Chapter 19

BOLOGNA AND THE APENNINES.

Road from Ferrara to Bologna--Wayside Oratories--Miserable Cultivation--Barbarism of People--Aspect of Bologna--Streets, Galleries, and Churches of its Interior--Decay of Art--San Petronio--View of Plain from Hill behind Bologna--Tyranny of Government--Night Arrests--Ruinous Taxation--Departure from Bologna--Brigands--The Apennines--Storm among these Mountains--Two Russian Travellers--Dinner at the Tuscan Frontier--Summit of the Pass--Halt for the Night at a Country Inn--The Hostess and her Company--Supper--Resume Journey next Morning--First Sight of Florence.

On the morrow at ten I took my departure for Bologna. It was sweet to exchange the sickly faces and unnatural silence of the city for the bright sun and the living trees. The road was good,--so very good, that it took me by surprise. It was not in keeping with the surrounding barbarism. Instead of a hard-bottomed, macadamized highway, which traversed the plain in a straight line, bordered by noble trees, I should have expected to find in this region of mouldering towns and neglected fields, a narrow, winding, rutted path, ploughed by torrents and obstructed by boulders; and so, I am sure, I should have done, had any of the native governments of Italy had the making of this road. But it had been designed and executed by Napoleon; and hence its excellence. His roads alone would have immortalized him. They remain, after all his victories have perished, to attest his genius. Would that that genius had been turned to the arts of peace! Conquerors would do well to ponder the eulogium pronounced on a humble tailor who built a bridge out of his savings,--that the world owed more to the scissors of that man than to the sword of some conquerors.

Along the road, at short intervals, were little temples, where good Catholics who had a mind might perform their devotions. This reminded me that I was now in Peter's patrimony,--the holy land of Romanism; and where, it was presumed, the wayfarer would catch the spirit of devotion from the soil and air. The hour of prayer might be past,--I know not; but I saw no one in these oratories. Little shrines were perched upon the trees, formed sometimes of boards, at others simply of the cavity of the trunk; while the boughs were bent so as to form a canopy over them. Little images and pictures had been stuck into these shrines; but the rooks,--these black republicans,--like the "reds" at Rome, had waged a war for possession, and, pitching overboard the little gods that occupied them, were inhabiting in their room. The "great powers" were too busy, or had been so, in the restoration of greater personages, to take up the quarrel of these minor divinities. A strange silence and dreariness brooded over the region. The land seemed keeping its Sabbaths. The fields rested,--the villages were asleep,--the road was untrodden. Had one been dropt from the clouds, he would have concluded that it was but a century or so since the Flood, and that these were the rude primitive great-grandchildren of Noah, who had just found their way into these parts, and were slowly emerging from barbarism. The fields around afforded little indication of such an instrument as the plough; and one would have concluded from the garments of the people, that the loom was among the yet uninvented arts. The harnessings of the horses formed a curiously tangled web of thong, and rope, and thread, twisted, tied, and knotted. It would have puzzled OEdipus himself to discover how a horse could ever be got into such gear, or, being in, how it ever could be got out. There seemed a most extraordinary number of beggars and vagabonds in Peter's patrimony. A little congregation of these worthies waited our arrival at every village, and whined round us for alms so long as we remained. Others, not quite so ragged, stood aloof, regarding us fixedly, as if devising some pretext on which to claim a paul of us. There were worse characters in the neighbourhood, though happily we saw none of them. But at certain intervals we met the Austrian patrol, whose duty it was to clear the road of brigands. Peter, it appeared to us, kept strange company about him,--idlers, beggars, vagabonds, and brigands. It must vex the good man much to find his dear children disgracing him so in the eyes of strangers.

These dismal scenes accompanied us half the way. We then entered the Bolognese, and things began to look a little better. Bologna, though under the Papal Government, has long been famous for nourishing a hardy, liberty-loving people, though, if report does them justice, extremely licentious and infidel. Its motto is "_libertas_;" and the air of liberty is favourable, it would seem, to vegetation; for the fields looked greener the moment we had crossed the barrier. Soon we were charmed with the sight of Bologna. Its appearance is indeed imposing, and gives promise of something like life and industry within its walls. A noble cluster of summits,--an offshoot of the Apennines,--rises behind the city, crowned with temples and towers. Within their bosky declivities, from which tall cypress-trees shoot up, lie embowered villas and little watch-towers, with their glittering vanes. At the foot of the hill is spread out the noble city, with its leaning towers and its tall minaret-looking steeples. The approach to the walls reminded me that below these ramparts sleeps Ugo Bassi. I afterwards searched for his resting-place, but could find no one who either would or could show me his tomb. A more eloquent declaimer than even Gavazzi, I have been assured by those who knew him, was silenced when Ugo Bassi fell beneath the murderous fire of the Croat's musket.

