Part 12

Of the noblemen’s feats in the neighbourhood it may indeed be remarked, that however spacious the house, and however splendid the furniture may prove upon examination, however pompous the garden may be to the first glance, and the terraces however magnificent,--spiders are seldom excluded from the mansion, or weeds from the pleasure-ground of the possessor. A climate so warm would afford some excuse for this nastiness, could one observe the inhabitants were discomposed at such an effect from a good cause, or if one could flatter one’s self that they themselves were hurt at it; but when they gravely display an embroidered bed or counterpane worthy of Arachne’s fingers before her metamorphosis, covered over by her present labours, who can forbear laughing?--The gardener in two minutes arriving to assist you up slopes, all flourishing with cat’s-tail and poppy; while your friends cry,--“_Here, this is nature! is it not?_ pure nature!--_Tutto naturale si, secondo l’uso Inglese_[40].”

Well! we have really passed a prodigiously gay _villegiatura_ here in this charming country, where the snowy cap of the _gros_ St. Bernard cools the air, though at so great a distance; and we have the pleasure of seeing Switzerland, without the pain of feeling its cold, or the fatigue of climbing its _glacieres_: the Alps of the Grisons rise up like a fortification behind us; the sun glows hot in our rich and fertile valleys, and throws up every vegetable production with all the poignant flavour that Summer can bestow; nor is shade wanting from the walnut and large chesnut trees, under which we often dine, and sing, and play at _tarocco_, and hear the horns and clarinets, while sipping our ice or swallowing our lemonade. The _cicala_ now feels the genial influence of that heat she requires, but her voice here is weak, compared to the powers she displayed so much to our disturbance in Tuscany; and the _lucciola_ has lost much of her scintillant beauty, but she darts up and down the hedges now and then. Here is an emerald-coloured butterfly, whose name I know not, plays over the lakes and standing pools, in a very pleasing abundance; the most exquisitely-tinted æphemera frolic before one all day long; and Antiope flutters in every parterre, and shares the garden sweets with a pale primrose-coloured creature of her own kind, whose wings are edged with brown, and, if I can remember right, bears the name of _hyale_. But we are not yet past the residence of scorpions, which certainly do commit suicide when provoked beyond all endurance; a story I had always heard, but never gave much credit to.

But I am disturbed from writing my book by the good-humoured gaiety of our cheerful friends, with whom we never sit down fewer than fourteen or fifteen to table I think, and surely never rise from it without many a genuine burst of honest merriment undisguised by affectation, unfettered by restraint. Our gentlemen make _improviso_ rhymes, and cut comical faces; go out to the field after dinner, and play at a sort of blindman’s buff, which they call breaking the pan; nor do the low ones in company arrange their minds as I see in compliment to the high ones, but tell their opinions with a freedom I little expected to find: mixed society is very rare among them, almost unknown it seems; but when they _do_ mix at a country place like this, the great are kind, to do them justice, and the little not servile. They are wise indeed in making society easy to them, for no human being suffers solitude so ill as does an Italian. An English lady once made me observe, that a cat never purs when she is alone, let her have what meat and warmth she will; I think these social-spirited Milanese are like _her_, for they can hardly believe that there is existing a person, who would not willingly prefer any company to none: when we were at the islands three weeks ago,--“A charming place,” says one of our companions,--“_Cioè con un mondo d’amici cosi_[41].”--“But with one’s own family, methinks,” said I, “and a good library of books, and this sweet lake to bathe in:”--“O!” cried they all at once, “_Dio ne liberi_[42].”--This is national character.

Why there are no birds of the watery kind, coots, wild ducks, cargeese, upon these lakes, nobody informs me: I have been often told that of Geneva swarms with them, and it is but a very few miles off: our people though have little care to ascertain such matters, and no desire at all to investigate effects and causes; those who study among them, study classic authors and learn rhetoric; poetry too is by no means uncultivated at Milan, where the Abate Parini’s satires are admirable, and so esteemed by those who themselves know very well how to write, and how to judge: common philosophy (_la physique_, as the French call it), geography, astronomy, chymistry, are oddly left behind somehow; and it is to their ignorance of these matters that I am apt to impute Italian credulity, to which every wonder is welcome.

