University of Virginia Library

34. LETTER XXXIV.

We pushed from the post-office stairs in a gondola
with six oars at sunset. It was melancholy to leave
Venice. A hasty farewell look, as we sped down the
grand canal, at the gorgeous palaces, even less famous
than beautiful—a glance at the disappearing Rialto,
and we shot out into the Gindecca in a blaze of sunset
glory. Oh how magnificently looked Venice in that
light—rising behind us from the sea—all her superb
towers and palaces, turrets and spires fused into gold;
and the waters about her, like a mirror of stained
glass, without a ripple!

An hour and a half of hard rowing brought us to
the nearest land. You should go to Venice to know
how like a dream a reality may be. You will find it
difficult to realize when you smell once more the
fresh earth and grass and flowers, and walk about and
see fields and mountains, that this city upon the sea
exists out of the imagination. You float to it and
about it and from it, in their light craft, so aerially,
that it seems a vision.

With a drive of two or three hours, half twilight,
half moonlight, we entered Padua. It was too late to
see the portrait of Petrarch, and I had not time to go
to his tomb at Argua, twelve miles distant, so, musing
on Livy and Galileo, to both of whom Padua was a

home, I inquired for a café. A new one had lately
been built in the centre of the town, quite the largest
and most thronged I ever saw. Eight or ten large,
high-roofed halls were open, and filled with tables, at
which sat more beauty and fashion than I supposed
all Padua could have mustered. I walked through
one after another, without finding a seat, and was
about turning to go out, and seek a place of less pretension,
when an elderly lady, who sat with a party of
seven, eating ices, rose, with Italian courtesy, and offered
me a chair at their table. I accepted it, and
made the acquaintance of eight as agreeable and polished
people as it has been my fortune to meet. We
parted as if we had known each other as many weeks
as minutes. I mention it as an instance of the manners
of the country.

Three hours more, through spicy fields and on a
road lined with the country-houses of the Venetian
nobles, brought us to Vicenza. It was past midnight,
and not a soul stirring in the bright moonlight streets.
I remember it as a kind of city of the dead. As we
passed out of the opposite gate, we detained for a moment
a carriage, with servants in splendid liveries, and
a lady inside returning from a party in full dress. I
rarely have seen so beautiful a head. The lamps
shone strongly on a broad pearl fillet on her forehead,
and lighted up features such as we do not often meet
even in Italy. A gentleman leaned back in the corner
of the carriage, fast asleep—probably her husband!

I breakfasted at Verona at seven. A humpbacked
cicerone there took me to “Juliet's tomb.” A very
high wall, green with age, surrounds what was once a
cemetery, just outside the city. An old woman answered
the bell at the dilapidated gate, and, without
saying a word, pointed to an empty granite sarcophagus,
raised upon a rude pile of stones. “Questa?”
asked I, with a doubtful look. “Questa,” said the
old woman. “Questa!” said the hunchback. And
here, I was to believe, lay the gentle Juliet! There
was a raised place in the sarcophagus, with a hollowed
socket for the head, and it was about the measure
for a woman! I ran my fingers through the cavity,
and tried to imagine the dark curls that covered the
hand of Father Lawrence as he laid her down in the
trance, and fitted her beautiful head softly to the
place. But where was “the tomb of the Capulets?”
The beldame took me through a cabbage-garden, and
drove off a donkey who was feeding on an artichoke
that grew on the very spot. “Ecco!” said she, pointing
to one of the slightly sunken spots on the surface.
I deferred my belief, and paying an extra paul for the
privilege of chipping off a fragment of the stone coffin,
followed the cicerone.

The tombs of the Scaligers were more authentic.
They stand in the centre of the town, with a highly
ornamental railing about them, and are a perfect mockery
of death with their splendor. If the poets and
scholars whom these petty princes drew to their court
had been buried in these airy tombs beside them, one
would look at them with some interest. Now, one
asks, “who were the Scaligers, that their bodies
should be lifted high in air in the midst of a city,
and kept for ages, in marble and precious stones?”
With less ostentation, however, it were pleasant to be
so disposed of after death, lifted thus into the sun, and
in sight of moving and living creatures.

I inquired for the old palace of the Capulets. The
cicerone knew nothing about it, and I dismissed her
and went into a café. “Two gentlemen of Verona”
sat on different sides; one reading, the other asleep,
with his chin on his cane—an old, white-headed man,
of about seventy. I sat down near the old gentleman,
and by the time I had eaten my ice, he awoke. I addressed
him in Italian, which I speak indifferently;
but, stumbling for a word, he politely helped me out
in French, and I went on in that language with my inquiries.
He was the very man—a walking chronicle
of Verona. He took up his hat and cane to conduct
me to casa Capuletti, and on the way told me the true
history, as I had heard it before, which differs but little,
as you know, from Shakspere's version. The
whole story is in the annuals.

After a half hour's walk among the handsomer, and
more modern parts of the city, we stopped opposite a
house of an antique construction, but newly stuccoed
and painted. A wheelwright occupied the lower story,
and by the sign, the upper part was used as a tavern.
“Impossible!” said I, as I looked at the fresh
front and the staring sign. The old gentleman smiled,
and kept his cane pointed at it in silence. “It is well
authenticated,” said he, after enjoying my astonishment
a minute or two, and the interior still bears
marks of a palace. We went in and mounted the
dirty staircase to a large hall on the second floor. The
frescoes and cornices had not been touched, and, I invited
my kind old friend to an early dinner on the spot.
He accepted, and we went back to the cathedral, and
sat an hour in the only cool place in an Italian city.
The best dinner the house could afford was ready
when we returned, and a pleasanter one it has never
been my fortune to sit down to; though, for the meats,
I have eaten better. That I relished an hour in the
very hall where the masque must have been held, to
which Romeo ventured in the house of his enemy, to
see the fair Juliet, you may easily believe. The wine
was not so bad either that my imagination did not
warm all fiction into fact; and another time, perhaps, I
may describe my old friend and the dinner more particularly.