coffin borne, and the
funeral conducted, by a body of persons called a Confraternita,
who, as a kind of voluntary penance, undertake to perform
these offices, in regular rotation, for the dead; but who, min-
gling something of pride with their humility, are dressed in a
loose garment covering their whole person, and wear a hood
concealing the face; with breathing-holes and apertures for
the eyes. The effect of this costume is very ghastly: especially
in the case of a certain Blue Confraternita belonging to Genoa,
who, to say the least of them, are very ugly customers, and
who look—suddenly encountered in their pious ministration
in the streets—as if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing
off the body for themselves.
Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse atten-
dant on many Italian customs, of being recognised as a means
of establishing a current account with Heaven, on which to
draw, too easily, for future bad actions, or as an expiation for
past misdeeds, it must be admitted to be a good one, and a
practical one, and one involving unquestionably good works.
A voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed
penance (not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks
to such and such a stone in the pavement of the cathedral; or
than a vow to the Madonna to wear nothing but blue for a
year or two. This is supposed to give great delight above; blue
being (as is well known) the Madonna’s
favourite colour. Women who have devoted themselves to this
act of Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.
There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one
now rarely opened. The most important—the Carlo Felice:
the opera-house of Genoa—is a very splendid, commodi-
ous, and beautiful theatre. A company of comedians were
acting there, when we arrived: and soon after their depar-
ture, a second-rate opera company came. The great season is
not until the carnival time—in the spring. Nothing impressed
me, so much, in my visits here (which were pretty numer-
ous) as the uncommonly hard and cruel character of the
audience, who resent the slightest defect, take nothing good-
humouredly, seem to be always lying in wait for an opportu-
nity to hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the actors.
But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which
they are allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps
they are resolved to make the most of this opportunity.
45
Charles Dickens
There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too,
who are allowed the privilege of kicking their heels in the
pit, for next to nothing: gratuitous, or cheap accommoda-
tion for these gentlemen being insisted on, by the Governor,
in all public or semi-public entertainments. They are lofty
critics in consequence, and infinitely more exacting than if
they made the unhappy manager’s fortune.
The Teatro Diurno, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the
open air, where the performances take place by daylight, in the
cool of the afternoon; commencing at four or five o’clock, and
lasting, some three hours. It is curious, sitting among the audi-
ence, to have a fine view of the neighbouring hills and houses,
and to see the neighbours at their windows looking on, and to
hear the bells of the churches and convents ringing at most com-
plete cross-purposes with the scene. Beyond this, and the novelty
of seeing a play in the fresh pleasant air, with the darkening evening
closing in, there is nothing very exciting or characteristic in the
performances. The actors are indifferent; and though they some-
times represent one of Goldoni’s comedies, the staple of the Drama
is French. Anything like nationality is dangerous to despotic gov-
ernments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti—a famous company
from Milan—is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition
I ever beheld in my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely
ridiculous. They look between four and five feet high, but are
really much smaller; for when a musician in the orchestra hap-
pens to put his hat on the stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic,
and almost blots out an actor. They usually play a comedy, and
a ballet. The comic man in the comedy I saw one summer
night, is a waiter in an hotel. There never was such a locomotive
actor, since the world began. Great pains are taken with him.
He has extra joints in his legs: and a practical eye, with which he
winks at the pit, in a manner that is absolutely insupportable to
a stranger, but which the initiated audience, mainly composed
of the common people, receive (so they do everything else) quite
as a matter of course, and as if he were a man. His spirits are
prodigious. He continually shakes his legs, and winks his eye.
And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who sits down on the
regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter in the
regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No one would
suppose it possible that anything short of a real man could be so
tedious. It is the triumph of art.
46
Pictures from Italy
In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in
the very hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and
tries to soothe her. They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa!
in the regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a proces-
sion of musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and
knocking himself off his legs at every blow. These failing to
delight her, dancers appear. Four first; then two; two two;
the flesh-coloured two. The way in which they dance; the
height to which they spring; the impossible and inhuman
extent to which they pirouette; the revelation of their pre-
posterous legs; the coming down with a pause, on the very
tips of their toes, when the music requires it; the gentleman’s
retiring up, when it is the lady’s turn; and the lady’s retiring
up, when it is the gentleman’s turn; the final passion of a
pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!—I shall never
see a real ballet, with a composed countenance again.
I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called
‘St. Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.’ It began by the dis-
closure of Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a
sofa in his chamber at St. Helena; to whom his valet entered
with this obscure announcement:
‘Sir Yew ud se on Low?’ (the ow, as in cow).
Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!)
was a perfect mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously
ugly, with a monstrously disproportionate face, and a great
clump for the lower-jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdu-
rate nature. He began his system of persecution, by calling
his prisoner ‘General Buonaparte;’ to which the latter re-
plied, with the deepest tragedy, ‘Sir Yew ud se on Low, call
me not thus. Repeat that phrase and leave me! I am Napo-
leon, Emperor of France!’ Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted,
proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of the British
Government, regulating the state he should preserve, and
the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his attendants to
four or five persons. ‘Four or five for me!’ said Napoleon.
‘Me! One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole com-
mand; and this English officer talks of four or five for me!’
Throughout the piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the
real Napoleon, and was, for ever, having small soliloquies by
himself) was very bitter on ‘these English officers,’ and ‘these
English soldiers;’ to the great satisfaction of the audience,
who were perfectly delighted to have Low bullied; and who,
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Charles Dickens
whenever Low said ‘General Buonaparte’ (which he always
did: always receiving the same correction), quite execrated
him. It would be hard to say why; for Italians have little
cause to sympathise with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, dis-
guised as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape;
and being discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnani-
mously refused to steal his freedom, was immediately ordered
off by Low to be hanged. In two very long speeches, which
Low made memorable, by winding up with ‘Yas!’—to show
that he was English—which brought down thunders of ap-
plause. Napoleon was so affected by this catastrophe, that he
fainted away on the spot, and was carried out by two other
puppets. Judging from what followed, it would appear that he
never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in a
clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a
lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little
children, who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a
decent end; the last word on his lips being ‘Vatterlo.’
It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte’s boots were so
wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things
of their own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting
under tables, and dangling in the air, and sometimes skating
away with him, out of all human knowledge, when he was
in full speech—mischances which were not rendered the less
absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted in his face. To put
an end to one conference with Low, he had to go to a table,
and read a book: when it was the finest spectacle I ever be-
held, to see his body bending over the volume, like a boot-
jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the
pit. He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense
collar to his shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet.
So was Dr. Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long
lank hair, like Mawworm’s, who, in consequence of some
derangement of his wires, hovered about the couch like a
vulture, and gave medical opinions in the air. He was almost
as good as Low, though the latter was great at all times—a
decided brute and villain, beyond all possibility of mistake.
Low was especially fine at the last, when, hearing the doctor
and the valet say, ‘The Emperor is dead!’ he pulled out his
watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by exclaim-
ing, with characteristic brutality, ‘Ha! ha! Eleven minutes to
48
Pictures from Italy
six! The General dead! and the spy hanged!’ This brought
the curtain down, triumphantly.
THERE IS NOT IN ITALY , they say (and I believe them), a love-
lier residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the
Fishponds, whither we removed as soon as our three months’
tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof
from the town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own,
adorned with statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces,
walks of orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and ca-
mellias. All its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and
decorations; but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with
three large windows at the end, overlooking the whole town of
Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords one of
the most fascinating and delightful prospects in the world. Any
house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are,
within, it would be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing
more delicious than the scene without, in sunshine or in moon-
light, could be imagined. It is more like an enchanted place in
an Eastern story than a grave and sober lodging.
How you may wander on, from room to room, and never
tire of the wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in
their fresh colouring as if they had been painted yesterday;
or how one floor, or even the great hall which opens on
eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade; or how there
are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use
and rarely visit, and scarcely know the way through; or how
there is a view of a perfectly different character on each of
the four sides of the building; matters little. But that pros-
pect from the hall is like a vision to me. I go back to it, in
fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred times a day;
and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents from the
garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of happiness.
There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many
churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the
sunny sky; and down below me, just where the roofs begin,
a solitary convent parapet, fashioned like a gallery, with an
iron across at the end, where sometimes early in the morn-
ing, I have seen a little group of dark-veiled nuns gliding
sorrowfully to and fro, and stopping now and then to peep
down upon the waking world in which they have no part.
49
Charles Dickens
Old Monte Faccio, brightest of hills in good weather, but
sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here, upon the left.
The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to com-
mand the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about
their ears, in case they should be discontented) commands
that height upon the right. The broad sea lies beyond, in
front there; and that line of coast, beginning by the light-
house, and tapering away, a mere speck in the rosy distance,
is the beautiful coast road that leads to Nice. The garden
near at hand, among the roofs and houses: all red with roses
and fresh with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola—a public
promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the white
veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round, and
round, and round, in state-clothes and coaches at least, if
not in absolute wisdom. Within a stone’s-throw, as it seems,
the audience of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned this
way. But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a
knowledge of the cause, to see their faces changed so sud-
denly from earnestness to laughter; and odder still, to hear
the rounds upon rounds of applause, rattling in the evening
air, to which the curtain falls. But, being Sunday night, they
act their best and most attractive play. And now, the sun is
going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green,
and golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and
to the ringing of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at once,
without a twilight. Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa,
and on the country road; and the revolving lanthorn out at
sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and
portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon burst-
ing from behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity.
And this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese
avoid it after dark, and think it haunted.
My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come;
but nothing worse, I will engage. The same Ghost will occa-
sionally sail away, as I did one pleasant autumn evening, into
the bright prospect, and sniff the morning air at Marseilles.
The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers
outside his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the
window, with the natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased
to twirl, and were languishing, stock still, with their beauti-
ful faces addressed to blind corners of the establishment,
where it was impossible for admirers to penetrate.
50
Pictures from Italy
The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of
eighteen hours, and we were going to run back again by the
Cornice road from Nice: not being satisfied to have seen
only the outsides of the beautiful towns that rise in pictur-
esque white clusters from among the olive woods, and rocks,
and hills, upon the margin of the Sea.
The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o’clock,
was very small, and so crowded with goods that there was
scarcely room to move; neither was there anything to cat on
board, except bread; nor to drink, except coffee. But being
due at Nice at about eight or so in the morning, this was of
no consequence; so when we began to wink at the bright
stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their winking at
us, we turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little
cabin, and slept soundly till morning.
The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever
was built, it was within an hour of noon when we turned
into Nice Harbour, where we very little expected anything
but breakfast. But we were laden with wool. Wool must not
remain in the Custom-house at Marseilles more than twelve
months at a stretch, without paying duty. It is the custom to
make fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this law; to
take it somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out;
bring it straight back again; and warehouse it, as a new cargo,
for nearly twelve months longer. This wool of ours, had come
originally from some place in the East. It was recognised as
Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour. Ac-
cordingly, the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people,
which had come off to greet us, were warned away by the
authorities; we were declared in quarantine; and a great flag
was solemnly run up to the mast-head on the wharf, to make
it known to all the town.
It was a very hot day indeed. We were unshaved, unwashed,
undressed, unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of
lying blistering in a lazy harbour, with the town looking on
from a respectful distance, all manner of whiskered men in
cocked hats discussing our fate at a remote guard-house, with
gestures (we looked very hard at them through telescopes)
expressive of a week’s detention at least: and nothing whatever
the matter all the time. But even in this crisis the brave Cou-
rier achieved a triumph. He telegraphed somebody (I saw
nobody) either naturally connected with the hotel, or put en
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Charles Dickens
rapport with the establishment for that occasion only. The tele-
graph was answered, and in half an hour or less, there came a
loud shout from the guard-house. The captain was wanted.
Everybody helped the captain into his boat. Everybody got
his luggage, and said we were going. The captain rowed away,
and disappeared behind a little jutting corner of the Galley-
slaves’ Prison: and presently came back with something, very
sulkily. The brave Courier met him at the side, and received
the something as its rightful owner. It was a wicker basket,
folded in a linen cloth; and in it were two great bottles of
wine, a roast fowl, some salt fish chopped with garlic, a great
loaf of bread, a dozen or so of peaches, and a few other trifles.
When we had selected our own breakfast, the brave Courier
invited a chosen party to partake of these refreshments, and
assured them that they need not be deterred by motives of
delicacy, as he would order a second basket to be furnished at
their expense. Which he did—no one knew how—and by-
and-by, the captain being again summoned, again sulkily re-
turned with another something; over which my popular at-
tendant presided as before: carving with a clasp-knife, his own
personal property, something smaller than a Roman sword.
The whole party on board were made merry by these un-
expected supplies; but none more so than a loquacious little
Frenchman, who got drunk in five minutes, and a sturdy
Cappuccino Friar, who had taken everybody’s fancy might-
ily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily be-
lieve.
He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flow-
ing beard; and was a remarkably handsome man, of about
fifty. He had come up to us, early in the morning, and in-
quired whether we were sure to be at Nice by eleven; saying
that he particularly wanted to know, because if we reached it
by that time he would have to perform Mass, and must deal
with the consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas, if there were
no chance of his being in time, he would immediately break-
fast. He made this communication, under the idea that the
brave Courier was the captain; and indeed he looked much
more like it than anybody else on board. Being assured that
we should arrive in good time, he fasted, and talked, fasting,
to everybody, with the most charming good humour; an-
swering jokes at the expense of friars, with other jokes at the
expense of laymen, and saying that, friar as he was, he would
52
Pictures from Italy
engage to take up the two strongest men on board, one after
the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the deck.
Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could
have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man,
even in the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most
ungainly that can well be.
All this had given great delight to the loquacious French-
man, who gradually patronised the Friar very much, and
seemed to commiserate him as one who might have been
born a Frenchman himself, but for an unfortunate destiny.
Although his patronage was such as a mouse might bestow
upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension; and
in the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe,
to slap the Friar on the back.
When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass:
the Friar went to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold
meat and bread, drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking
cigars, taking snuff, sustaining an uninterrupted conversation
with all hands, and occasionally running to the boat’s side and
hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence that we must
be got out of this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to
take part in a great religious procession in the afternoon. After
this, he would come back, laughing lustily from pure good
humour: while the Frenchman wrinkled his small face into
ten thousand creases, and said how droll it was, and what a
brave boy was that Friar! At length the heat of the sun with-
out, and the wine within, made the Frenchman sleepy. So, in
the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic protege, he lay
down among the wool, and began to snore.
It was four o’clock before we were released; and the French-
man, dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when
the Friar went ashore. As soon as we were free, we all hur-
ried away, to wash and dress, that we might make a decent
appearance at the procession; and I saw no more of the
Frenchman until we took up our station in the main street
to see it pass, when he squeezed himself into a front place,
elaborately renovated; threw back his little coat, to show a
broad-barred velvet waistcoat, sprinkled all over with stars;
then adjusted himself and his cane so as utterly to bewilder
and transfix the Friar, when he should appear.
The procession was a very long one, and included an im-
mense number of people divided into small parties; each
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Charles Dickens
party chanting nasally, on its own account, without refer-
ence to any other, and producing a most dismal result. There
were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on flat boards surrounded
by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals, infantry, tapers, monks,
nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in green hats, walking
under crimson parasols: and, here and there, a species of
sacred street-lamp hoisted on a pole. We looked out anx-
iously for the Cappuccini, and presently their brown robes
and corded girdles were seen coming on, in a body.
I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that
when the Friar saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he
would mentally exclaim, ‘Is that my Patron! that distinguished
man!’ and would be covered with confusion. Ah! never was
the Frenchman so deceived. As our friend the Cappuccino
advanced, with folded arms, he looked straight into the vis-
age of the little Frenchman, with a bland, serene, composed
abstraction, not to be described. There was not the faintest
trace of recognition or amusement on his features; not the
smallest consciousness of bread and meat, wine, snuff, or
cigars. ‘C’est lui-meme,’ I heard the little Frenchman say, in
some doubt. Oh yes, it was himself. It was not his brother or
his nephew, very like him. It was he. He walked in great
state: being one of the Superiors of the Order: and looked
his part to admiration. There never was anything so perfect
of its kind as the contemplative way in which he allowed his
placid gaze to rest on us, his late companions, as if he had
never seen us in his life and didn’t see us then. The French-
man, quite humbled, took off his hat at last, but the Friar
still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity; and
the broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd, was seen
no more.
The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry
that shook all the windows in the town. Next afternoon we
started for Genoa, by the famed Cornice road.
The half-French, half-Italian Vetturino, who undertook,
with his little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither
in three days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-
heartedness and singing propensities knew no bounds as long
as we went on smoothly. So long, he had a word and a smile,
and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and
ends of the Sonnambula for all the echoes. So long, he went
jingling through every little village, with bells on his horses
54
Pictures from Italy
and rings in his ears: a very meteor of gallantry and cheerful-
ness. But, it was highly characteristic to see him under a
slight reverse of circumstances, when, in one part of the jour-
ney, we came to a narrow place where a waggon had broken
down and stopped up the road. His hands were twined in
his hair immediately, as if a combination of all the direst
accidents in life had suddenly fallen on his devoted head. He
swore in French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down,
beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair.
There were various carters and mule-drivers assembled round
the broken waggon, and at last some man of an original turn
of mind, proposed that a general and joint effort should be
made to get things to-rights again, and clear the way—an
idea which I verily believe would never have presented itself
to our friend, though we had remained there until now. It
was done at no great cost of labour; but at every pause in the
doing, his hands were wound in his hair again, as if there
were no ray of hope to lighten his misery. The moment he
was on his box once more, and clattering briskly down hill,
he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant girls, as if it
were not in the power of misfortune to depress him.
Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages
on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for
many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow,
dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the
withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up
into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads
on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in
Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim door-ways
with their spindles, or crooning together in by-corners, they
are like a population of Witches—except that they certainly
are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument
of cleanliness. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to
hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any
means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very
bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling up-
side-down by their own tails.
These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however:
nestling, with their clustering roofs and towers, among trees
on steep hill-sides, or built upon the brink of noble bays: are
charming. The vegetation is, everywhere, luxuriant and beau-
tiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel feature in the novel
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Charles Dickens
scenery. In one town, San Remo—a most extraordinary place,
built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble un-
derneath the whole town—there are pretty terrace gardens;
in other towns, there is the clang of shipwrights’ hammers,
and the building of small vessels on the beach. In some of
the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at anchor. In
every case, each little group of houses presents, in the dis-
tance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanci-
ful shapes.
The road itself—now high above the glittering sea, which
breaks against the foot of the precipice: now turning inland
to sweep the shore of a bay: now crossing the stony bed of a
mountain stream: now low down on the beach: now wind-
ing among riven rocks of many forms and colours: now
chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of tow-
ers built, in old time, to protect the coast from the invasions
of the Barbary Corsairs—presents new beauties every mo-
ment. When its own striking scenery is passed, and it trails
on through a long line of suburb, lying on the flat seashore,
to Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that noble city and
its harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened by
every huge, unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its out-
skirts: and coming to its climax when the city gate is reached,
and all Genoa with its beautiful harbour, and neighbouring
hills, bursts proudly on the view.
CHAPTER V
TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA
I strolled away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound
for a good many places (England among them), but first for
Piacenza; for which town I started in the coupe of a machine
something like a travelling caravan, in company with the
brave Courier, and a lady with a large dog, who howled dole-
fully, at intervals, all night. It was very wet, and very cold;
very dark, and very dismal; we travelled at the rate of barely
four miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment.
At ten o’clock next morning, we changed coaches at
Alessandria, where we were packed up in another coach (the
body whereof would have been small for a fly), in company
with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his companion—who
carried their breviaries and other books, and who, in the
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Pictures from Italy
exertion of getting into the coach, had made a gash of pink
leg between his black stocking and his black knee-shorts,
that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia’s closet, only it was
visible on both legs—a provincial Avvocato; and a gentle-
man with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular
sheen upon it, which I never observed in the human subject
before. In this way we travelled on, until four o’clock in the
afternoon; the roads being still very heavy, and the coach
very slow. To mend the matter, the old priest was troubled
with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible yell
every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united
efforts of the company; the coach always stopping for him,
with great gravity. This disorder, and the roads, formed the
main subject of conversation. Finding, in the afternoon, that
the coupe had discharged two people, and had only one pas-
senger inside—a monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great purple
moustache, of which no man could see the ends when he
had his hat on—I took advantage of its better accommoda-
tion, and in company with this gentleman (who was very
conversational and good-humoured) travelled on, until nearly
eleven o’clock at night, when the driver reported that he
couldn’t think of going any farther, and we accordingly made
a halt at a place called Stradella.
The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a
yard where our coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of
fowls, and firewood, were all heaped up together, higgledy-
piggledy; so that you didn’t know, and couldn’t have taken
your oath, which was a fowl and which was a cart. We fol-
lowed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into a great, cold
room, where there were two immensely broad beds, on what
looked like two immensely broad deal dining-tables; another
deal table of similar dimensions in the middle of the bare
floor; four windows; and two chairs. Somebody said it was
my room; and I walked up and down it, for half an hour or
so, staring at the Tuscan, the old priest, the young priest,
and the Avvocato (Red-Nose lived in the town, and had gone
home), who sat upon their beds, and stared at me in return.
The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the pro-
ceedings, is interrupted by an announcement from the Brave
(he had been cooking) that supper is ready; and to the priest’s
chamber (the next room and the counterpart of mine) we all
adjourn. The first dish is a cabbage, boiled with a great quan-
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Charles Dickens
tity of rice in a tureen full of water, and flavoured with cheese.
It is so hot, and we are so cold, that it appears almost jolly.
The second dish is some little bits of pork, fried with pigs’
kidneys. The third, two red fowls. The fourth, two little red
turkeys. The fifth, a huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I
don’t know what else; and this concludes the entertainment.
Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of
the dampest, the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in,
in the middle of such a quantity of fuel that he looks like
Birnam Wood taking a winter walk. He kindles this heap in a
twinkling, and produces a jorum of hot brandy and water; for
that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and now
holds nothing but the purest eau de vie. When he has accom-
plished this feat, he retires for the night; and I hear him, for
an hour afterwards, and indeed until I fall asleep, making jokes
in some outhouse (apparently under the pillow), where he is
smoking cigars with a party of confidential friends. He never
was in the house in his life before; but he knows everybody
everywhere, before he has been anywhere five minutes; and is
certain to have attracted to himself, in the meantime, the en-
thusiastic devotion of the whole establishment.
This is at twelve o’clock at night. At four o’clock next
morning, he is up again, fresher than a full-blown rose; mak-
ing blazing fires without the least authority from the land-
lord; producing mugs of scalding coffee when nobody else
can get anything but cold water; and going out into the dark
streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on the chance of some-
body with a cow getting up to supply it. While the horses
are ‘coming,’ I stumble out into the town too. It seems to be
all one little Piazza, with a cold damp wind blowing in and
out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of pattern. But it is
profoundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn’t know
it to-morrow, if I were taken there to try. Which Heaven
forbid.
The horses arrive in about an hour. In the interval, the
driver swears; sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan
oaths. Sometimes, when it is a long, compound oath, he
begins with Christianity and merges into Paganism. Various
messengers are despatched; not so much after the horses, as
after each other; for the first messenger never comes back,
and all the rest imitate him. At length the horses appear,
surrounded by all the messengers; some kicking them, and
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Pictures from Italy
some dragging them, and all shouting abuse to them. Then,
the old priest, the young priest, the Avvocato, the Tuscan,
and all of us, take our places; and sleepy voices proceeding
from the doors of extraordinary hutches in divers parts of
the yard, cry out ‘Addio corriere mio! Buon’ viaggio, corriere!’
Salutations which the courier, with his face one monstrous
grin, returns in like manner as we go jolting and wallowing
away, through the mud.
At Piacenza, which was four or five hours’ journey from
the inn at Stradella, we broke up our little company before
the hotel door, with divers manifestations of friendly feeling
on all sides. The old priest was taken with the cramp again,
before he had got half-way down the street; and the young
priest laid the bundle of books on a door-step, while he du-
tifully rubbed the old gentleman’s legs. The client of the
Avvocato was waiting for him at the yard-gate, and kissed
him on each cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am
afraid he had either a very bad case, or a scantily-furnished
purse. The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went loitering
off, carrying his hat in his hand that he might the better trail
up the ends of his dishevelled moustache. And the brave
Courier, as he and I strolled away to look about us, began
immediately to entertain me with the private histories and
family affairs of the whole party.
A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is. A deserted, soli-
tary, grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up
trenches, which afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine
that wander about them; and streets of stern houses, mood-
ily frowning at the other houses over the way. The sleepiest
and shabbiest of soldiery go wandering about, with the double
curse of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their
misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of children play with their
impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters;
and the gauntest of dogs trot in and out of the dullest of
archways, in perpetual search of something to eat, which
they never seem to find. A mysterious and solemn Palace,
guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the place,
stands gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king
with the marble legs, who flourished in the time of the thou-
sand and one Nights, might live contentedly inside of it, and
never have the energy, in his upper half of flesh and blood,
to want to come out.
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Charles Dickens
What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it
is, to ramble through these places gone to sleep and basking
in the sun! Each, in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy,
dreary, God-forgotten towns in the wide world, the chief.
Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used to be, and where
a noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman station
here, I became aware that I have never known till now, what
it is to be lazy. A dormouse must surely be in very much the
same condition before he retires under the wool in his cage;
or a tortoise before he buries himself.
I feel that I am getting rusty. That any attempt to think,
would be accompanied with a creaking noise. That there is
nothing, anywhere, to be done, or needing to be done. That
there is no more human progress, motion, effort, or advance-
ment, of any kind beyond this. That the whole scheme
stopped here centuries ago, and laid down to rest until the
Day of Judgment.
Never while the brave Courier lives! Behold him jingling
out of Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest post-
ing-chaise ever seen, so that he looks out of the front win-
dow as if he were peeping over a garden wall; while the
postilion, concentrated essence of all the shabbiness of Italy,
pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to touch
his hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than
himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch’s show outside the town.
In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trellis-
work, supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in them-
selves, are anything but picturesque. But, here, they twine
them around trees, and let them trail among the hedges; and
the vineyards are full of trees, regularly planted for this pur-
pose, each with its own vine twining and clustering about it.
Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest red;
and never was anything so enchantingly graceful and full of
beauty. Through miles of these delightful forms and colours,
the road winds its way. The wild festoons, the elegant wreaths,
and crowns, and garlands of all shapes; the fairy nets flung
over great trees, and making them prisoners in sport; the
tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon the
ground; how rich and beautiful they are! And every now
and then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and
garlanded together: as if they had taken hold of one another,
and were coming dancing down the field!
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Pictures from Italy
Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town;
and consequently is not so characteristic as many places of
less note. Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the
Cathedral, Baptistery, and Campanile—ancient buildings,
of a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque
monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in marble and
red stone—are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose.
Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw them,
by the twittering of the many birds that were flying in and
out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in the archi-
tecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy,
rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into
the sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within,
who were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling
before the same kinds of images and tapers, or whispering,
with their heads bowed down, in the selfsame dark confes-
sionals, as I had left in Genoa and everywhere else.
The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this
church is covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mourn-
ful and depressing influence. It is miserable to see great works
of art—something of the Souls of Painters—perishing and
fading away, like human forms. This cathedral is odorous
with the rotting of Correggio’s frescoes in the Cupola. Heaven
knows how beautiful they may have been at one time. Con-
noisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such a laby-
rinth of arms and legs: such heaps of fore-shortened limbs,
entangled and involved and jumbled together: no operative
surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium.
