A Short History of Italy Part 13

Europe had been too long accustomed to the idea of ecclesiastical unity to sit still without some attempt at reconciliation between the Catholics and Protestants. It was hoped that a Council would heal all wounds, smooth all difficulties, and bring back the irrevocable past.

The Popes, however, had come to regard Councils as inimical bodies with dangerous tendencies towards investigation and with hostile canons, and were inclined to take the risk of losing the tainted parts of Christendom altogether, rather than make use of so perilous an instrument to recover them. But the Emperor, Charles V, was insistent; his Empire, as well as the Church, was cracked, and in great danger of breaking in two. The Council was convoked, and met at Trent. The primary object was reconciliation; but everybody knew that no reconciliation was possible without radical reforms in the Church, so the papal party played its cards with exceeding wariness. The Lutherans did not attend, and the papal party, in order to forestall practical reforms, plunged into the comparatively safe matter of defining dogma, and defined it in such a way as to fence out all the Lutheran schismatics. The reformers, nevertheless, managed to sandwich in between the definitions of dogma various decrees for the reform of Church discipline. In Catholic theory an Ec.u.menical Council acts under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; but looking at this Council from a purely secular point of view, it is hard to find other guidance than the quarrelling interests of Pope, bishops, Emperor, Spaniards, French, and Italians. In fact, the Council was twice broken up. The first time the Pope, having taken alarm, declared the Council adjourned to Bologna. The second time the Lutherans, then at war with the Emperor, swooped down near Trent and frightened the Council away. It met again, for the third time. All hope of reconciliation with the Protestants had then pa.s.sed away, and the Council set to work as a purely Roman Catholic partisan body. A striking change of att.i.tude within the Council showed that since the early sessions the reforming party had won complete control. Paul IV (1555-59), a man of high character, formerly Cardinal Caraffa, head of the Roman Inquisition, had promulgated many edicts concerning reforms; and his successor Pius IV, Giovanni Angelo Medici of Milan (not of the Florentine family) (1559-66), who was Pope during the final sessions of the Council, followed his lead. Pius, a clever man who had received a legal training, instead of wasting efforts in persuading disputatious bishops, first made diplomatic arrangements with the Catholic sovereigns of Spain, France, and Austria, and then secured the embodiment of those arrangements in decrees by the Council. Nothing, however, could have been accomplished without the reforming spirit within the Church; Pius removed obstacles in its way and let it have full play. Stern rules were made against the corrupt practices, which had given Luther his strength. Canons regulated the conduct of the clergy, the duties of bishops, the affairs of monasteries and nunneries, and all matters connected with the great organization of the Roman Church. These reforms came too late to affect Protestant opinion, but they rallied the doubting, confirmed the faithful, and gave the Papacy wide-reaching moral support. The dogmas of the Church were cast in adamant, and secured the immense advantage of definiteness and fixity. The Council of Trent remains the princ.i.p.al monument of the Catholic Revival, and that Revival is certainly the most important event for Italy in the period immediately following the Renaissance. Pius IV, the clever lawyer, had a great share in the work of the Council, but his most skilful achievement was to maintain and confirm the doctrine of the subordination of Councils to the Papacy. This great stroke, as well as his share in the reforms, has won for him the t.i.tle of founder of the Modern Papacy.

In this manner the Papacy prospered during the very generations in which the greatness of Italy dwindled away. The fortunes of the two had wholly parted company. The Papacy, indeed, had made itself an Italian inst.i.tution,--never again would it seat a foreigner on the chair of St.

Peter,--but in all other ways it had ceased to have any national affections. Italy, her genius faded, her vigour faint, not only deprived of what might have been a great support, but even pushed down and held under by the help of her own greatest creation, the Church, ceased to be a country. She had become, in Metternich's famous phrase, a mere geographical expression, an aggregate of little states, with no tie between them except that of juxtaposition and of common subservience to foreigners. If we look at a map drawn at the close of the sixteenth century, we shall find the following political divisions:--

The Duchy of Savoy, The Spanish province of Lombardy, The Republic of Venice, The little Duchy of Parma, under the Farnesi, The little Duchy of Mantua, under the Gonzaga, The little Duchy of Modena, under the Este family, The little Duchy of Urbino, under the della Rovere who had succeeded to the Montefeltri, The Republic of Genoa, The Republic of Lucca, The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, under the Medici, The Papal States, The Spanish province of Naples, The Spanish province of Sicily.

