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ITALIAN JOURNEYS

By

W.D. Howells

1867 and 1895




PAGE
CONTENTS.

The Road to Rome from Venice:
I. Leaving Venice 9
II. From Padua to Ferrara 10
III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and
the Pathetic in Ferrara 14
IV. Through Bologna to Genoa 43
V. Up and Down Genoa 52
VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples 65
VII. Certain Things in Naples 75
VIII. A Day in Pompeii 89
IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum 106
X. Capri and Capriotes 116
XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples 136
XII. Between Rome and Naples 147
XIII. Roman Pearls 151

Forza Maggiore 178

At Padua 196

A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arqua 216

A Visit to the Cimbri 235

Minor Travels:
I. Pisa 251
II. The Ferrara Road 259
III. Trieste 264
IV. Bassano 274
V. Possagno, Canova's Birthplace 280
VI. Como 285

Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma 293

Ducal Mantua 321




THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.

I.

LEAVING VENICE.

We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so
down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the
briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path,
so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on
shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void,
battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,

"The moving accident is not my trade,"

for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which,
if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the
reader from taking any road to Rome.

Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?




II.

FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.

As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct
line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss
family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were
going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent
nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only
daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country,
was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning
twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet,
and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about
Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted
away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.

The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us
every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence
had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it
again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were
as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed;
"you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide--the world is
wide!" The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little
lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy
with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted
that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that
the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.

Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American
unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the
expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and
every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with
which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the
cultivation of cotton.

We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we
were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was
more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy.
Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own
countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who
think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in
Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as
keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded
that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller
of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion,
that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse
often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their
porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same
impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the
diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant
an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is
more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser
has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua,
twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles
south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in
another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people
who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence
to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his
hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give
five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to
the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with
Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the
rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took
snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a
flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the
spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate
soup.

But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting,
and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been
so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our
dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to
Ferrara.




III.

THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.

I.

It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest
in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of
our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The _portier_ at the
Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is
sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the
coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had
not read.

The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven
years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer
used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese
streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the
window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower.
It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of
the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso
could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at
last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a
modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a
slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper
of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an
Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True
and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper,
unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in
a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's
time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low
doorway to the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and
passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered
the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof
ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single
narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window
has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there
by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner
his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to
this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention
to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself
to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in
trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in
them or not. On the other hand, my _portier_, an ex-_valet de place_,
pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the
freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest.

One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which
the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name
of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped
away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there
is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still
fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the
story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and
there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting
his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It
is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing
when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than
three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after
this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian:
"I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind
and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the
Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre
result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for
the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the
spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell
in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them,
that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were
Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt
about Lady Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her
heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy
curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation."

I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's
own language, in a clever guide-book called _Il Servitore di Piazza_,
which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt
all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count
Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a
valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these
unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says,
before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in
question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the
shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by
every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the
poet's time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old
servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It
is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible
that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place
unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it
seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the
visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso
allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride
about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a
cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our _valet
de place_ who knows how to read and write, "visit the prison of Tasso,
certain that _in the hospital of St. Anna_ that great man was confined
for many years;" and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to
his emotions.

I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly
in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read
and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of
Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know
a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise.
But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress
throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if
one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much
better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an
interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most
famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and
is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could
furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has
the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the
hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is
that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy,
credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and
proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its
native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing
about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to
believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a
cherished dream.


II.

But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon
the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually
believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long
and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the
longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only
one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took
me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its
shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad
celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the
residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little
suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them.
It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of
a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with
peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their
unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence
to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she
bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge;
and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned
that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and
ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she
reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and
perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was
surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and,
justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself
her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden
revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he
not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his
mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into
his heart.

The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung
out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither
the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only
removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the
wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to
Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the
conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored
the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of
Venetian red.


III.

It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men,
could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena,
Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to
crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them
in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come
to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if
he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon
the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these
sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their
peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick
and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the
emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them
inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and
idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with
history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the
newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope
and of Napoleon in their shop windows.

Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against
her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a
portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had
its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to
lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety
and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories
as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history.
Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when
the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied
that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of
surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed
to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly
bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon,
into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the
Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk
back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting
the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from
actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to
me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all,
I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though
it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final
repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter
the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have
studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals,
and gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the history of
my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past
renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate
my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my
people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and
I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be
as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished
capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of
the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in
hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene
protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed
and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.

However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just
depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under
the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and
rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single
face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii,
where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world
worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are
Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern
quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is
loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in
Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the
street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise
that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed,
surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
midst.


IV.

I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
on the facade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist
here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as
well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in
an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us
well as agony.

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