Italian Journeys

by William Dean Howells

  Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art was – if ever – a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of decay.

  I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read in Mr. Norton’s Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, “the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence,” and it is of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good world, – e pur si muove.

  The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicoló Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled.

  We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence.

  “Did you ever,” said the cicerone after we had left the building, “hear such music as that?”

  “The papal choir does not equal it,” we answered with one voice.

  The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went on:

  “Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, ‘We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little, – thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, ‘There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,” pursued the cicerone, “for making this echo. But,” he added with a sigh, “it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!' ” – here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject – “ ‘make me the echo!' I was forced,” concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, “to howl half an hour without ceasing.”

  The Ferrara Road

  The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman cameriere out of place, who got into the diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who thought it particularly Italian to say “SÍ” three times for every assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman cameriere. The last was worth all the rest – being a man of vast general information acquired in the course of service with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with “SÍ!” “Vabene!” “Ecco!” He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. “St. Peter’s, Signori, – have you ever seen it? – is the first church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. SÍ, Signori, la mia seconda patria.” After a pause, “Va bene.”

  We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, “Ecco!”

  Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of living. “Wonderfully well they eat – the English. Four times a day. With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico.” After a pause, “SÍ!” “And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: ‘Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi.' (’On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice,” concludes the cameriere.

  He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble 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 ga
y, 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 grass, 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 bloody 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 butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing 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 proprietorship 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 cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in old-world fashion, 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 mass 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 passed; 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.

  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 fishing-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 balustraded 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 sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy 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 glass, 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 button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions 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 Cantù, “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 lang
uage of ceremony; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the employés 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 class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, 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 Classical 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 passes 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:~