Over them all, Spanish provinces, independent republics, Italian duchies, and Papal States, falls the shadow cast by the royal standard of Spain. Next to our consciousness of that dreaded banner, the most vivid impression which we take away is the contrast between the vigour of the Papacy and the weakness of Italy, and we draw the necessary inference that the fortunes of the two not only have wholly parted company, but also are wholly irreconcilable.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE CINQUECENTO (16TH CENTURY)

The _Cinquecento_, as the Italians call the sixteenth century, exhibits in the arts the same disintegration and decay that we have found in the political life of Italy. Honesty, independence, genuineness fade away, and in their stead we find cleverness and effort. The high tide of the Renaissance was in the pontificate of Julius II, but the flood lingered on at the full till 1540, and then the ebb began. This is the date which the famous German scholar and critic, Jakob Burckhardt, a.s.signs as the limit of the Golden Age; and it is interesting to find how closely it corresponds with the political dates which marked the establishment of the new political order in Italy. In 1530 Florence was definitely handed over to the Medici; in 1535 the duchy of Milan was annexed to Spain; in 1540 the Pope sanctioned the Order of Jesus; in 1542 he established the Holy Office in Rome; in 1543 he accepted the scheme of an _Index Librorum Prohibitorum_; and in 1545 the Council of Trent was opened.

The change from maturity to decay was all-pervasive; yet it was slow, and a period of excellence and good taste intervened between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. This process is most clearly marked in architecture. During the High Renaissance dignity was law, the grand manner dominated, and charm determined subordinate parts. Domes were n.o.ble, loggias elegant, pilasters decorative, cornices well proportioned, ceilings splendid. After 1540 indications of decline appeared; but this fading brilliance was a kind of _gtterdmmerung_, and, though it heralded the Baroque, displayed at times a purity of detail and a n.o.ble restraint worthy of the earlier period.

Of the architects of this intervening stage the greatest was Giacomo Barozzi, surnamed Vignola after the little town where he was born in the province of Modena. He was a man of theories, had great knowledge of cla.s.sical architecture, and wrote a manual on the architectural orders which enjoyed great authority for two centuries and more. He built various buildings at Bologna, and designed a gigantic palace at Piacenza for the Farnesi, the ducal children of Alexander Farnese, Paul III, and nephews of the beautiful Giulia. The art of making gardens, of using cypress trees, greensward, pools, terraces, and clumps of ilex as joint partners with stone, brick, and stucco, in one artistic whole, had come into being in the sixteenth century; and Vignola was one of the masters of this new art. He designed the Farnese gardens on the Palatine Hill, since destroyed by time, neglect, subsequent owners, and eager archologists. He was an artist of great ideas, and sometimes caught the grand manner. On the other hand, he also helped to bring on the Baroque.

His famous church at Rome, the Ges, despite its vast, high-arching nave, lent itself with fatal facility to a gorgeous hideousness of decoration, and set the fas.h.i.+on for many imitative Jesuit churches, which caught the hideous gorgeousness but missed the grandeur of their exemplar. He had an important part in building the _Villa di Papa Giulio_ (Pope Julius III), a little outside the city walls, charming in its grace, its variety, and its succession of arcades, courts, loggias, bal.u.s.trades, grotto, terrace, and garden.

The next in rank, Bartolommeo Ammanati of Florence, may be called the court architect of Duke Cosimo I. He built two bridges across the Arno, the Ponte alia Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinit, finished the main body of the Pitti Palace, originally designed by Brunelleschi, and completed the elaborate Boboli garden, the pleasure grounds behind the palace. He also was drawn to Rome at the behest of villa-building Popes, and had a share in elaborating the plans of the Villa of Papa Giulio.

Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, biographer, designed the Uffizi at Florence, painted many indifferent pictures, and wrote "Lives of the Painters," a garrulous, discursive, inaccurate, and delightful book.

Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia built the stately, tourist-haunted palaces of Genoa, once occupied by opulent merchants, and also the gigantic church of S. Maria degli Angeli, which covers the Portiuncula of St. Francis, like a bowl turned over a forget-me-not. Jacopo Tatti Sansovino of Florence was the architect of many n.o.ble buildings in Venice. Andrea Palladio of Vicenza embodied his pa.s.sionate love of cla.s.sical architecture in palaces and churches in his native town and in Venice.