There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the
roof supported by marble pillars, behind each of which there
seemed to be at least one beggar in ambush: to say nothing
of the tombs and secluded altars. From every one of these
lurking-places, such crowds of phantom-looking men and
women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs,
or chattering jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or
some other sad infirmity, came hobbling out to beg, that if
the ruined frescoes in the cathedral above, had been sud-
denly animated, and had retired to this lower church, they
could hardly have made a greater confusion, or exhibited a
more confounding display of arms and legs.
There is Petrarch’s Monument, too; and there is the Bap-
tistery, with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there
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Charles Dickens
is a gallery containing some very remarkable pictures, whereof
a few were being copied by hairy-faced artists, with little
velvet caps more off their heads than on. There is the Farnese
Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of decay
that ever was seen—a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering
away.
It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the
lower seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them,
great heavy chambers; rather than boxes, where the Nobles
sat, remote in their proud state. Such desolation as has fallen
on this theatre, enhanced in the spectator’s fancy by its gay
intention and design, none but worms can be familiar with.
A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was
acted here. The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof;
the boxes are dropping down, wasting away, and only ten-
anted by rats; damp and mildew smear the faded colours,
and make spectral maps upon the panels; lean rags are dan-
gling down where there were gay festoons on the Proscenium;
the stage has rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery is thrown
across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the
visitor in the gloomy depth beneath. The desolation and decay
impress themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering
smell, and an earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle
in with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the
worm, the maggot, and the rot have changed the surface of
the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam and roughen
a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on
this ghostly stage.
It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena,
where the darkness of the sombre colonnades over the
footways skirting the main street on either side, was made
refreshing and agreeable by the bright sky, so wonderfully
blue. I passed from all the glory of the day, into a dim cathe-
dral, where High Mass was performing, feeble tapers were
burning, people were kneeling in all directions before all
manner of shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the
usual chant, in the usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy
tone.
Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant
town, this same Heart beating with the same monotonous
pulsation, the centre of the same torpid, listless system, I
came out by another door, and was suddenly scared to death
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Pictures from Italy
by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was blown.
Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian
company from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls
of the church, and flouting, with their horses’ heels, the grif-
fins, lions, tigers, and other monsters in stone and marble,
decorating its exterior. First, there came a stately nobleman
with a great deal of hair, and no hat, bearing an enormous
banner, on which was inscribed, Mazeppa! Tonight! Then, a
Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoul-
der, like Hercules. Then, six or eight Roman chariots: each
with a beautiful lady in extremely short petticoats, and un-
naturally pink tights, erect within: shedding beaming looks
upon the crowd, in which there was a latent expression of
discomposure and anxiety, for which I couldn’t account, until,
as the open back of each chariot presented itself, I saw the
immense difficulty with which the pink legs maintained their
perpendicular, over the uneven pavement of the town: which
gave me quite a new idea of the ancient Romans and Brit-
ons. The procession was brought to a close, by some dozen
indomitable warriors of different nations, riding two and
two, and haughtily surveying the tame population of
Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally conde-
scended to scatter largesse in the form of a few handbills.
After caracolling among the lions and tigers, and proclaim-
ing that evening’s entertainments with blast of trumpet, it
then filed off, by the other end of the square, and left a new
and greatly increased dulness behind.
When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the
shrill trumpet was mild in the distance, and the tail of the
last horse was hopelessly round the corner, the people who
had come out of the church to stare at it, went back again.
But one old lady, kneeling on the pavement within, near the
door, had seen it all, and had been immensely interested,
without getting up; and this old lady’s eye, at that juncture,
I happened to catch: to our mutual confusion. She cut our
embarrassment very short, however, by crossing herself de-
voutly, and going down, at full length, on her face, before a
figure in a fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which was so
like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps at this hour
she may think the whole appearance a celestial vision. Any-
how, I must certainly have forgiven her her interest in the
Circus, though I had been her Father Confessor.
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There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoul-
der, in the cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no
effort to see the bucket (kept in an old tower) which the
people of Modena took away from the people of Bologna in
the fourteenth century, and about which there was war made
and a mock-heroic poem by Tassone, too. Being quite con-
tent, however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast,
in imagination, on the bucket within; and preferring to loi-
ter in the shade of the tall Campanile, and about the cathe-
dral; I have no personal knowledge of this bucket, even at
the present time.
Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or
the Guide-Book) would have considered that we had half
done justice to the wonders of Modena. But it is such a
delight to me to leave new scenes behind, and still go on,
encountering newer scenes—and, moreover, I have such a
perverse disposition in respect of sights that are cut, and
dried, and dictated—that I fear I sin against similar authori-
ties in every place I visit.
Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I
found myself walking next Sunday morning, among the stately
marble tombs and colonnades, in company with a crowd of
Peasants, and escorted by a little Cicerone of that town, who
was excessively anxious for the honour of the place, and most
solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments:
whereas he was never tired of extolling the good ones. Seeing
this little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who
seemed to have nothing in his face but shining teeth and eyes)
looking wistfully at a certain plot of grass, I asked him who
was buried there. ‘The poor people, Signore,’ he said, with a
shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at me—for he
always went on a little before, and took off his hat to intro-
duce every new monument. ‘Only the poor, Signore! It’s very
cheerful. It’s very lively. How green it is, how cool! It’s like a
meadow! There are five,’—holding up all the fingers of his
right hand to express the number, which an Italian peasant
will always do, if it be within the compass of his ten fingers,—
’there are five of my little children buried there, Signore; just
there; a little to the right. Well! Thanks to God! It’s very cheer-
ful. How green it is, how cool it is! It’s quite a meadow!’
He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry
for him, took a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff),
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and made a little bow; partly in deprecation of his having
alluded to such a subject, and partly in memory of the chil-
dren and of his favourite saint. It was as unaffected and as
perfectly natural a little bow, as ever man made. Immedi-
ately afterwards, he took his hat off altogether, and begged
to introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his
teeth shone brighter than before.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
THERE WAS SUCH A VERY SMART official in attendance at the Cem-
etery where the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when
the little Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would
be no offence in presenting this officer, in return for some slight
extra service, with a couple of pauls (about tenpence, English
money), I looked incredulously at his cocked hat, wash-leather
gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling buttons, and rebuked
the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head. For, in splendour
of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy Usher of the
Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler would
say, ‘such a thing as tenpence’ away with him, seemed monstrous.
He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it
him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would
have been a bargain at double the money.
It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the
people—at all events he was doing so; and when I compared
him, like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, ‘with the Institutions of
my own beloved country, I could not refrain from tears of
pride and exultation.’ He had no pace at all; no more than a
tortoise. He loitered as the people loitered, that they might
gratify their curiosity; and positively allowed them, now and
then, to read the inscriptions on the tombs. He was neither
shabby, nor insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant. He spoke
his own language with perfect propriety, and seemed to con-
sider himself, in his way, a kind of teacher of the people, and
to entertain a just respect both for himself and them. They
would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster
Abbey, than they would let the people in (as they do at Bo-
logna) to see the monuments for nothing.
Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky;
with heavy arcades over the footways of the older streets,
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and lighter and more cheerful archways in the newer por-
tions of the town. Again, brown piles of sacred buildings,
with more birds flying in and out of chinks in the stones;
and more snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars. Again,
rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells,
priests in bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths,
crosses, images, and artificial flowers.
There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleas-
ant gloom upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and sepa-
rate impression in the mind, among a crowd of cities, though
it were not still further marked in the traveller’s remembrance
by the two brick leaning towers (sufficiently unsightly in
themselves, it must be acknowledged), inclining cross-wise
as if they were bowing stiffly to each other—a most extraor-
dinary termination to the perspective of some of the narrow
streets. The colleges, and churches too, and palaces: and above
all the academy of Fine Arts, where there are a host of inter-
esting pictures, especially by Guido, Domenichino , and
Ludovico Caracci: give it a place of its own in the memory.
Even though these were not, and there were nothing else to
remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement of the
church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time
among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleas-
ant interest.
Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an
inundation which rendered the road to Florence impassable,
I was quartered up at the top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-
way room which I never could find: containing a bed, big
enough for a boarding-school, which I couldn’t fall asleep
in. The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely re-
treat, where there was no other company but the swallows in
the broad eaves over the window, was a man of one idea in
connection with the English; and the subject of this harm-
less monomania, was Lord Byron. I made the discovery by
accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the matting
with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at
that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron
had been much attached to that kind of matting. Observ-
ing, at the same moment, that I took no milk, he exclaimed
with enthusiasm, that Milor Beeron had never touched it.
At first, I took it for granted, in my innocence, that he had
been one of the Beeron servants; but no, he said, no, he was
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in the habit of speaking about my Lord, to English gentle-
men; that was all. He knew all about him, he said. In proof
of it, he connected him with every possible topic, from the
Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was grown on an
estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was the
very model of his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his
final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by
which I was going, had been Milor Beeron’s favourite ride;
and before the horse’s feet had well begun to clatter on the
pavement, he ran briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to tell
some other Englishman in some other solitary room that the
guest who had just departed was Lord Beeron’s living image.
I had entered Bologna by night—almost midnight—and all
along the road thither, after our entrance into the Papal terri-
tory: which is not, in any part, supremely well governed, Saint
Peter’s keys being rather rusty now; the driver had so worried
about the danger of robbers in travelling after dark, and had so
infected the brave Courier, and the two had been so constantly
stopping and getting up and down to look after a portmanteau
which was tied on behind, that I should have felt almost obliged
to any one who would have had the goodness to take it away.
Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left Bologna, we
should start so as not to arrive at Ferrara later than eight at
night; and a delightful afternoon and evening journey it was,
albeit through a flat district which gradually became more marshy
from the overflow of brooks and rivers in the recent heavy rains.
At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses
rested, I arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those
singular mental operations of which we are all conscious,
seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly
now. There was not much in it. In the blood red light, there
was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening
wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground was a
group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a
little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now down into
the water; in the distance, a deep bell; the shade of approach-
ing night on everything. If I had been murdered there, in
some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the
place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of
the blood; and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that
minute, is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection,
that I hardly think I could forget it.
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More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old
Ferrara, than any city of the solemn brotherhood! The grass
so grows up in the silent streets, that any one might make
hay there, literally, while the sun shines. But the sun shines
with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara; and the people
are so few who pass and re-pass through the places, that the
flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing
in the squares.
I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town,
always lives next door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the
visitor feel as if the beating hammers were his own heart,
palpitating with a deadly energy! I wonder why jealous cor-
ridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with
unnecessary doors that can’t be shut, and will not open, and
abut on pitchy darkness! I wonder why it is not enough that
these distrustful genii stand agape at one’s dreams all night,
but there must also be round open portholes, high in the
wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is heard behind the
wainscot, of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes, in
his endeavours to reach one of these portholes and look in! I
wonder why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no
effect but an agony of heat when they are lighted and re-
plenished, and an agony of cold and suffocation at all other
times! I wonder, above all, why it is the great feature of do-
mestic architecture in Italian inns, that all the fire goes up
the chimney, except the smoke!
The answer matters little. Coppersmiths, doors, portholes,
smoke, and faggots, are welcome to me. Give me the smiling
face of the attendant, man or woman; the courteous man-
ner; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased; the light-
hearted, pleasant, simple air—so many jewels set in dirt—
and I am theirs again to-morrow!
Ariosto’s house, Tasso’s prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral,
and more churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara. But
the long silent streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy
waves in lieu of banners, and where rank weeds are slowly
creeping up the long-untrodden stairs, are the best sights of
all.
The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sun-
rise one fine morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it
seemed unreal and spectral. It was no matter that the people
were not yet out of bed; for if they had all been up and busy,
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they would have made but little difference in that desert of a
place. It was best to see it, without a single figure in the
picture; a city of the dead, without one solitary survivor.
Pestilence might have ravaged streets, squares, and market-
places; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses, bat-
tered down their doors and windows, and made breaches in
their roofs. In one part, a great tower rose into the air; the
only landmark in the melancholy view. In another, a prodi-
gious castle, with a moat about it, stood aloof: a sullen city
in itself. In the black dungeons of this castle, Parisina and
her lover were beheaded in the dead of night. The red light,
beginning to shine when I looked back upon it, stained its
walls without, as they have, many a time, been stained within,
in old days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and
the city might have been avoided by all human creatures,
from the moment when the axe went down upon the last of
the two lovers: and might have never vibrated to another
sound
Beyond the blow that to the block
Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.
Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and run-
ning fiercely, we crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and
so came into the Austrian territory, and resumed our jour-
ney: through a country of which, for some miles, a great
part was under water. The brave Courier and the soldiery
had first quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our eter-
nal passport. But this was a daily relaxation with the Brave,
who was always stricken deaf when shabby functionaries in
uniform came, as they constantly did come, plunging out of
wooden boxes to look at it—or in other words to beg—and
who, stone deaf to my entreaties that the man might have a
trifle given him, and we resume our journey in peace, was
wont to sit reviling the functionary in broken English: while
the unfortunate man’s face was a portrait of mental agony
framed in the coach window, from his perfect ignorance of
what was being said to his disparagement.
There was a postilion, in the course of this day’s journey,
as wild and savagely good-looking a vagabond as you would
desire to see. He was a tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned
fellow, with a profusion of shaggy black hair hanging all over
his face, and great black whiskers stretching down his throat.
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His dress was a torn suit of rifle green, garnished here and
there with red; a steeple-crowned hat, innocent of nap, with
a broken and bedraggled feather stuck in the band; and a
flaming red neckerchief hanging on his shoulders. He was
not in the saddle, but reposed, quite at his ease, on a sort of
low foot-board in front of the postchaise, down amongst the
horses’ tails—convenient for having his brains kicked out,
at any moment. To this Brigand, the brave Courier, when
we were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest the practi-
cability of going faster. He received the proposal with a per-
fect yell of derision; brandished his whip about his head (such
a whip! it was more like a home-made bow); flung up his
heels, much higher than the horses; and disappeared, in a
paroxysm, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the axletree.
I fully expected to see him lying in the road, a hundred yards
behind, but up came the steeple-crowned hat again, next
minute, and he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining
himself with the idea, and crying, ‘Ha, ha! what next! Oh
the devil! Faster too! Shoo—hoo—o—o!’ (This last ejacula-
tion, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.) Being anxious to reach
our immediate destination that night, I ventured, by-and-
by, to repeat the experiment on my own account. It pro-
duced exactly the same effect. Round flew the whip with the
same scornful flourish, up came the heels, down went the
steeple-crowned hat, and presently he reappeared, reposing
as before and saying to himself, ‘Ha ha! what next! Faster
too! Oh the devil! Shoo—hoo—o—o!’
CHAPTER VII
AN ITALIAN DREAM
I HAD BEEN TRAVELLING, for some days; resting very little in
the night, and never in the day. The rapid and unbroken
succession of novelties that had passed before me, came back
like half-formed dreams; and a crowd of objects wandered
in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I travelled
on, by a solitary road. At intervals, some one among them
would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and
enable me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full
distinctness. After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a
view in a magic-lantern; and while I saw some part of it
quite plainly, and some faintly, and some not at all, would
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show me another of the many places I had lately seen, lin-
gering behind it, and coming through it. This was no sooner
visible than, in its turn, it melted into something else.
At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown
old rugged churches of Modena. As I recognised the curious
pillars with grim monsters for their bases, I seemed to see
them, standing by themselves in the quiet square at Padua,
where there were the staid old University, and the figures,
demurely gowned, grouped here and there in the open space
about it. Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleas-
ant city, admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-
houses, gardens, and orchards, as I had seen them a few hours
before. In their stead arose, immediately, the two towers of
Bologna; and the most obstinate of all these objects, failed to
hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous moated
castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild ro-
mance, came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over
the solitary, grass-grown, withered town. In short, I had that
incoherent but delightful jumble in my brain, which travel-
lers are apt to have, and are indolently willing to encourage.
Every shake of the coach in which I sat, half dozing in the
dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection out of its place,
and to jerk some other new recollection into it; and in this
state I fell asleep.
I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stop-
ping of the coach. It was now quite night, and we were at
the waterside. There lay here, a black boat, with a little house
or cabin in it of the same mournful colour. When I had
taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled, by two men,
towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea.
Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind. It ruffled
the water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds
flying before the stars. I could not but think how strange it
was, to be floating away at that hour: leaving the land be-
hind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea. It soon
began to burn brighter; and from being one light became a
cluster of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the water, as
the boat approached towards them by a dreamy kind of track,
marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.
We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water,
when I heard it rippling in my dream, against some obstruc-
tion near at hand. Looking out attentively, I saw, through
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the gloom, a something black and massive—like a shore,
but lying close and flat upon the water, like a raft—which
we were gliding past. The chief of the two rowers said it was
a burial-place.
Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying
out there, in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon
it as it should recede in our path, when it was quickly shut
out from my view. Before I knew by what, or how, I found
that we were gliding up a street—a phantom street; the houses
rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat glid-
ing on beneath their windows. Lights were shining from
some of these casements, plumbing the depth of the black
stream with their reflected rays, but all was profoundly si-
lent.
So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold
our course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and
flowing with water. Some of the corners where our way
branched off, were so acute and narrow, that it seemed im-
possible for the long slender boat to turn them; but the row-
ers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming
on without a pause. Sometimes, the rowers of another black
boat like our own, echoed the cry, and slackening their speed
(as I thought we did ours) would come flitting past us like a
dark shadow. Other boats, of the same sombre hue, were
lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to dark
mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some
of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards
one, I saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway
from the interior of a palace: gaily dressed, and attended by
torch-bearers. It was but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge,
so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready to fall
down and crush us: one of the many bridges that perplexed
the Dream: blotted them out, instantly. On we went, float-
ing towards the heart of this strange place—with water all
about us where never water was elsewhere—clusters of
houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings growing out of
it—and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence. Pres-
ently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing,
as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright
lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of
arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great
strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or
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gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walk-
ing—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a
large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and
galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the
black boats stealing up and down below the window on the
rippling water, till I fell asleep.
The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream;
its freshness, motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in
water; its clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words
can tell. But, from my window, I looked down on boats and
barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on groups of busy sail-
ors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on wide quays,
strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on
great ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on is-
lands, crowned with gorgeous domes and turrets: and where
golden crosses glittered in the light, atop of wondrous
churches, springing from the sea! Going down upon the
margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and fill-
ing all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing
beauty, and such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and
faded, in comparison with its absorbing loveliness.
It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the
rest, in the deep ocean. On its broad bosom, was a Palace,
more majestic and magnificent in its old age, than all the
buildings of the earth, in the high prime and fulness of their
youth. Cloisters and galleries: so light, they might have been
the work of fairy hands: so strong that centuries had bat-
tered them in vain: wound round and round this palace, and
enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant
fancies of the East. At no great distance from its porch, a
lofty tower, standing by itself, and rearing its proud head,
alone, into the sky, looked out upon the Adriatic Sea. Near
to the margin of the stream, were two ill-omened pillars of
red granite; one having on its top, a figure with a sword and
shield; the other, a winged lion. Not far from these again, a
second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even
here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleam-
ing with gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on
it, and a mimic sun revolving in its course around them:
while above, two bronze giants hammered out the hours upon
a sounding bell. An oblong square of lofty houses of the
whitest stone, surrounded by a light and beautiful arcade,
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formed part of this enchanted scene; and, here and there,
gay masts for flags rose, tapering, from the pavement of the
unsubstantial ground.
I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out
among its many arches: traversing its whole extent. A grand
and dreamy structure, of immense proportions; golden with
old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of
incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glit-
tering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark
with carved woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast
heights, and lengthened distances; shining with silver lamps
and winking lights; unreal, fantastic, solemn, inconceivable
throughout. I thought I entered the old palace; pacing silent
galleries and council-chambers, where the old rulers of this
mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures, from
the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious
on canvas, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I wan-
dered through its halls of state and triumph—bare and empty
now!—and musing on its pride and might, extinct: for that
was past; all past: heard a voice say, ‘Some tokens of its an-
cient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall, may
be traced here, yet!’
I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms,
communicating with a prison near the palace; separated from
it by a lofty bridge crossing a narrow street; and called, I
dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs.
But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions’
mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror
of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the
old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a
time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-
room to which such prisoners were taken for examination,
and the door by which they passed out, when they were
condemned—a door that never closed upon a man with life
and hope before him—my heart appeared to die within me.
It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I de-
scended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below
another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were
quite dark. Each had a loop-hole in its massive wall, where,
in the old time, every day, a torch was placed—I dreamed—
to light the prisoner within, for half an hour. The captives,
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by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut
inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their
labour with a rusty nail’s point, had outlived their agony
and them, through many generations.
One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than
four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he
entered it. Hard by, another, and a dismal one, whereto, at
midnight, the confessor came—a monk brown-robed, and
hooded—ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but in the
midnight of that murky prison, Hope’s extinguisher, and
Murder’s herald. I had my foot upon the spot, where, at the
same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and
struck my hand upon the guilty door—low-browed and
stealthy—through which the lumpish sack was carried out
into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death
to cast a net.
Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it:
licking the rough walls without, and smearing them with
damp and slime within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into
chinks and crevices, as if the very stones and bars had mouths
to stop: furnishing a smooth road for the removal of the
bodies of the secret victims of the State—a road so ready
that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a
cruel officer—flowed the same water that filled this Dream
of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.
Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought,
the Giant’s—I had some imaginary recollection of an old
man abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down
it, when he heard the bell, proclaiming his successor—I glided
off, in one of the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal
guarded by four marble lions. To make my Dream more
monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sen-
tences upon its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time,
and in an unknown language; so that their purport was a
mystery to all men.
There was little sound of hammers in this place for build-
ing ships, and little work in progress; for the greatness of the
city was no more, as I have said. Indeed, it seemed a very
wreck found drifting on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its
honourable stations, and strangers standing at its helm. A
splendid barge in which its ancient chief had gone forth,
pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I
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thought, no more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model,
made from recollection like the city’s greatness; and it told
of what had been (so are the strong and weak confounded in
the dust) almost as eloquently as the massive pillars, arches,
roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships that had no other
shadow now, upon the water or the earth.
An armoury was there yet. Plundered and despoiled; but
an armoury. With a fierce standard taken from the Turks,
drooping in the dull air of its cage. Rich suits of mail worn
by great warriors were hoarded there; crossbows and bolts;
quivers full of arrows; spears; swords, daggers, maces, shields,
and heavy-headed axes. Plates of wrought steel and iron, to
make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales; and
one spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed
to do its office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with
poisoned darts.
One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of
torture horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind
and crush men’s bones, and tear and twist them with the
torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were two iron hel-
mets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth
upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each,
was a small knob or anvil, where the directing devil could
repose his elbow at his ease, and listen, near the walled-up
ear, to the lamentations and confessions of the wretch within.
There was that grim resemblance in them to the human
shape—they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained and
cramped—that it was difficult to think them empty; and
terrible distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow
me, when, taking to my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of
garden or public walk in the sea, where there were grass and
trees. But I forgot them when I stood upon its farthest
brink—I stood there, in my dream—and looked, along the
ripple, to the setting sun; before me, in the sky and on the
deep, a crimson flush; and behind me the whole city resolv-
ing into streaks of red and purple, on the water.
In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but
little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its
flight. But there were days and nights in it; and when the
sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in
the running water, I was still afloat, I thought: plashing the
slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as
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my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.
Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast
palaces, I wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to
aisle, through labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments;
decayed apartments where the furniture, half awful, half gro-
tesque, was mouldering away. Pictures were there, replete
with such enduring beauty and expression: with such pas-
sion, truth and power: that they seemed so many young and
fresh realities among a host of spectres. I thought these, of-
ten intermingled with the old days of the city: with its beau-
ties, tyrants, captains, patriots, merchants, counters, priests:
nay, with its very stones, and bricks, and public places; all of
which lived again, about me, on the walls. Then, coming
down some marble staircase where the water lapped and oozed
against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and
went on in my dream.
Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work
with plane and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving
straight upon the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed
away before me in a tangled heap. Past open doors, decayed
and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through which
some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making
unusual shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves.
Past quays and terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were
passing and repassing, and where idlers were reclining in the
sun-shine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps. Past bridges,
where there were idlers too; loitering and looking over. Be-
low stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the
loftiest windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of garden,
theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of architecture—Gothic—
Saracenic—fanciful with all the fancies of all times and coun-
tries. Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and
white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy
and strong. Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges,
and shooting out at last into a Grand Canal! There, in the
errant fancy of my dream, I saw old Shylock passing to and
fro upon a bridge, all built upon with shops and humming
with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for
Desdemona’s, leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck
a flower. And, in the dream, I thought that Shakespeare’s
spirit was abroad upon the water somewhere: stealing through
the city.
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At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of
the Virgin, in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the
roof, I fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a
blaze of cheerful light, and that its whole arcade was thronged
with people; while crowds were diverting themselves in splen-
did coffee-houses opening from it—which were never shut, I
thought, but open all night long. When the bronze giants
struck the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and
animation of the city were all centred here; and as I rowed
away, abreast the silent quays, I only saw them dotted, here
and there, with sleeping boatmen wrapped up in their cloaks,
and lying at full length upon the stones.
But close about the quays and churches, palaces and pris-
ons sucking at their walls, and welling up into the secret
places of the town: crept the water always. Noiseless and
watchful: coiled round and round it, in its many folds, like
an old serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when people
should look down into its depths for any stone of the old
city that had claimed to be its mistress.
Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-
place at Verona. I have, many and many a time, thought
since, of this strange Dream upon the water: half-wonder-
ing if it lie there yet, and if its name be Venice.
CHAPTER VIII
BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN,
ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON
INTO SWITZERLAND
I HAD BEEN HALF AFRAID to go to Verona, lest it should at all
put me out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet. But, I was no
sooner come into the old market-place, than the misgiving
vanished. It is so fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place,
formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety of fantas-
tic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core
of even this romantic town: scene of one of the most roman-
tic and beautiful of stories.
It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-
place, to the House of the Capulets, now degenerated into a
most miserable little inn. Noisy vetturini and muddy mar-
ket-carts were disputing possession of the yard, which was
ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered
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geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting
in a doorway, who would certainly have had Romeo by the
leg, the moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and
been at large in those times. The orchard fell into other hands,
and was parted off many years ago; but there used to be one
attached to the house—or at all events there may have,
been,—and the hat (Cappello) the ancient cognizance of
the family, may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gate-
way of the yard. The geese, the market-carts, their drivers,
and the dog, were somewhat in the way of the story, it must
be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter to have found
the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the
disused rooms. But the hat was unspeakably comfortable;
and the place where the garden used to be, hardly less so.
Besides, the house is a distrustful, jealous-looking house as
one would desire to see, though of a very moderate size. So
I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion of old
Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my acknowl-
edgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady,
the Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the thresh-
old looking at the geese; and who at least resembled the
Capulets in the one particular of being very great indeed in
the ‘Family’ way.
From Juliet’s home, to Juliet’s tomb, is a transition as natu-
ral to the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest
Juliet that ever has taught the torches to burn bright in any
time. So, I went off, with a guide, to an old, old garden,
once belonging to an old, old convent, I suppose; and being
admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman who
was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh
plants and young flowers were prettily growing among frag-
ments of old wall, and ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown
a little tank, or water-trough, which the bright-eyed
woman—drying her arms upon her ‘kerchief, called ‘ La
tomba di Giulietta la sfortunata.’ With the best disposition in
the world to believe, I could do no more than believe that
the bright-eyed woman believed; so I gave her that much
credit, and her customary fee in ready money. It was a plea-
sure, rather than a disappointment, that Juliet’s resting-place
was forgotten. However consolatory it may have been to
Yorick’s Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement over-
head, and, twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it
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is better for Juliet to lie out of the track of tourists, and to
have no visitors but such as come to graves in spring-rain,
and sweet air, and sunshine.
