Part 26

It is impossible to conceive any thing more rich and beautiful, than the country between Florence and Lucca, though it can boast little of the elevated picturesque, and is destitute of poetical associations. The road lay through valleys, with the Apennines (which are here softened down into gently sunny hills) on each side. Every spot of ground is in the highest state of cultivation; the boundaries between the small fields of wheat or lupines, were rows of olives or mulberries, with an interminable treillage of vines flung from tree to tree. In England we should be obliged to cut them all down for fear of depriving the crops of heat and sunshine, but here they have no such fears. The style of husbandry is exquisitely neat, and in general performed by manual labour. The only plough I saw would have excited the amusement and amazement of an English farmer: I should think it was exactly similar to the ploughs of Virgil's time: it was drawn by an ox and an ass yoked together, and guided by a woman. The whole country looked as if it had been laid out by skilful gardeners, and the hills in many parts were cut into terraces, that not one available inch of soil might be lost. The products of this luxuriant country are corn, silk, wine, and principally oil: potteries abound, the making of jars and flasks being an immense and necessary branch of trade.

The city of Lucca has an appearance in itself of stately solemn dulness, and bears no trace of the smiling prosperity of the adjacent country: the shops are poor and empty, there are no signs of business, and the streets swarm with beggars. The interior of the Duomo is a fine specimen of Gothic: the exterior is Greek, Gothic, and Saracenic jumbled together in vile taste: it contains nothing very interesting. The palace is like other palaces, very fine and so forth; and only remarkable for not containing one good picture, or one valuable work of art.

Pisa, April 25.--Pisa has a look of elegant tranquillity, which is not exactly dulness, and pleases me particularly: if the thought of its past independence, the memory of its once proud name in arts, arms, and literature, came across the mind, it is not accompanied by any painful regret caused by the sight of present misery and degradation, but by that philosophic melancholy with which we are used to contemplate the mutability of earthly greatness.

The Duomo, the Baptistry, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, stand altogether in a fine open elevated part of the city. The Duomo is a magnificent edifice in bad taste. The interior, with its noble columns of oriental granite, is grand, sombre, and very striking. As to the style of architecture, it would be difficult to determine what name to give it: it is not Greek, nor Gothic, nor Saxon, and exhibits a strange mixture of Pagan and Christian ornaments, not very unfrequent in Italian churches. The Leaning Tower should be contemplated from the portico of the church to heighten its effect: when the perpendicular column cuts it to the eye like a plumb line, the obliquity appears really terrific.

The Campo Santo is an extraordinary place: it affects the mind like the cloisters of one of our Gothic cathedrals which it resembles in effect. Means have lately been taken to preserve the singular frescos on the walls, which for five hundred years have been exposed to the open air.

I remarked the tomb of that elegant fabulist Pignotti; the last personage of celebrity buried in the Campo Santo.

The university of Pisa is no longer what it was when France and Venice had nearly gone to war about one of its law professors, and its colleges ranked next to those of Padua: it has declined in fame, in riches, and in discipline. The Botanic Garden was a few years ago the finest in all Europe, and is still maintained with great cost and care: it contains a lofty magnolia, the stem of which is as bulky as a good sized tree: the gardener told us rather poetically, that when in blossom it perfumed the whole city of Pisa.

Leghorn, April 26.--So different from any thing we have yet seen in Italy! busy streets--gay shops--various costumes--Greeks, Turks, Jews, and Christians, mingled on terms of friendly equality--a crowded port, and all the activity of prosperous commerce.

Leghorn is in every sense a free port: all kinds of merchandise enter exempt from duty, all religions are equally tolerated, and all nations trade on an equal footing.