During the revival of cla.s.sic enthusiasm in the eighteenth century Palladio became a demi-G.o.d. The captivated Goethe, as soon as he arrived at Vicenza, hurried to see the Palladian palaces. "When we stand face to face with these buildings, then we first realize their great excellence; their bulk and ma.s.siveness fill the eye, while the lovely harmony of their proportions, admirable in the advance and retreat of perspective, brings peace to the spirit." In Venice, he says, "Before all things I hastened to the Carit.... Alas! scarcely a tenth part of the edifice is finished. However, even this part is worthy of that heavenly genius....

One ought to pa.s.s whole years in the contemplation of such a work."

These men and their rivals kept alive the traditions of the great period; nevertheless, in course of time stiltedness and exaggeration usurped the place of elegance and force. A servile imitation of Roman models, an absolute acceptance of cla.s.sical correctness, prevailed; the cla.s.sic orders, especially the Corinthian, spread themselves everywhere; in one place barren and formal simplicity obtruded itself, in another pretentious magnificence. After 1580 the transition is complete; the baroque triumphs; sham tyrannizes, wood and plaster mimic stone, columns twist themselves awry; monstrous scrolls, heavy mouldings, crazy statues, gilt deformities, and all the contortions to which stucco and other cohesive substances will submit, hang and cling everywhere, inside and out. But this is to antic.i.p.ate, for the full revel of the Baroque takes place in the seventeenth century.

The same degeneration prevailed in sculpture. Michelangelo, in his statues in the Medicean chapel at Florence, "Night" and "Day," "Evening"

and "Dawn" (1529-34), had achieved the utmost which thought and emotion could express in marble. They stand, pillars set up by Hercules, at the end of the n.o.ble sculpture of the Renaissance. His successors tried to imitate him, in vain; they produced bulk, or writhing or distortion. Yet some men of this period did excellent work: Benvenuto Cellini, delicate goldsmith, and sculptor of the Florentine Perseus; John of Bologna, who modelled the Flying Mercury; Taddeo Landini of Florence, who designed the charming fountain in Rome, in which several boys are boosting turtles into a basin above; Bandinelli, whose big statues are familiar in Florence, "a man strangely composed," as Burckhardt says, "of natural talent, of reminiscence of the old school, and of a false originality which carried him beyond a disregard of nicety even to grossness." After these men and a few others, sculpture followed architecture in its facile descent into the Baroque, and expressed itself in prophets, saints, and Popes, who stand in swaying and vacillating postures in nave and aisle, on roof and bal.u.s.trade. These decadent sculptors strictly belong to the next century; they are but heralded by the last works of the Cinquecento.

In painting, too, the same story is repeated all over Italy. In Florence after the close of the High Renaissance twilight darkened rapidly. There are few artists of note except two fas.h.i.+onable portrait painters, Pontormo and Bronzino, who display the characteristics of the period.

Bronzino's picture of the Descent of Christ into Hades almost justifies Ruskin's comment, a "heap of c.u.mbrous nothingness and sickening offensiveness;" on the other hand, Pontormo's decorations in the great hall of the Medicean Villa at Poggio a Caiano are as graceful, gay, and charming as can well be imagined. After them in dreary succession come the decadent painters, who painted figures bigger and bigger in would-be Michelangelesque att.i.tudes, as may be seen in one of the rooms of the _Belle Arti_ in Florence. Elsewhere, also, the generation bred under the great masters faded away,--the sweet Luini of Milan, Leonardo's follower; the facile Giulio Romano, Raphael's pupil; the beauty-loving Sodoma of Siena; the romantic Dosso Dossi of Ferrara. These names show how loath the genius of painting was to leave Italy, but she obeyed fate; and, at the end of the century, we have the Caracci beginning to paint in Bologna, and Caravaggio (1569-1609) in Naples. It needs but a glance at these later pictures to see what a change had come over the spirit of beauty during the hundred years since Botticelli painted Venus fresh from the salt sea foam.