After the death-like desertion and silence of Ferrara, the feeble bustle of Bologna seemed like a return to the world and its ways. Its streets are lined with covered porticoes, less heavy than those of Padua, but harbouring after nightfall, says the old traveller ARCHENHOLTZ, robbers and murderers, of whom the latter are the more numerous. He accounts for this by saying, that whereas the robber has to make restitution before receiving absolution, the murderer, whether condemned to die or set at liberty, receives full pardon, without the "double labour," as Sir John Falstaff called it, of "paying back." Its hundred churches are vast museums of sculpture and painting. Its university, which the Bolognese boast is the oldest in Europe, rivalled Padua in its glory, and now rivals it in its decay. Its two famous leaning towers,--the rent in the bottom of one is quite visible,--are bending from age, and will one day topple over, and pour a deluge of old bricks upon the adjoining tenements. Its "Academy of the Fine Arts" is, after Rome and Florence, the finest in Italy. It is filled with the works of the Caracci, Domenichino, Guido Albani, and others of almost equal celebrity. I am no judge of such matters; and therefore my reader need lay no stress upon my criticisms; but it appeared to me, that some paintings placed in the first rank had not attained that excellence. The highly-praised "Victory of Sampson over the Philistines," I felt, wanted the grandeur of the Hebrew Judge on this the greatest occasion of his life; although it gave you a very excellent representation of a thirsty man drinking, with rows of prostrate people in the background. Other pieces were disfigured by glaring anachronisms in time and dress. The artist evidently had drawn his inspiration, not from the _Bible_, but from the _Cathedral_. The Apostles in some cases had the faces of monks, and looked as if they had divided their time betwixt Liguori and the wine-flagon. Several Scriptural personages were attired in an ecclesiastical dress, which must have been made by some tailor of the sixteenth century. But there is one picture in that gallery that impressed me more than any other picture I ever saw. It is a painting of the Crucifixion by Guido. The background is a dark thundery mass of cloud, resting angrily above the dimly-seen roofs and towers of Jerusalem. There is "darkness over all the land;" and in the foreground, and relieved by the darkness, stands the cross, with the sufferer. On the left is John, looking up with undying affection. On the right is Mary,--calm, but with eyes full of unutterable sorrow. Mary Magdalene embraces the foot of the cross: her face and upper parts are finely shaded; but her attitude and form are strongly expressive of reverence, affection, and profound grief. There are no details: the piece is simple and great. There are no attempts to produce effect by violent manifestations of grief. Hope is gone, but love remains; and there before you are the parties standing calm and silent, with their great sorrow.

It so happened that the exhibition of the works of living artists was open at the time, and I had a good opportunity of comparing the present with the past race of Italian painters. I soon found that the race of Guidos was extinct, and that the pencil of the masters had fallen into the hands of but poor copyists. The present artists of Italy have given over painting saints and Scripture-pieces, and work mostly in portraits and landscapes. They paint, of course, what will sell; and the public taste appears decidedly to have changed. There was a great dearth of good historical, imaginative, and allegorical subjects; too often an attempt was visible to give interest to a piece by an appeal to the baser passions. But the living artists of that country fall below not only their great predecessors, but even the artists of Scotland. This exhibition in Bologna did not by any means equal in excellence or interest the similar exhibition opened every spring in Edinburgh. The statuary displayed only beauty and voluptuousness of form: it wanted the simple energy and the chastened grandeur of expression which characterize the statuary of the ancients, and which have made it the admiration of all ages.