The Jews, who are in every other city a shunned and degraded race, are among the most opulent and respectable inhabitants of Leghorn: their quarter is the richest, and, I may add, the dirtiest in the city: their synagogue here is reckoned the finest in Europe, and I was induced to visit it yesterday at the hour of worship. I confess I was much disappointed; and, notwithstanding my inclination to respect always what is respectable in the eyes of others, I never felt so strong a disposition to smile. An old Rabbi with a beard of venerable length, a pointed bonnet, and a long white veil, got up into a superb marble pulpit and chanted in strange nasal tones, something which was repeated after him in various and discordant voices by the rest of the assembly. The congregation consisted of an uncouth set of men and boys, many of them from different parts of the Levant, in the dresses of their respective countries: there was no appearance of devotion, no solemnity; all wore their hats, some were poring over ragged books, some were talking, some sleeping, or lounging, or smoking. While I stood looking about me, without exciting the smallest attention, I heard at every pause a prodigious chattering and whispering, which seemed to come from the regions above, and looking up I saw a row of latticed and skreened galleries where the women were caged up like the monkies at a menagerie, and seemed as noisy, as restless, and as impatient of confinement: the door-keeper offered to introduce me among them, but I was already tired and glad to depart.

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We have visited the pretty English burial-ground, and the tomb of Smollet, which in the true English style is cut and scratched all over with the names of fools, who think thus to link their own insignificance to his immortality. We have also seen whatever else is to be seen, and what all travellers describe: to-morrow we leave Leghorn--for myself without regret: it is a place with which I have no sympathies, and the hot, languid, damp atmosphere, which depresses the spirits and relaxes the nerves, has made me suffer ever since we arrived.

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Lucca.--Had I never visited Italy I think I should never have understood the word picturesque. In England we apply it generally to rural objects or natural scenery, for nothing else in England can deserve the epithet. Civilization, cleanliness, and comfort are excellent things, but they are sworn enemies to the picturesque: they have banished it gradually from our towns, and habitations, into remote countries, and little nooks and corners, where we are obliged to hunt after it to find it; but in Italy the picturesque is every where, in every variety of form; it meets us at every turn, in town and in country, at all times and seasons; the commonest objects of every-day life here become picturesque, and assume from a thousand causes a certain character of poetical interest it cannot have elsewhere. In England, when travelling in some distant county, we see perhaps a craggy hill, a thatched cottage, a mill on a winding stream, a rosy milkmaid, or a smock-frocked labourer whistling after his plough, and we exclaim "How picturesque!" Travelling in Italy we see a piny mountain, a little dilapidated village on its declivity, the ruined temple of Jupiter or Apollo on its summit; a peasant with a bunch of roses hanging from his hat, and singing to his guitar, or a cotadina in her white veil and scarlet petticoat, and we exclaim "How picturesque!" but how different! Again--a tidy drill or a hay-cart, with a team of fine horses, is a very useful, valuable, civilized machine; but a grape-waggon reeling under its load of purple clusters, and drawn by a pair of oxen in their clumsy, ill-contrived harness, and bowing their patient heads to the earth, is much more picturesque. A spinning wheel is very convenient it must be allowed, but the distaff and spindle are much more picturesque. A snug English villa with its shaven lawn, its neat shrubbery, and its park, is a delightful thing--an Italian villa is probably far less comfortable, but with its vineyards, its gardens, its fountains, and statutes, is far more picturesque. A laundry-maid at her wash-tub, immersed in soap-suds, is a vulgar idea, though our clothes may be the better for it. I shall never forget the group of women I saw at Terracina washing their linen in a bubbling brook as clear as crystal, which rushed from the mountains to the sea--there were twenty of them at least grouped with the most graceful effect, some standing up to the mid-leg in the stream, others spreading the linen on the sunny bank, some, flinging back their long hair, stood shading their brows with their hands and gazing on us as we passed: it was a scene for a poet, or a painter, or a melo-drama. An English garden, adorned at every turn with statues of the heathen deities (although they were all but personifications of the various attributes of nature,) would be ridiculous. Setting aside the injury they must sustain from our damp, variable climate, they would be out of keeping with all around; here it is altogether different; the very air of Italy is embued with the spirit of ancient mythology; and though "the fair humanities of old religion," the Nymphs, the Fauns, the Dryads be banished from their haunts and live no longer in the faith of reason, yet still, whithersoever we turn, some statue, some temple in ruins, some fragment of an altar, some inscription half effaced, some name half-barbarized, recalls to the fancy those forms of light, of beauty, of majesty, which poetry created to people scenes for which mere humanity was not in itself half pure enough, fair enough, bright enough.

