University of Virginia Library

37. LETTER XXXVII.

After five or six weeks sejour at the baths of Lucca,
the only exception to the pleasure of which was an
attack of the “country fever,” I am again on the road,
with a pleasant party, bound for Venice; but passing
by cities I had not seen, I have been from one place
to another for a week, till I find myself to-day in Modena—a
place I might as well not have seen at all as
to have hurried through, as I was compelled to do a
month or two since. To go back a little, however,
our first stopping-place was the city of Lucca, about
fifteen miles from the baths; a little, clean, beautiful
gem of a town, with a wall three miles round only,
and on the top of it a broad carriage road, giving you
on every side views of the best cultivated and loveliest
country in Italy. The traveller finds nothing so
rural and quiet, nothing so happy-looking, in the whole
land. The radius to the horizon is nowhere more
than five or six miles; and the bright green farms and
luxuriant vineyards stretch from the foot of the wall
to the summits of the lovely mountains which form
the theatre around. It is a very ancient town, but the
dutchy is so rich and flourishing that it bears none of
the marks of decay, so common to even more modern
towns in Italy. Here Cesar is said to have stopped to
deliberate on passing the Rubicon.

The palace of the duke is the prettiest I ever saw.
There is not a room in it you could not live in—and
no feeling is less common than this in visiting palaces.
It is furnished with splendor, too—but with such an
eye to comfort, such taste and elegance, that you
would respect the prince's affections that should order
such a one. The duke of Lucca, however, is never
at home. He is a young man of twenty-eight or
thirty, and spends his time and money in travelling, as
caprice takes him. He has been now for a year at
Vienna, where he spends the revenue of these rich
plains most lavishly. The dutchess, too, travels always,
but in a different direction, and the people complain
loudly of the desertion. For many years they have
now been both absent and parted. The duke is a
member of the royal family of Spain, and at the death
of Maria Louisa of Parma, he becomes Duke of Parma,
and the dutchy goes to Tuscany.

From Lucca we crossed the Appenines, by a road
seldom travelled, performing the hundred miles to
Modena in three days. We suffered, as all must who
leave the high roads in continental countries, more
privations than the novelty was worth. The mountain
scenery was fine, of course, but I think less so
than that on the passes between Florence and Bologna,
the account of which I wrote a few weeks since. We
were too happy to get to Modena.

Modena lies in the vast campagnia lying between
the Appenines and the Adriatic—an immense plain
looking like the sea as far as the eye can stretch from
north to south. The view of it from the mountains
in descending is magnificent beyond description. The
capital of the little dutchy lay in the midst of us, like a
speck on a green carpet, and smaller towns and rivers
varied its else unbroken surface of vineyards and fields.
We reached the gates just as a fine sunset was reddening
the ramparts and towers, and, giving up our passports
to the soldier on guard, rattled in to the hotel.

The town is full of Austrian troops, and in our walk
to the ducal palace we met scarce any one else. The
streets look gloomy and neglected, and the people
singularly dispirited and poor. This petty duke of
Modena is a man of about fifty, and said to be the
greatest tyrant after Don Miguel in the world. The
prisons are full of suspected traitors: one hundred
and thirty of the best families of the dutchy are banished
for liberal opinions; three hundred and over are
now under arrest (among them a considerable number
of ladies); and many of the Modenese nobility are
now serving in the galleys for conspiracy. He has
been shot at eighteen times. The last man who attempted
it, as I stated in a former letter, was executed
the morning I passed through Modena on my return
from Venice. With all this he is a fine soldier, and
his capital looks in all respects like a garrison in the
first style of discipline. He is just now absent at a
chateau three miles in the country.