We have now passed one day in Switzerland however, rowing to the little town Lugano over its pretty lake. The mountains at the end are a neat miniature of Vesuvius, Somma, &c.; and the situation altogether looks as a picture of Naples would look, if painted by Brughuel; but not so full of figures. A fanciful traveller too might be tempted to think he could discern some streaks of liberty in the manners of the people, if it were but in the inn-keeper at whose house we dined; this may however be merely my own prejudice, and somebody told me it was so.

We were shewn on one side the water as we went across, a small place called Campioni, which is _feudo Imperiale_, and governed by the Padre Abate of a neighbouring convent, who has power even over the lives of his subjects for six years; at the expiration of which term another despot of the day is chosen--appointed I should have said; and the last returns to his original state, amenable however for any _very_ shocking thing he may have done during the course of his dictatorship; and no complaint has been ever made yet of any such governor so circumstanced and appointed, whose conduct is commonly but too mild and clement. This I thought worth remarking, as consolatory to one’s feelings.

Lugano meantime scorns absolute authority: our Cicerone there, in reply to the question asked in Italy three times a-day I believe--_Che Principe fà qui la sua residenza?_[43]--replied, that they were plagued with no Principi at all, while the thirteen Cantons protected all their subjects; and though, as the man expressed it, only half of them were _Christians_, and the other half _Protestants_; no church or convent had ever wanted respect; while their town regularly received a monthly governor from every canton, and was perfectly contented with this ambulatory dominion. Here was the first gallows I have seen these two years. They have a pretty commerce too at Lugano for the size of the place, and the shopkeepers shew that officiousness and attention seldom observed in arbitrary states, where

Content, the bane of industry,

soon leads people to neglect the trouble of getting, for the pleasure of spending their money. One therefore sees the inhabitants of Italian cities for the most part merry and cheerful, or else pious and penitent; little attentive to their shops, but easily disposed to loiter under their mistress’s window with a guitar, or rove about the streets at night with a pretty girl under their arm, singing as they go, or squeaking with a droll accent, if it is the time for masquerades. Fraud, avarice, ambition, are the vices of republican states and a cold climate; idleness, sensuality, and revenge, are the weeds of a warm country and monarchical governments. If these people are not good, they at least wish they were better; they do not applaud their own conduct when their passions carry them too far; nor rejoice, like old Moneytrap or Sir Giles Overreach, in their successful sins: but rather say with Racine’s hero, translated by Philips, that

Pyrrhus will ne’er approve his own injustice, Or form excuses while his heart condemns him.

They beat their bosoms at the feet of a crucifix in the street, with no more hypocrisy than they beat a tambourine there; perhaps with no more effect neither, if no alteration of behaviour succeeds their contrition: yet when an Englishman (who is probably more ashamed of repenting than of sinning) accuses them of false pretensions to pious fervour, he wrongs them, and would do well to repent himself.

But a natural curiosity seen at Milan this 16th day of August 1786, leads my mind into another channel. I went to wait upon and thank the lady, or the relations of the lady, who lent us her house at Varese, and make our proper acknowledgments; and at that visit saw something very uncommon surely: though I remember Doctor Johnson once said, that nobody had ever seen a very strange thing; and challenged the company (about seventeen people, myself among them) to produce a strange thing;--but I had not then seen Avvocato B----, a lawyer here at Milan, and a man respected in his profession, who actually chews the cud like an ox; which he did at my request, and in my presence: he is apparently much like another tall stout man, but has many extraordinary properties, being eminent for strength, and possessing a set of ribs and sternum very surprising, and worthy the attention of anatomists: his body, upon the slightest touch, even through all his clothes, throws out electric sparks; he can reject his meals from his stomach at pleasure, and did absolutely in the course of two hours, the only two I ever passed in his company, go through, to oblige me, the whole operation of eating, masticating, swallowing, and returning by the mouth, a large piece of bread and a peach. With all this conviction, nothing more was wanting; but I obtained beside, the confirmation of common friends, who were willing likewise to bear testimony of this strange accidental variety. What I hear of his character is, that he is a low-spirited, nervous man; and I suppose his _ruminating_ moments are spent in lamenting the singularities of his frame:--be this how it will, we have now no time to think any more of them, as we are packing up for a trip to Bergamo, a city I have not yet seen.