Pleasant Verona! With its beautiful old palaces, and charm-
ing country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and
stately, balustraded galleries. With its Roman gates, still span-
ning the fair street, and casting, on the sunlight of to-day,
the shade of fifteen hundred years ago. With its marble-fit-
ted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture, and quaint old
quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and
Capulets once resounded,
And made Verona’s ancient citizens
Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partizans.
With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great
castle, waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so
cheerful! Pleasant Verona!
In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Bra—a spirit of old
time among the familiar realities of the passing hour—is the
great Roman Amphitheatre. So well preserved, and carefully
maintained, that every row of seats is there, unbroken. Over
certain of the arches, the old Roman numerals may yet be
seen; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subterra-
nean passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground
and below, as when the fierce thousands hurried in and out,
intent upon the bloody shows of the arena. Nestling in some
of the shadows and hollow places of the walls, now, are smiths
with their forges, and a few small dealers of one kind or
other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon
the parapet. But little else is greatly changed.
When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and
had gone up to the topmost round of seats, and turning
from the lovely panorama closed in by the distant Alps, looked
down into the building, it seemed to lie before me like the
inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enor-
mously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being
represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The com-
parison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance
and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested at the mo-
ment, nevertheless.
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An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before—
the same troop, I dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the
church at Modena—and had scooped out a little ring at one
end of the area; where their performances had taken place, and
where the marks of their horses’ feet were still fresh. I could not
but picture to myself, a handful of spectators gathered together
on one or two of the old stone seats, and a spangled Cavalier
being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with the grim walls look-
ing on. Above all, I thought how strangely those Roman mutes
would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling
English, where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very
loose stomach: dressed in a blue-tailed coat down to his heels,
bright yellow breeches, and a white hat: comes abroad, riding
double on a rearing horse, with an English lady (Lady Betsy) in
a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red spencer; and who al-
ways carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up parasol.
I walked through and through the town all the rest of the
day, and could have walked there until now, I think. In one
place, there was a very pretty modern theatre, where they
had just performed the opera (always popular in Verona) of
Romeo and Juliet. In another there was a collection, under a
colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains, pre-
sided over by an ancient man who might have been an
Etruscan relic himself; for he was not strong enough to open
the iron gate, when he had unlocked it, and had neither
voice enough to be audible when he described the curiosi-
ties, nor sight enough to see them: he was so very old. In
another place, there was a gallery of pictures: so abominably
bad, that it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away.
But anywhere: in the churches, among the palaces, in the
streets, on the bridge, or down beside the river: it was always
pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance always will be.
I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that
night—of course, no Englishman had ever read it there, be-
fore—and set out for Mantua next day at sunrise, repeating
to myself (in the coupe of an omnibus, and next to the con-
ductor, who was reading the Mysteries of Paris),
There is no world without Verona’s walls
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banished from the world,
And world’s exile is death—
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which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-
and-twenty miles after all, and rather disturbed my confi-
dence in his energy and boldness.
Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I won-
der! Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright with
the same glancing streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of
graceful trees! Those purple mountains lay on the horizon,
then, for certain; and the dresses of these peasant girls, who
wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English ‘life-pre-
server’ through their hair behind, can hardly be much
changed. The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning, and so
exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger, even to an
exiled lover’s breast; and Mantua itself must have broken on
him in the prospect, with its towers, and walls, and water,
pretty much as on a common-place and matrimonial omni-
bus. He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over
two rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long,
covered, wooden bridge; and leaving the marshy water be-
hind, approached the rusty gate of stagnant Mantua.
If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his
place of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua
came together in a perfect fitness of things. It may have been
more stirring then, perhaps. If so, the Apothecary was a man
in advance of his time, and knew what Mantua would be, in
eighteen hundred and forty-four. He fasted much, and that
assisted him in his foreknowledge.
I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my
own room arranging plans with the brave Courier, when
there came a modest little tap at the door, which opened on
an outer gallery surrounding a court-yard; and an intensely
shabby little man looked in, to inquire if the gentleman would
have a Cicerone to show the town. His face was so very
wistful and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there
was so much poverty expressed in his faded suit and little
pinched hat, and in the thread-bare worsted glove with which
he held it—not expressed the less, because these were evi-
dently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped on—that I would
as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him. I engaged
him on the instant, and he stepped in directly.
While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged,
he stood, beaming by himself in a corner, making a feint of
brushing my hat with his arm. If his fee had been as many
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napoleons as it was francs, there could not have shot over
the twilight of his shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as lighted
up the whole man, now that he was hired.
‘Well!’ said I, when I was ready, ‘shall we go out now?’
‘If the gentleman pleases. It is a beautiful day. A little fresh,
but charming; altogether charming. The gentleman will al-
low me to open the door. This is the Inn Yard. The court-
yard of the Golden Lion! The gentleman will please to mind
his footing on the stairs.’
We were now in the street.
‘This is the street of the Golden Lion. This, the outside of
the Golden Lion. The interesting window up there, on the
first Piano, where the pane of glass is broken, is the window
of the gentleman’s chamber!’
Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if
there were much to see in Mantua.
‘Well! Truly, no. Not much! So, so,’ he said, shrugging his
shoulders apologetically.
‘Many churches?’
‘No. Nearly all suppressed by the French.’
‘Monasteries or convents?’
‘No. The French again! Nearly all suppressed by Napo-
leon.’
‘Much business?’
‘Very little business.’
‘Many strangers?’
‘Ah Heaven!’
I thought he would have fainted.
‘Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder,
what shall we do next?’ said I.
He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed
his chin timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a
light had broken on his mind, yet with a humble appeal to
my forbearance that was perfectly irresistible:
‘We can take a little turn about the town, Signore!’ (Si puo
far ‘un piccolo giro della citta).
It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the
proposal, so we set off together in great good-humour. In
the relief of his mind, he opened his heart, and gave up as
much of Mantua as a Cicerone could.
‘One must eat,’ he said; ‘but, bah! it was a dull place,
without doubt!’
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He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa An-
drea—a noble church—and of an inclosed portion of the
pavement, about which tapers were burning, and a few people
kneeling, and under which is said to be preserved the Sangreal
of the old Romances. This church disposed of, and another
after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the Mu-
seum, which was shut up. ‘It was all the same,’ he said. ‘Bah!
There was not much inside!’ Then, we went to see the Piazza
del Diavolo, built by the Devil (for no particular purpose)
in a single night; then, the Piazza Virgiliana; then, the statue
of Virgil—OUR Poet, my little friend said, plucking up a
spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on one
side. Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which
a picture-gallery was approached. The moment the gate of
this retreat was opened, some five hundred geese came wad-
dling round us, stretching out their necks, and clamouring
in the most hideous manner, as if they were ejaculating, ‘Oh!
here’s somebody come to see the Pictures! Don’t go up! Don’t
go up!’ While we went up, they waited very quietly about
the door in a crowd, cackling to one another occasionally, in
a subdued tone; but the instant we appeared again, their
necks came out like telescopes, and setting up a great noise,
which meant, I have no doubt, ‘What, you would go, would
you! What do you think of it! How do you like it!’ they
attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively,
into Mantua.
The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to
these, Pork to the learned Pig. What a gallery it was! I would
take their opinion on a question of art, in preference to the
discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus
ignominiouly escorted thither, my little friend was plainly re-
duced to the ‘piccolo giro,’ or little circuit of the town, he had
formerly proposed. But my suggestion that we should visit
the Palazzo Te (of which I had heard a great deal, as a strange
wild place) imparted new life to him, and away we went.
The secret of the length of Midas’s ears, would have been
more extensively known, if that servant of his, who whis-
pered it to the reeds, had lived in Mantua, where there are
reeds and rushes enough to have published it to all the world.
The Palazzo Te stands in a swamp, among this sort of vegeta-
tion; and is, indeed, as singular a place as I ever saw.
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Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its
dampness, though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate con-
dition, though it is as desolate and neglected as house can
be. But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which
its interior has been decorated (among other subjects of more
delicate execution), by Giulio Romano. There is a leering
Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens of
Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another
room, so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvel-
lous how any man can have imagined such creatures. In the
chamber in which they abound, these monsters, with swol-
len faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of distortion of
look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight
of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins;
upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath;
vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple
down upon their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and
doing every kind of mad and demoniacal destruction. The
figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the utmost
pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh and disagree-
able; and the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a
violent rush of blood to the head of the spectator, than any
real picture set before him by the hand of an artist. This
apoplectic performance was shown by a sickly-looking
woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the
bad air of the marshes; but it was difficult to help feeling as
if she were too much haunted by the Giants, and they were
frightening her to death, all alone in that exhausted cistern
of a Palace, among the reeds and rushes, with the mists hov-
ering about outside, and stalking round and round it con-
tinually.
Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every
street, some suppressed church: now used for a warehouse,
now for nothing at all: all as crazy and dismantled as they
could be, short of tumbling down bodily. The marshy town
was so intensely dull and flat, that the dirt upon it seemed
not to have come there in the ordinary course, but to have
settled and mantled on its surface as on standing water. And
yet there were some business-dealings going on, and some
profits realising; for there were arcades full of Jews, where
those extraordinary people were sitting outside their shops,
contemplating their stores of stuffs, and woollens, and bright
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handkerchiefs, and trinkets: and looking, in all respects, as
wary and business-like, as their brethren in Houndsditch,
London.
Having selected a Vetturino from among the neighbouring
Christians, who agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and
a half, and to start, next morning, as soon as the gates were
opened, I returned to the Golden Lion, and dined luxuri-
ously in my own room, in a narrow passage between two
bedsteads: confronted by a smoky fire, and backed up by a
chest of drawers. At six o’clock next morning, we were jin-
gling in the dark through the wet cold mist that enshrouded
the town; and, before noon, the driver (a native of Mantua,
and sixty years of age or thereabouts) began to ask the way to
Milan.
It lay through Bozzolo; formerly a little republic, and now
one of the most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns: where
the landlord of the miserable inn (God bless him! it was his
weekly custom) was distributing infinitesimal coins among
a clamorous herd of women and children, whose rags were
fluttering in the wind and rain outside his door, where they
were gathered to receive his charity. It lay through mist, and
mud, and rain, and vines trained low upon the ground, all
that day and the next; the first sleeping-place being Cremona,
memorable for its dark brick churches, and immensely high
tower, the Torrazzo—to say nothing of its violins, of which
it certainly produces none in these degenerate days; and the
second, Lodi. Then we went on, through more mud, mist,
and rain, and marshy ground: and through such a fog, as
Englishmen, strong in the faith of their own grievances, are
apt to believe is nowhere to be found but in their own coun-
try, until we entered the paved streets of Milan.
The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far-famed
Cathedral might as well have been at Bombay, for anything
that could be seen of it at that time. But as we halted to
refresh, for a few days then, and returned to Milan again
next summer, I had ample opportunities of seeing the glori-
ous structure in all its majesty and beauty.
All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it! There
are many good and true saints in the calendar, but San Carlo
Borromeo has—if I may quote Mrs. Primrose on such a
subject—’my warm heart.’ A charitable doctor to the sick, a
munificent friend to the poor, and this, not in any spirit of
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blind bigotry, but as the bold opponent of enormous abuses
in the Romish church, I honour his memory. I honour it
none the less, because he was nearly slain by a priest, sub-
orned, by priests, to murder him at the altar: in acknowledg-
ment of his endeavours to reform a false and hypocritical
brotherhood of monks. Heaven shield all imitators of San
Carlo Borromeo as it shielded him! A reforming Pope would
need a little shielding, even now.
The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo
Borromeo is preserved, presents as striking and as ghastly a
contrast, perhaps, as any place can show. The tapers which
are lighted down there, flash and gleam on alti-rilievi in gold
and silver, delicately wrought by skilful hands, and repre-
senting the principal events in the life of the saint. Jewels,
and precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side. A wind-
lass slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it, in a
gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster,
the shrivelled mummy of a man: the pontifical robes with
which it is adorned, radiant with diamonds, emeralds, ru-
bies: every costly and magnificent gem. The shrunken heap
of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more pitiful
than if it lay upon a dung-hill. There is not a ray of impris-
oned light in all the flash and fire of jewels, but seems to
mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once. Every thread of
silk in the rich vestments seems only a provision from the
worms that spin, for the behoof of worms that propagate in
sepulchres.
In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of Santa
Maria delle Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps, better known
than any other in the world: the Last Supper, by Leonardo
da Vinci—with a door cut through it by the intelligent Do-
minican friars, to facilitate their operations at dinner-time.
I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of paint-
ing, and have no other means of judging of a picture than as
I see it resembling and refining upon nature, and presenting
graceful combinations of forms and colours. I am, there-
fore, no authority whatever, in reference to the ‘touch’ of
this or that master; though I know very well (as anybody
may, who chooses to think about the matter) that few very
great masters can possibly have painted, in the compass of
their lives, one-half of the pictures that bear their names,
and that are recognised by many aspirants to a reputation
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for taste, as undoubted originals. But this, by the way. Of
the Last Supper, I would simply observe, that in its beautiful
composition and arrangement, there it is, at Milan, a won-
derful picture; and that, in its original colouring, or in its
original expression of any single face or feature, there it is
not. Apart from the damage it has sustained from damp,
decay, or neglect, it has been (as Barry shows) so retouched
upon, and repainted, and that so clumsily, that many of the
heads are, now, positive deformities, with patches of paint
and plaster sticking upon them like wens, and utterly dis-
torting the expression. Where the original artist set that im-
press of his genius on a face, which, almost in a line or touch,
separated him from meaner painters and made him what he
was, succeeding bunglers, filling up, or painting across seams
and cracks, have been quite unable to imitate his hand; and
putting in some scowls, or frowns, or wrinkles, of their own,
have blotched and spoiled the work. This is so well estab-
lished as an historical fact, that I should not repeat it, at the
risk of being tedious, but for having observed an English
gentleman before the picture, who was at great pains to fall
into what I may describe as mild convulsions, at certain
minute details of expression which are not left in it. Whereas,
it would be comfortable and rational for travellers and crit-
ics to arrive at a general understanding that it cannot fail to
have been a work of extraordinary merit, once: when, with
so few of its original beauties remaining, the grandeur of the
general design is yet sufficient to sustain it, as a piece replete
with interest and dignity.
We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due course, and a
fine city it is, though not so unmistakably Italian as to possess
the characteristic qualities of many towns far less important in
themselves. The Corso, where the Milanese gentry ride up
and down in carriages, and rather than not do which, they
would half starve themselves at home, is a most noble public
promenade, shaded by long avenues of trees. In the splendid
theatre of La Scala, there was a ballet of action performed
after the opera, under the title of Prometheus: in the begin-
ning of which, some hundred or two of men and women
represented our mortal race before the refinements of the arts
and sciences, and loves and graces, came on earth to soften
them. I never saw anything more effective. Generally speak-
ing, the pantomimic action of the Italians is more remarkable
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for its sudden and impetuous character than for its delicate
expression, but, in this case, the drooping monotony: the weary,
miserable, listless, moping life: the sordid passions and desires
of human creatures, destitute of those elevating influences to
which we owe so much, and to whose promoters we render so
little: were expressed in a manner really powerful and affect-
ing. I should have thought it almost impossible to present
such an idea so strongly on the stage, without the aid of speech.
Milan soon lay behind us, at five o’clock in the morning;
and before the golden statue on the summit of the cathedral
spire was lost in the blue sky, the Alps, stupendously con-
fused in lofty peaks and ridges, clouds and snow, were tow-
ering in our path.
Still, we continued to advance toward them until night-
fall; and, all day long, the mountain tops presented strangely
shifting shapes, as the road displayed them in different points
of view. The beautiful day was just declining, when we came
upon the Lago Maggiore, with its lovely islands. For how-
ever fanciful and fantastic the Isola Bella may be, and is, it
still is beautiful. Anything springing out of that blue water,
with that scenery around it, must be.
It was ten o’clock at night when we got to Domo d’Ossola,
at the foot of the Pass of the Simplon. But as the moon was
shining brightly, and there was not a cloud in the starlit sky,
it was no time for going to bed, or going anywhere but on.
So, we got a little carriage, after some delay, and began the
ascent.
It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five
feet thick in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts
the new drift was already deep), the air was piercing cold.
But, the serenity of the night, and the grandeur of the road,
with its impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms, and its
sudden turns into the shining of the moon and its incessant
roar of falling water, rendered the journey more and more
sublime at every step.
Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleeping
in the moonlight, the road began to wind among dark trees,
and after a time emerged upon a barer region, very steep and
toilsome, where the moon shone bright and high. By de-
grees, the roar of water grew louder; and the stupendous
track, after crossing the torrent by a bridge, struck in be-
tween two massive perpendicular walls of rock that quite
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shut out the moonlight, and only left a few stars shining in
the narrow strip of sky above. Then, even this was lost, in
the thick darkness of a cavern in the rock, through which
the way was pierced; the terrible cataract thundering and
roaring close below it, and its foam and spray hanging, in a
mist, about the entrance. Emerging from this cave, and com-
ing again into the moonlight, and across a dizzy bridge, it
crept and twisted upward, through the Gorge of Gondo,
savage and grand beyond description, with smooth-fronted
precipices, rising up on either hand, and almost meeting
overhead. Thus we went, climbing on our rugged way, higher
and higher all night, without a moment’s weariness: lost in
the contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous heights
and depths, the fields of smooth snow lying, in the clefts and
hollows, and the fierce torrents thundering headlong down
the deep abyss.
Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen
wind was blowing fiercely. Having, with some trouble, awak-
ened the inmates of a wooden house in this solitude: round
which the wind was howling dismally, catching up the snow
in wreaths and hurling it away: we got some breakfast in a
room built of rough timbers, but well warmed by a stove,
and well contrived (as it had need to be) for keeping out the
bitter storms. A sledge being then made ready, and four horses
harnessed to it, we went, ploughing, through the snow. Still
upward, but now in the cold light of morning, and with the
great white desert on which we travelled, plain and clear.
We were well upon the summit of the mountain: and had
before us the rude cross of wood, denoting its greatest alti-
tude above the sea: when the light of the rising sun, struck,
all at once, upon the waste of snow, and turned it a deep red.
The lonely grandeur of the scene was then at its height.
As we went sledging on, there came out of the Hospice
founded by Napoleon, a group of Peasant travellers, with
staves and knapsacks, who had rested there last night: at-
tended by a Monk or two, their hospitable entertainers, trudg-
ing slowly forward with them, for company’s sake. It was
pleasant to give them good morning, and pretty, looking
back a long way after them, to see them looking back at us,
and hesitating presently, when one of our horses stumbled
and fell, whether or no they should return and help us. But
he was soon up again, with the assistance of a rough waggoner
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whose team had stuck fast there too; and when we had helped
him out of his difficulty, in return, we left him slowly plough-
ing towards them, and went slowly and swiftly forward, on
the brink of a steep precipice, among the mountain pines.
Taking to our wheels again, soon afterwards, we began rap-
idly to descend; passing under everlasting glaciers, by means
of arched galleries, hung with clusters of dripping icicles; un-
der and over foaming waterfalls; near places of refuge, and
galleries of shelter against sudden danger; through caverns over
whose arched roofs the avalanches slide, in spring, and bury
themselves in the unknown gulf beneath. Down, over lofty
bridges, and through horrible ravines: a little shifting speck in
the vast desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite
rocks; down through the deep Gorge of the Saltine, and deaf-
ened by the torrent plunging madly down, among the riven
blocks of rock, into the level country, far below. Gradually
down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an upward and a down-
ward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and softer
scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver
in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yel-
low, domes and church-spires of a Swiss town.
The business of these recollections being with Italy, and
my business, consequently, being to scamper back thither as
fast as possible, I will not recall (though I am sorely tempted)
how the Swiss villages, clustered at the feet of Giant moun-
tains, looked like playthings; or how confusedly the houses
were heaped and piled together; or how there were very nar-
row streets to shut the howling winds out in the winter-
time; and broken bridges, which the impetuous torrents,
suddenly released in spring, had swept away. Or how there
were peasant women here, with great round fur caps: look-
ing, when they peeped out of casements and only their heads
were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to the Lord
Mayor of London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the
smooth lake of Geneva, was beautiful to see; or how the
statue of Saint Peter in the street at Fribourg, grasps the larg-
est key that ever was beheld; or how Fribourg is illustrious
for its two suspension bridges, and its grand cathedral or-
gan.
Or how, between that town and Bale, the road meandered
among thriving villages of wooden cottages, with overhang-
ing thatched roofs, and low protruding windows, glazed with
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small round panes of glass like crown-pieces; or how, in ev-
ery little Swiss homestead, with its cart or waggon carefully
stowed away beside the house, its little garden, stock of poul-
try, and groups of red-cheeked children, there was an air of
comfort, very new and very pleasant after Italy; or how the
dresses of the women changed again, and there were no more
sword-bearers to be seen; and fair white stomachers, and
great black, fan-shaped, gauzy-looking caps, prevailed in-
stead.
Or how the country by the Jura mountains, sprinkled with
snow, and lighted by the moon, and musical with falling
water, was delightful; or how, below the windows of the great
hotel of the Three Kings at Bale, the swollen Rhine ran fast
and green; or how, at Strasbourg, it was quite as fast but not
as green: and was said to be foggy lower down: and, at that
late time of the year, was a far less certain means of progress,
than the highway road to Paris.
Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic
Cathedral, and its ancient houses with their peaked roofs
and gables, made a little gallery of quaint and interesting
views; or how a crowd was gathered inside the cathedral at
noon, to see the famous mechanical clock in motion, strik-
ing twelve. How, when it struck twelve, a whole army of
puppets went through many ingenious evolutions; and,
among them, a huge puppet-cock, perched on the top, crowed
twelve times, loud and clear. Or how it was wonderful to see
this cock at great pains to clap its wings, and strain its throat;
but obviously having no connection whatever with its own
voice; which was deep within the clock, a long way down.
Or how the road to Paris, was one sea of mud, and thence
to the coast, a little better for a hard frost. Or how the cliffs
of Dover were a pleasant sight, and England was so wonder-
fully neat—though dark, and lacking colour on a winter’s
day, it must be conceded.
Or how, a few days afterwards, it was cool, re-crossing the
channel, with ice upon the decks, and snow lying pretty deep
in France. Or how the Malle Poste scrambled through the
snow, headlong, drawn in the hilly parts by any number of
stout horses at a canter; or how there were, outside the Post-
office Yard in Paris, before daybreak, extraordinary adven-
turers in heaps of rags, groping in the snowy streets with
little rakes, in search of odds and ends.
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Or how, between Paris and Marseilles, the snow being
then exceeding deep, a thaw came on, and the mail waded
rather than rolled for the next three hundred miles or so;
breaking springs on Sunday nights, and putting out its two
passengers to warm and refresh themselves pending the re-
pairs, in miserable billiard-rooms, where hairy company,
collected about stoves, were playing cards; the cards being
very like themselves—extremely limp and dirty.
Or how there was detention at Marseilles from stress of
weather; and steamers were advertised to go, which did not
go; or how the good Steam-packet Charlemagne at length
put out, and met such weather that now she threatened to
run into Toulon, and now into Nice, but, the wind moder-
ating, did neither, but ran on into Genoa harbour instead,
where the familiar Bells rang sweetly in my ear. Or how
there was a travelling party on board, of whom one member
was very ill in the cabin next to mine, and being ill was
cross, and therefore declined to give up the Dictionary, which
he kept under his pillow; thereby obliging his companions
to come down to him, constantly, to ask what was the Italian
for a lump of sugar—a glass of brandy and water—what’s
o’clock? and so forth: which he always insisted on looking
out, with his own sea-sick eyes, declining to entrust the book
to any man alive.
Like Grumio, I might have told you, in detail, all this and
something more—but to as little purpose—were I not de-
terred by the remembrance that my business is with Italy.
Therefore, like Grumio’s story, ‘it shall die in oblivion.’
CHAPTER IX
TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA
THERE IS NOTHING IN ITALY , more beautiful to me, than the
coast-road between Genoa and Spezzia. On one side: some-
times far below, sometimes nearly on a level with the road,
and often skirted by broken rocks of many shapes: there is
the free blue sea, with here and there a picturesque felucca
gliding slowly on; on the other side are lofty hills, ravines
besprinkled with white cottages, patches of dark olive woods,
country churches with their light open towers, and country
houses gaily painted. On every bank and knoll by the way-
side, the wild cactus and aloe flourish in exuberant profu-
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sion; and the gardens of the bright villages along the road,
are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with clusters of
the Belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter
with golden oranges and lemons.
Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by
fishermen; and it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled
up on the beach, making little patches of shade, where they
lie asleep, or where the women and children sit romping and
looking out to sea, while they mend their nets upon the
shore. There is one town, Camoglia, with its little harbour
on the sea, hundreds of feet below the road; where families
of mariners live, who, time out of mind, have owned coast-
ing-vessels in that place, and have traded to Spain and else-
where. Seen from the road above, it is like a tiny model on
the margin of the dimpled water, shining in the sun. De-
scended into, by the winding mule-tracks, it is a perfect min-
iature of a primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest,
most piratical little place that ever was seen. Great rusty iron
rings and mooring-chains, capstans, and fragments of old
masts and spars, choke up the way; hardy rough-weather
boats, and seamen’s clothing, flutter in the little harbour or
are drawn out on the sunny stones to dry; on the parapet of
the rude pier, a few amphibious-looking fellows lie asleep,
with their legs dangling over the wall, as though earth or
water were all one to them, and if they slipped in, they would
float away, dozing comfortably among the fishes; the church
is bright with trophies of the sea, and votive offerings, in
commemoration of escape from storm and shipwreck. The
dwellings not immediately abutting on the harbour are ap-
proached by blind low archways, and by crooked steps, as if
in darkness and in difficulty of access they should be like
holds of ships, or inconvenient cabins under water; and ev-
erywhere, there is a smell of fish, and sea-weed, and old rope.
The coast-road whence Camoglia is descried so far below,
is famous, in the warm season, especially in some parts near
Genoa, for fire-flies. Walking there on a dark night, I have
seen it made one sparkling firmament by these beautiful in-
sects: so that the distant stars were pale against the flash and
glitter that spangled every olive wood and hill-side, and per-
vaded the whole air.
It was not in such a season, however, that we traversed
this road on our way to Rome. The middle of January was
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Pictures from Italy
only just past, and it was very gloomy and dark weather; very
wet besides. In crossing the fine pass of Bracco, we encoun-
tered such a storm of mist and rain, that we travelled in a
cloud the whole way. There might have been no Mediterra-
nean in the world, for anything that we saw of it there, except
when a sudden gust of wind, clearing the mist before
it, for a moment, showed the agitated sea at a great depth
below, lashing the distant rocks, and spouting up its foam
furiously. The rain was incessant; every brook and torrent was
greatly swollen; and such a deafening leaping, and roaring,
and thundering of water, I never heard the like of in my life.
Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra,
an unbridged river on the high-road to Pisa, was too high to
be safely crossed in the Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait
until the afternoon of next day, when it had, in some degree,
subsided. Spezzia, however, is a good place to tarry at; by
reason, firstly, of its beautiful bay; secondly, of its ghostly
Inn; thirdly, of the head-dress of the women, who wear, on
one side of their head, a small doll’s straw hat, stuck on to
the hair; which is certainly the oddest and most roguish head-
gear that ever was invented.
The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat—the passage
is not by any means agreeable, when the current is swollen
and strong—we arrived at Carrara, within a few hours. In
good time next morning, we got some ponies, and went out
to see the marble quarries.
They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of
lofty hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by
being abruptly strangled by Nature. The quarries, ‘or caves,’ as
they call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills,
on either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for
marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make a man’s
fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of work-
ing what is worth nothing. Some of these caves were opened by
the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour.