In literature, also, at the opening of the sixteenth century, we had the historian, Guicciardini; the political writer, Machiavelli; the poet, Ariosto; the cultivated Castiglione: at the end we have the pathetic figure of Torquato Ta.s.so (1544-95), who stands drooping, like a symbol of Italy. Ta.s.so is always inscribed in textbooks as one of the four greatest Italian poets, and it would be useless and impertinent to dispute the concordant testimony of many witnesses. Byron apostrophizes him, "O victor unsurpa.s.sed in modern song;" yet one with difficulty avoids thinking that his sad story has added to the beauty of his poetry and heightened his reputation.

Torquato Ta.s.so was the last great genius of the Italian Renaissance, and stands there facing the oncoming decadence in gifted helplessness; he had many talents, a n.o.ble nature, a melancholy temperament, and a weak character. In boyhood his religious emotions and his intellectual faculties were both over-stimulated. His story is a medley of court favour, success, rivalry, suspicion. His home was Ferrara, but he wandered about, as a sick person seeks to ease his body by changing posture. Early forcing and some natural weakness combined to bring too great a strain upon his mind, which gave way, and the unfortunate man was put in a madhouse by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. He was confined for seven years, but not ill treated. He died in the monastery of Sant' Onofrio on the Janiculum at Rome, where tourists stop to gaze at the poor remnant of an oak tree, under whose shade he used to sit.

Carducci, the great poet, says: "Italy's great literature, the living, national, and at the same time, human literature, with which she reconciled Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and, in a Roman way, represented a renewed Europe, ended with Ta.s.so." His sad story is a fitting epilogue to the Italian Renaissance.

This general course of ascent, culmination, and decline holds true even of Venice, except in chronology; for Venice preserved her independence from the normal Italian experience almost as resolutely in the arts as in politics. She produced no literature, piqued perhaps because Italy had taken the Tuscan dialect rather than hers for the national language; but in the arts, after decay had elsewhere set in, she bloomed in the fulness of perfection, as late roses blossom when other bushes show nothing but hips. Of her individual career a few words must be said.

In architecture and sculpture, the Lombardi, a Venetian family probably from Lombardy, flourished for nearly a hundred years (1452-1537), and left their mark on Venice, in tombs and statues, in churches and palaces. Contemporary with the last generation of Lombardi came the more gifted Alessandro Leopardi, who completed the great statue of Colleoni designed by Verrocchio, and gave a new impulse to Venetian sculpture.

While the Tuscan sculptors had been studying Roman remains, the Isles of Greece had been giving Greek models to their Venetian conquerors, and Leopardi in particular profited greatly by them. In the sister art the first famous architect after the Lombardi was the Florentine, Jacopo Sansovino, who spent most of a long life in Venice, where he built the Zecca, the Loggetta, the Libreria Vecchia (the Old Library), and also the Scala d'Oro (the Golden Stairway) of the ducal palace. Sanmicheli, a military engineer, as well as a builder of palaces, came from Verona to work in Venice. Palladio (1508-80), of whom we have spoken, came from Vicenza, and bequeathed his name to the neo-cla.s.sic style, known as Palladian.

In painting first came the famous Bellini family, Jacopo (1400-64?) and his two sons, Gentile and the more gifted Giovanni, painter of tenderest Madonnas; after them came Carpaccio, painter of St. Jerome and his lion, and of St. George and his dragon. Then followed in rapid succession the most gifted group of painters that ever lived together, all born within twenty years of one another, as if to prove how prodigally Nature could endow a petty province that had the luck to please her: Giorgione, from Castelfranco on the Venetian mainland, of highest fame and disputed pictures; t.i.tian, of Cadore, n.o.blest of portrait painters; Palma Vecchio, of Bergamo, creator of the most glorious of animals, the superb Venetian women; Sebastiano del Piombo, who painted the Fornarina of the Uffizi Gallery long attributed to Raphael, and deserved his fortune of being pupil to Giorgione and friend to Michelangelo; Lorenzo Lotto, of Bergamo, another painter of exquisite women, high-bred men, n.o.ble saints, and poetical angels; Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone, inferior only to t.i.tian; Bonifazio from Verona, painter of patrician luxury; Paris Bordone, of Treviso, so uncertain in merit, yet at his best so rich in hue, so tender in sentiment, so admirable in his pictures of Venetian ceremonial; and at the close, the giant Tintoretto (1512-94) and Paolo Veronese (1528-88) the glorious: all, though in different degrees, splendid in colour, voluptuous ministers to the sensuous eye.