BERGAMO

Is built up a steep hill, like Lansdown road at Bath; the buildings not so regular; the prospect not inferior, but of a different kind, resembling that one sees from Wrotham hill in Kent, but richer, and presenting a variety beyond credibility, when it is premised that scarce any water can be seen, and that the plains of Lombardy are low and flat: within the eye however one may count all the original blessings bestowed on humankind,--corn, wine, oil, and fruit;--the inclosures being small too, and the trees _touffu_, as the French call it. No parterre was ever more beautifully disposed than are the fields surveyed from the summit of the hill, where stands the Marquis’s palace elegantly sheltered by a still higher rising ground behind it, and commanding from every window of its stately front a view of prodigious extent and almost unmatched beauty: as the diversification of colouring reminds one of nothing but the fine pavement at the Roman Pantheon, so curiously intersected are the patches of grass and grain, flax and vines, arable and tilth, in this happy disposition of earth and its most valuable products; while not a hedge fails to afford perfume that fills the very air with fragrance, from the sweet jessamine that, twisting through it, lends a weak support to the wild grapes, which, dangling in clusters, invite ten thousand birds of every European species I believe below the size of a pigeon. Nor is the taking of these creatures by the _roccolo_ to be left out from among the amusements of Brescian and Bergamasc nobility; nor is the eating of them when taken to be despised: _beccaficos_ and _ortolans_ are here in high perfection; and it was from these northern districts of Italy I trust that Vitellius, and all the classic gluttons of antiquity, got their curious dishes of singing-bird pye, &c. The rich scent of melons at every cottage door is another delicious proof of the climate’s fertility and opulence,--

Where every sense is lost in every joy,

as Hughes expresses it; and where, in the delightful villa of our highly accomplished acquaintance the Marquis of Aracieli, we have passed ten days in all the pleasures which wit could invent, money purchase, or friendship bestow. The last nobleman who resided here, father to the present lord, was _cavalier servente_ to the immortal Clelia Borromæo, whose virtues and varieties of excellence would fill a volume; nor can there be a stronger proof of her uncommon, almost unequalled merit, than the long-continued esteem of the famous Vallisnieri, whose writings on natural history, particularly insects, are valued for their learning, as their author was respected for his birth and talents. Letters from him are still preserved in the family by Marchese Aracieli, and breathe admiration of the conduct, beauty, and extensive knowledge possessed by this worthy descendant of the Borromæan house; to whose incomparable qualities his father’s steady attachment bore the truest testimony, while the son still speaks of her death with tears, and delights in nothing more than in paying just tribute to her memory. He shewed me this pretty distich in her praise, made improviso by the celebrated philosopher Vallisnieri:

Contemptrix sexus, omniscia Clelia sexum, Illustrat studio, moribus, arte metro[44].

The Italians are exceedingly happy in the power of making verses improviso, either in their _old_ or their _new_ language: we were speaking the other day of the famous epigram in Ausonius;

Infelix Dido, nulli bene nupta marito, Hoc moriente fugis, hoc fugiente peris[45].

Our equally noble and ingenious master of the house rendered it in Italian thus immediately:

Misera Dido! fra i nuziali ardori, L’un muore e fuggi--l’altro fuggi e mori.