What can be more grand than a noble forest of English oak? or more beautiful than a grove of beeches and elms, clothed in their rich autumnal tints? or more delicious than the apple orchard in full bloom? but it is true, notwithstanding, that the olive, and cypress, and cedar, the orange and the citron, the fig and the pomegranate, the myrtle and the vine, convey a different and more luxuriant feeling to the mind; and are associated with ideas which give to the landscape they adorn a character more delightfully, more poetically picturesque.

When at Lord Grosvenor's or Lord Stafford's I have been seated opposite to some beautiful Italian landscape, a Claude or a Poussin, with a hill crowned with olives, a ruined temple, a group of peasants seated on a fallen column, or dancing to the pipe and the guitar, and over all the crimson glow of evening, or the violet tints of morning, I have exclaimed with others, "How lovely! how picturesque, how very poetical!" No one thought of saying "How natural!" because it is a style of nature with which we are totally unacquainted; and if some amateurs of real taste and feeling prefer a rural cattle scene of Paul Potter or Cuyp, to all the grand or lovely creations of Salvator, or Claude, or Poussin, it is perhaps, because the former are associated in their minds with reality and familiar nature, while the latter appear in comparison mere inventions of the painter's fertile fancy, mere visionary representations of what may or might exist but which do not come home to the memory or the mind with the force of truth or delighted recollection. So when I have been travelling in Italy how often I have exclaimed, "How like a picture!" and I remember once, while contemplating a most glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, "This is truly one of Claude's sunsets!" Now should I live to see again one of my favourite Grosvenor Claudes I shall probably exclaim, "How natural! how like what I have seen so often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio!"

And, in conclusion, let it be remembered by those who are inclined to smile (as I have often done) when travellers fresh from Italy rave almost in blank verse, and think it all as unmeaning as

"Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber!"

let them recollect that it is not alone the visible picturesque of Italy which thus intoxicates; it is not only her fervid skies, her sunsets, which envelope one-half of heaven from the horizon to the zenith, in living blaze; nor her soaring pine-clad mountains; nor her azure seas; nor her fields, "ploughed by the sunbeams;" nor her gorgeous cities, spread out with all their domes and towers, unobscured by cloud or vapours;--but it is something more than these, something beyond, and over all--

----The gleam, The light that never was on sea or land The consecration, and the poet's dream!

Genoa, 30.--We arrived here late, and I should not write now, weary, weak, sick, and down-spirited as I am, did I not know how the impressions of one day efface those of the former; and as I cannot sleep, it is better to scribble than to think.

As to describing all I have seen, thought, and felt in three days, that were indeed impossible: I think I have exhausted all my prose eloquence, and all allowable raptures; so that unless I ramble into absolute poetry, I dare not say a word of the scenery around Sarzana and Lerici. After spending one evening at Sarzana, in lingering through green lanes and watching the millions of fire-flies, sparkling in the dark shade of the trees, and lost again in the brilliant moonlight--we left it the next morning about sunrise, to embark in a felucca at Lerici, as the road between Spezia and Sestri is not yet completed. The groves and vineyards on each side of the road were filled with nightingales, singing in concert loud enough to overpower the sound of our carriage-wheels, and the whole scene, as the sun rose over it, and the purple shadows drew off and disclosed it gradually to the eye, was so enchanting--that positively I will say nothing about it.

