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Chapter 5
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 dolefully, 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 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 gentleman 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 passenger 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 accommodation, 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 followed 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 proceedings, 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 quantity 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 accomplished 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 enthusiastic 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; making blazing
fires without the least authority from the landlord; 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 somebody 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 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 dutifully 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, solitary,
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, moodily 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 thousand 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.
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 advancement, 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 posting-chaise
ever seen, so that he looks out of the front window 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 themselves, 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 purpose, 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!
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 architecture, 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 confessionals, 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 mournful 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. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such
a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened 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 suddenly 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 Baptistery,
with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there 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 tenanted by rats; damp and mildew smear the faded colours,
and make spectral maps upon the panels; lean rags are dangling 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 cathedral, 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 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 griffins, 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! TO-NIGHT! Then, a
Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder, like
Hercules. Then, six or eight Roman chariots: each with a
beautiful lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally 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 Britons. 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 condescended to scatter
largesse in the form of a few handbills. After caracolling among
the lions and tigers, and proclaiming 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 devoutly, 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.
Anyhow, I must certainly have forgiven her her interest in the
Circus, though I had been her Father Confessor.
There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, 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 content, however, to look at the outside of the
tower, and feast, in imagination, on the bucket within; and
preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall Campanile, and about
the cathedral; 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 authorities 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 introduce 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 cheerful. 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), and made a
little bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a
subject, and partly in memory of the children and of his favourite
saint. It was as unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow,
as ever man made. Immediately 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.
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