This is more compressed and clever than that of Guarini _himself_ I think,

Oh fortunata Dido! Mal fornita d’amante e di marito, Ti fu quel traditor, l’altro tradito; Mori l’úno e fuggisti, Fuggi l’altro e moristi.

Though this latter has been preserved with many deserved eulogiums from Crescembini, and likewise by Mr. de Chevreau.

Could I clear my head of prejudice for such talents as I find here, and my heart of partial regard, which is in reality but grateful friendship, justly due from me for so many favours received; could I forget that we are now once more in the state of Venice, where every thing assumes an air of cheerfulness unknown to other places, I might perhaps perceive that the fair at Bergamo differs little from a fair in England, except that these cattle are whiter and ours larger. _How a score of good ewes now?_ as Master Shallow says; but I really did ask the price of a pair of good strong oxen for work, and heard it was ten zecchines; about half the price given at Blackwater, but ours are stouter, and capable of rougher service. It is strange to me where these creatures are kept all the rest of the year, for except at fair time one very seldom sees them, unless in actual employment of carting, ploughing, &c. Nothing is so little animated by the sight of living creatures as an Italian prospect. No sheep upon their hills, no cattle grazing in their meadows, no water-fowl, swans, ducks, &c. upon their lakes; and when you leave Lombardy, no birds flying in the air, save only from time to time betwixt Florence and Bologna, a solitary kite soaring over the surly Appenines, and breaking the immense void which fatigues the eye; a ragged lad or wench too now and then leading a lean cow to pick among the hedges, has a melancholy appearance, the more so as it is always fast held by a string, and struggles in vain to get loose. These however are only consequences of luxuriant plenty, for where the farmer makes four harvests of his grass, and every other speck of ground is profitably covered with grain, vines, &c. all possibility of open pasturage is precluded. Horses too, so ornamental in an English landscape, will never be seen loose in an Italian one, as they are all _chevaux entiers_, and cannot be trusted in troops together as ours are, even if there was ground uninclosed for them to graze on, like the common lands in Great Britain. A nobleman’s park is another object never to be seen or expected in a country, where people would really be deserving much blame did they retain in their hands for mere amusement ten or twelve miles circuit of earth, capable to produce two or three thousand pounds a-year profit to their families, beside making many tenants rich and happy in the mean time. I will confess, however, that the absence of all these _agrèmens_ gives a flatness and uniformity to the views which we cannot complain of in England; but when Italians consider the cause, they will have reason to be satisfied with the effect, especially while vegetable nature flourishes in full perfection, while every step crushes out perfume from the trodden herbs, and those in the hedges dispense with delightful liberality a fragrance that enchants one. Hops and pyracanthus cover the sides of every cottage; and the scent of truffles attracts, and the odour of melons gratifies one’s nerves, when driving among the habitations of fertile Lombardy.

The old church here of mingled Gothic and Grecian architecture pleased me exceedingly, it sends one back to old times so, and shews one the progress of _barbarism_, rapid and gigantic in its strides, to overturn, confound, and destroy what taste was left in the world at the moment of its _onset_. Here is a picture of the Israelites passing over the Red Sea, which Luca Giordano, contrary to his usual custom, seems to have taken pains with, a rarity of course; and here are some single figures of the prophets, heroes, and judges of the Old Testament, painted with prodigious spirit indeed, by Ciro Ferri. That which struck me as most capital, was Gideon wringing the dew out of the fleece, full of character and glowing with expression.

The theatre has fallen down, but they are building it up again with a nicety of proportion that will ensure it from falling any more. Italians cannot live without a theatre; they have erected a temporary one to serve during the fair time, and even that is beautiful. The Terzetto of charming Guglielmi was sung last night; I liked it still better than when we heard it performed by singers of more established reputation at St. Carlo; but then I like every thing at Bergamo, till it comes to the thunder storms, which are far more innoxious here than at Naples or in Tuscany.