The only god whom the Bolognese worship is San Petronio. His temple, in which Charles V. was crowned by Clement VII., stands in the Piazza Maggiore, the forum of Bologna in the middle ages, and rivals the "Academy" itself in its paintings and sculptures. Though the facade is not finished, nor likely soon to be, it is one of the largest churches in Italy, and is a fine specimen of the Italian Gothic. In a little side chapel is the head of San Petronius himself, certified by Benedict XIV. On the forms on the cathedral floor lie little framed pictures of the saint, with a prayer addressed to him. I saw a country girl enter the church, drop on her knees, kiss the picture, and recite the prayer. I afterwards read this prayer, though not on bended knee; and can certify that a grosser piece of idolatry never polluted human lips. Petronio was addressed by the same titles in which the Almighty is usually approached; as, "the most glorious," "the most merciful."

"Towards him they bend With awful reverence prone; and as a god Extol him equal to the Highest in heaven."

Higher blessings, whether for time or for eternity, than those for which the devotee was directed to supplicate San Petronio, man needs not, and God has not to bestow. Daily bread, protection from danger, grace to love San Petronio, grace to serve San Petronio, pardon, a happy death, deliverance from hell, and eternal felicity in Paradise,--all who offered this prayer,--and other prayer was unheard beneath that roof,--supplicated of San Petronio. The Church of Rome affirms that she does not pray _to the_ saints, but _through_ them,--namely, as intercessors with Christ and God. This is no justification of the practice, though it were the fact; but it is not the fact. In protestant countries she may insert the name of God at the end of her prayers; but in popish countries she does not deem it needful to observe this formality. The name of Christ and of God rarely occurs in her popular formulas. In the Duomo of Bologna, the only god supplicated,--the only god known,--is San Petronio. The tendency of the worship of the Church of Rome is to efface God from the knowledge and the love of her members. And so completely has this result been realized, that, as one said, "You might steal God from them without their knowing it." Indeed, that "Great and Dreadful Name" might be blotted out from the few prayers of that Church in which it is still retained, and its worship would go on as before. What possible change would take place in the Duomo of San Petronio at Bologna, and in thousands of other churches in Italy, though Rome was to decree in _words_, as she does in _deeds_, that "_there is no God_?"

On the second day of my stay at Bologna I ascended the fine hill on the north of the city. A noble pillared arcade of marble, three miles in length, leads up to the summit. At every twelve yards or so is an alcove, with a florid painting of some saint; and at each station sits a poor old woman, who begs an alms of you, in the name of the saint beneath whose picture she spins her thread,--her own thread being nearly ended. There met me here a regiment of little priests, of about an hundred in number, none of whom seemed more than ten years of age, and all of whom wore shoes with buckles, silk stockings, breeches, a loose flowing robe, a white-edged stock, and shovel hat,--in short, miniature priests in dress, in figure, and in everything save their greater sportiveness. On the summit is a magnificent church, containing one of those black madonnas ascribed to Luke, and said to have been brought hither by a hermit from Constantinople in the twelfth century. Be this as it may, the black image serves the Bolognese for an occasion of an annual festival, kept with fully as much hilarity as devotion.

From the summit one looks far and wide over Italy. Below is spread out the plain of Lombardy, level as the sea, and as thickly studded with white villas as the heavens with stars. On the north, the cities of Mantua and Verona, and numerous other towns and villages, are visible. On the east, the towers and cathedral roofs of Ferrara are seen rising above the woods that cover the plain; and the view is bounded by the Adriatic, which, like a thin line of blue, runs along the horizon. On the south and west is the hill country of the Apennines, among whose serrated peaks and cleft sides is many a lovely dell, rich in waters, and vines, and olive trees. The distant country towards the Mediterranean lay engulphed in a white mist. A violent electrical action was going on in it, which, like a strong wind moving upon its surface, raised it into billows, which appeared to sweep onward, tossing and tumbling like the waves of ocean.