Many others are being worked at this moment; others are to be
begun to-morrow, next week, next month; others are unbought,
unthought of; and marble enough for more ages than have passed
since the place was resorted to, lies hidden everywhere: patiently
awaiting its time of discovery.
As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (hav-
ing left your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or
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two lower down) you hear, every now and then, echoing among
the hills, in a low tone, more silent than the previous silence,
a melancholy warning bugle,—a signal to the miners to with-
draw. Then, there is a thundering, and echoing from hill to
hill, and perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of rock
into the air; and on you toil again until some other bugle
sounds, in a new direction, and you stop directly, lest you
should come within the range of the new explosion.
There were numbers of men, working high up in these
hills—on the sides—clearing away, and sending down the
broken masses of stone and earth, to make way for the blocks
of marble that had been discovered. As these came rolling
down from unseen hands into the narrow valley, I could not
help thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen)
where the Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where the mer-
chants from the heights above, flung down great pieces of
meat for the diamonds to stick to. There were no eagles here,
to darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them;
but it was as wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds.
But the road, the road down which the marble comes, how-
ever immense the blocks! The genius of the country, and the
spirit of its institutions, pave that road: repair it, watch it,
keep it going! Conceive a channel of water running over a
rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and
sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and that being
the road—because it was the road five hundred years ago!
Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being
used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be, five hundred
years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five
hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in
twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel work!
Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, ac-
cording to its size; down it must come, this way. In their strug-
gling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind
them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone;
for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their
energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was
good five hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a
railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world)
would be flat blasphemy.
When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by
only a pair of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble
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on it), coming down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat
upon the heavy yoke, to keep it on the neck of the poor
beasts—and who faced backwards: not before him—as the
very Devil of true despotism. He had a great rod in his hand,
with an iron point; and when they could plough and force
their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer,
and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on
their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got
them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; re-
peated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of pur-
pose, when they stopped again; got them on, once more;
forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent;
and when their writhing and smarting, and the weight be-
hind them, bore them plunging down the precipice in a cloud
of scattered water, whirled his rod above his head, and gave
a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved something,
and had no idea that they might shake him off, and blindly
mash his brains upon the road, in the noon-tide of his tri-
umph.
Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that after-
noon—for it is a great workshop, full of beautifully-finished
copies in marble, of almost every figure, group, and bust, we
know—it seemed, at first, so strange to me that those ex-
quisite shapes, replete with grace, and thought, and delicate
repose, should grow out of all this toil, and sweat, and tor-
ture! But I soon found a parallel to it, and an explanation of
it, in every virtue that springs up in miserable ground, and
every good thing that as its birth in sorrow and distress. And,
looking out of the sculptor’s great window, upon the marble
mountains, all red and glowing in the decline of day, but
stern and solemn to the last, I thought, my God! how many
quarries of human hearts and souls, capable of far more beau-
tiful results, are left shut up and mouldering away: while
pleasure-travellers through life, avert their faces, as they pass,
and shudder at the gloom and ruggedness that conceal them!
The then reigning Duke of Modena, to whom this terri-
tory in part belonged, claimed the proud distinction of be-
ing the only sovereign in Europe who had not recognised
Louis-Philippe as King of the French! He was not a wag, but
quite in earnest. He was also much opposed to railroads;
and if certain lines in contemplation by other potentates, on
either side of him, had been executed, would have probably
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enjoyed the satisfaction of having an omnibus plying to and
fro across his not very vast dominions, to forward travellers
from one terminus to another.
Carrara, shut in by great hills, is very picturesque and
bold. Few tourists stay there; and the people are nearly all
connected, in one way or other, with the working of marble.
There are also villages among the caves, where the workmen
live. It contains a beautiful little Theatre, newly built; and it
is an interesting custom there, to form the chorus of labourers
in the marble quarries, who are self-taught and sing by ear. I
heard them in a comic opera, and in an act of ‘Norma;’ and
they acquitted themselves very well; unlike the common
people of Italy generally, who (with some exceptions among
the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of tune, and have very dis-
agreeable singing voices.
From the summit of a lofty hill beyond Carrara, the first
view of the fertile plain in which the town of Pisa lies—with
Leghorn, a purple spot in the flat distance—is enchanting.
Nor is it only distance that lends enchantment to the view;
for the fruitful country, and rich woods of olive-trees through
which the road subsequently passes, render it delightful.
The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for
a long time we could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower,
all awry in the uncertain light; the shadowy original of the
old pictures in school-books, setting forth ‘The Wonders of
the World.’ Like most things connected in their first associa-
tions with school-books and school-times, it was too small. I
felt it keenly. It was nothing like so high above the wall as I
had hoped. It was another of the many deceptions practised
by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the corner of St. Paul’s Church-
yard, London. His Tower was a fiction, but this was a real-
ity—and, by comparison, a short reality. Still, it looked very
well, and very strange, and was quite as much out of the
perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be. The quiet
air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the gate, with only
two little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of
people in them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the
centre of the town; were excellent. So, I bore no malice in
my heart against Mr. Harris (remembering his good inten-
tions), but forgave him before dinner, and went out, full of
confidence, to see the Tower next morning.
I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected
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to see it, casting its long shadow on a public street where
people came and went all day. It was a surprise to me to find
it in a grave retired place, apart from the general resort, and
carpeted with smooth green turf. But, the group of build-
ings, clustered on and about this verdant carpet: comprising
the Tower, the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Church of
the Campo Santo: is perhaps the most remarkable and beau-
tiful in the whole world; and from being clustered there,
together, away from the ordinary transactions and details of
the town, they have a singularly venerable and impressive
character. It is the architectural essence of a rich old city,
with all its common life and common habitations pressed
out, and filtered away.
Simond compares the Tower to the usual pictorial repre-
sentations in children’s books of the Tower of Babel. It is a
happy simile, and conveys a better idea of the building than
chapters of laboured description. Nothing can exceed the
grace and lightness of the structure; nothing can be more
remarkable than its general appearance. In the course of the
ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase), the inclina-
tion is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes so,
and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled
over, through the action of an ebb-tide. The effect upon the
low side, so to speak—looking over from the gallery, and
seeing the shaft recede to its base—is very startling; and I
saw a nervous traveller hold on to the Tower involuntarily,
after glancing down, as if he had some idea of propping it
up. The view within, from the ground—looking up, as
through a slanted tube—is also very curious. It certainly in-
clines as much as the most sanguine tourist could desire.
The natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hun-
dred, who were about to recline upon the grass below it, to
rest, and contemplate the adjacent buildings, would prob-
ably be, not to take up their position under the leaning side;
it is so very much aslant.
The manifold beauties of the Cathedral and Baptistery
need no recapitulation from me; though in this case, as in a
hundred others, I find it difficult to separate my own de-
light in recalling them, from your weariness in having them
recalled. There is a picture of St. Agnes, by Andrea del Sarto,
in the former, and there are a variety of rich columns in the
latter, that tempt me strongly.
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It is, I hope, no breach of my resolution not to be tempted
into elaborate descriptions, to remember the Campo Santo;
where grass-grown graves are dug in earth brought more
than six hundred years ago, from the Holy Land; and where
there are, surrounding them, such cloisters, with such play-
ing lights and shadows falling through their delicate tracery
on the stone pavement, as surely the dullest memory could
never forget. On the walls of this solemn and lovely place,
are ancient frescoes, very much obliterated and decayed, but
very curious. As usually happens in almost any collection of
paintings, of any sort, in Italy, where there are many heads,
there is, in one of them, a striking accidental likeness of
Napoleon. At one time, I used to please my fancy with the
speculation whether these old painters, at their work, had a
foreboding knowledge of the man who would one day arise
to wreak such destruction upon art: whose soldiers would
make targets of great pictures, and stable their horses among
triumphs of architecture. But the same Corsican face is so
plentiful in some parts of Italy at this day, that a more com-
monplace solution of the coincidence is unavoidable.
If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its
Tower, it may claim to be, at least, the second or third in
right of its beggars. They waylay the unhappy visitor at ev-
ery turn, escort him to every door he enters at, and lie in
wait for him, with strong reinforcements, at every door by
which they know he must come out. The grating of the por-
tal on its hinges is the signal for a general shout, and the
moment he appears, he is hemmed in, and fallen on, by
heaps of rags and personal distortions. The beggars seem to
embody all the trade and enterprise of Pisa. Nothing else is
stirring, but warm air. Going through the streets, the fronts
of the sleepy houses look like backs. They are all so still and
quiet, and unlike houses with people in them, that the greater
part of the city has the appearance of a city at daybreak, or
during a general siesta of the population. Or it is yet more
like those backgrounds of houses in common prints, or old
engravings, where windows and doors are squarely indicated,
and one figure (a beggar of course) is seen walking off by
itself into illimitable perspective.
Not so Leghorn (made illustrious by Smollett’s grave), which
is a thriving, business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idle-
ness is shouldered out of the way by commerce. The regula-
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tions observed there, in reference to trade and merchants,
are very liberal and free; and the town, of course, benefits by
them. Leghorn had a bad name in connection with stabbers,
and with some justice it must be allowed; for, not many
years ago, there was an assassination club there, the mem-
bers of which bore no ill-will to anybody in particular, but
stabbed people (quite strangers to them) in the streets at
night, for the pleasure and excitement of the recreation. I
think the president of this amiable society was a shoemaker.
He was taken, however, and the club was broken up. It would,
probably, have disappeared in the natural course of events,
before the railroad between Leghorn and Pisa, which is a
good one, and has already begun to astonish Italy with a
precedent of punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improve-
ment—the most dangerous and heretical astonisher of all.
There must have been a slight sensation, as of earthquake,
surely, in the Vatican, when the first Italian railroad was
thrown open.
Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered Vetturino,
and his four horses, to take us on to Rome, we travelled
through pleasant Tuscan villages and cheerful scenery all day.
The roadside crosses in this part of Italy are numerous and
curious. There is seldom a figure on the cross, though there
is sometimes a face, but they are remarkable for being gar-
nished with little models in wood, of every possible object
that can be connected with the Saviour’s death. The cock
that crowed when Peter had denied his Master thrice, is usu-
ally perched on the tip-top; and an ornithological phenom-
enon he generally is. Under him, is the inscription. Then,
hung on to the cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the
sponge of vinegar and water at the end, the coat without
seam for which the soldiers cast lots, the dice-box with which
they threw for it, the hammer that drove in the nails, the
pincers that pulled them out, the ladder which was set against
the cross, the crown of thorns, the instrument of flagella-
tion, the lanthorn with which Mary went to the tomb (I
suppose), and the sword with which Peter smote the servant
of the high priest,—a perfect toy-shop of little objects, re-
peated at every four or five miles, all along the highway.
On the evening of the second day from Pisa, we reached
the beautiful old city of Siena. There was what they called a
Carnival, in progress; but, as its secret lay in a score or two
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of melancholy people walking up and down the principal
street in common toy-shop masks, and being more melan-
choly, if possible, than the same sort of people in England, I
say no more of it. We went off, betimes next morning, to see
the Cathedral, which is wonderfully picturesque inside and
out, especially the latter—also the market-place, or great
Piazza, which is a large square, with a great broken-nosed
fountain in it: some quaint Gothic houses: and a high square
brick tower; outside the top of which—a curious feature in
such views in Italy—hangs an enormous bell. It is like a bit
of Venice, without the water. There are some curious old
Palazzi in the town, which is very ancient; and without hav-
ing (for me) the interest of Verona, or Genoa, it is very dreamy
and fantastic, and most interesting.
We went on again, as soon as we had seen these things,
and going over a rather bleak country (there had been noth-
ing but vines until now: mere walking-sticks at that season
of the year), stopped, as usual, between one and two hours
in the middle of the day, to rest the horses; that being a part
of every Vetturino contract. We then went on again, through
a region gradually becoming bleaker and wilder, until it be-
came as bare and desolate as any Scottish moors. Soon after
dark, we halted for the night, at the osteria of La Scala: a
perfectly lone house, where the family were sitting round a
great fire in the kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or
four feet high, and big enough for the roasting of an ox. On
the upper, and only other floor of this hotel, there was a
great, wild, rambling sala, with one very little window in a
by-corner, and four black doors opening into four black bed-
rooms in various directions. To say nothing of another large
black door, opening into another large black sala, with the
staircase coming abruptly through a kind of trap-door in the
floor, and the rafters of the roof looming above: a suspicious
little press skulking in one obscure corner: and all the knives
in the house lying about in various directions. The fireplace
was of the purest Italian architecture, so that it was perfectly
impossible to see it for the smoke. The waitress was like a
dramatic brigand’s wife, and wore the same style of dress
upon her head. The dogs barked like mad; the echoes re-
turned the compliments bestowed upon them; there was not
another house within twelve miles; and things had a dreary,
and rather a cut-throat, appearance.
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They were not improved by rumours of robbers having
come out, strong and boldly, within a few nights; and of
their having stopped the mail very near that place. They
were known to have waylaid some travellers not long before,
on Mount Vesuvius itself, and were the talk at all the road-
side inns. As they were no business of ours, however (for we
had very little with us to lose), we made ourselves merry on
the subject, and were very soon as comfortable as need be.
We had the usual dinner in this solitary house; and a very
good dinner it is, when you are used to it. There is some-
thing with a vegetable or some rice in it which is a sort of
shorthand or arbitrary character for soup, and which tastes
very well, when you have flavoured it with plenty of grated
cheese, lots of salt, and abundance of pepper. There is the
half fowl of which this soup has been made. There is a stewed
pigeon, with the gizzards and livers of himself and other
birds stuck all round him. There is a bit of roast beef, the
size of a small French roll. There are a scrap of Parmesan
cheese, and five little withered apples, all huddled together
on a small plate, and crowding one upon the other, as if each
were trying to save itself from the chance of being eaten.
Then there is coffee; and then there is bed. You don’t mind
brick floors; you don’t mind yawning doors, nor banging
windows; you don’t mind your own horses being stabled
under the bed: and so close, that every time a horse coughs
or sneezes, he wakes you. If you are good-humoured to the
people about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful,
take my word for it you may be well entertained in the very
worst Italian Inn, and always in the most obliging manner,
and may go from one end of the country to the other (de-
spite all stories to the contrary) without any great trial of
your patience anywhere. Especially, when you get such wine
in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte Pulciano.
It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we
went, for twelve miles, over a country as barren, as stony,
and as wild, as Cornwall in England, until we came to
Radicofani, where there is a ghostly, goblin inn: once a hunt-
ing-seat, belonging to the Dukes of Tuscany. It is full of such
rambling corridors, and gaunt rooms, that all the murdering
and phantom tales that ever were written might have origi-
nated in that one house. There are some horrible old Palazzi
in Genoa: one in particular, not unlike it, outside: but there
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is a winding, creaking, wormy, rustling, door-opening, foot-
on-staircase-falling character about this Radicofani Hotel, such
as I never saw, anywhere else. The town, such as it is, hangs on
a hill-side above the house, and in front of it. The
inhabitants are all beggars; and as soon as they see a carriage
coming, they swoop down upon it, like so many birds of prey.
When we got on the mountain pass, which lies beyond
this place, the wind (as they had forewarned us at the inn)
was so terrific, that we were obliged to take my other half
out of the carriage, lest she should be blown over, carriage
and all, and to hang to it, on the windy side (as well as we
could for laughing), to prevent its going, Heaven knows
where. For mere force of wind, this land-storm might have
competed with an Atlantic gale, and had a reasonable chance
of coming off victorious. The blast came sweeping down
great gullies in a range of mountains on the right: so that we
looked with positive awe at a great morass on the left, and
saw that there was not a bush or twig to hold by. It seemed as
if, once blown from our feet, we must be swept out to sea, or
away into space. There was snow, and hail, and rain, and
lightning, and thunder; and there were rolling mists, travel-
ling with incredible velocity. It was dark, awful, and solitary
to the last degree; there were mountains above mountains,
veiled in angry clouds; and there was such a wrathful, rapid,
violent, tumultuous hurry, everywhere, as rendered the scene
unspeakably exciting and grand.
It was a relief to get out of it, notwithstanding; and to
cross even the dismal, dirty Papal Frontier. After passing
through two little towns; in one of which, Acquapendente,
there was also a ‘Carnival’ in progress: consisting of one man
dressed and masked as a woman, and one woman dressed
and masked as a man, walking ankle-deep, through the
muddy streets, in a very melancholy manner: we came, at
dusk, within sight of the Lake of Bolsena, on whose bank
there is a little town of the same name, much celebrated for
malaria. With the exception of this poor place, there is not a
cottage on the banks of the lake, or near it (for nobody dare
sleep there); not a boat upon its waters; not a stick or stake
to break the dismal monotony of seven-and-twenty watery
miles. We were late in getting in, the roads being very bad
from heavy rains; and, after dark, the dulness of the scene
was quite intolerable.
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We entered on a very different, and a finer scene of deso-
lation, next night, at sunset. We had passed through
Montefiaschone (famous for its wine) and Viterbo (for its
fountains): and after climbing up a long hill of eight or ten
miles’ extent, came suddenly upon the margin of a solitary
lake: in one part very beautiful, with a luxuriant wood; in
another, very barren, and shut in by bleak volcanic hills.
Where this lake flows, there stood, of old, a city. It was swal-
lowed up one day; and in its stead, this water rose. There are
ancient traditions (common to many parts of the world) of
the ruined city having been seen below, when the water was
clear; but however that may be, from this spot of earth it
vanished. The ground came bubbling up above it; and the
water too; and here they stand, like ghosts on whom the
other world closed suddenly, and who have no means of
getting back again. They seem to be waiting the course of
ages, for the next earthquake in that place; when they will
plunge below the ground, at its first yawning, and be seen
no more. The unhappy city below, is not more lost and dreary,
than these fire-charred hills and the stagnant water, above.
The red sun looked strangely on them, as with the knowl-
edge that they were made for caverns and darkness; and the
melancholy water oozed and sucked the mud, and crept
quietly among the marshy grass and reeds, as if the over-
throw of all the ancient towers and house-tops, and the death
of all the ancient people born and bred there, were yet heavy
on its conscience.
A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a
little town like a large pig-sty, where we passed the night.
Next morning at seven o’clock, we started for Rome.
As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the
Campagna Romana; an undulating flat (as you know), where
few people can live; and where, for miles and miles, there is
nothing to relieve the terrible monotony and gloom. Of all
kinds of country that could, by possibility, lie outside the
gates of Rome, this is the aptest and fittest burial-ground for
the Dead City. So sad, so quiet, so sullen; so secret in its
covering up of great masses of ruin, and hiding them; so like
the waste places into which the men possessed with devils
used to go and howl, and rend themselves, in the old days of
Jerusalem. We had to traverse thirty miles of this Campagna;
and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing nothing
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but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking
shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself
wrapped to the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his
sheep. At the end of that distance, we stopped to refresh the
horses, and to get some lunch, in a common malaria-shaken,
despondent little public-house, whose every inch of wall and
beam, inside, was (according to custom) painted and deco-
rated in a way so miserable that every room looked like the
wrong side of another room, and, with its wretched imita-
tion of drapery, and lop-sided little daubs of lyres, seemed to
have been plundered from behind the scenes of some travel-
ling circus.
When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a per-
fect fever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after an-
other mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in
the distance; it looked like—I am half afraid to write the
word—like London!!! There it lay, under a thick cloud, with
innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, ris-
ing up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome. I
swear, that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of the com-
parison, it was so like London, at that distance, that if you
could have shown it me, in a glass, I should have taken it for
nothing else.
CHAPTER X
ROME
WE ENTERED THE ETERNAL CITY, at about four o’clock in the
afternoon, on the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo,
and came immediately—it was a dark, muddy day, and there
had been heavy rain—on the skirts of the Carnival. We did
not, then, know that we were only looking at the fag end of
the masks, who were driving slowly round and round the
Piazza until they could find a promising opportunity for fall-
ing into the stream of carriages, and getting, in good time,
into the thick of the festivity; and coming among them so
abruptly, all travel-stained and weary, was not coming very
well prepared to enjoy the scene.
We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three
miles before. It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and
hurrying on between its worn-away and miry banks, had a
promising aspect of desolation and ruin. The masquerade
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dresses on the fringe of the Carnival, did great violence to
this promise. There were no great ruins, no solemn tokens
of antiquity, to be seen;—they all lie on the other side of the
city. There seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops
and houses, such as are to be found in any European town;
there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and
fro; a multitude of chattering strangers. It was no more my
Rome: the Rome of anybody’s fancy, man or boy; degraded
and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins:
than the Place de la Concorde in Paris is. A cloudy sky, a dull
cold rain, and muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for
this: and I confess to having gone to bed, that night, in a
very indifferent humour, and with a very considerably
quenched enthusiasm.
Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St.
Peter’s. It looked immense in the distance, but distinctly and
decidedly small, by comparison, on a near approach. The
beauty of the Piazza, on which it stands, with its clusters of
exquisite columns, and its gushing fountains—so fresh, so
broad, and free, and beautiful—nothing can exaggerate. The
first burst of the interior, in all its expansive majesty and
glory: and, most of all, the looking up into the Dome: is a
sensation never to be forgotten. But, there were prepara-
tions for a Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in
some impertinent frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and
entrance to the subterranean chapel: which is before it: in
the centre of the church: were like a goldsmith’s shop, or one
of the opening scenes in a very lavish pantomime. And though
I had as high a sense of the beauty of the building (I hope) as
it is possible to entertain, I felt no very strong emotion. I
have been infinitely more affected in many English cathe-
drals when the organ has been playing, and in many English
country churches when the congregation have been singing.
I had a much greater sense of mystery and wonder, in the
Cathedral of San Mark at Venice.
When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly
an hour staring up into the dome: and would not have ‘gone
over’ the Cathedral then, for any money), we said to the
coachman, ‘Go to the Coliseum.’ In a quarter of an hour or
so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.
It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so
suggestive and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment—
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actually in passing in—they who will, may have the whole
great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of
eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of
strife, and blood, and dust going on there, as no language
can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter deso-
lation, strike upon the stranger the next moment, like a soft-
ened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so
moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately con-
nected with his own affections and afflictions.
To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and
arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day;
the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yester-
day, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit:
chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who
build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit
of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted
in the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down
on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of
Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Fo-
rum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old reli-
gion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome,
wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on
which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most
stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight,
conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of
the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lusti-
est life, have moved one’s heart, as it must move all who look
upon it now, a ruin. GOD be thanked: a ruin!
As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain
among graves: so do its ancient influences outlive all other
remnants of the old mythology and old butchery of Rome,
in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman people. The
Italian face changes as the visitor approaches the city; its
beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one counte-
nance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets,
that would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coli-
seum to-morrow.
Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one
can imagine in its full and awful grandeur! We wandered
out upon the Appian Way, and then went on, through miles
of ruined tombs and broken walls, with here and there a
desolate and uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus,
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where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges,
competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as
in old time: past the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclo-
sure, hedge, or stake, wall or fence: away upon the open
Campagna, where on that side of Rome, nothing is to be
beheld but Ruin. Except where the distant Apennines bound
the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one field
of ruin. Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and
beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs.
A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expres-
sion; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground.
ON SUNDAY, THE POPE assisted in the performance of High
Mass at St. Peter’s. The effect of the Cathedral on my mind,
on that second visit, was exactly what it was at first, and
what it remains after many visits. It is not religiously im-
pressive or affecting. It is an immense edifice, with no one
point for the mind to rest upon; and it tires itself with wan-
dering round and round. The very purpose of the place, is
not expressed in anything you see there, unless you examine
its details—and all examination of details is incompatible
with the place itself. It might be a Pantheon, or a Senate
House, or a great architectural trophy, having no other ob-
ject than an architectural triumph. There is a black statue of
St. Peter, to be sure, under a red canopy; which is larger than
life and which is constantly having its great toe kissed by
good Catholics. You cannot help seeing that: it is so very
prominent and popular. But it does not heighten the effect
of the temple, as a work of art; and it is not expressive—to
me at least—of its high purpose.
A large space behind the altar, was fitted up with boxes,
shaped like those at the Italian Opera in England, but in
their decoration much more gaudy. In the centre of the kind
of theatre thus railed off, was a canopied dais with the Pope’s
chair upon it. The pavement was covered with a carpet of
the brightest green; and what with this green, and the intol-
erable reds and crimsons, and gold borders of the hangings,
the whole concern looked like a stupendous Bonbon. On
either side of the altar, was a large box for lady strangers.
These were filled with ladies in black dresses and black veils.
The gentlemen of the Pope’s guard, in red coats, leather
breeches, and jack-boots, guarded all this reserved space, with
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drawn swords that were very flashy in every sense; and from
the altar all down the nave, a broad lane was kept clear by
the Pope’s Swiss guard, who wear a quaint striped surcoat,
and striped tight legs, and carry halberds like those which
are usually shouldered by those theatrical supernumeraries,
who never can get off the stage fast enough, and who may be
generally observed to linger in the enemy’s camp after the
open country, held by the opposite forces, has been split up
the middle by a convulsion of Nature.
I got upon the border of the green carpet, in company
with a great many other gentlemen, attired in black (no other
passport is necessary), and stood there at my ease, during
the performance of Mass. The singers were in a crib of wire-
work (like a large meat-safe or bird-cage) in one corner; and
sang most atrociously. All about the green carpet, there was
a slowly moving crowd of people: talking to each other: star-
ing at the Pope through eye-glasses; defrauding one another,
in moments of partial curiosity, out of precarious seats on
the bases of pillars: and grinning hideously at the ladies.
Dotted here and there, were little knots of friars (Frances-
cani, or Cappuccini, in their coarse brown dresses and peaked
hoods) making a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics
of higher degree, and having their humility gratified to the
utmost, by being shouldered about, and elbowed right and
left, on all sides. Some of these had muddy sandals and um-
brellas, and stained garments: having trudged in from the
country. The faces of the greater part were as coarse and
heavy as their dress; their dogged, stupid, monotonous stare
at all the glory and splendour, having something in it, half
miserable, and half ridiculous.
Upon the green carpet itself, and gathered round the al-
tar, was a perfect army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold,
purple, violet, white, and fine linen. Stragglers from these,
went to and fro among the crowd, conversing two and two,
or giving and receiving introductions, and exchanging salu-
tations; other functionaries in black gowns, and other func-
tionaries in court-dresses, were similarly engaged. In the midst
of all these, and stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out, and the
extreme restlessness of the Youth of England, who were per-
petually wandering about, some few steady persons in black
cassocks, who had knelt down with their faces to the wall,
and were poring over their missals, became, unintentionally,
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a sort of humane man-traps, and with their own devout legs,
tripped up other people’s by the dozen.
There was a great pile of candles lying down on the floor
near me, which a very old man in a rusty black gown with
an open-work tippet, like a summer ornament for a fire-
place in tissue-paper, made himself very busy in dispensing
to all the ecclesiastics: one a-piece. They loitered about with
these for some time, under their arms like walking-sticks, or
in their hands like truncheons. At a certain period of the
ceremony, however, each carried his candle up to the Pope,
laid it across his two knees to be blessed, took it back again,
and filed off. This was done in a very attenuated procession,
as you may suppose, and occupied a long time. Not because
it takes long to bless a candle through and through, but be-
cause there were so many candles to be blessed. At last they
were all blessed: and then they were all lighted; and then the
Pope was taken up, chair and all, and carried round the
church.
I must say, that I never saw anything, out of November,
so like the popular English commemoration of the fifth of
that month. A bundle of matches and a lantern, would have
made it perfect. Nor did the Pope, himself, at all mar the
resemblance, though he has a pleasant and venerable face;
for, as this part of the ceremony makes him giddy and sick,
he shuts his eyes when it is performed: and having his eyes
shut and a great mitre on his head, and his head itself wag-
ging to and fro as they shook him in carrying, he looked as if
his mask were going to tumble off. The two immense fans
which are always borne, one on either side of him, accompa-
nied him, of course, on this occasion. As they carried him
along, he blessed the people with the mystic sign; and as he
passed them, they kneeled down. When he had made the
round of the church, he was brought back again, and if I am
not mistaken, this performance was repeated, in the whole,
three times. There was, certainly nothing solemn or effec-
tive in it; and certainly very much that was droll and tawdry.