We could contemplate electricity from this fine hill yesterday with great composure, being amused with her caprices and not endangered by her anger. There has however been a fierce tempest in the neighbourhood, which has greatly lowered the spirits of the farmer; and we have been told another tale, that lowers mine much more as an Englishwoman, because the people of this town complain of strange failure in their accustomed orders for silk from England, and the foreigners make disgraceful conjectures about our commerce, in consequence of that failure.

Here is a report prevailing too, of King George III. being assassinated, which, though we all know to be false, fails not to produce much unpleasing talk. Were the Londoners aware of the diffusion of their newspapers, and the strange ideas taken up by foreigners about things which pass by _us_ like a day dream, I think more caution would be used, and characters less lightly hung up to infamy or ridicule, on which those very prints mean not to bestow so lasting or severe a punishment, as their ill word produces at a distance from home, whither the contradiction often misses though the report arrives, and mischief, originally little intended, becomes the fatal consequence of a joke. But it is time to return to

MILAN,

Whence I went for my very first airing to Casa Simonetti, in search of the echo so celebrated by my country-folks and fellow-travellers, but did not find all that has been said of it strictly true. It certainly does repeat a single sound more than seventy times, but has no power to give back by reverberation a whole sentence. I have met too with another petty mortification; having been taught by Cave to expect, that in our Ambrosian library here at Milan, there was a MS. of Boethius preserved relative to his condemnation, and confessing his design of subverting the Gothic government in Lombardy. I therefore prevailed on Canonico Palazzi, a learned old ecclesiastic, to go with me and beg a sight of it. The præfect politely promised indulgence, but referred me to a future day; and when we returned again at the time appointed, shewed me only Pere Mabillon’s book, in which we read that it is to be found no where but at Florence, in the library of Lorenzo de Medicis. We were however shewn some curiosities to compensate our trouble, particularly the skeleton of the lady mentioned by Dr. Moore and Lady Millar with some contempt. This is the copy of her inscription:

ÆGROTANTIUM SANITATI MORTUORUM INSPECTIONE VIVENTES PROSPICERE POSSINT HUNC ΣΚΕΛΕΤΟΝ P.

A MS. of the Consolations of Philosophy, very finely written in the tenth century, and kept in elegant preservation;--a private common-place of Leonardo da Vinci never shewn, full of private memoirs, caricaturas, hints for pictures, sketches, remarks, &c.; it is invaluable. But there is another treasure in this town, the præfect tells me, by the same inimitable master, no other than an alphabet, pater noster, &c. written out by himself for the use of his own little babies, and ornamented with vignettes, &c. to tempt them to study it. I shall not see it however, as Conte Trivulci is out of town, to whom it belongs. I have not neglected to go see the monument erected to one of his family, with the famous inscription,

Hic quiescit qui nunquam quievit;

preserved by father Bouhours. The same day shewed me the remains of a temple to Hercules, with many of the fine old pillars still standing. They are soon to be taken down we hear for the purpose of widening the street, as Carfax was at Oxford.

My hunger after a journey to Pavia is much abated; since professor Villa, whose erudition is well known, and whose works do him so much honour, informed me that the inscription said by Pere Mabillon still to subsist in praise of Boethius, is long since perished by time; nor do they now shew the brick tower in which it is said he was confined while he wrote his Consolations of Philosophy: for the tower is fallen to the ground, and so is the report, every body being now persuaded that they were composed in a strong place then standing upon the spot called Calventianus Ager, from the name of a noble house to which it had belonged for ages, and which I am told Cicero mentions as a family half Placentian, half Milaneze. The field still goes by the name of _Il Campo Calvenziano_; but, as it now belongs to people careless of remote events, however interesting to literature, is not adorned by any obelisk, or other mark, to denote its past importance, in having been once the scene of sufferings gloriously endured by the most zealous christian, the most steady patriot, and the most refined philosopher of the age in which he lived.