I had taken up my abode at the Il Pellegrino, one of the best recommended hotels in Bologna,--not knowing that the Austrian officers had made it their head-quarters, and that not a Bolognese would enter it. At dinner-time I saw only the Austrian uniform around the table. This was a matter of no great moment. Not so what followed. When I went to bed, there commenced overhead a heavy shuffling of feet, and an incessant going and coming, with slamming of doors, and jolting of tables, which lasted all night long. A sad tragedy was enacting above me. The political apprehensions are made over-night in the Italian towns; and I little doubt that the soldiers were all night busily engaged in bringing in prisoners, and sending them off to jail. The persons so arrested are subjected to moral and physical tortures, which speedily prostrate both mind and body, and sometimes terminate in death. Loaded with chains, they are shut up in stinking holes, where they can neither stand upright nor lie down at their length. The heat of the weather and the foul air breed diseases of the skin, and cover them with pustules. The food, too, is scanty, often consisting of only bread and water. The Government strive to keep their cruel condition a secret from their relatives, who, notwithstanding, are able at times to penetrate the mystery that surrounds them, but only to have their feelings lacerated by the thought of the dreadful sufferings undergone by those who are the objects of their tenderest affection. And what agony can be more dreadful than to know that a father, a husband, a son, is rotting in a putrid cell, or being beaten to death by blows, while neither relief nor sympathy from you can reach the sufferer? The case of a young man of the name of Neri, formerly healthy and handsome, found its way to the public prints. Broken down by blows, he was carried to the military hospital in an almost dying condition, where an English physician, in company with an Austrian surgeon, found him with lacerated skin, and the vertebral bones uncovered. He was enduring at the same time so acute pain from inflammation of the bowels, that he was unable, but by hints, to express his misery. It was here that the atrocities of the Papal Nuncio BEDINI were perpetrated,--the same man who was afterwards chased from the soil of America by a storm of execration evoked against him by the friends and countrymen of the victims who had been tortured and shot during his sway in Bologna. In short, the acts of the Holy Office are imitated and renewed; so that numbers, distracted and maddened by the torments which they endure, avow offences which they never committed, and name accomplices whom they never had; and the retractations of these unhappy beings are of no avail to prevent new arrests. The Bolognese are permitted to weep their complicated evils only in secret; to do so openly would be charged as a crime.

The fiscal oppression is nearly as unbearable as the political and social. The taxation, both as regards its amount and the mode of enforcing it, is ruinous to the individual, and operates as a fatal check to the progress of industry. The country is eaten up with foreign soldiers. The great hotels in all the principal towns resemble casernes. The reader may judge of my surprise on opening my bed-room door one morning, to find that a couple of Croats had slept on the mat outside of it all night. It might be a special mark of honour to myself; but I rather think that they are accustomed to bivouac in the passages and lobbies. The eternal drumming in the streets is enough to deafen one for life. To the traveller it is sufficiently annoying; how much more so to the Bolognese, who knows that that is music for which he must pay dear! Since 1848, the aggregate of taxation between Leghorn and Ancona has been increased about 40 per cent.; and the taxes are levied upon a principle of arbitrary assessment which compels the rich to simulate poverty, as in Turkey, lest they should be stripped of their last farthing. In Bologna, the payments of the house and land tax, which used to be made every two months, are now collected for the same sums every seven weeks; and a per centage is added at the pleasure of the Government, of which no one knows the amount till the collector calls with his demand. In other towns an income-tax is levied upon trades and professions, framed upon no rule but the supposed capabilities of the individual assessed to pay. Bologna, I may note, although in the Papal States, is now quite an Austrian town. The Austrians have there six-and-twenty pieces of artillery, and are building extensive barracks for cavalry and infantry. Bologna belongs to that part of the Papal States called the Four Legations, where, whether it pleases the Pope to be so protected or not, it is now quite understood that the Austrians have come to stay. The officer in command at Bologna styles himself its civil as well as military governor.