This cl.u.s.ter of names serves to show that while elsewhere in Italy art was dwindling into mannerism and exaggeration, Venice put forth an extraordinary burst of pictorial magnificence; yet even in Venice at the end of the century none of the great men were left.

The reason for this decadence of the arts from their splendour in the early decades of the century is not easy to a.s.sign; no one can say why genius spurts up in one spot or in one individual, why the brilliant Italian race should have achieved so many masterpieces and then have become ineffectual. One can merely notice, whether as a cause or an accompanying phenomenon, that, with individual exceptions,--no man could be n.o.bler than Michelangelo,--Italy of the High Renaissance was a great moral failure. In intellectual achievement the Italians eclipsed the world; in morality they stumbled about like blind men. This lack of morality finds its fullest expression, at least its most conspicuous expression, at the very time of the culmination of the arts. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

The night that the Duke of Gandia, son of Pope Borgia, was murdered in Rome (1497), a wood-seller, living beside the Tiber, saw several men come cautiously to the river. They peered about and made a sign to some one behind. Up came a horseman, with a dead body lying across his horse's back, head and heels dangling down; the horse was turned rump to the river, and two men on foot seized the body and flung it into the water. The wood-seller was asked why he had not reported the fact. He answered that he had seen some hundred bodies thrown into the river at that spot, and had never heard any inquiries made. The duke's brother, Csar, was at the time believed to have done the deed, but evidence fails.

The same Csar Borgia, bearing the somewhat ambitious motto _Aut Csar aut nihil_, energetic, ruthless, vigorous, ingenious, and plausible, embodied the Italian conception of what a political leader should be; so much so, that Machiavelli, the greatest of Italian political writers, cites him as a model. Machiavelli was a patriot, animated by real love of his country, but he was free from our conceptions of morality, or perhaps sceptical of Italian virtue, and believed that the achievement of liberating Italy from foreign tyranny could only be accomplished by the qualities of an Iago. In the chapter in "The Prince" ent.i.tled "In what manner Princes should keep faith," he says: "How praiseworthy it is for a Prince to keep faith, to practise integrity and eschew trickery, everybody knows; nevertheless, within our own lifetime and our own experience, we know that those Princes have done great things who have made small account of good faith and have known how to turn men's heads by means of trickery, and in the end have surpa.s.sed those who planted themselves on loyalty.... Therefore a prudent lord ought not to keep faith, when keeping faith would make against him, and the reasons which made him promise are no more. If men were all good this precept would not be good; but as they are bad and would not keep faith with you, you, too, ought not to keep faith with them; and a Prince will never lack legitimate reasons to colour the breach.... I shall even make bold to say this, that to have certain moral qualities and always observe them is bad, but to seem to have them is good; as to seem to be pious, faithful, kind, religious, honest, or even to be so, provided your mind be so adjusted that, in case of need, you will know how to be the opposite. For you must know that a Prince, and especially a newly crowned Prince, cannot do all the things for which men are esteemed good, for, in order to maintain the state, they are often obliged to act contrary to humanity, contrary to charity, contrary to religion; therefore, he must have a mind prompt to veer with the wind and the fluctuations of fortune; and, as I have said, not to forsake the good, if may be, but to know how to cleave to evil, if he must."

Another ill.u.s.tration shall be the life of Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), born the child of an artist's model in a hospital at Arezzo, who, by wit and infinite impudence, by toadying, bullying, and blackmail, worked his way to such a position that he could say, "Without serving courts I have compelled the great world, dukes, princes, kings, to pay tribute to my genius." Once a pious lady, the Marchesa di Pesaro, remonstrated with him upon his life, and bade him mend his ways. He wrote back: "I must say that I am not less useful to the world, or less pleasing to Jesus, spending my vigils upon trifles than if I had employed them on works of piety. But why do I do this? If princes were as devout as I am needy, my pen would write nothing but _misereres_.... Let us see. I have a friend named Brucioli, who dedicated his translation of the Bible to the Most Christian King [of France]. Four years pa.s.sed and he got no answer. On the other hand, my comedy, 'The Courtesan,' won a rich necklace from this same king; so that my Courtesan would have felt tempted to make fun of the Old Testament, if that were not a trifle unbecoming. Forgive me lady for the jests I have written, not from malice, but for a livelihood. All the world does not possess the inspiration of divine grace. Music and comedy are to us what prayer and preaching are to you.

