Italian Journeys Part 14

The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with n.o.ble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all smile, and the little man very gladly with us.

"An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed."

At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?

As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and gra.s.s, with here and there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with the b.l.o.o.d.y red of poppies; the fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the b.u.t.terflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the pa.s.sing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of Spring.

At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city.

I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of proprietors.h.i.+p in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and _buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a c.u.mulative feeling of owners.h.i.+p in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in old-world fas.h.i.+on, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing to ma.s.s themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we pa.s.sed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road.

III.

TRIESTE.

If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted with the sail of fis.h.i.+ng-craft. The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible.

But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter."

The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and bal.u.s.traded with iron.

Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal suns.h.i.+ne, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the gra.s.sy borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan provinces,--a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.

It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with gla.s.s, where are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian Lloyds,--which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste,--and where the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian b.u.t.ton-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here Christianity encounters the h.o.a.ry superst.i.tions of the East, and makes a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. "In regard to language," says Cantu, "though the country is peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the h.e.l.lenic and Illyric, the _employes_ of the civil courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper cla.s.s prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fas.h.i.+ons, and fancies change. This in the salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."

And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St.

Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.

The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the Museum of Cla.s.sical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince,--the Miramare, where the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he pa.s.ses the gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:--

"And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored wave below; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow."

I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impa.s.sive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought so many woes.

It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen.

The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different lights--blue lights, yellow lights, green lights--to be seen at different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pa.s.s the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for the _Fatti Diversi_ of the _Osservatore Triestino_, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a _triste evvenimento_--the driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone.

Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on cus.h.i.+oned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared.

_Was_ this the steamer for Venice?

_Sicuro_!

All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way.

"The other pa.s.sengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room.

He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other state-rooms. They were empty.

"Am I the only pa.s.senger?" I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety.

"Precisely," he answered.

I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew--it seemed too fearfully probable that he did.

I now suspected that I had taken pa.s.sage with the Olandese Volante.

There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner--I was a Ma.n.u.script Found in a Bottle!

Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffe latte, and the b.u.t.tered toast for my breakfast. He said "_Servitor suo_!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.

"This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.

No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return ticket, and would go.

Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at expectoration.

We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another.

Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly, bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.

IV.

Ba.s.sANO.

I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri, how full of courts.h.i.+p we found the little city of Ba.s.sano on the evening of our arrival there. Ba.s.sano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Ba.s.sano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Ba.s.sano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you a.s.sure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same G.o.d as the Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact for himself.

Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we pa.s.sed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat s.p.a.ce, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Ba.s.sano than we had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons.

We respected Ba.s.sano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her ill.u.s.trious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom no one out of Ba.s.sano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Ba.s.sano to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Ba.s.sano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco.

We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by pa.s.sing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalact.i.tes of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.

The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is a.s.sociated with the grot, let us have her story, which is curiously ill.u.s.trative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardians.h.i.+p of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Ba.s.sano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian n.o.ble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children.

This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitue_ of the caffe in Ba.s.sano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the caffe playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank his gla.s.ses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years.

V.

POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.

It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Ba.s.sano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Ba.s.sano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fict.i.tious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with, "Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.