On the third day after my arrival, I started at four of the morning for Florence. It was dark as we rode through the streets of Bologna; and our _diligence_, piled a-top with luggage, smashed several of the oil-lamps, which dangled on cords at a dangerous proximity to the causeway. I don't know that the Bolognese would miss them, for we left the street very little, if at all, darker than we found it. I looked forward with no little interest to the day's ride, which was to lie among the dells of the Apennines, and to terminate at eve with the fair sight of the Queen of the Arno. How unlike the reality, will appear in the sequel. In half an hour we came in the dim light to a little valley, where the village bell was sweetly chiming the matins. I note the spot because I narrowly missed being an actor in a tragedy which took place here the very next morning. I may tell the story now, though I anticipate somewhat. I was sitting at the table d'hote in Florence three days after, when the gentleman on my right began to tell the company how he had travelled from Bologna on the Saturday previous, and how he and all his fellow-passengers had been robbed on the way. They had got to the spot I have indicated, when suddenly a little band of brigands, which lay in ambush by the wayside, rushed on the _diligence_. Some mounted on the front, and attended to the outside passengers; others took charge of those in the _interieur_. Now it was, when the passengers saw into what hands they had fallen, that nothing was heard but groaning in all parts of the _diligence_. Our informant, who sat next the window in the _interieur_, was seized by the collar, a long knife was held to his breast, and he was admonished to use all diligence in making over to his new acquaintance any worldly goods he had about him. He had to part with his gold watch and chain, his breast-pin, and sundry other articles of jewellery; but his purse and sovereigns he contrived to drop among the straw at the bottom of the vehicle. All the rest fared as he did, and some of them worse, for they lost their money as well as jewels. These grave proceedings were diversified by a somewhat humorous incident. The coachman had providently put his dinner in the form of a sausage, rolled in brown paper, under his seat. This is the form in which Austrian zwanzigers are commonly made up; and the brigands, fancying the coachman's sausage to be a roll of silver zwanzigers, seized on it with avidity, and bore it off in triumph. They were proceeding to rifle the baggage, when, hearing the horse-patrol approaching, they plunged into the thicket as suddenly as they had appeared. The morning chimes were sounding, as on the previous day, while this operation was going on. But what is not a little extraordinary is, that all this took place within two miles of the city gates of Bologna, where there could not be fewer than twelve thousand Austrian soldiers. But these, I presume, were too much engaged on this, as on previous nights, in apprehending and imprisoning the citizens in the Pope's behalf, to think of looking after brigands. In Peter's privileged patrimony one may rob, murder, and break every command of the decalogue, and defy the police, provided he obey the Church. Were I to travel that road again, I would provide myself with a tinsel watch and appendages, and a sausage carefully rolled up in paper, to avoid the unpleasantness of meeting such wellwishers empty-handed.

In another half hour we came to the spurs of the Apennines. The day was breaking, and its light, I hoped, would lay open many a sweet dell and many a romantic peak, before evening. These hopes, as, alas! too often happens in the longer journey of life, were to be suddenly dashed. I felt a warm, suffocating current of air breathing over the valley, and looked up to see the furnace whence, as I supposed, it proceeded. This was the sirocco, the herald of the tempest that soon thereafter burst upon us. Masses of whitish cloud came rolling over the summits of the hills; furious gusts came down upon us from the heights; and in a few minutes we found ourselves contending with a hurricane such as I have never seen equalled save on one other occasion. The cloud became fearfully black, and made the lightning the more awful as it touched with fire the peaks around us, and bathed in an ocean of flame the vines and hamlets on the hill-side. Terrible peals of thunder broke over us; and these were followed by torrents of rain, which the furious winds dashed against our vehicle with the force and noise of a cataract. We had to make our way up the mountain's side in the face of this tempest. At times more than a dozen animals were yoked to our _diligence_,--horses, oxen, and beasts of every kind which we could press into the service; while half-a-dozen postilions, shouting and cracking their whips, strove to urge the motley cavalcade onward. Still we crept up only by inches. The road in most cases wound over the very peak of the mountain; and there the tempest, rushing upon us from all sides at once, threatened to lay our vehicle, which shook and quivered in the blast, flat on its side, or toss it into the valley below. The storm continued to rage with unabated violence from day-break till mid-day; and, by favour of horses, bullocks, and postilions, we kept moving on at the rate of two miles an hour, now climbing, now descending, well knowing that at every summit a fresh buffeting awaited us.

I had as my companions on this journey, two Russian gentlemen, with whom afterwards, at several points of my tour, I came into contact. They were urbane and intelligent men, full of their own country and of the Czar, yet professing great respect for England, which they had just visited, and looking down with a contempt they were at little pains to conceal, upon the Frenchmen and Italians among whom they were moving. They possessed the sobriety of mind, the turn for quiet, shrewd observation, in short, much of the physical and intellectual stamina, of Englishmen, with just a shade less of the exquisite polish which marks the latter wherever they are met with. These, no doubt, were favourable specimens of the Russian nation; but it is such men who give the tone to a State, while the masses below execute their designs. I have ever since felt that, should we ever meet that people on the field of battle, the contest would be no ordinary one. I recollect one of these gentlemen meeting me on the streets of Rome some weeks afterwards, and informing me that he had been the day before to visit the ball on the top of St Peter's, and that he had been delighted at seeing his Emperor's name, in his Emperor's own handwriting, inside the ball, with a few lines beneath the signature, stating that he had stood in that ball, and had there prayed for Mother Holy Russia,--a fact full of significance.