The palace is a union of splendor and meanness
within. The endless succession of state apartments
are gorgeously draped and ornamented, but the entrance
halls and intermediate passages are furnished
with an economy you would scarce find exceeded in
the “worst inn's worst room.” Modena is Corregio's
birthplace, and it was from a duke of Modena that he
received the bag of copper coin which occasioned his
death. It was, I think, the meager reward of his
celebrated “Night,” and he broke a bloodvessel in
carrying it to his house. The duke has sold this picture,
as well as every other other sufficiently celebrated
to bring a princely price. His gallery is a
heap of trash, with but here and there a redeeming
thing. Among others, there is a portrait of a boy, I
think by Rembrandt, very intellectual and lofty, yet
with all the youthfulness of fourteen; and a copy of
“Giorgione's mistress,” the “love in life” of the
Manfrein palace, so admired by Lord Byron. There
is also a remarkably fine crucifixion, I forget by whom.

The front of the palace is renowned for its beauty.
In a street near it, we passed a house half battered
down by cannon. It was the residence of the chief
of a late conspiracy, who was betrayed a few hours
before his plot was ripe. He refused to surrender,
and before the ducal troops had mastered his house,
the revolt commenced and the duke was driven from
Modena. He returned in a week or two with some
three thousand Austrians, and has kept possession by
their assistance ever since. While we were waiting
dinner at the hotel, I took up a volume of the Modenese
law, and opened upon a statute forbidding all
subjects of the dutchy to live out of the duke's territories
under pain of the entire confiscation of their property.
They are liable to arrest, also, if it is suspected
that they are taking measures to remove. The alternatives
are oppression here or poverty elsewhere, and
the result is that the duke has scarce a noble left in
his realm.

Modena is a place of great antiquity. It was a
strong-hold in the time of Cesar, and after his death
was occupied by Brutus, and besieged by Antony.
There are no traces left, except some mutilated and
uncertain relics in the museum.

We drove to Bologna the following morning, and I
slept once more in Rogers's chamber at “the Pilgrim”

I have described this city, which I passed on my way
to Venice, so fully before, that I pass it over now with
the mere mention. I should not forget, however, my
acquaintance with a snuffy little librarian, who showed
me the manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto, with much
amusing importance.

We crossed the Po to the Austrian custom-house.
Our trunks were turned inside out, our papers and
books examined, our passports studied for flaws—as
usual. After two hours of vexation, we were permitted
to go on board the steamboat, thanking Heaven
that our troubles were over for a week or two, and
giving Austria the common benediction she gets from
travellers. The ropes were cast off from the pier
when a police retainer came running to the boat, and
ordered our whole party on shore, bag and baggage.
Our passports, which had been retained to be sent on
to Venice by the captain, were irregular. We had
not passed by Florence, and they had not the signature
of the Austrian ambassador. We were ordered
imperatively back over the Po, with a flat assurance
that without first going to Florence, we never could
see Venice. To the ladies of the party, who had
made themselves certain of seeing this romance of
cities in twelve hours, it was a sad disappointment, and
after seeing them safely seated in the return shallop,
I thought I would go and make a desperate appeal to
the commissary in person. My nominal commission
as attaché to the legation at Paris, served me in this
case as it had often done before, and making myself
and the honor of the American nation responsible for
the innocent designs of a party of ladies upon Venice,
the dirty and surly commissary signed our passports
and permitted us to remand our baggage.

It was with unmingled pleasure that I saw again the
towers and palaces of Venice rising from the sea.
The splendid approach to the Piazzetta; the transfer
to the gondola and its soft motion; the swift and still
glide beneath the balconies of palaces, with whose
history I was familiar; and the renewal of my own
first impressions in the surprise and delight of others,
made up, altogether, a moment of high happiness.
There is nothing like—nothing equal to Venice. She
is the city of the imagination—the realization of romance—the
queen of splendor and softness and luxury.
Allow all her decay—feel all her degradation—see the
“Huns in her palaces,” and the “Greek upon her
mart,” and, after all, she is alone in the world for
beauty, and, spoiled as she has been by successive
conquerors, almost for riches too. Her churches of
marble, with their floors of precious stones, and walls
of gold and mosaic; her ducal palace, with its world
of art and massy magnificence; her private palaces,
with their fronts of inland gems, and balconies and
towers of inimitable workmanship and richness; her
lovely islands and mirror-like canals—all distinguish
her, and will till the sea rolls over her, as one of the
wonders of time.