But this remark applies to the whole ceremony, except the
raising of the Host, when every man in the guard dropped
on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the
ground; which had a fine effect.
The next time I saw the cathedral, was some two or three
weeks afterwards, when I climbed up into the ball; and then,
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the hangings being taken down, and the carpet taken up,
but all the framework left, the remnants of these decorations
looked like an exploded cracker.
The Friday and Saturday having been solemn Festa days,
and Sunday being always a dies non in carnival proceedings,
we had looked forward, with some impatience and curiosity,
to the beginning of the new week: Monday and Tuesday
being the two last and best days of the Carnival.
On the Monday afternoon at one or two o’clock, there
began to be a great rattling of carriages into the court-yard
of the hotel; a hurrying to and fro of all the servants in it;
and, now and then, a swift shooting across some doorway or
balcony, of a straggling stranger in a fancy dress: not yet
sufficiently well used to the same, to wear it with confidence,
and defy public opinion. All the carriages were open, and
had the linings carefully covered with white cotton or calico,
to prevent their proper decorations from being spoiled by
the incessant pelting of sugar-plums; and people were pack-
ing and cramming into every vehicle as it waited for its oc-
cupants, enormous sacks and baskets full of these confetti,
together with such heaps of flowers, tied up in little nosegays,
that some carriages were not only brimful of flowers, but
literally running over: scattering, at every shake and jerk of
the springs, some of their abundance on the ground. Not to
be behindhand in these essential particulars, we caused two
very respectable sacks of sugar-plums (each about three feet
high) and a large clothes-basket full of flowers to be con-
veyed into our hired barouche, with all speed. And from our
place of observation, in one of the upper balconies of the
hotel, we contemplated these arrangements with the liveliest
satisfaction. The carriages now beginning to take up their
company, and move away, we got into ours, and drove off
too, armed with little wire masks for our faces; the sugar-
plums, like Falstaff’s adulterated sack, having lime in their
composition.
The Corso is a street a mile long; a street of shops, and
palaces, and private houses, sometimes opening into a broad
piazza. There are verandahs and balconies, of all shapes and
sizes, to almost every house—not on one story alone, but
often to one room or another on every story—put there in
general with so little order or regularity, that if, year after
year, and season after season, it had rained balconies, hailed
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balconies, snowed balconies, blown balconies, they could scarcely
have come into existence in a more disorderly manner.
This is the great fountain-head and focus of the Carnival.
But all the streets in which the Carnival is held, being vigi-
lantly kept by dragoons, it is necessary for carriages, in the
first instance, to pass, in line, down another thoroughfare,
and so come into the Corso at the end remote from the Piazza
del Popolo; which is one of its terminations. Accordingly, we
fell into the string of coaches, and, for some time, jogged on
quietly enough; now crawling on at a very slow walk; now
trotting half-a-dozen yards; now backing fifty; and now stop-
ping altogether: as the pressure in front obliged us. If any
impetuous carriage dashed out of the rank and clattered for-
ward, with the wild idea of getting on faster, it was suddenly
met, or overtaken, by a trooper on horseback, who, deaf as his
own drawn sword to all remonstrances, immediately escorted
it back to the very end of the row, and made it a dim speck in
the remotest perspective. Occasionally, we interchanged a volley
of confetti with the carriage next in front, or the carriage next
behind; but as yet, this capturing of stray and errant coaches
by the military, was the chief amusement.
Presently, we came into a narrow street, where, besides
one line of carriages going, there was another line of car-
riages returning. Here the sugar-plums and the nosegays
began to fly about, pretty smartly; and I was fortunate enough
to observe one gentleman attired as a Greek warrior, catch a
light-whiskered brigand on the nose (he was in the very act
of tossing up a bouquet to a young lady in a first-floor win-
dow) with a precision that was much applauded by the by-
standers. As this victorious Greek was exchanging a face-
tious remark with a stout gentleman in a doorway—one-
half black and one-half white, as if he had been peeled up
the middle—who had offered him his congratulations on
this achievement, he received an orange from a house-top,
full on his left ear, and was much surprised, not to say dis-
comfited. Especially, as he was standing up at the time; and
in consequence of the carriage moving on suddenly, at the
same moment, staggered ignominiously, and buried himself
among his flowers.
Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress, brought
us to the Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as
the whole scene there, it would be difficult to imagine. From
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all the innumerable balconies: from the remotest and high-
est, no less than from the lowest and nearest: hangings of
bright red, bright green, bright blue, white and gold, were
fluttering in the brilliant sunlight. From windows, and from
parapets, and tops of houses, streamers of the richest colours,
and draperies of the gaudiest and most sparkling hues, were
floating out upon the street. The buildings seemed to have
been literally turned inside out, and to have all their gaiety
towards the highway. Shop-fronts were taken down, and the
windows filled with company, like boxes at a shining the-
atre; doors were carried off their hinges, and long tapestried
groves, hung with garlands of flowers and evergreens, dis-
played within; builders’ scaffoldings were gorgeous temples,
radiant in silver, gold, and crimson; and in every nook and
corner, from the pavement to the chimney-tops, where
women’s eyes could glisten, there they danced, and laughed,
and sparkled, like the light in water. Every sort of bewitch-
ing madness of dress was there. Little preposterous scarlet
jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smart-
est bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe goose-
berries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark
hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pet-
tish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every
fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of
merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain
entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy
arches, that morning.
The carriages were now three abreast; in broader places
four; often stationary for a long time together, always one
close mass of variegated brightness; showing, the whole street-
full, through the storm of flowers, like flowers of a larger
growth themselves. In some, the horses were richly
caparisoned in magnificent trappings; in others they were
decked from head to tail, with flowing ribbons. Some were
driven by coachmen with enormous double faces: one face
leering at the horses: the other cocking its extraordinary eyes
into the carriage: and both rattling again, under the hail of
sugar-plums. Other drivers were attired as women, wearing
long ringlets and no bonnets, and looking more ridiculous
in any real difficulty with the horses (of which, in such a
concourse, there were a great many) than tongue can tell, or
pen describe. Instead of sitting IN the carriages, upon the
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seats, the handsome Roman women, to see and to be seen
the better, sit in the heads of the barouches, at this time of
general licence, with their feet upon the cushions—and oh,
the flowing skirts and dainty waists, the blessed shapes and
laughing faces, the free, good-humoured, gallant figures that
they make! There were great vans, too, full of handsome
girls—thirty, or more together, perhaps—and the broadsides
that were poured into, and poured out of, these fairy fire-
shops, splashed the air with flowers and bon-bons for ten
minutes at a time. Carriages, delayed long in one place, would
begin a deliberate engagement with other carriages, or with
people at the lower windows; and the spectators at some
upper balcony or window, joining in the fray, and attacking
both parties, would empty down great bags of confetti, that
descended like a cloud, and in an instant made them white
as millers. Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses,
colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end. Men
and boys clinging to the wheels of coaches, and holding on
behind, and following in their wake, and diving in among
the horses’ feet to pick up scattered flowers to sell again;
maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic exag-
gerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through
enormous eye-glasses, and always transported with an ec-
stasy of love, on the discovery of any particularly old lady at
a window; long strings of Policinelli, laying about them with
blown bladders at the ends of sticks; a waggon-full of mad-
men, screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full of grave
mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst;
a party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a
shipful of sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by
strange animals with pigs’ faces, and lions’ tails, carried un-
der their arms, or worn gracefully over their shoulders; car-
riages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours,
crowds upon crowds, without end. Not many actual charac-
ters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering the num-
ber dressed, but the main pleasure of the scene consisting in
its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and flash-
ing variety; and in its entire abandonment to the mad humour
of the time—an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so
irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle
in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them
all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o’clock, when
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he is suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not
the whole business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets
sound, and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street.
How it ever is cleared for the race that takes place at five,
or how the horses ever go through the race, without going
over the people, is more than I can say. But the carriages get
out into the by-streets, or up into the Piazza del Popolo, and
some people sit in temporary galleries in the latter place, and
tens of thousands line the Corso on both sides, when the
horses are brought out into the Piazza—to the foot of that
same column which, for centuries, looked down upon the
games and chariot-races in the Circus Maximus.
At a given signal they are started off. Down the live lane,
the whole length of the Corso, they fly like the wind: rider-
less, as all the world knows: with shining ornaments upon
their backs, and twisted in their plaited manes: and with
heavy little balls stuck full of spikes, dangling at their sides,
to goad them on. The jingling of these trappings, and the
rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the dash and
fury of their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very
cannon that are fired—these noises are nothing to the roar-
ing of the multitude: their shouts: the clapping of their hands.
But it is soon over—almost instantaneously. More cannon
shake the town. The horses have plunged into the carpets
put across the street to stop them; the goal is reached; the
prizes are won (they are given, in part, by the poor Jews, as a
compromise for not running foot-races themselves); and there
is an end to that day’s sport.
But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last
day but one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height
of glittering colour, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that
the bare recollection of it makes me giddy at this moment.
The same diversions, greatly heightened and intensified in
the ardour with which they are pursued, go on until the same
hour. The race is repeated; the cannon are fired; the shouting
and clapping of hands are renewed; the cannon are fired again;
the race is over; and the prizes are won. But the carriages:
ankle-deep with sugar-plums within, and so be-flowered and
dusty without, as to be hardly recognisable for the same ve-
hicles that they were, three hours ago: instead of scampering
off in all directions, throng into the Corso, where they are
soon wedged together in a scarcely moving mass. For the di-
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version of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the Carni-
val, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers like what are
called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily on
every side, ‘Moccoli, Moccoli! Ecco Moccoli!’—a new item
in the tumult; quite abolishing that other item of ‘ Ecco
Fiori! Ecco Fior-r-r!’ which has been making itself audible
over all the rest, at intervals, the whole day through.
As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one
dull, heavy, uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights
begin flashing, here and there: in the windows, on the house-
tops, in the balconies, in the carriages, in the hands of the
foot-passengers: little by little: gradually, gradually: more and
more: until the whole long street is one great glare and blaze
of fire. Then, everybody present has but one engrossing ob-
ject; that is, to extinguish other people’s candles, and to keep
his own alight; and everybody: man, woman, or child, gentle-
man or lady, prince or peasant, native or foreigner: yells and
screams, and roars incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued,
‘Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccolo!’ (Without a light! Without
a light!) until nothing is heard but a gigantic chorus of those
two words, mingled with peals of laughter.
The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordi-
nary that can be imagined. Carriages coming slowly by, with
everybody standing on the seats or on the box, holding up
their lights at arms’ length, for greater safety; some in paper
shades; some with a bunch of undefended little tapers, kindled
altogether; some with blazing torches; some with feeble little
candles; men on foot, creeping along, among the wheels,
watching their opportunity, to make a spring at some par-
ticular light, and dash it out; other people climbing up into
carriages, to get hold of them by main force; others, chasing
some unlucky wanderer, round and round his own coach, to
blow out the light he has begged or stolen somewhere, be-
fore he can ascend to his own company, and enable them to
light their extinguished tapers; others, with their hats off, at
a carriage-door, humbly beseeching some kind-hearted lady
to oblige them with a light for a cigar, and when she is in the
fulness of doubt whether to comply or no, blowing out the
candle she is guarding so tenderly with her little hand; other
people at the windows, fishing for candles with lines and
hooks, or letting down long willow-wands with handker-
chiefs at the end, and flapping them out, dexterously, when
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the bearer is at the height of his triumph, others, biding
their time in corners, with immense extinguishers like
halberds, and suddenly coming down upon glorious torches;
others, gathered round one coach, and sticking to it; others,
raining oranges and nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or
regularly storming a pyramid of men, holding up one man
among them, who carries one feeble little wick above his
head, with which he defies them all! Senza Moccolo! Senza
Moccolo! Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, point-
ing in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping their
hands, as they pass on, crying, ‘Senza Moccolo! Senza
Moccolo!’; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses,
struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them
as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over,
some shrinking back—delicate arms and bosoms—graceful
figures -glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo,
Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!—when in the wild-
est enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the
Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and the Carnival
is over in an instant—put out like a taper, with a breath!
There was a masquerade at the theatre at night, as dull
and senseless as a London one, and only remarkable for the
summary way in which the house was cleared at eleven
o’clock: which was done by a line of soldiers forming along
the wall, at the back of the stage, and sweeping the whole
company out before them, like a broad broom. The game of
the Moccoletti (the word, in the singular, Moccoletto, is the
diminutive of Moccolo, and means a little lamp or
candlesnuff) is supposed by some to be a ceremony of bur-
lesque mourning for the death of the Carnival: candles be-
ing indispensable to Catholic grief. But whether it be so, or
be a remnant of the ancient Saturnalia, or an incorporation
of both, or have its origin in anything else, I shall always
remember it, and the frolic, as a brilliant and most captivat-
ing sight: no less remarkable for the unbroken good-humour
of all concerned, down to the very lowest (and among those
who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men
and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may
seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and per-
sonal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any
general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there
seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general,
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almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks
of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a
whole year.
AVAILING OURSELVES OF A PART of the quiet interval between
the termination of the Carnival and the beginning of the
Holy Week: when everybody had run away from the one,
and few people had yet begun to run back again for the
other: we went conscientiously to work, to see Rome. And,
by dint of going out early every morning, and coming back
late every evening, and labouring hard all day, I believe we
made acquaintance with every post and pillar in the city,
and the country round; and, in particular, explored so many
churches, that I abandoned that part of the enterprise at
last, before it was half finished, lest I should never, of my
own accord, go to church again, as long as I lived. But, I
managed, almost every day, at one time or other, to get back
to the Coliseum, and out upon the open Campagna, be-
yond the Tomb of Cecilia Metella.
We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company
of English Tourists, with whom I had an ardent, but
ungratified longing, to establish a speaking acquaintance.
They were one Mr. Davis, and a small circle of friends. It
was impossible not to know Mrs. Davis’s name, from her
being always in great request among her party, and her party
being everywhere. During the Holy Week, they were in ev-
ery part of every scene of every ceremony. For a fortnight or
three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and every
church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I
hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment.
Deep underground, high up in St. Peter’s, out on the
Campagna, and stifling in the Jews’ quarter, Mrs. Davis
turned up, all the same. I don’t think she ever saw anything,
or ever looked at anything; and she had always lost some-
thing out of a straw hand-basket, and was trying to find it,
with all her might and main, among an immense quantity
of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon the sea-
shore, at the bottom of it. There was a professional Cicerone
always attached to the party (which had been brought over
from London, fifteen or twenty strong, by contract), and if
he so much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably cut him
short by saying, ‘There, God bless the man, don’t worrit me!
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I don’t understand a word you say, and shouldn’t if you was
to talk till you was black in the face!’ Mr. Davis always had a
snuff-coloured great-coat on, and carried a great green um-
brella in his hand, and had a slow curiosity constantly de-
vouring him, which prompted him to do extraordinary
things, such as taking the covers off urns in tombs, and look-
ing in at the ashes as if they were pickles—and tracing out
inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and saying, with
intense thoughtfulness, ‘Here’s a B you see, and there’s a R,
and this is the way we goes on in; is it!’ His antiquarian
habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of the rest;
and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the party in gen-
eral, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost. This
caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and
at the most improper seasons. And when he came, slowly
emerging out of some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful
Ghoule, saying ‘Here I am!’ Mrs. Davis invariably replied,
‘You’ll be buried alive in a foreign country, Davis, and it’s no
use trying to prevent you!’
Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been
brought from London in about nine or ten days. Eighteen
hundred years ago, the Roman legions under Claudius, pro-
tested against being led into Mr. and Mrs. Davis’s country,
urging that it lay beyond the limits of the world.
Among what may be called the Cubs or minor Lions of
Rome, there was one that amused me mightily. It is always
to be found there; and its den is on the great flight of steps
that lead from the Piazza di Spagna, to the church of Trinita
del Monte. In plainer words, these steps are the great place
of resort for the artists’ ‘Models,’ and there they are con-
stantly waiting to be hired. The first time I went up there, I
could not conceive why the faces seemed familiar to me;
why they appeared to have beset me, for years, in every pos-
sible variety of action and costume; and how it came to pass
that they started up before me, in Rome, in the broad day,
like so many saddled and bridled nightmares. I soon found
that we had made acquaintance, and improved it, for several
years, on the walls of various Exhibition Galleries. There is
one old gentleman, with long white hair and an immense
beard, who, to my knowledge, has gone half through the
catalogue of the Royal Academy. This is the venerable, or
patriarchal model. He carries a long staff; and every knot
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and twist in that staff I have seen, faithfully delineated, in-
numerable times. There is another man in a blue cloak, who
always pretends to be asleep in the sun (when there is any),
and who, I need not say, is always very wide awake, and very
attentive to the disposition of his legs. This is the Dolce Far’
Niente model. There is another man in a brown cloak, who
leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and
looks out of the corners of his eyes: which are just visible
beneath his broad slouched hat. This is the assassin model.
There is another man, who constantly looks over his own
shoulder, and is always going away, but never does. This is
the haughty, or scornful model. As to Domestic Happiness,
and Holy Families, they should come very cheap, for there
are lumps of them, all up the steps; and the cream of the
thing is, that they are all the falsest vagabonds in the world,
especially made up for the purpose, and having no counter-
parts in Rome or any other part of the habitable globe.
My recent mention of the Carnival, reminds me of its
being said to be a mock mourning (in the ceremony with
which it closes), for the gaieties and merry-makings before
Lent; and this again reminds me of the real funerals and
mourning processions of Rome, which, like those in most
other parts of Italy, are rendered chiefly remarkable to a For-
eigner, by the indifference with which the mere clay is uni-
versally regarded, after life has left it. And this is not from
the survivors having had time to dissociate the memory of
the dead from their well-remembered appearance and form
on earth; for the interment follows too speedily after death,
for that: almost always taking place within four-and-twenty
hours, and, sometimes, within twelve.
At Rome, there is the same arrangement of Pits in a great,
bleak, open, dreary space, that I have already described as
existing in Genoa. When I visited it, at noonday, I saw a
solitary coffin of plain deal: uncovered by any shroud or
pall, and so slightly made, that the hoof of any wandering
mule would have crushed it in: carelessly tumbled down, all
on one side, on the door of one of the pits—and there left,
by itself, in the wind and sunshine. ‘How does it come to be
left here?’ I asked the man who showed me the place. ‘It was
brought here half an hour ago, Signore,’ he said. I remem-
bered to have met the procession, on its return: straggling
away at a good round pace. ‘When will it be put in the pit?’
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I asked him. ‘When the cart comes, and it is opened to-
night,’ he said. ‘How much does it cost to be brought here
in this way, instead of coming in the cart?’ I asked him. ‘Ten
scudi,’ he said (about two pounds, two-and-sixpence, En-
glish). ‘The other bodies, for whom nothing is paid, are taken
to the church of the Santa Maria della Consolazione,’ he
continued, ‘and brought here altogether, in the cart at night.’
I stood, a moment, looking at the coffin, which had two
initial letters scrawled upon the top; and turned away, with
an expression in my face, I suppose, of not much liking its
exposure in that manner: for he said, shrugging his shoul-
ders with great vivacity, and giving a pleasant smile, ‘But
he’s dead, Signore, he’s dead. Why not?’
AMONG THE INNUMERABLE CHURCHES, there is one I must se-
lect for separate mention. It is the church of the Ara Coeli,
supposed to be built on the site of the old Temple of Jupiter
Feretrius; and approached, on one side, by a long steep flight
of steps, which seem incomplete without some group of
bearded soothsayers on the top. It is remarkable for the pos-
session of a miraculous Bambino, or wooden doll, repre-
senting the Infant Saviour; and I first saw this miraculous
Bambino, in legal phrase, in manner following, that is to
say:
We had strolled into the church one afternoon, and were
looking down its long vista of gloomy pillars (for all these
ancient churches built upon the ruins of old temples, are
dark and sad), when the Brave came running in, with a grin
upon his face that stretched it from ear to ear, and implored
us to follow him, without a moment’s delay, as they were
going to show the Bambino to a select party. We accordingly
hurried off to a sort of chapel, or sacristy, hard by the chief
altar, but not in the church itself, where the select party,
consisting of two or three Catholic gentlemen and ladies
(not Italians), were already assembled: and where one hol-
low-cheeked young monk was lighting up divers candles,
while another was putting on some clerical robes over his
coarse brown habit. The candles were on a kind of altar, and
above it were two delectable figures, such as you would see
at any English fair, representing the Holy Virgin, and Saint
Joseph, as I suppose, bending in devotion over a wooden
box, or coffer; which was shut.
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The hollow-cheeked monk, number One, having finished
lighting the candles, went down on his knees, in a corner,
before this set-piece; and the monk number Two, having
put on a pair of highly ornamented and gold-bespattered
gloves, lifted down the coffer, with great reverence, and set
it on the altar. Then, with many genuflexions, and mutter-
ing certain prayers, he opened it, and let down the front,
and took off sundry coverings of satin and lace from the
inside. The ladies had been on their knees from the com-
mencement; and the gentlemen now dropped down devoutly,
as he exposed to view a little wooden doll, in face very like
General Tom Thumb, the American Dwarf: gorgeously
dressed in satin and gold lace, and actually blazing with rich
jewels. There was scarcely a spot upon its little breast, or
neck, or stomach, but was sparkling with the costly offer-
ings of the Faithful. Presently, he lifted it out of the box, and
carrying it round among the kneelers, set its face against the
forehead of every one, and tendered its clumsy foot to them
to kiss—a ceremony which they all performed down to a
dirty little ragamuffin of a boy who had walked in from the
street. When this was done, he laid it in the box again: and
the company, rising, drew near, and commended the jewels
in whispers. In good time, he replaced the coverings, shut
up the box, put it back in its place, locked up the whole
concern (Holy Family and all) behind a pair of folding-doors;
took off his priestly vestments; and received the customary
‘small charge,’ while his companion, by means of an extin-
guisher fastened to the end of a long stick, put out the lights,
one after another. The candles being all extinguished, and
the money all collected, they retired, and so did the specta-
tors.
I met this same Bambino, in the street a short time after-
wards, going, in great state, to the house of some sick per-
son. It is taken to all parts of Rome for this purpose, con-
stantly; but, I understand that it is not always as successful as
could be wished; for, making its appearance at the bedside
of weak and nervous people in extremity, accompanied by a
numerous escort, it not unfrequently frightens them to death.
It is most popular in cases of child-birth, where it has done
such wonders, that if a lady be longer than usual in getting
through her difficulties, a messenger is despatched, with all
speed, to solicit the immediate attendance of the Bambino.
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It is a very valuable property, and much confided in—espe-
cially by the religious body to whom it belongs.
I am happy to know that it is not considered immaculate,
by some who are good Catholics, and who are behind the
scenes, from what was told me by the near relation of a Priest,
himself a Catholic, and a gentleman of learning and intelli-
gence. This Priest made my informant promise that he would,
on no account, allow the Bambino to be borne into the bed-
room of a sick lady, in whom they were both interested.
‘For,’ said he, ‘if they (the monks) trouble her with it, and
intrude themselves into her room, it will certainly kill her.’
My informant accordingly looked out of the window when
it came; and, with many thanks, declined to open the door.
He endeavoured, in another case of which he had no other
knowledge than such as he gained as a passer-by at the mo-
ment, to prevent its being carried into a small unwholesome
chamber, where a poor girl was dying. But, he strove against
it unsuccessfully, and she expired while the crowd were press-
ing round her bed.
Among the people who drop into St. Peter’s at their lei-
sure, to kneel on the pavement, and say a quiet prayer, there
are certain schools and seminaries, priestly and otherwise,
that come in, twenty or thirty strong. These boys always
kneel down in single file, one behind the other, with a tall
grim master in a black gown, bringing up the rear: like a
pack of cards arranged to be tumbled down at a touch, with
a disproportionately large Knave of clubs at the end. When
they have had a minute or so at the chief altar, they scramble
up, and filing off to the chapel of the Madonna, or the sac-
rament, flop down again in the same order; so that if any-
body did stumble against the master, a general and sudden
overthrow of the whole line must inevitably ensue.
The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible. The
same monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going
on; the same dark building, darker from the brightness of the
street without; the same lamps dimly burning; the self-same
people kneeling here and there; turned towards you, from
one altar or other, the same priest’s back, with the same large
cross embroidered on it; however different in size, in shape, in
wealth, in architecture, this church is from that, it is the same
thing still. There are the same dirty beggars stopping in their
muttered prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples exhibit-
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ing their deformity at the doors; the same blind men, rattling
little pots like kitchen pepper-castors: their depositories for
alms; the same preposterous crowns of silver stuck upon the
painted heads of single saints and Virgins in crowded pic-
tures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a head-dress
bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent miles of
landscape; the same favourite shrine or figure, smothered with
little silver hearts and crosses, and the like: the staple trade
and show of all the jewellers; the same odd mixture of respect
and indecorum, faith and phlegm: kneeling on the stones,
and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers to beg a
little, or to pursue some other worldly matter: and then kneel-
ing down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the
point where it was interrupted. In one church, a kneeling lady
got up from her prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card, as
a teacher of Music; and in another, a sedate gentleman with a
very thick walking-staff, arose from his devotions to belabour
his dog, who was growling at another dog: and whose yelps
and howls resounded through the church, as his master qui-
etly relapsed into his former train of meditation—keeping his
eye upon the dog, at the same time, nevertheless.
Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contribu-
tions of the Faithful, in some form or other. Sometimes, it is
a money-box, set up between the worshipper, and the wooden
life-size figure of the Redeemer; sometimes, it is a little chest
for the maintenance of the Virgin; sometimes, an appeal on
behalf of a popular Bambino; sometimes, a bag at the end of
a long stick, thrust among the people here and there, and
vigilantly jingled by an active Sacristan; but there it always
is, and, very often, in many shapes in the same church, and
doing pretty well in all. Nor, is it wanting in the open air—
the streets and roads—for, often as you are walking along,
thinking about anything rather than a tin canister, that ob-
ject pounces out upon you from a little house by the way-
side; and on its top is painted, ‘For the Souls in Purgatory;’
an appeal which the bearer repeats a great many times, as he
rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles the cracked bell
which his sanguine disposition makes an organ of.
And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar
sanctity, bear the inscription, ‘Every Mass performed at this
altar frees a soul from Purgatory.’ I have never been able to
find out the charge for one of these services, but they should
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needs be expensive. There are several Crosses in Rome too,
the kissing of which, confers indulgences for varying terms.
That in the centre of the Coliseum, is worth a hundred days;
and people may be seen kissing it from morning to night. It
is curious that some of these crosses seem to acquire an arbi-
trary popularity: this very one among them. In another part
of the Coliseum there is a cross upon a marble slab, with the
inscription, ‘Who kisses this cross shall be entitled to Two
hundred and forty days’ indulgence.’ But I saw no one per-
son kiss it, though, day after day, I sat in the arena, and saw
scores upon scores of peasants pass it, on their way to kiss
the other.
To single out details from the great dream of Roman
Churches, would be the wildest occupation in the world.
But St. Stefano Rotondo, a damp, mildewed vault of an old
church in the outskirts of Rome, will always struggle upper-
most in my mind, by reason of the hideous paintings with
which its walls are covered. These represent the martyrdoms
of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of hor-
ror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though
he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper. Grey-bearded
men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by
wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by
horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their
breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their
ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched
upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up
and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest subjects.