About mid-day we came, wet, and weary, and cold, to the Duana on the Tuscan frontier, where was a poor inn, at which, after our passports had been viseed, and our trunks and carpet-bags plumbed, we dined. There were some twenty of us at table; a priest taking the top, and the _conducteur_ the bottom. I remember that two persons of the party kept their hats on at table, and that these were the priest and a poor country lad,--the priest because he presided perhaps, and the countryman because, not knowing the etiquette of the point, he wisely determined to follow in that, as in greater matters, the priest. Our dinner consisted of coarse broth, black bread, buffalo beef, and wine of not the sweetest flavour; but what helped us was an excellent appetite, for we had not breakfasted beyond a few chestnuts and grapes picked up at the poor villages through which we passed. We obtained, however, an hour's shelter from the elements.

We resumed our journey, and in about an hour's ride we gained the central chain of the Apennines. Happily the tempest had moderated somewhat; for this, lying midway between the two seas, is ordinarily the stormiest point of the pass. We crossed it, however, with less inconvenience than we had looked for. The summits, which had hitherto been conical, with vines straggling up their sides, now became rounded, or ran off in serrated lines, with sides scarred with tempests and strewn with stones. The scenery was bleak and desolate, as that of the Grampian pass leading by Spittal of Glenshee to Dee-side. But as we continued our descent, the richly wooded glens returned; the clouds rose; and at one time I ventured to hope that I should yet have my first sight of Florence under a golden sky, and that Milton's description might, after all, be applicable to this day of storms:--

"As when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the low'ring element Scowls o'er the darken'd landskip snow or shower; If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."

But the hope was short-lived: no Florence was I to see that night; nor was note of bird to gladden the dells. The mists again fell, and hid in premature night those fine valleys, so famous in Florentine history, which we were now approaching. We wound round hills, traversed deep ravines, heard on every side the thunder of the swollen torrents, and, when the parting vapour permitted, had glimpses of the luxuriant woods of myrtle and laurel that clothe these valleys,--

"Where round some mouldering tower pale ivy creeps, And low-brow'd rocks hang nodding o'er the deeps."

At last we found ourselves on the banks of a broad and swollen river,--the Save,--with no means of transit save a dismantled bridge, so sorely shattered by the flood, that it was an even question whether our vehicle might not, like the last straw on the dromedary's back, sink the structure outright.

We dismounted, and, by the help of lights, measured first the bridge, and next the _diligence_, and found that the breadth of the former exceeded that of the latter by just two inches. The passengers passed on foot; the _diligence_, with the baggage, came after; and so all arrived safely on the other side. Our first care was to assemble a council of war in the poor inn which stood on the spot, and deliberate what next to do.

The _conducteur_ opened the debate. "We had," he said, "twenty miles of road still before us; the way lay through deep ravines, and over torrents which the rains must have rendered impassable: it would be long past midnight till we should reach Florence,--if we should ever reach it: his opinion was, therefore, that we ought to stay where we were; nevertheless, if we insisted, he would go on at all risks." So counselled our leader; and if we wanted an argument on the other side, we had only to look around. The walls of the inn were naked and black; the floor was covered inch-deep with slime, the deposit of the flood which had that day broke into the dwelling; and the place was evidently unequal to the "entertainment" of such a number of "men and horses" as had thus unexpectedly been thrown upon it. It is not wonderful, in these circumstances, that a small opposition party sprung up, headed by an English lady, whose delicate slippers were never made for such a floor as that on which she now stood. She could see no danger in going on, and urged us to set forward. Better counsels prevailed, however; and we resolved to endure the evils we knew, rather than adventure on those we knew not.