Lerici is a small fishing town on the Gulf of Spezia. Here I met with an adventure which with a little exaggeration and embellishment, such as no real story-teller ever spares, would make an admirable morceau for a quarto tourist; but, in simple truth, was briefly thus.

While some of our party were at breakfast, and the servants and sailors were embarking the carriages and baggage, I sat down to sketch the old grey fort on the cliff above the town; but every time I looked up, the scene was so inexpressibly gay and lovely, it was with difficulty and reluctance I could turn my eyes down to my paper again; and soon I gave up the attempt, and threw away both paper and pencil. It struck me that the view from the castle itself must be a thousand times finer than the view of the castle from below, and without loss of time I proceeded to explore the path leading to it. With some fatigue and difficulty, and after losing myself once or twice, I reached the top of the rock, and there a wicket opened into a walled passage cut into steps to ease the ascent. I knocked at the wicket with three strokes, that being the orthodox style of demanding entrance into the court of an enchanted castle, using my parasol instead of a dagger, and no one appearing, I entered, and in a few moments reached a small paved terrace in front of the fortress, defended towards the sea by a low parapet wall. The massy portal was closed, and instead of a bugle horn hanging at the gate I found only the handle and fragments of an old birch-broom, which base utensil I presently applied to the purpose of a horn, viz. sounding an alarm, and knocked and knocked--but no hoary-headed seneschal nor armed warder appeared at my summons. After a moment's hesitation, I gave the door a push with all my strength: it yielded, creaking on its hinges, and I stepped over the raised threshold. I found myself in a low dark vaulted hall which appeared at first to have no communication with any other chamber: but on advancing cautiously to the end I found a low door in the side, which had once been defended by a strong iron grating of which some part remained: it led to a flight of stone stairs, which I began to ascend slowly, stopping every moment to listen; but all was still as the grave. On each side of this winding staircase I peeped into several chambers, all solitary and ruinous: more and more surprised, I continued to ascend till I put my head unexpectedly through a trap-door, and found myself on the roof on the tower: it was spacious, defended by battlements, and contained the only signs of warlike preparation I had met with; videlicet, two cannons, or culverins, as they are called, and a pyramidal heap of balls, rusted by the sea air.

I sat down on one of the cannon, and leaning on the battlements, surveyed the scene around, below me, with a feeling of rapture, not a little enhanced by the novelty and romance of my situation. I was alone--I had no reason to think there was a single human being within hearing. I was at such a vast height above the town and the shore, that not a sound reached me, except an indistinct murmur now and then, borne upwards by the breeze, and the scream of the sea-fowl as they wheeled round and round my head. I looked down giddily upon the blue sea, all glowing and trembling in the sunshine: and the scenery around me was such, as the dullest eye--the coldest, the most unimaginative soul, could not have contemplated without emotion. I sat, I know not how long, abandoned to reveries, sweet and bitter, till I was startled by footsteps close to me, and turning round, I beheld a figure so strange and fantastic, and considering the time, place, and circumstance, so incomprehensible and extraordinary, that I was dumb with surprise. It was a little spare old man, with a face and form which resembled the anatomy of a baboon, dressed in an ample nightgown of flowered silk, which hung upon him as if it had been made for a giant, and trailed on the ground, a yard and a half behind him. He had no stockings, but on his feet a pair of red slippers, turned up in front like those the Turks wear. His beard was grizzled, and on his head he wore one of the long many-coloured woollen caps usually worn in this country, with two tassels depending from it, which nearly reached his knees. I had full time to examine the appearance and costume of this strange apparition as he stood before me, bowing profoundly, and looking as if fright and wonder had deprived him of speech. As soon as I had recovered from my first amazement, I replied to every low bow, by as low a courtesy, and waited till it should please him to begin the parley.

At length he ventured to ask, in bad provincial Italian, what I did there?

I replied that I was only admiring the fine prospect.

He begged to know, "come diavolo," I had got there?