So insisted on, and laboured at, besides, that every sufferer
gives you the same occasion for wonder as poor old Duncan
awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his having
so much blood in him.
There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons,
over what is said to have been—and very possibly may have
been—the dungeon of St. Peter. This chamber is now fitted
up as an oratory, dedicated to that saint; and it lives, as a
distinct and separate place, in my recollection, too. It is very
small and low-roofed; and the dread and gloom of the pon-
derous, obdurate old prison are on it, as if they had come up
in a dark mist through the floor. Hanging on the walls, among
the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at once strangely
in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the place—rusty
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daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers instruments of violence
and murder, brought here, fresh from use, and hung up to
propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon them would
drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry with. It
is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the dungeons
below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked;
that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream:
and in the vision of great churches which come rolling past
me like a sea, it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no
other wave, and does not flow on with the rest.
It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that
are entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the
city. Many churches have crypts and subterranean chapels
of great size, which, in the ancient time, were baths, and
secret chambers of temples, and what not: but I do not speak
of them. Beneath the church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo,
there are the jaws of a terrific range of caverns, hewn out of
the rock, and said to have another outlet underneath the
Coliseum—tremendous darknesses of vast extent, half-bur-
ied in the earth and unexplorable, where the dull torches,
flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of dis-
tant vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a
city of the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the
walls, drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that
lie here and there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray
of the sun. Some accounts make these the prisons of the
wild beasts destined for the amphitheatre; some the prisons
of the condemned gladiators; some, both. But the legend
most appalling to the fancy is, that in the upper range (for
there are two stories of these caves) the Early Christians des-
tined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the wild
beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon
the night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sud-
den noon and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet,
and of these, their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond
the gate of San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the en-
trance to the catacombs of Rome—quarries in the old time,
but afterwards the hiding-places of the Christians. These
ghastly passages have been explored for twenty miles; and
form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.
A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our
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only guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The
narrow ways and openings hither and thither, coupled with
the dead and heavy air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any
recollection of the track by which we had come: and I could
not help thinking ‘Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of mad-
ness, he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized
with a fit, what would become of us!’ On we wandered, among
martyrs’ graves: passing great subterranean vaulted roads, di-
verging in all directions, and choked up with heaps of stones,
that thieves and murderers may not take refuge there, and
form a population under Rome, even worse than that which
lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; Graves of
men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
persecutors, ‘We are Christians! We are Christians!’ that they
might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm
of martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and
little niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs’ blood; Graves
of some who lived down here, for years together, ministering
to the rest, and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from
the rude altars, that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour;
more roomy graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds,
being surprised, were hemmed in and walled up: buried be-
fore Death, and killed by slow starvation.
‘The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our
splendid churches,’ said the friar, looking round upon us, as
we stopped to rest in one of the low passages, with bones
and dust surrounding us on every side. ‘They are here! Among
the Martyrs’ Graves!’ He was a gentle, earnest man, and said
it from his heart; but when I thought how Christian men
have dealt with one another; how, perverting our most mer-
ciful religion, they have hunted down and tortured, burnt
and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed each
other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this
Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it,
and how these great and constant hearts would have been
shaken—how they would have quailed and drooped—if a
foreknowledge of the deeds that professing Christians would
commit in the Great Name for which they died, could have
rent them with its own unutterable anguish, on the cruel
wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful fire.
Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches,
that remain apart, and keep their separate identity. I have a
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fainter recollection, sometimes of the relics; of the fragments
of the pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the
portion of the table that was spread for the Last Supper; of
the well at which the woman of Samaria gave water to Our
Saviour; of two columns from the house of Pontius Pilate;
of the stone to which the Sacred hands were bound, when
the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint
Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of
his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathe-
drals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an
instant, as they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of
consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one
with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug
up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to sup-
port the roofs of Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and
wonderful, and impious, and ridiculous; of kneeling people,
curling incense, tinkling bells, and sometimes (but not of-
ten) of a swelling organ: of Madonne, with their breasts stuck
full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern fan; of
actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy
satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their withered
crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets
of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round the
pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and
preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some
high window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across
the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost
among the echoes of the roof. Then my tired memory comes
out upon a flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep,
or basking in the light; and strolls away, among the rags, and
smells, and palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street.
ON ONE SATURDAY MORNING (the eighth of March), a man
was beheaded here. Nine or ten months before, he had way-
laid a Bavarian countess, travelling as a pilgrim to Rome—
alone and on foot, of course—and performing, it is said,
that act of piety for the fourth time. He saw her change a
piece of gold at Viterbo, where he lived; followed her; bore
her company on her journey for some forty miles or more,
on the treacherous pretext of protecting her; attacked her, in
the fulfilment of his unrelenting purpose, on the Campagna,
within a very short distance of Rome, near to what is called
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(but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat
her to death with her own pilgrim’s staff. He was newly
married, and gave some of her apparel to his wife: saying
that he had bought it at a fair. She, however, who had seen
the pilgrim-countess passing through their town, recognised
some trifle as having belonged to her. Her husband then
told her what he had done. She, in confession, told a priest;
and the man was taken, within four days after the commis-
sion of the murder.
There are no fixed times for the administration of justice,
or its execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had
been in prison ever since. On the Friday, as he was dining
with the other prisoners, they came and told him he was to
be beheaded next morning, and took him away. It is very
unusual to execute in Lent; but his crime being a very bad
one, it was deemed advisable to make an example of him at
that time, when great numbers of pilgrims were coming to-
wards Rome, from all parts, for the Holy Week. I heard of
this on the Friday evening, and saw the bills up at the
churches, calling on the people to pray for the criminal’s
soul. So, I determined to go, and see him executed.
The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half
o’clock, Roman time: or a quarter before nine in the fore-
noon. I had two friends with me; and as we did not know
but that the crowd might be very great, we were on the spot
by half-past seven. The place of execution was near the church
of San Giovanni decollato (a doubtful compliment to Saint
John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back streets with-
out any footway, of which a great part of Rome is composed—
a street of rotten houses, which do not seem to belong to
anybody, and do not seem to have ever been inhabited, and
certainly were never built on any plan, or for any particular
purpose, and have no window-sashes, and are a little like
deserted breweries, and might be warehouses but for having
nothing in them. Opposite to one of these, a white house,
the scaffold was built. An untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy-
looking thing of course: some seven feet high, perhaps: with
a tall, gallows-shaped frame rising above it, in which was the
knife, charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all ready to
descend, and glittering brightly in the morning sun, when-
ever it looked out, now and then, from behind a cloud.
There were not many people lingering about; and these
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were kept at a considerable distance from the scaffold, by
parties of the Pope’s dragoons. Two or three hundred foot-
soldiers were under arms, standing at ease in clusters here
and there; and the officers were walking up and down in
twos and threes, chatting together, and smoking cigars.
At the end of the street, was an open space, where there
would be a dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and
mounds of vegetable refuse, but for such things being thrown
anywhere and everywhere in Rome, and favouring no par-
ticular sort of locality. We got into a kind of wash-house,
belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and standing
there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled against
the wall, looked, through a large grated window, at the scaf-
fold, and straight down the street beyond it until, in conse-
quence of its turning off abruptly to the left, our perspective
was brought to a sudden termination, and had a corpulent
officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.
Nine o’clock struck, and ten o’clock struck, and nothing
happened. All the bells of all the churches rang as usual. A
little parliament of dogs assembled in the open space, and
chased each other, in and out among the soldiers. Fierce-look-
ing Romans of the lowest class, in blue cloaks, russet cloaks,
and rags uncloaked, came and went, and talked together.
Women and children fluttered, on the skirts of the scanty
crowd. One large muddy spot was left quite bare, like a bald
place on a man’s head. A cigar-merchant, with an earthen pot
of charcoal ashes in one hand, went up and down, crying his
wares. A pastry-merchant divided his attention between the
scaffold and his customers. Boys tried to climb up walls, and
tumbled down again. Priests and monks elbowed a passage for
themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight
of the knife: then went away. Artists, in inconceivable hats of
the middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all,
flashed picturesque scowls about them from their stations in
the throng. One gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I
presume) went up and down in a pair of Hessian-boots, with
a red beard hanging down on his breast, and his long and
bright red hair, plaited into two tails, one on either side of his
head, which fell over his shoulders in front of him, very nearly
to his waist, and were carefully entwined and braided!
Eleven o’clock struck and still nothing happened. A
rumour got about, among the crowd, that the criminal would
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not confess; in which case, the priests would keep him until
the Ave Maria (sunset); for it is their merciful custom never
finally to turn the crucifix away from a man at that pass, as
one refusing to be shriven, and consequently a sinner aban-
doned of the Saviour, until then. People began to drop off.
The officers shrugged their shoulders and looked doubtful.
The dragoons, who came riding up below our window, ev-
ery now and then, to order an unlucky hackney-coach or
cart away, as soon as it had comfortably established itself,
and was covered with exulting people (but never before),
became imperious, and quick-tempered. The bald place
hadn’t a straggling hair upon it; and the corpulent officer,
crowning the perspective, took a world of snuff.
Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets. ‘Attention!’ was
among the foot-soldiers instantly. They were marched up to
the scaffold and formed round it. The dragoons galloped to
their nearer stations too. The guillotine became the centre of
a wood of bristling bayonets and shining sabres. The people
closed round nearer, on the flank of the soldiery. A long strag-
gling stream of men and boys, who had accompanied the pro-
cession from the prison, came pouring into the open space.
The bald spot was scarcely distinguishable from the rest. The
cigar and pastry-merchants resigned all thoughts of business,
for the moment, and abandoning themselves wholly to plea-
sure, got good situations in the crowd. The perspective ended,
now, in a troop of dragoons. And the corpulent officer, sword
in hand, looked hard at a church close to him, which he could
see, but we, the crowd, could not.
After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to
the scaffold from this church; and above their heads, com-
ing on slowly and gloomily, the effigy of Christ upon the
cross, canopied with black. This was carried round the foot
of the scaffold, to the front, and turned towards the crimi-
nal, that he might see it to the last. It was hardly in its place,
when he appeared on the platform, bare-footed; his hands
bound; and with the collar and neck of his shirt cut away,
almost to the shoulder. A young man—six-and-twenty—
vigorously made, and well-shaped. Face pale; small dark
moustache; and dark brown hair.
He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having
his wife brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for
her, which had occasioned the delay.
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He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck
fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank,
was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pil-
lory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it
his head rolled instantly.
The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking
with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before
one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a
rattling sound.
When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold,
it was set upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and
white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on.
The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight
of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge
and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold,
livid, wax. The body also.
There was a great deal of blood. When we left the win-
dow, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one
of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to
help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as
through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent anni-
hilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it
seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the
jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there
were nothing left above the shoulder.
Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no mani-
festation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My
empty pockets were tried, several times, in the crowd imme-
diately below the scaffold, as the corpse was being put into
its coffin. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle;
meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary in-
terest, to the one wretched actor. Yes! Such a sight has one
meaning and one warning. Let me not forget it. The specu-
lators in the lottery, station themselves at favourable points
for counting the gouts of blood that spirt out, here or there;
and buy that number. It is pretty sure to have a run upon it.
The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed,
the scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus re-
moved. The executioner: an outlaw ex officio (what a satire
on the Punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the
Bridge of St. Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair,
and the show was over.
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AT THE HEAD OF THE COLLECTIONS in the palaces of Rome, the
Vatican, of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous gal-
leries, and staircases, and suites upon suites of immense cham-
bers, ranks highest and stands foremost. Many most noble
statues, and wonderful pictures, are there; nor is it heresy to
say that there is a considerable amount of rubbish there, too.
When any old piece of sculpture dug out of the ground, finds
a place in a gallery because it is old, and without any reference
to its intrinsic merits: and finds admirers by the hundred,
because it is there, and for no other reason on earth: there will
be no lack of objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of
any one who employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear
the spectacles of Cant for less than nothing, and establish him-
self as a man of taste for the mere trouble of putting them on.
I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my
natural perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-
door, in Italy or elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I
were travelling in the East. I cannot forget that there are
certain expressions of face, natural to certain passions, and
as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a lion, or the
flight of an eagle. I cannot dismiss from my certain knowl-
edge, such commonplace facts as the ordinary proportion of
men’s arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with per-
formances that do violence to these experiences and recol-
lections, no matter where they may be, I cannot honestly
admire them, and think it best to say so; in spite of high
critical advice that we should sometimes feign an admira-
tion, though we have it not.
Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly
young Waterman representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and
Perkins’s Drayman depicted as an Evangelist, I see nothing
to commend or admire in the performance, however great
its reputed Painter. Neither am I partial to libellous Angels,
who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of
sprawling monks apparently in liquor. Nor to those Mon-
sieur Tonsons of galleries, Saint Francis and Saint Sebastian;
both of whom I submit should have very uncommon and
rare merits, as works of art, to justify their compound mul-
tiplication by Italian Painters.
It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and deter-
mined raptures in which some critics indulge, is incompat-
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ible with the true appreciation of the really great and tran-
scendent works. I cannot imagine, for example, how the reso-
lute champion of undeserving pictures can soar to the amaz-
ing beauty of Titian’s great picture of the Assumption of the
Virgin at Venice; or how the man who is truly affected by
the sublimity of that exquisite production, or who is truly
sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto’s great picture of the
Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can discern in
Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel, any
general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with
the stupendous subject. He who will contemplate Raphael’s
masterpiece, the Transfiguration, and will go away into an-
other chamber of that same Vatican, and contemplate an-
other design of Raphael, representing (in incredible carica-
ture) the miraculous stopping of a great fire by Leo the
Fourth—and who will say that he admires them both, as
works of extraordinary genius—must, as I think, be want-
ing in his powers of perception in one of the two instances,
and, probably, in the high and lofty one.
It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt
whether, sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly ob-
served, and whether it is quite well or agreeable that we should
know beforehand, where this figure will be turning round,
and where that figure will be lying down, and where there
will be drapery in folds, and so forth. When I observe heads
inferior to the subject, in pictures of merit, in Italian galler-
ies, I do not attach that reproach to the Painter, for I have a
suspicion that these great men, who were, of necessity, very
much in the hands of monks and priests, painted monks
and priests a great deal too often. I frequently see, in pic-
tures of real power, heads quite below the story and the
painter: and I invariably observe that those heads are of the
Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the
Convent inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself
that, in such cases, the lameness was not with the painter,
but with the vanity and ignorance of certain of his employ-
ers, who would be apostles—on canvas, at all events.
The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova’s statues; the
wonderful gravity and repose of many of the ancient works
in sculpture, both in the Capitol and the Vatican; and the
strength and fire of many others; are, in their different ways,
beyond all reach of words. They are especially impressive
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and delightful, after the works of Bernini and his disciples,
in which the churches of Rome, from St. Peter’s downward,
abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most detestable
class of productions in the wide world. I would infinitely
rather (as mere works of art) look upon the three deities of
the Past, the Present, and the Future, in the Chinese Collec-
tion, than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose ev-
ery fold of drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein,
or artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is
like a nest of lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other
extravagance to shame. Insomuch that I do honestly believe,
there can be no place in the world, where such intolerable
abortions, begotten of the sculptor’s chisel, are to be found
in such profusion, as in Rome.
There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the
Vatican; and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are
arranged, are painted to represent a starlight sky in the Desert.
It may seem an odd idea, but it is very effective. The grim,
half-human monsters from the temples, look more grim and
monstrous underneath the deep dark blue; it sheds a strange
uncertain gloomy air on everything—a mystery adapted to
the objects; and you leave them, as you find them, shrouded
in a solemn night.
In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advan-
tage. There are seldom so many in one place that the atten-
tion need become distracted, or the eye confused. You see
them very leisurely; and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of
people. There are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and
Rembrandt, and Vandyke; heads by Guido, and
Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects by
Correggio, and Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa,
and Spagnoletto—many of which it would be difficult, in-
deed, to praise too highly, or to praise enough; such is their
tenderness and grace; their noble elevation, purity, and
beauty.
The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini,
is a picture almost impossible to be forgotten. Through the
transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a some-
thing shining out, that haunts me. I see it now, as I see this
paper, or my pen. The head is loosely draped in white; the
light hair falling down below the linen folds. She has turned
suddenly towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes—
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although they are very tender and gentle—as if the wildness
of a momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled
with and overcome, that instant; and nothing but a celestial
hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a desolate earthly helpless-
ness remained. Some stories say that Guido painted it, the
night before her execution; some other stories, that he painted
it from memory, after having seen her, on her way to the
scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see her on his
canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from the
first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look
which he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside
him in the concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blight-
ing a whole quarter of the town, as it stands withering away
by grains: had that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch,
and at its black, blind windows, and flitting up and down its
dreary stairs, and growing out of the darkness of the ghostly
galleries. The History is written in the Painting; written, in
the dying girl’s face, by Nature’s own hand. And oh! how in
that one touch she puts to flight (instead of making kin) the
puny world that claim to be related to her, in right of poor
conventional forgeries!
I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue
at whose base Caesar fell. A stern, tremendous figure! I imag-
ined one of greater finish: of the last refinement: full of deli-
cate touches: losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one
whose blood was ebbing before it, and settling into some
such rigid majesty as this, as Death came creeping over the
upturned face.
The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charm-
ing, and would be full of interest were it only for the chang-
ing views they afford, of the wild Campagna. But, every
inch of ground, in every direction, is rich in associations,
and in natural beauties. There is Albano, with its lovely lake
and wooded shore, and with its wine, that certainly has not
improved since the days of Horace, and in these times hardly
justifies his panegyric. There is squalid Tivoli, with the river
Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging down, head-
long, some eighty feet in search of it. With its picturesque
Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor wa-
terfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cav-
ern yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge
and shoots on, low down under beetling rocks. There, too,
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is the Villa d’Este, deserted and decaying among groves of
melancholy pine and cypress trees, where it seems to lie in
state. Then, there is Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the
ruins of Tusculum, where Cicero lived, and wrote, and
adorned his favourite house (some fragments of it may yet
be seen there), and where Cato was born. We saw its ruined
amphitheatre on a grey, dull day, when a shrill March wind
was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old city
lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead
as the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano,
fourteen miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there
by the ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown.
We started at half-past seven in the morning, and within an
hour or so were out upon the open Campagna. For twelve
miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of
mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples,
overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns,
friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble;
mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough
to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Some-
times, loose walls, built up from these fragments by the shep-
herds, came across our path; sometimes, a ditch between
two mounds of broken stones, obstructed our progress; some-
times, the fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our
feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance; but it was always
ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the old road, above the
ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if
that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In the distance,
ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along
the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us,
stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously,
on miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone dis-
turbed the awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the
fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then
scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed
in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direc-
tion, where it was most level, reminded me of an American
prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have
never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have
left their footprints in the earth from which they have van-
ished; where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen
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like their Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a
heap of idle dust! Returning, by the road, at sunset! and
looking, from the distance, on the course we had taken in
the morning, I almost feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at
that hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its
last, that night, upon a ruined world.
To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an ex-
pedition, is a fitting close to such a day. The narrow streets,
devoid of foot-ways, and choked, in every obscure corner,
by heaps of dunghill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their
cramped dimensions, and their filth, and darkness, with the
broad square before some haughty church: in the centre of
which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt
in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign
scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honoured
statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint: Marcus
Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter. Then,
there are the ponderous buildings reared from the spoliation
of the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like mountains:
while here and there, are broken arches and rent walls,
through which it gushes freely, as the life comes pouring
from a wound. The little town of miserable houses, walled,
and shut in by barred gates, is the quarter where the Jews are
locked up nightly, when the clock strikes eight—a miserable
place, densely populated, and reeking with bad odours, but
where the people are industrious and money-getting. In the
day-time, as you make your way along the narrow streets,
you see them all at work: upon the pavement, oftener than
in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing old clothes, and
driving bargains.
Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into
the moon once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a
hundred jets, and rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the
eye and ear. In the narrow little throat of street, beyond, a
booth, dressed out with flaring lamps, and boughs of trees,
attracts a group of sulky Romans round its smoky coppers of
hot broth, and cauliflower stew; its trays of fried fish, and its
flasks of wine. As you rattle round the sharply-twisting cor-
ner, a lumbering sound is heard. The coachman stops
abruptly, and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by, preceded
by a man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a
priest: the latter chaunting as he goes. It is the Dead Cart,
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with the bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the
Sacred Field outside the walls, where they will be thrown
into the pit that will be covered with a stone to-night, and
sealed up for a year.
But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or col-
umns ancient temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums:
it is strange to see, how every fragment, whenever it is pos-
sible, has been blended into some modern structure, and
made to serve some modern purpose—a wall, a dwelling-
place, a granary, a stable—some use for which it never was
designed, and associated with which it cannot otherwise than
lamely assort. It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of
the old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend
and observance: have been incorporated into the worship of
Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the
false faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.
From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a
squat and stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius)
makes an opaque triangle in the moonlight. But, to an En-
glish traveller, it serves to mark the grave of Shelley too,
whose ashes lie beneath a little garden near it. Nearer still,
almost within its shadow, lie the bones of Keats, ‘whose name
is writ in water,’ that shines brightly in the landscape of a
calm Italian night.
The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attrac-
tions to all visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sun-
day, I would counsel those who go to Rome for its own in-
terest, to avoid it at that time. The ceremonies, in general,
are of the most tedious and wearisome kind; the heat and
crowd at every one of them, painfully oppressive; the noise,
hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting. We abandoned
the pursuit of these shows, very early in the proceedings,
and betook ourselves to the Ruins again. But, we plunged
into the crowd for a share of the best of the sights; and what
we saw, I will describe to you.
At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little,
for by the time we reached it (though we were early) the
besieging crowd had filled it to the door, and overflowed
into the adjoining hall, where they were struggling, and
squeezing, and mutually expostulating, and making great
rushes every time a lady was brought out faint, as if at least
fifty people could be accommodated in her vacant standing-
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room. Hanging in the doorway of the chapel, was a heavy
curtain, and this curtain, some twenty people nearest to it,
in their anxiety to hear the chaunting of the Miserere, were
continually plucking at, in opposition to each other, that it
might not fall down and stifle the sound of the voices. The
consequence was, that it occasioned the most extraordinary
confusion, and seemed to wind itself about the unwary, like
a Serpent. Now, a lady was wrapped up in it, and couldn’t be
unwound. Now, the voice of a stifling gentleman was heard
inside it, beseeching to be let out. Now, two muffled arms,
no man could say of which sex, struggled in it as in a sack.
Now, it was carried by a rush, bodily overhead into the chapel,
like an awning. Now, it came out the other way, and blinded
one of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, who had arrived, that mo-
ment, to set things to rights.
Being seated at a little distance, among two or three of the
Pope’s gentlemen, who were very weary and counting the
minutes—as perhaps his Holiness was too—we had better
opportunities of observing this eccentric entertainment, than
of hearing the Miserere. Sometimes, there was a swell of
mournful voices that sounded very pathetic and sad, and
died away, into a low strain again; but that was all we heard.
At another time, there was the Exhibition of Relics in St.
Peter’s, which took place at between six and seven o’clock in the
evening, and was striking from the cathedral being dark and
gloomy, and having a great many people in it. The place into
which the relics were brought, one by one, by a party of three
priests, was a high balcony near the chief altar. This was the
only lighted part of the church. There are always a hundred and
twelve lamps burning near the altar, and there were two tall
tapers, besides, near the black statue of St. Peter; but these were
nothing in such an immense edifice. The gloom, and the gen-
eral upturning of faces to the balcony, and the prostration of
true believers on the pavement, as shining objects, like pictures
or looking-glasses, were brought out and shown, had some-
thing effective in it, despite the very preposterous manner in
which they were held up for the general edification, and the
great elevation at which they were displayed; which one would
think rather calculated to diminish the comfort derivable from
a full conviction of their being genuine.
On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the
Sacrament from the Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella
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Paolina, another chapel in the Vatican;—a ceremony em-
blematical of the entombment of the Saviour before His
Resurrection. We waited in a great gallery with a great crowd
of people (three-fourths of them English) for an hour or so,
while they were chaunting the Miserere, in the Sistine chapel
again. Both chapels opened out of the gallery; and the gen-
eral attention was concentrated on the occasional opening
and shutting of the door of the one for which the Pope was
ultimately bound. None of these openings disclosed any-
thing more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting a
great quantity of candles; but at each and every opening,
there was a terrific rush made at this ladder and this man,
something like (I should think) a charge of the heavy British
cavalry at Waterloo. The man was never brought down, how-
ever, nor the ladder; for it performed the strangest antics in
the world among the crowd—where it was carried by the
man, when the candles were all lighted; and finally it was
stuck up against the gallery wall, in a very disorderly man-
ner, just before the opening of the other chapel, and the
commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach
of his Holiness. At this crisis, the soldiers of the guard, who
had been poking the crowd into all sorts of shapes, formed
down the gallery: and the procession came up, between the
two lines they made.
There were a few choristers, and then a great many priests,
walking two and two, and carrying—the good-looking priests
at least—their lighted tapers, so as to throw the light with a
good effect upon their faces: for the room was darkened.
Those who were not handsome, or who had not long beards,
carried their tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to
spiritual contemplation. Meanwhile, the chaunting was very
monotonous and dreary. The procession passed on, slowly,
into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came
on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under
a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in
both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, mak-
ing a brilliant show. The soldiers of the guard knelt down as
he passed; all the bystanders bowed; and so he passed on
into the chapel: the white satin canopy being removed from
over him at the door, and a white satin parasol hoisted over
his poor old head, in place of it. A few more couples brought
up the rear, and passed into the chapel also. Then, the chapel
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door was shut; and it was all over; and everybody hurried off
headlong, as for life or death, to see something else, and say
it wasn’t worth the trouble.
I think the most popular and most crowded sight (except-
ing those of Easter Sunday and Monday, which are open to
all classes of people) was the Pope washing the feet of Thir-
teen men, representing the twelve apostles, and Judas Iscariot.
The place in which this pious office is performed, is one of
the chapels of St. Peter’s, which is gaily decorated for the
occasion; the thirteen sitting, ‘all of a row,’ on a very high
bench, and looking particularly uncomfortable, with the eyes
of Heaven knows how many English, French, Americans,
Swiss, Germans, Russians, Swedes, Norwegians, and other
foreigners, nailed to their faces all the time. They are robed
in white; and on their heads they wear a stiff white cap, like
a large English porter-pot, without a handle. Each carries in
his hand, a nosegay, of the size of a fine cauliflower; and two
of them, on this occasion, wore spectacles; which, remem-
bering the characters they sustained, I thought a droll ap-
pendage to the costume. There was a great eye to character.
St. John was represented by a good-looking young man. St.
Peter, by a grave-looking old gentleman, with a flowing brown
beard; and Judas Iscariot by such an enormous hypocrite (I
could not make out, though, whether the expression of his
face was real or assumed) that if he had acted the part to the
death and had gone away and hanged himself, he would
have left nothing to be desired.
As the two large boxes, appropriated to ladies at this sight,
were full to the throat, and getting near was hopeless, we
posted off, along with a great crowd, to be in time at the
Table, where the Pope, in person, waits on these Thirteen;
and after a prodigious struggle at the Vatican staircase, and
several personal conflicts with the Swiss guard, the whole
crowd swept into the room. It was a long gallery hung with
drapery of white and red, with another great box for ladies
(who are obliged to dress in black at these ceremonies, and
to wear black veils), a royal box for the King of Naples and
his party; and the table itself, which, set out like a ball sup-
per, and ornamented with golden figures of the real apostles,
was arranged on an elevated platform on one side of the
gallery. The counterfeit apostles’ knives and forks were laid
out on that side of the table which was nearest to the wall, so
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that they might be stared at again, without let or hindrance.