The next matter to be negotiated was supper, of which the aspect of the place gave no great promise. The landlady was a thin, wiry, black, voluble Tuscan. "Have you beef?--Have you cheese?--Have you macaroni?"--inquired several voices in succession. "Oh, she had all these, and a great many dainties besides, in the morning; but the flood,--the flood!" The same flood, however, which had swept off our hostess's larder, had swept in a great deal of good company, and she was evidently resolved on setting the one evil over against the other. She now showered upon us a long, rapid, and vehement address; and he who has not heard the Tuscan discourse does not know what volubility is. "What does she say?" I inquired at one of my two Russian friends. "She says very many words," he replied, "but the meaning is moneys, moneys." "Have you any coffee?" I asked. "Oh, coffee! delightful coffee; but it had gone sailing down the flood." "And it carried off the eggs too, I suppose?" "No; I have eggs." We resolved to sup on eggs. A fire of logs was kindled up stairs, and a table was extemporized out of some deals. In a quarter of an hour in came our supper,--black bread, fried eggs, and a skein of wine. We fell to; but, alack! what from the smut of the chimney and the dust of the pan, the eggs were done in the _chiaro scuro_ style; the wine had so villanous a twang, that a few sips of it contented me; and the bread, black as it was, was the only thing palatable. I got the landlady persuaded to boil me an egg; and though the Italian peasants only dip their eggs in hot water, and serve them up raw, it was preferable to the conglomerate of the pan. We made merry, however, over our poor meal and the grateful warmth of the fire; and somewhere towards midnight we entertained the question of going to bed. We had avoided the topic as long as possible, from a foreboding that our hostess would present us with some rueful tale of blankets lost in the flood. Besides, we were not without misgivings that, should the clouds return and the river rise as before, house and all might follow the other things down the stream, and no one could tell where we might find ourselves on awakening. On broaching the subject, however, we found to our delight, that cribs, couches, shakedowns, and all sorts of contrivances, with store of cloaks, garments, and blankets, had been got ready for our use.

We were told off into parties; and the first to be sorted were the two Russians, an Italian, and myself. We four were shown into a room, which, to our great surprise, contained two excellent four-posted beds, one of which was allotted to the two Russian gentlemen, and the other to the Italian and myself. Our mode of turning in was somewhat novel. The Russians put away simply their greatcoats, and lay down beneath the coverlet. My bed-fellow the Italian took up a position for the night by throwing himself, as he was, on the top of the bed-clothes. Not approving of either mode, I slipped off both greatcoat and coat, and, covering myself with the blankets, soon forgot in sleep all the mishaps of the day.

The voice of the _conducteur_ shouting at the door of our apartment awakened us before day-break. Our company mustered with what haste they could, and we again betook us to the road,

"While the still morn went out with sandals gray."

The path lay along the banks of the torrent Carza, and the valley we found frightfully scarred by the flood of the former day. Fierce torrents rushing from the hills had torn the fences, ploughed up the road, piled up hillocks of mud among the vineyards, and covered with barren sand, or strewn with stones, many an acre of fine meadow. Had we attempted the path in the darkness, our course must have found a speedy termination. At length, ascending a steep hill, we found ourselves overlooking the valley of the Arno.

Every traveller taxes his descriptive powers to the utmost to paint the view from this hill-top; and I verily believe that, seen under a cloudless sky, it is one of the most enchanting landscapes in the world. The numberless conical hills,--the white villas and villages, which lie as thick as if the soil had produced them,--the silvery stream of the Arno,--the rich chestnut and olive woods,--the domes of the Italian Athens,--the songs,--the fragrance,--and the great wall of the Apennines bounding all,--must present a picture of rare magnificence. But I saw it under different conditions, and must needs describe it as it appeared.

Sub-Apennine Italy was before me, and it seemed the Italy I had dreamed of, could I only see it; but, alas! it was blotted with mists, and overshadowed by a black canopy of cloud. Outspread, far as the eye could extend southward, was a landscape of ridges and conical tops, separated by winding wreaths of white mist, giving to the country the aspect of an ocean broken up into creeks, and bays, and channels, with no end of islands. The hills were covered to their very summits with the richest vegetation; and the multitude of villages sprinkled over them lent them an air of great animation. The great chain of the Apennines, with rolling masses of cloud on its summits, ran along on the east, and formed the bounding wall of the prospect. Below us there floated on the surface of the mist an immense dome, looking like a balloon of huge size about to ascend into the air. It did not ascend, however; but, surrounded by several tall shafts and towers which rose silently out of the mist, it remained suspended over the same spot. Like a buoy at sea affixed to the place where some noble vessel lies entombed, this dome told us that engulphed in this ocean of vapour lay FLORENCE, with her rich treasures of art, and her many stirring recollections and traditions.