The body of the room was full of male strangers; the crowd
immense; the heat very great; and the pressure sometimes
frightful. It was at its height, when the stream came pouring
in, from the feet-washing; and then there were such shrieks
and outcries, that a party of Piedmontese dragoons went to
the rescue of the Swiss guard, and helped them to calm the
tumult.
The ladies were particularly ferocious, in their struggles
for places. One lady of my acquaintance was seized round
the waist, in the ladies’ box, by a strong matron, and hoisted
out of her place; and there was another lady (in a back row
in the same box) who improved her position by sticking a
large pin into the ladies before her.
The gentlemen about me were remarkably anxious to see
what was on the table; and one Englishman seemed to have
embarked the whole energy of his nature in the determina-
tion to discover whether there was any mustard. ‘By Jupiter
there’s vinegar!’ I heard him say to his friend, after he had
stood on tiptoe an immense time, and had been crushed and
beaten on all sides. ‘And there’s oil! I saw them distinctly, in
cruets! Can any gentleman, in front there, see mustard on
the table? Sir, will you oblige me! do you see a Mustard-Pot?’
The apostles and Judas appearing on the platform, after
much expectation, were marshalled, in line, in front of the
table, with Peter at the top; and a good long stare was taken
at them by the company, while twelve of them took a long
smell at their nosegays, and Judas—moving his lips very
obtrusively—engaged in inward prayer. Then, the Pope, clad
in a scarlet robe, and wearing on his head a skull-cap of
white satin, appeared in the midst of a crowd of Cardinals
and other dignitaries, and took in his hand a little golden
ewer, from which he poured a little water over one of Peter’s
hands, while one attendant held a golden basin; a second, a
fine cloth; a third, Peter’s nosegay, which was taken from
him during the operation. This his Holiness performed, with
considerable expedition, on every man in the line (Judas, I
observed, to be particularly overcome by his condescension);
and then the whole Thirteen sat down to dinner. Grace said
by the Pope. Peter in the chair.
There was white wine, and red wine: and the dinner looked
very good. The courses appeared in portions, one for each
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apostle: and these being presented to the Pope, by Cardinals
upon their knees, were by him handed to the Thirteen. The
manner in which Judas grew more white-livered over his
victuals, and languished, with his head on one side, as if he
had no appetite, defies all description. Peter was a good,
sound, old man, and went in, as the saying is, ‘to win;’ eat-
ing everything that was given him (he got the best: being
first in the row) and saying nothing to anybody. The dishes
appeared to be chiefly composed of fish and vegetables. The
Pope helped the Thirteen to wine also; and, during the whole
dinner, somebody read something aloud, out of a large
book—the Bible, I presume—which nobody could hear, and
to which nobody paid the least attention. The Cardinals,
and other attendants, smiled to each other, from time to
time, as if the thing were a great farce; and if they thought
so, there is little doubt they were perfectly right. His Holi-
ness did what he had to do, as a sensible man gets through a
troublesome ceremony, and seemed very glad when it was
all over.
The Pilgrims’ Suppers: where lords and ladies waited on
the Pilgrims, in token of humility, and dried their feet when
they had been well washed by deputy: were very attractive.
But, of all the many spectacles of dangerous reliance on out-
ward observances, in themselves mere empty forms, none
struck me half so much as the Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase,
which I saw several times, but to the greatest advantage, or
disadvantage, on Good Friday.
This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps,
said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate’s house and to be the
identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down
from the judgment-seat. Pilgrims ascend it, only on their
knees. It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel, reported to
be full of relics; into which they peep through some iron
bars, and then come down again, by one of two side stair-
cases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on.
On Good Friday, there were, on a moderate computa-
tion, a hundred people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, on
their knees, at one time; while others, who were going up,
or had come down—and a few who had done both, and
were going up again for the second time—stood loitering in
the porch below, where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-
box, rattled a tin canister, with a slit in the top, incessantly,
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to remind them that he took the money. The majority were
country-people, male and female. There were four or five
Jesuit priests, however, and some half-dozen well-dressed
women. A whole school of boys, twenty at least, were about
half-way up—evidently enjoying it very much. They were
all wedged together, pretty closely; but the rest of the com-
pany gave the boys as wide a berth as possible, in conse-
quence of their betraying some recklessness in the manage-
ment of their boots.
I never, in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and
so unpleasant, as this sight—ridiculous in the absurd inci-
dents inseparable from it; and unpleasant in its senseless and
unmeaning degradation. There are two steps to begin with,
and then a rather broad landing. The more rigid climbers
went along this landing on their knees, as well as up the
stairs; and the figures they cut, in their shuffling progress
over the level surface, no description can paint. Then, to see
them watch their opportunity from the porch, and cut in
where there was a place next the wall! And to see one man
with an umbrella (brought on purpose, for it was a fine day)
hoisting himself, unlawfully, from stair to stair! And to ob-
serve a demure lady of fifty-five or so, looking back, every
now and then, to assure herself that her legs were properly
disposed!
There were such odd differences in the speed of different
people, too. Some got on as if they were doing a match against
time; others stopped to say a prayer on every step. This man
touched every stair with his forehead, and kissed it; that man
scratched his head all the way. The boys got on brilliantly,
and were up and down again before the old lady had accom-
plished her half-dozen stairs. But most of the penitents came
down, very sprightly and fresh, as having done a real good
substantial deed which it would take a good deal of sin to
counterbalance; and the old gentleman in the watch-box was
down upon them with his canister while they were in this
humour, I promise you.
As if such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll
enough, there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure
on a crucifix, resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety
and unsteady, that whenever an enthusiastic person kissed
the figure, with more than usual devotion, or threw a coin
into the saucer, with more than common readiness (for it
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served in this respect as a second or supplementary canister),
it gave a great leap and rattle, and nearly shook the attendant
lamp out: horribly frightening the people further down, and
throwing the guilty party into unspeakable embarrassment.
On Easter Sunday, as well as on the preceding Thursday,
the Pope bestows his benediction on the people, from the
balcony in front of St. Peter’s. This Easter Sunday was a day
so bright and blue: so cloudless, balmy, wonderfully bright:
that all the previous bad weather vanished from the recollec-
tion in a moment. I had seen the Thursday’s Benediction
dropping damply on some hundreds of umbrellas, but there
was not a sparkle then, in all the hundred fountains of
Rome—such fountains as they are!—and on this Sunday
morning they were running diamonds. The miles of miser-
able streets through which we drove (compelled to a certain
course by the Pope’s dragoons: the Roman police on such
occasions) were so full of colour, that nothing in them was
capable of wearing a faded aspect. The common people came
out in their gayest dresses; the richer people in their smartest
vehicles; Cardinals rattled to the church of the Poor Fisher-
men in their state carriages; shabby magnificence flaunted
its thread-bare liveries and tarnished cocked hats, in the sun;
and every coach in Rome was put in requisition for the Great
Piazza of St. Peter’s.
One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at least!
Yet there was ample room. How many carriages were there,
I don’t know; yet there was room for them too, and to spare.
The great steps of the church were densely crowded. There
were many of the Contadini, from Albano (who delight in
red), in that part of the square, and the mingling of bright
colours in the crowd was beautiful. Below the steps the troops
were ranged. In the magnificent proportions of the place
they looked like a bed of flowers. Sulky Romans, lively peas-
ants from the neighbouring country, groups of pilgrims from
distant parts of Italy, sight-seeing foreigners of all nations,
made a murmur in the clear air, like so many insects; and
high above them all, plashing and bubbling, and making
rainbow colours in the light, the two delicious fountains
welled and tumbled bountifully.
A kind of bright carpet was hung over the front of the
balcony; and the sides of the great window were bedecked
with crimson drapery. An awning was stretched, too, over
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the top, to screen the old man from the hot rays of the sun.
As noon approached, all eyes were turned up to this win-
dow. In due time, the chair was seen approaching to the
front, with the gigantic fans of peacock’s feathers, close be-
hind. The doll within it (for the balcony is very high) then
rose up, and stretched out its tiny arms, while all the male
spectators in the square uncovered, and some, but not by
any means the greater part, kneeled down. The guns upon
the ramparts of the Castle of St. Angelo proclaimed, next
moment, that the benediction was given; drums beat; trum-
pets sounded; arms clashed; and the great mass below, sud-
denly breaking into smaller heaps, and scattering here and
there in rills, was stirred like parti-coloured sand.
What a bright noon it was, as we rode away! The Tiber
was no longer yellow, but blue. There was a blush on the old
bridges, that made them fresh and hale again. The Pantheon,
with its majestic front, all seamed and furrowed like an old
face, had summer light upon its battered walls. Every squalid
and desolate hut in the Eternal City (bear witness every grim
old palace, to the filth and misery of the plebeian neighbour
that elbows it, as certain as Time has laid its grip on its patri-
cian head!) was fresh and new with some ray of the sun. The
very prison in the crowded street, a whirl of carriages and
people, had some stray sense of the day, dropping through
its chinks and crevices: and dismal prisoners who could not
wind their faces round the barricading of the blocked-up
windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to the rusty
bars, turned them towards the overflowing street: as if it were
a cheerful fire, and could be shared in, that way.
But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the
full moon, what a sight it was to see the Great Square full
once more, and the whole church, from the cross to the
ground, lighted with innumerable lanterns, tracing out the
architecture, and winking and shining all round the colon-
nade of the piazza! And what a sense of exultation, joy, de-
light, it was, when the great bell struck half-past seven—on
the instant—to behold one bright red mass of fire, soar gal-
lantly from the top of the cupola to the extremest summit of
the cross, and the moment it leaped into its place, become
the signal of a bursting out of countless lights, as great, and
red, and blazing as itself, from every part of the gigantic
church; so that every cornice, capital, and smallest ornament
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of stone, expressed itself in fire: and the black, solid ground-
work of the enormous dome seemed to grow transparent as
an egg-shell!
A train of gunpowder, an electric chain—nothing could
be fired, more suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumi-
nation; and when we had got away, and gone upon a distant
height, and looked towards it two hours afterwards, there it
still stood, shining and glittering in the calm night like a
jewel! Not a line of its proportions wanting; not an angle
blunted; not an atom of its radiance lost.
The next night—Easter Monday—there was a great dis-
play of fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo. We hired a
room in an opposite house, and made our way, to our places,
in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up
the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so
loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it
seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below. There are
statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them,
great vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely
on the faces of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone
counterfeits above them.
The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon;
and then, for twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole
castle was one incessant sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blaz-
ing wheels of every colour, size, and speed: while rockets
streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or scores, but
hundreds at a time. The concluding burst—the Girandola—
was like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive
castle, without smoke or dust.
In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had
dispersed; the moon was looking calmly down upon her
wrinkled image in the river; and half-a-dozen men and boys,
with bits of lighted candle in their hands: moving here and
there, in search of anything worth having, that might have
been dropped in the press: had the whole scene to them-
selves.
By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome,
after all this firing and booming, to take our leave of the
Coliseum. I had seen it by moonlight before (I could never
get through a day without going back to it), but its tremen-
dous solitude that night is past all telling. The ghostly pillars
in the Forum; the Triumphal Arches of Old Emperors; those
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enormous masses of ruins which were once their palaces;
the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of ruined
temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread
of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their
transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody
holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled
by pillaging Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wring-
ing wild hands of weed, and grass, and bramble; and lament-
ing to the night in every gap and broken arch—the shadow
of its awful self, immovable!
As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day,
on our way to Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a
little wooden cross had been erected on the spot where the
poor Pilgrim Countess was murdered. So, we piled some
loose stones about it, as the beginning of a mound to her
memory, and wondered if we should ever rest there again,
and look back at Rome.
CHAPTER XI
A RAPID DIORAMA
WE ARE BOUND FOR NAPLES! And we cross the threshold of
the Eternal City at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni
Laterano, where the two last objects that attract the notice
of a departing visitor, and the two first objects that attract
the notice of an arriving one, are a proud church and a de-
caying ruin—good emblems of Rome.
Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more sol-
emn on a bright blue day like this, than beneath a darker
sky; the great extent of ruin being plainer to the eye: and the
sunshine through the arches of the broken aqueducts, show-
ing other broken arches shining through them in the melan-
choly distance. When we have traversed it, and look back
from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies below us like a
stagnant lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing round the
walls of Rome, and separating it from all the world! How
often have the Legions, in triumphant march, gone glitter-
ing across that purple waste, so silent and unpeopled now!
How often has the train of captives looked, with sinking
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hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population pour-
ing out, to hail the return of their conqueror! What riot,
sensuality and murder, have run mad in the vast palaces now
heaps of brick and shattered marble! What glare of fires, and
roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine,
have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gam-
bol unmolested in the sun!
The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a
shaggy peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned
canopy of sheep-skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up
into a higher country where there are trees. The next day
brings us on the Pontine Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome,
and overgrown with brushwood, and swamped with water,
but with a fine road made across them, shaded by a long,
long avenue. Here and there, we pass a solitary guard-house;
here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled up. Some herds-
men loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes
rippling idly along it. A horseman passes occasionally, carry-
ing a long gun cross-wise on the saddle before him, and at-
tended by fierce dogs; but there is nothing else astir save the
wind and the shadows, until we come in sight of Terracina.
How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows
of the inn so famous in robber stories! How picturesque the
great crags and points of rock overhanging to-morrow’s nar-
row road, where galley-slaves are working in the quarries
above, and the sentinels who guard them lounge on the sea-
shore! All night there is the murmur of the sea beneath the
stars; and, in the morning, just at daybreak, the prospect
suddenly becoming expanded, as if by a miracle, reveals—in
the far distance, across the sea there!—Naples with its is-
lands, and Vesuvius spouting fire! Within a quarter of an
hour, the whole is gone as if it were a vision in the clouds,
and there is nothing but the sea and sky.
The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours’ travel-
ling; and the hungriest of soldiers and custom-house officers
with difficulty appeased; we enter, by a gateless portal, into
the first Neapolitan town—Fondi. Take note of Fondi, in
the name of all that is wretched and beggarly.
A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the
centre of the miserable streets, fed by obscene rivulets that
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trickle from the abject houses. There is not a door, a win-
dow, or a shutter; not a roof, a wall, a post, or a pillar, in all
Fondi, but is decayed, and crazy, and rotting away. The
wretched history of the town, with all its sieges and pillages
by Barbarossa and the rest, might have been acted last year.
How the gaunt dogs that sneak about the miserable streets,
come to be alive, and undevoured by the people, is one of
the enigmas of the world.
A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are! All beg-
gars; but that’s nothing. Look at them as they gather round.
Some, are too indolent to come down-stairs, or are too wisely
mistrustful of the stairs, perhaps, to venture: so stretch out
their lean hands from upper windows, and howl; others, come
flocking about us, fighting and jostling one another, and
demanding, incessantly, charity for the love of God, charity
for the love of the Blessed Virgin, charity for the love of all
the Saints. A group of miserable children, almost naked,
screaming forth the same petition, discover that they can see
themselves reflected in the varnish of the carriage, and begin
to dance and make grimaces, that they may have the plea-
sure of seeing their antics repeated in this mirror. A crippled
idiot, in the act of striking one of them who drowns his
clamorous demand for charity, observes his angry counter-
part in the panel, stops short, and thrusting out his tongue,
begins to wag his head and chatter. The shrill cry raised at
this, awakens half-a-dozen wild creatures wrapped in frowsy
brown cloaks, who are lying on the church-steps with pots
and pans for sale. These, scrambling up, approach, and beg
defiantly. ‘I am hungry. Give me something. Listen to me,
Signor. I am hungry!’ Then, a ghastly old woman, fearful of
being too late, comes hobbling down the street, stretching
out one hand, and scratching herself all the way with the
other, and screaming, long before she can be heard, ‘Char-
ity, charity! I’ll go and pray for you directly, beautiful lady, if
you’ll give me charity!’ Lastly, the members of a brother-
hood for burying the dead: hideously masked, and attired in
shabby black robes, white at the skirts, with the splashes of
many muddy winters: escorted by a dirty priest, and a con-
genial cross-bearer: come hurrying past. Surrounded by this
motley concourse, we move out of Fondi: bad bright eyes
glaring at us, out of the darkness of every crazy tenement,
like glistening fragments of its filth and putrefaction.
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A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong
eminence, traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old
town of Itri, like a device in pastry, built up, almost perpen-
dicularly, on a hill, and approached by long steep flights of
steps; beautiful Mola di Gaeta, whose wines, like those of
Albano, have degenerated since the days of Horace, or his
taste for wine was bad: which is not likely of one who enjoyed
it so much, and extolled it so well; another night upon the
road at St. Agatha; a rest next day at Capua, which is pictur-
esque, but hardly so seductive to a traveller now, as the sol-
diers of Praetorian Rome were wont to find the ancient city of
that name; a flat road among vines festooned and looped from
tree to tree; and Mount Vesuvius close at hand at last!—its
cone and summit whitened with snow; and its smoke hanging
over it, in the heavy atmosphere of the day, like a dense cloud.
So we go, rattling down hill, into Naples.
A funeral is coming up the street, towards us. The body, on
an open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a
gay cloth of crimson and gold. The mourners, in white gowns
and masks. If there be death abroad, life is well represented
too, for all Naples would seem to be out of doors, and tearing
to and fro in carriages. Some of these, the common Vetturino
vehicles, are drawn by three horses abreast, decked with smart
trappings and great abundance of brazen ornament, and al-
ways going very fast. Not that their loads are light; for the
smallest of them has at least six people inside, four in front,
four or five more hanging on behind, and two or three more,
in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie half-suffo-
cated with mud and dust. Exhibitors of Punch, buffo singers
with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a row of
cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and
trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders within, and
admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl and bustle.
Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways, and ken-
nels; the gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing up and down in
carriages on the Chiaji, or walking in the Public Gardens; and
quiet letter-writers, perched behind their little desks and
inkstands under the Portico of the Great Theatre of San Carlo,
in the public street, are waiting for clients.
Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written
to a friend. He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting
under the corner arch, and makes his bargain. He has ob-
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tained permission of the sentinel who guards him: who stands
near, leaning against the wall and cracking nuts. The galley-
slave dictates in the ear of the letter-writer, what he desires
to say; and as he can’t read writing, looks intently in his face,
to read there whether he sets down faithfully what he is told.
After a time, the galley-slave becomes discursive—incoher-
ent. The secretary pauses and rubs his chin. The galley-slave
is voluble and energetic. The secretary, at length, catches the
idea, and with the air of a man who knows how to word it,
sets it down; stopping, now and then, to glance back at his
text admiringly. The galley-slave is silent. The soldier sto-
ically cracks his nuts. Is there anything more to say? inquires
the letter-writer. No more. Then listen, friend of mine. He
reads it through. The galley-slave is quite enchanted. It is
folded, and addressed, and given to him, and he pays the
fee. The secretary falls back indolently in his chair, and takes
a book. The galley-slave gathers up an empty sack. The sen-
tinel throws away a handful of nut-shells, shoulders his mus-
ket, and away they go together.
Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their
right hands, when you look at them? Everything is done in
pantomime in Naples, and that is the conventional sign for
hunger. A man who is quarrelling with another, yonder, lays
the palm of his right hand on the back of his left, and shakes
the two thumbs—expressive of a donkey’s ears—whereat his
adversary is goaded to desperation. Two people bargaining
for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary waistcoat pocket
when he is told the price, and walks away without a word:
having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers it
too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his
lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right
hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm.
The other nods briskly, and goes his way. He has been in-
vited to a friendly dinner at half-past five o’clock, and will
certainly come.
All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the
wrist, with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a nega-
tive—the only negative beggars will ever understand. But,
in Naples, those five fingers are a copious language.
All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
macaroni-eating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long,
and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you
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see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay
sparkle merrily. But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque,
let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable de-
pravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay
Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find
Saint Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attrac-
tive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make
ALL the difference between what is interesting and what is
coarse and odious? Painting and poetising for ever, if you
will, the beauties of this most beautiful and lovely spot of
earth, let us, as our duty, try to associate a new picturesque
with some faint recognition of man’s destiny and capabili-
ties; more hopeful, I believe, among the ice and snow of the
North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples.
Capri—once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius—
Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant beauties of the Bay,
lie in the blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine
twenty times a-day: now close at hand, now far off, now
unseen. The fairest country in the world, is spread about us.
Whether we turn towards the Miseno shore of the splendid
watery amphitheatre, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to
the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae: or take the other
way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one succession of
delights. In the last-named direction, where, over doors and
archways, there are countless little images of San Gennaro,
with his Canute’s hand stretched out, to check the fury of
the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a rail-
road on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del
Greco, built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by
an eruption of Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past
the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and macaroni manufacto-
ries; to Castel-a-Mare, with its ruined castle, now inhabited
by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks. Here,
the railroad terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an
unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and beautiful scen-
ery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo, the
highest neighbouring mountain, down to the water’s edge—
among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lem-
ons, orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills—
and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small
towns with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors—
and pass delicious summer villas—to Sorrento, where the
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Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surround-
ing him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castel-
a-Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves,
see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white
houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of
prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the
beach again, at sunset: with the glowing sea on one side, and
the darkening mountain, with its smoke and flame, upon
the other: is a sublime conclusion to the glory of the day.
That church by the Porta Capuana—near the old fisher-
market in the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt
of Masaniello began—is memorable for having been the scene
of one of his earliest proclamations to the people, and is par-
ticularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen
and bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or
the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping
their chins there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral
with the beautiful door, and the columns of African and Egyp-
tian granite that once ornamented the temple of Apollo, con-
tains the famous sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius:
which is preserved in two phials in a silver tabernacle, and
miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the great admira-
tion of the people. At the same moment, the stone (distant
some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes
faintly red. It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly red
also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of
these ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infir-
mity, seem waiting here, to be buried themselves, are mem-
bers of a curious body, called the Royal Hospital, who are
the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old spectres
totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of
death—as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were
used as burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one
part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad
remains of a great mortality occasioned by a plague. In the
rest there is nothing but dust. They consist, chiefly, of great
wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock. At the
end of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses
of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly
and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the
dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.
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The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between
the city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three
hundred and sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in
hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends.
The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it,
though yet unfinished, has already many graves among its
shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reason-
ably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretri-
cious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to
justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by
a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the scene.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead,
with its dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much
more awful and impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly
ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii!
Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii,
and look up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of
Jupiter and Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost
sanctuaries open to the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright
and snowy in the peaceful distance; and lose all count of
time, and heed of other things, in the strange and melan-
choly sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer
making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble on, and
see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human habita-
tion and every-day pursuits; the chafing of the bucket-rope
in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-
wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-
vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae
in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago,
and undisturbed to this hour—all rendering the solitude and
deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten thousand times more
solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury, had swept the city
from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of the sea.
After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the
eruption, workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone,
new ornaments for temples and other buildings that had
suffered. Here lies their work, outside the city gate, as if
they would return to-morrow.
In the cellar of Diomede’s house, where certain skeletons
were found huddled together, close to the door, the impres-
sion of their bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes,
and became stamped and fixed there, after they had shrunk,
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inside, to scanty bones. So, in the theatre of Herculaneum, a
comic mask, floating on the stream when it was hot and
liquid, stamped its mimic features in it as it hardened into
stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the fantastic look
it turned upon the audiences in that same theatre two thou-
sand years ago.
Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and
in and out of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers
of the temples of a religion that has vanished from the earth,
and finding so many fresh traces of remote antiquity: as if the
course of Time had been stopped after this desolation, and
there had been no nights and days, months, years, and centu-
ries, since: nothing is more impressive and terrible than the
many evidences of the searching nature of the ashes, as be-
speaking their irresistible power, and the impossibility of es-
caping them. In the wine-cellars, they forced their way into
the earthen vessels: displacing the wine and choking them, to
the brim, with dust. In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the
dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin
even into them. The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the
skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum,
where the flood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled
in, like a sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at
its height—and that is what is called ‘the lava’ here.
Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink
of which we now stand, looking down, when they came on
some of the stone benches of the theatre—those steps (for
such they seem) at the bottom of the excavation—and found
the buried city of Herculaneum. Presently going down, with
lighted torches, we are perplexed by great walls of monstrous
thickness, rising up between the benches, shutting out the
stage, obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd places, con-
fusing the whole plan, and making it a disordered dream.
We cannot, at first, believe, or picture to ourselves, that this
came rolling in, and drowned the city; and that all that is not
here, has been cut away, by the axe, like solid stone. But this
perceived and understood, the horror and oppression of its
presence are indescribable.
Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless cham-
bers of both cities, or carefully removed to the museum at
Naples, are as fresh and plain, as if they had been executed
yesterday. Here are subjects of still life, as provisions, dead
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game, bottles, glasses, and the like; familiar classical stories,
or mythological fables, always forcibly and plainly told; con-
ceits of cupids, quarrelling, sporting, working at trades; the-
atrical rehearsals; poets reading their productions to their
friends; inscriptions chalked upon the walls; political squibs,
advertisements, rough drawings by schoolboys; everything
to people and restore the ancient cities, in the fancy of their
wondering visitor. Furniture, too, you see, of every kind—
lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking, and cook-
ing; workmen’s tools, surgical instruments, tickets for the
theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of
keys found clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of
guards and warriors; little household bells, yet musical with
their old domestic tones.
The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the
interest of Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination.
The looking, from either ruined city, into the neighbouring
grounds overgrown with beautiful vines and luxuriant trees;
and remembering that house upon house, temple on temple,
building after building, and street after street, are still lying
underneath the roots of all the quiet cultivation, waiting to be
turned up to the light of day; is something so wonderful, so
full of mystery, so captivating to the imagination, that one
would think it would be paramount, and yield to nothing
else. To nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain is the genius
of the scene. From every indication of the ruin it has worked,
we look, again, with an absorbing interest to where its smoke
is rising up into the sky. It is beyond us, as we thread the
ruined streets: above us, as we stand upon the ruined walls,
we follow it through every vista of broken columns, as we
wander through the empty court-yards of the houses; and
through the garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine.
Turning away to Paestum yonder, to see the awful structures
built, the least aged of them, hundreds of years before the
birth of Christ, and standing yet, erect in lonely majesty, upon
the wild, malaria-blighted plain—we watch Vesuvius as it dis-
appears from the prospect, and watch for it again, on our
return, with the same thrill of interest: as the doom and des-
tiny of all this beautiful country, biding its terrible time.
It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when
we return from Paestum, but very cold in the shade:
insomuch, that although we may lunch, pleasantly, at noon,
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in the open air, by the gate of Pompeii, the neighbouring
rivulet supplies thick ice for our wine. But, the sun is shin-
ing brightly; there is not a cloud or speck of vapour in the
whole blue sky, looking down upon the bay of Naples; and
the moon will be at the full to-night. No matter that the
snow and ice lie thick upon the summit of Vesuvius, or that
we have been on foot all day at Pompeii, or that croakers
maintain that strangers should not be on the mountain by
night, in such an unusual season. Let us take advantage of
the fine weather; make the best of our way to Resina, the
little village at the foot of the mountain; prepare ourselves,
as well as we can, on so short a notice, at the guide’s house;
ascend at once, and have sunset half-way up, moon-light at
the top, and midnight to come down in!
At four o’clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible uproar
in the little stable-yard of Signior Salvatore, the recognised
head-guide, with the gold band round his cap; and thirty
under-guides who are all scuffling and screaming at once,
are preparing half-a-dozen saddled ponies, three litters, and
some stout staves, for the journey. Every one of the thirty,
quarrels with the other twenty-nine, and frightens the six
ponies; and as much of the village as can possibly squeeze
itself into the little stable-yard, participates in the tumult,
and gets trodden on by the cattle.
After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than
would suffice for the storming of Naples, the procession starts.
The head-guide, who is liberally paid for all the attendants,
rides a little in advance of the party; the other thirty guides
proceed on foot. Eight go forward with the litters that are to
be used by-and-by; and the remaining two-and-twenty beg.
We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad
flights of stairs, for some time. At length, we leave these, and
the vineyards on either side of them, and emerge upon a
bleak bare region where the lava lies confusedly, in enor-
mous rusty masses; as if the earth had been ploughed up by
burning thunderbolts. And now, we halt to see the sun set.
The change that falls upon the dreary region, and on the
whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes
on—and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign
around, who that has witnessed it, can ever forget!
It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the
broken ground, we arrive at the foot of the cone: which is
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extremely steep, and seems to rise, almost perpendicularly,
from the spot where we dismount. The only light is reflected
from the snow, deep, hard, and white, with which the cone
is covered. It is now intensely cold, and the air is piercing.
The thirty-one have brought no torches, knowing that the
moon will rise before we reach the top. Two of the litters are
devoted to the two ladies; the third, to a rather heavy gentle-
man from Naples, whose hospitality and good-nature have
attached him to the expedition, and determined him to as-
sist in doing the honours of the mountain. The rather heavy
gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by
half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves;
and so the whole party begin to labour upward over the
snow,—as if they were toiling to the summit of an antedilu-
vian Twelfth-cake.
We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks
oddly about him when one of the company—not an Italian,
though an habitue of the mountain for many years: whom
we will call, for our present purpose, Mr. Pickle of Portici—
suggests that, as it is freezing hard, and the usual footing of
ashes is covered by the snow and ice, it will surely be diffi-
cult to descend. But the sight of the litters above, tilting up
and down, and jerking from this side to that, as the bearers
continually slip and tumble, diverts our attention; more es-
pecially as the whole length of the rather heavy gentleman
is, at that moment, presented to us alarmingly foreshort-
ened, with his head downwards.
The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flag-
ging spirits of the bearers. Stimulating each other with their
usual watchword, ‘Courage, friend! It is to eat macaroni!’
they press on, gallantly, for the summit.
From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of
light, and pouring it in a stream through the valley below,
while we have been ascending in the dark, the moon soon
lights the whole white mountain-side, and the broad sea down
below, and tiny Naples in the distance, and every village in the
country round. The whole prospect is in this lovely state, when
we come upon the platform on the mountain-top—the re-
gion of Fire—an exhausted crater formed of great masses of
gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some tremendous
waterfall, burnt up; from every chink and crevice of which,
hot, sulphurous smoke is pouring out: while, from another
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conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising abruptly from
this platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth:
reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke,
and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up
into the air like feathers, and fall down like lead. What words
can paint the gloom and grandeur of this scene!
The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation
from the sulphur: the fear of falling down through the crev-
ices in the yawning ground; the stopping, every now and then,
for somebody who is missing in the dark (for the dense smoke
now obscures the moon); the intolerable noise of the thirty;
and the hoarse roaring of the mountain; make it a scene of
such confusion, at the same time, that we reel again. But,
dragging the ladies through it, and across another exhausted
crater to the foot of the present Volcano, we approach close to
it on the windy side, and then sit down among the hot ashes
at its foot, and look up in silence; faintly estimating the action
that is going on within, from its being full a hundred feet
higher, at this minute, than it was six weeks ago.
There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an
irresistible desire to get nearer to it. We cannot rest long,
without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees,
accompanied by the head-guide, to climb to the brim of the
flaming crater, and try to look in. Meanwhile, the thirty
yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and
call to us to come back; frightening the rest of the party out
of their wits.
What with their noise, and what with the trembling of
the thin crust of ground, that seems about to open under-
neath our feet and plunge us in the burning gulf below (which
is the real danger, if there be any); and what with the flash-
ing of the fire in our faces, and the shower of red-hot ashes
that is raining down, and the choking smoke and sulphur;
we may well feel giddy and irrational, like drunken men.
But, we contrive to climb up to the brim, and look down,
for a moment, into the Hell of boiling fire below. Then, we
all three come rolling down; blackened, and singed, and
scorched, and hot, and giddy: and each with his dress alight
in half-a-dozen places.
You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of
descending, is, by sliding down the ashes: which, forming a
gradually-increasing ledge below the feet, prevent too rapid
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a descent. But, when we have crossed the two exhausted
craters on our way back and are come to this precipitous
place, there is (as Mr. Pickle has foretold) no vestige of ashes
to be seen; the whole being a smooth sheet of ice.
In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously
join hands, and make a chain of men; of whom the foremost
beat, as well as they can, a rough track with their sticks,
down which we prepare to follow. The way being fearfully
steep, and none of the party: even of the thirty: being able to
keep their feet for six paces together, the ladies are taken out
of their litters, and placed, each between two careful per-
sons; while others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to pre-
vent their falling forward—a necessary precaution, tending
to the immediate and hopeless dilapidation of their apparel.
The rather heavy gentleman is abjured to leave his litter too,
and be escorted in a similar manner; but he resolves to be
brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that
his fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and
that he is safer so, than trusting to his own legs.
In this order, we begin the descent: sometimes on foot,
sometimes shuffling on the ice: always proceeding much more
quietly and slowly, than on our upward way: and constantly
alarmed by the falling among us of somebody from behind,
who endangers the footing of the whole party, and clings
pertinaciously to anybody’s ankles. It is impossible for the
litter to be in advance, too, as the track has to be made; and
its appearance behind us, overhead—with some one or other
of the bearers always down, and the rather heavy gentleman
with his legs always in the air—is very threatening and fright-
ful. We have gone on thus, a very little way, painfully and
anxiously, but quite merrily, and regarding it as a great suc-
cess—and have all fallen several times, and have all been
stopped, somehow or other, as we were sliding away—when
Mr. Pickle of Portici, in the act of remarking on these un-
common circumstances as quite beyond his experience,
stumbles, falls, disengages himself, with quick presence of
mind, from those about him, plunges away head foremost,
and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the cone!
Sickening as it is to look, and be so powerless to help him,
I see him there, in the moonlight—I have had such a dream
often—skimming over the white ice, like a cannon-ball. Al-
most at the same moment, there is a cry from behind; and a
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man who has carried a light basket of spare cloaks on his
head, comes rolling past, at the same frightful speed, closely
followed by a boy. At this climax of the chapter of accidents,
the remaining eight-and-twenty vociferate to that degree,
that a pack of wolves would be music to them!
Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of
Portici when we reach the place where we dismounted, and
where the horses are waiting; but, thank God, sound in limb!
And never are we likely to be more glad to see a man alive and
on his feet, than to see him now—making light of it too,
though sorely bruised and in great pain. The boy is brought
into the Hermitage on the Mountain, while we are at supper,
with his head tied up; and the man is heard of, some hours
afterwards. He too is bruised and stunned, but has broken no
bones; the snow having, fortunately, covered all the larger
blocks of rock and stone, and rendered them harmless.
After a cheerful meal, and a good rest before a blazing
fire, we again take horse, and continue our descent to
Salvatore’s house—very slowly, by reason of our bruised friend
being hardly able to keep the saddle, or endure the pain of
motion. Though it is so late at night, or early in the morn-
ing, all the people of the village are waiting about the little
stable-yard when we arrive, and looking up the road by which
we are expected. Our appearance is hailed with a great
clamour of tongues, and a general sensation for which in
our modesty we are somewhat at a loss to account, until,
turning into the yard, we find that one of a party of French
gentlemen who were on the mountain at the same time is
lying on some straw in the stable, with a broken limb: look-
ing like Death, and suffering great torture; and that we were
confidently supposed to have encountered some worse acci-
dent.
So ‘well returned, and Heaven be praised!’ as the cheerful
Vetturino, who has borne us company all the way from Pisa,
says, with all his heart! And away with his ready horses, into
sleeping Naples!
It wakes again to Policinelli and pickpockets, buffo sing-
ers and beggars, rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and
universal degradation; airing its Harlequin suit in the sun-
shine, next day and every day; singing, starving, dancing,
gaming, on the sea-shore; and leaving all labour to the burn-
ing mountain, which is ever at its work.
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Our English dilettanti would be very pathetic on the sub-
ject of the national taste, if they could hear an Italian opera
half as badly sung in England as we may hear the Foscari
performed, to-night, in the splendid theatre of San Carlo.
But, for astonishing truth and spirit in seizing and embody-
ing the real life about it, the shabby little San Carlino The-
atre—the rickety house one story high, with a staring pic-
ture outside: down among the drums and trumpets, and the
tumblers, and the lady conjurer—is without a rival anywhere.
There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples,
at which we may take a glance before we go—the Lotteries.
They prevail in most parts of Italy, but are particularly
obvious, in their effects and influences, here. They are drawn
every Saturday. They bring an immense revenue to the Gov-
ernment; and diffuse a taste for gambling among the poorest
of the poor, which is very comfortable to the coffers of the
State, and very ruinous to themselves. The lowest stake is
one grain; less than a farthing. One hundred numbers—
from one to a hundred, inclusive—are put into a box. Five
are drawn. Those are the prizes. I buy three numbers. If one
of them come up, I win a small prize. If two, some hundreds
of times my stake. If three, three thousand five hundred
times my stake. I stake (or play as they call it) what I can
upon my numbers, and buy what numbers I please. The
amount I play, I pay at the lottery office, where I purchase
the ticket; and it is stated on the ticket itself.
Every lottery office keeps a printed book, an Universal
Lottery Diviner, where every possible accident and circum-
stance is provided for, and has a number against it. For in-
stance, let us take two carlini—about sevenpence. On our
way to the lottery office, we run against a black man. When
we get there, we say gravely, ‘The Diviner.’ It is handed over
the counter, as a serious matter of business. We look at black
man. Such a number. ‘Give us that.’ We look at running
against a person in the street. ‘Give us that. ‘ We look at the
name of the street itself. ‘Give us that.’ Now, we have our
three numbers.
If the roof of the theatre of San Carlo were to fall in, so
many people would play upon the numbers attached to such
an accident in the Diviner, that the Government would soon
close those numbers, and decline to run the risk of losing
any more upon them. This often happens. Not long ago,
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when there was a fire in the King’s Palace, there was such a
desperate run on fire, and king, and palace, that further stakes
on the numbers attached to those words in the Golden Book
were forbidden. Every accident or event, is supposed, by the
ignorant populace, to be a revelation to the beholder, or party
concerned, in connection with the lottery. Certain people
who have a talent for dreaming fortunately, are much sought
after; and there are some priests who are constantly favoured
with visions of the lucky numbers.
I heard of a horse running away with a man, and dashing
him down, dead, at the corner of a street. Pursuing the horse
with incredible speed, was another man, who ran so fast,
that he came up, immediately after the accident. He threw
himself upon his knees beside the unfortunate rider, and
clasped his hand with an expression of the wildest grief. ‘If
you have life,’ he said, ‘speak one word to me! If you have
one gasp of breath left, mention your age for Heaven’s sake,
that I may play that number in the lottery.’
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and we may go to see
our lottery drawn. The ceremony takes place every Satur-
day, in the Tribunale, or Court of Justice—this singular,
earthy-smelling room, or gallery, as mouldy as an old cellar,
and as damp as a dungeon. At the upper end is a platform,
with a large horse-shoe table upon it; and a President and
Council sitting round—all judges of the Law. The man on
the little stool behind the President, is the Capo Lazzarone,
a kind of tribune of the people, appointed on their behalf to
see that all is fairly conducted: attended by a few personal
friends. A ragged, swarthy fellow he is: with long matted
hair hanging down all over his face: and covered, from head
to foot, with most unquestionably genuine dirt. All the body
of the room is filled with the commonest of the Neapolitan
people: and between them and the platform, guarding the
steps leading to the latter, is a small body of soldiers.
There is some delay in the arrival of the necessary number
of judges; during which, the box, in which the numbers are
being placed, is a source of the deepest interest. When the box
is full, the boy who is to draw the numbers out of it becomes
the prominent feature of the proceedings. He is already dressed
for his part, in a tight brown Holland coat, with only one (the
left) sleeve to it, which leaves his right arm bared to the shoul-
der, ready for plunging down into the mysterious chest.
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During the hush and whisper that pervade the room, all
eyes are turned on this young minister of fortune. People
begin to inquire his age, with a view to the next lottery; and
the number of his brothers and sisters; and the age of his
father and mother; and whether he has any moles or pimples
upon him; and where, and how many; when the arrival of
the last judge but one (a little old man, universally dreaded
as possessing the Evil Eye) makes a slight diversion, and would
occasion a greater one, but that he is immediately deposed,
as a source of interest, by the officiating priest, who advances
gravely to his place, followed by a very dirty little boy, carry-
ing his sacred vestments, and a pot of Holy Water.
Here is the last judge come at last, and now he takes his
place at the horse-shoe table.
There is a murmur of irrepressible agitation. In the midst
of it, the priest puts his head into the sacred vestments, and
pulls the same over his shoulders. Then he says a silent prayer;
and dipping a brush into the pot of Holy Water, sprinkles it
over the box—and over the boy, and gives them a double-
barrelled blessing, which the box and the boy are both hoisted
on the table to receive. The boy remaining on the table, the
box is now carried round the front of the platform, by an
attendant, who holds it up and shakes it lustily all the time;
seeming to say, like the conjurer, ‘There is no deception,
ladies and gentlemen; keep your eyes upon me, if you please!’
At last, the box is set before the boy; and the boy, first
holding up his naked arm and open hand, dives down into
the hole (it is made like a ballot-box) and pulls out a num-
ber, which is rolled up, round something hard, like a bon-
bon. This he hands to the judge next him, who unrolls a
little bit, and hands it to the President, next to whom he sits.
The President unrolls it, very slowly. The Capo Lazzarone
leans over his shoulder. The President holds it up, unrolled,
to the Capo Lazzarone. The Capo Lazzarone, looking at it
eagerly, cries out, in a shrill, loud voice, ‘Sessantadue!’ (sixty-
two), expressing the two upon his fingers, as he calls it out.
Alas! the Capo Lazzarone himself has not staked on sixty-
two. His face is very long, and his eyes roll wildly.
As it happens to be a favourite number, however, it is
pretty well received, which is not always the case. They are
all drawn with the same ceremony, omitting the blessing.
One blessing is enough for the whole multiplication-table.
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The only new incident in the proceedings, is the gradually
deepening intensity of the change in the Cape Lazzarone,
who has, evidently, speculated to the very utmost extent of
his means; and who, when he sees the last number, and finds
that it is not one of his, clasps his hands, and raises his eyes
to the ceiling before proclaiming it, as though remonstrat-
ing, in a secret agony, with his patron saint, for having com-
mitted so gross a breach of confidence. I hope the Capo
Lazzarone may not desert him for some other member of
the Calendar, but he seems to threaten it.
Where the winners may be, nobody knows. They certainly are
not present; the general disappointment filling one with pity for
the poor people. They look: when we stand aside, observing them,
in their passage through the court-yard down below: as miserable
as the prisoners in the gaol (it forms a part of the building), who
are peeping down upon them, from between their bars; or, as the
fragments of human heads which are still dangling in chains out-
side, in memory of the good old times, when their owners were
strung up there, for the popular edification.
Away from Naples in a glorious sunrise, by the road to
Capua, and then on a three days’ journey along by-roads,
that we may see, on the way, the monastery of Monte Cassino,
which is perched on the steep and lofty hill above the little
town of San Germano, and is lost on a misty morning in the
clouds.
So much the better, for the deep sounding of its bell, which,
as we go winding up, on mules, towards the convent, is heard
mysteriously in the still air, while nothing is seen but the
grey mist, moving solemnly and slowly, like a funeral pro-
cession. Behold, at length the shadowy pile of building close
before us: its grey walls and towers dimly seen, though so
near and so vast: and the raw vapour rolling through its clois-
ters heavily.
There are two black shadows walking to and fro in the
quadrangle, near the statues of the Patron Saint and his sis-
ter; and hopping on behind them, in and out of the old
arches, is a raven, croaking in answer to the bell, and utter-
ing, at intervals, the purest Tuscan. How like a Jesuit he
looks! There never was a sly and stealthy fellow so at home as
is this raven, standing now at the refectory door, with his
head on one side, and pretending to glance another way,
while he is scrutinizing the visitors keenly, and listening with
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fixed attention. What a dull-headed monk the porter be-
comes in comparison!
‘He speaks like us!’ says the porter: ‘quite as plainly.’ Quite
as plainly, Porter. Nothing could be more expressive than his
reception of the peasants who are entering the gate with bas-
kets and burdens. There is a roll in his eye, and a chuckle in
his throat, which should qualify him to be chosen Superior
of an Order of Ravens. He knows all about it. ‘It’s all right,’
he says. ‘We know what we know. Come along, good people.
Glad to see you!’ How was this extraordinary structure ever
built in such a situation, where the labour of conveying the
stone, and iron, and marble, so great a height, must have
been prodigious? ‘Caw!’ says the raven, welcoming the peas-
ants. How, being despoiled by plunder, fire and earthquake,
has it risen from its ruins, and been again made what we
now see it, with its church so sumptuous and magnificent?
‘Caw!’ says the raven, welcoming the peasants. These people
have a miserable appearance, and (as usual) are densely ig-
norant, and all beg, while the monks are chaunting in the
chapel. ‘Caw!’ says the raven, ‘Cuckoo!’
So we leave him, chuckling and rolling his eye at the con-
vent gate, and wind slowly down again through the cloud.
At last emerging from it, we come in sight of the village far
below, and the flat green country intersected by rivulets;
which is pleasant and fresh to see after the obscurity and
haze of the convent—no disrespect to the raven, or the holy
friars.
Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most
shattered and tattered of villages, where there is not a whole
window among all the houses, or a whole garment among all
the peasants, or the least appearance of anything to eat, in
any of the wretched hucksters’ shops. The women wear a
bright red bodice laced before and behind, a white skirt, and
the Neapolitan head-dress of square folds of linen, primi-
tively meant to carry loads on. The men and children wear
anything they can get. The soldiers are as dirty and rapa-
cious as the dogs. The inns are such hobgoblin places, that
they are infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best
hotels in Paris. Here is one near Valmontone (that is
Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount oppo-
site), which is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep.
There is a wild colonnade below, and a dark yard full of
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empty stables and lofts, and a great long kitchen with a great
long bench and a great long form, where a party of travel-
lers, with two priests among them, are crowding round the
fire while their supper is cooking. Above stairs, is a rough
brick gallery to sit in, with very little windows with very
small patches of knotty glass in them, and all the doors that
open from it (a dozen or two) off their hinges, and a bare
board on tressels for a table, at which thirty people might
dine easily, and a fireplace large enough in itself for a break-
fast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze and crackle, they
illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn in char-
coal on the whitewashed chimney-sides by previous travel-
lers. There is a flaring country lamp on the table; and, hov-
ering about it, scratching her thick black hair continually, a
yellow dwarf of a woman, who stands on tiptoe to arrange
the hatchet knives, and takes a flying leap to look into the
water-jug. The beds in the adjoining rooms are of the liveli-
est kind. There is not a solitary scrap of looking-glass in the
house, and the washing apparatus is identical with the cook-
ing utensils. But the yellow dwarf sets on the table a good
flask of excellent wine, holding a quart at least; and pro-
duces, among half-a-dozen other dishes, two-thirds of a
roasted kid, smoking hot. She is as good-humoured, too, as
dirty, which is saying a great deal. So here’s long life to her,
in the flask of wine, and prosperity to the establishment.
Rome gained and left behind, and with it the Pilgrims
who are now repairing to their own homes again—each with
his scallop shell and staff, and soliciting alms for the love of
God—we come, by a fair country, to the Falls of Terni, where
the whole Velino river dashes, headlong, from a rocky height,
amidst shining spray and rainbows. Perugia, strongly forti-
fied by art and nature, on a lofty eminence, rising abruptly
from the plain where purple mountains mingle with the dis-
tant sky, is glowing, on its market-day, with radiant colours.
They set off its sombre but rich Gothic buildings admirably.
The pavement of its market-place is strewn with country
goods. All along the steep hill leading from the town, under
the town wall, there is a noisy fair of calves, lambs, pigs,
horses, mules, and oxen. Fowls, geese, and turkeys, flutter
vigorously among their very hoofs; and buyers, sellers, and
spectators, clustering everywhere, block up the road as we
come shouting down upon them.
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Suddenly, there is a ringing sound among our horses. The
driver stops them. Sinking in his saddle, and casting up his
eyes to Heaven, he delivers this apostrophe, ‘Oh Jove Om-
nipotent! here is a horse has lost his shoe!’
Notwithstanding the tremendous nature of this accident,
and the utterly forlorn look and gesture (impossible in any
one but an Italian Vetturino) with which it is announced, it
is not long in being repaired by a mortal Farrier, by whose
assistance we reach Castiglione the same night, and Arezzo
next day. Mass is, of course, performing in its fine cathedral,
where the sun shines in among the clustered pillars, through
rich stained-glass windows: half revealing, half concealing
the kneeling figures on the pavement, and striking out paths
of spotted light in the long aisles.
But, how much beauty of another kind is here, when, on
a fair clear morning, we look, from the summit of a hill, on
Florence! See where it lies before us in a sun-lighted valley,
bright with the winding Arno, and shut in by swelling hills;
its domes, and towers, and palaces, rising from the rich coun-
try in a glittering heap, and shining in the sun like gold!
Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful
Florence; and the strong old piles of building make such heaps
of shadow, on the ground and in the river, that there is an-
other and a different city of rich forms and fancies, always
lying at our feet. Prodigious palaces, constructed for defence,
with small distrustful windows heavily barred, and walls of
great thickness formed of huge masses of rough stone, frown,
in their old sulky state, on every street. In the midst of the
city—in the Piazza of the Grand Duke, adorned with beauti-
ful statues and the Fountain of Neptune—rises the Palazzo
Vecchio, with its enormous overhanging battlements, and the
Great Tower that watches over the whole town. In its court-
yard—worthy of the Castle of Otranto in its ponderous
gloom—is a massive staircase that the heaviest waggon and
the stoutest team of horses might be driven up. Within it, is a
Great Saloon, faded and tarnished in its stately decorations,
and mouldering by grains, but recording yet, in pictures on its
walls, the triumphs of the Medici and the wars of the old
Florentine people. The prison is hard by, in an adjacent court-
yard of the building—a foul and dismal place, where some
men are shut up close, in small cells like ovens; and where
others look through bars and beg; where some are playing
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draughts, and some are talking to their friends, who smoke, the
while, to purify the air; and some are buying wine and fruit of
women-vendors; and all are squalid, dirty, and vile to look at.
‘They are merry enough, Signore,’ says the jailer. ‘They are all
blood-stained here,’ he adds, indicating, with his hand, three-
fourths of the whole building. Before the hour is out, an old
man, eighty years of age, quarrelling over a bargain with a young
girl of seventeen, stabs her dead, in the market-place full of
bright flowers; and is brought in prisoner, to swell the number.
Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte
Vecchio—that bridge which is covered with the shops of
Jewellers and Goldsmiths—is a most enchanting feature in
the scene. The space of one house, in the centre, being left
open, the view beyond is shown as in a frame; and that pre-
cious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings, shining
so quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge,
is exquisite. Above it, the Gallery of the Grand Duke crosses
the river. It was built to connect the two Great Palaces by a
secret passage; and it takes its jealous course among the streets
and houses, with true despotism: going where it lists, and
spurning every obstacle away, before it.
The Grand Duke has a worthier secret passage through the
streets, in his black robe and hood, as a member of the
Compagnia della Misericordia, which brotherhood includes
all ranks of men. If an accident take place, their office is, to
raise the sufferer, and bear him tenderly to the Hospital. If a
fire break out, it is one of their functions to repair to the spot,
and render their assistance and protection. It is, also, among
their commonest offices, to attend and console the sick; and
they neither receive money, nor eat, nor drink, in any house
they visit for this purpose. Those who are on duty for the
time, are all called together, on a moment’s notice, by the
tolling of the great bell of the Tower; and it is said that the
Grand Duke has been seen, at this sound, to rise from his seat
at table, and quietly withdraw to attend the summons.
In this other large Piazza, where an irregular kind of market
is held, and stores of old iron and other small merchandise are
set out on stalls, or scattered on the pavement, are grouped
together, the Cathedral with its great Dome, the beautiful
Italian Gothic Tower the Campanile, and the Baptistery with
its wrought bronze doors. And here, a small untrodden square
in the pavement, is ‘the Stone of Dante,’ where (so runs the
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story) he was used to bring his stool, and sit in contempla-
tion. I wonder was he ever, in his bitter exile, withheld from
cursing the very stones in the streets of Florence the un-
grateful, by any kind remembrance of this old musing-place,
and its association with gentle thoughts of little Beatrice!
The chapel of the Medici, the Good and Bad Angels, of Flo-
rence; the church of Santa Croce where Michael Angelo lies
buried, and where every stone in the cloisters is eloquent on
great men’s deaths; innumerable churches, often masses of un-
finished heavy brickwork externally, but solemn and serene
within; arrest our lingering steps, in strolling through the city.
In keeping with the tombs among the cloisters, is the Mu-
seum of Natural History, famous through the world for its
preparations in wax; beginning with models of leaves, seeds,
plants, inferior animals; and gradually ascending, through
separate organs of the human frame, up to the whole struc-
ture of that wonderful creation, exquisitely presented, as in
recent death. Few admonitions of our frail mortality can be
more solemn and more sad, or strike so home upon the heart,
as the counterfeits of Youth and Beauty that are lying there,
upon their beds, in their last sleep.
Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the
convent at Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, Boccaddio’s house,
old villas and retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glow-
ing in a landscape of surpassing beauty steeped in the richest
light; are spread before us. Returning from so much bright-
ness, how solemn and how grand the streets again, with their
great, dark, mournful palaces, and many legends: not of siege,
and war, and might, and Iron Hand alone, but of the trium-
phant growth of peaceful Arts and Sciences.
What light is shed upon the world, at this day, from amidst
these rugged Palaces of Florence! Here, open to all comers,
in their beautiful and calm retreats, the ancient Sculptors
are immortal, side by side with Michael Angelo, Canova,
Titian, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poets, Historians, Philoso-
phers—those illustrious men of history, beside whom its
crowned heads and harnessed warriors show so poor and
small, and are so soon forgotten. Here, the imperishable part
of noble minds survives, placid and equal, when strongholds
of assault and defence are overthrown; when the tyranny of
the many, or the few, or both, is but a tale; when Pride and
Power are so much cloistered dust. The fire within the stern
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streets, and among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled
by rays from Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flick-
ering of war is extinguished and the household fires of gen-
erations have decayed; as thousands upon thousands of faces,
rigid with the strife and passion of the hour, have faded out
of the old Squares and public haunts, while the nameless
Florentine Lady, preserved from oblivion by a Painter’s hand,
yet lives on, in enduring grace and youth.
Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its
shining Dome is seen no more, go travelling through cheer-
ful Tuscany, with a bright remembrance of it; for Italy will
be the fairer for the recollection. The summer-time being
come: and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como lying
far behind us: and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village, near
the awful rocks and mountains, the everlasting snows and
roaring cataracts, of the Great Saint Gothard: hearing the
Italian tongue for the last time on this journey: let us part
from Italy, with all its miseries and wrongs, affectionately, in
our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which
it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a
people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tem-
pered. Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been
at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit; mis-
erable jealousies, fomented by petty Princes to whom union
was destruction, and division strength, have been a canker
at their root of nationality, and have barbarized their lan-
guage; but the good that was in them ever, is in them yet,
and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these
ashes. Let us entertain that hope! And let us not remember
Italy the less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her
fallen Temples, and every stone of her deserted palaces and
prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of
Time is rolling for an end, and that the world is, in all great
essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and more hope-
ful, as it rolls!