May Jesus grant you His grace to get for me from Sebastiano di Pesaro [her husband?] the rest of the money of which I have only received thirty scudi; for this I am in antic.i.p.ation your debtor." Of Pietro Aretino a recent Italian critic says: "His memory is infamous; no gentleman would mention his name before a lady." Yet, perhaps, we may doubt if he was peculiarly bad; he possessed the cynical views of morality current at the time. Aretino made a fortune, received knighthood from the Pope, nearly obtained a cardinal's hat, and was painted by t.i.tian.

The following anecdote is taken from the autobiography of the famous goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71). He was travelling on a sort of ca.n.a.l boat on his way from Venice to Florence. "We went to lodge for the night in an inn on this side of Chioggia, on the left as we were approaching Ferrara. Our host wished to be paid, according to his custom, before we went to bed. I told him that in other places it was the custom to pay in the morning, but he said, 'I wish to be paid, according to my way, in the evening.' I replied that men who wanted their own special way would have to make a world to suit their special way, because in this world that was not the way things were done. The host answered that I need not vex my wits, for he wished to do according to his way. My companion was trembling for fear, and poked me to be quiet lest the host do worse; so we paid him, according to his way, and went to bed. We had excellent new beds, everything new, spick and span; in spite of this I did not sleep a wink, thinking all night long what I could do to revenge myself; first I thought of setting fire to the house, next of cutting the throats of the four good horses that he had in his stable; I could see that this would be easy to do, but not how it would be easy for me and my companion to escape afterwards. At last I hit on a plan. In the morning I put my companion and all the things into the ca.n.a.l boat. When the horses were hitched to the rope that pulled the boat, I said that they must not start the boat till I got back, as I had left a pair of slippers in my room.... When I got in the room I took my knife, which was sharp as a razor, and I cut the mattresses on the four beds to little bits, so that I knew I had done more than fifty scudi worth of damage." Throughout a delightful autobiography, which we need not accept too literally, Cellini exhibits a perfectly unmoral disposition, a mind with no sense of social law and no respect for anything except Michelangelo and art.

These four men, Csar Borgia, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Cellini, possessed fort.i.tude, energy, subtlety, and courage, but they showed no appreciation of the fundamental social virtues, loyalty, trust, subordination of self to the general good; and for this reason they enable us to understand why Italy fell like a ripe apple, without resistance, into the lap of foreigners and lay helpless under Jesuit, inquisitor, petty duke, and Spanish viceroy, and why freedom to think and freedom to act faded from art and intellectual life as well as from political life.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

A SURVEY OF ITALY (1580-1581)

At the end of the sixteenth century Italy is well under way on a new stretch of history, which lasted until the nineteenth century. Except Venice, always individual, and the Papacy, freshly revivified, Italy has lost all moral force, and become wholly effeminate. In twenty-five years three hundred and twenty-six volumes of sonnets were published. Her political life has become what one may call grand-ducal; her religion formal, superst.i.tious; her literature affected, stilted; her architecture Baroque; her painting and sculpture steeped in mannerism and exaggeration. Nevertheless, Italy is Italy, and has her own charm, her own individuality, her own coquetry. As formerly she lured Barbarian nations, so now she lures individual Barbarians, and becomes the roaming-ground of travellers. She seems less a real country than a theatre, where rococo dukes, cavaliers, and ladies curl their hair and powder their cheeks.

For two centuries this artificial existence continued. Its history is not to be found in the solemn volumes of Cesare Cant, Carlo Botta, or other Italian historians, but in the journals of German, French, and English travellers: for during these centuries Italy was not a country in either a political or a sentimental sense; it was a place of recreation for gentlemen on the grand tour, pious folk bound Romeward, virtuosi seeking cla.s.sical remains, and elderly statesmen hoping to cure the gout. The several petty states were so many artificial gardens, where the peasants wore pretty costumes, the dukes sang prize songs, the d.u.c.h.esses trilled _tra la la_ in rival endeavour, and the ecclesiastics trolled out the chorus. It was the Italian opera bouffe on the most charming stage in the world. The best summary of the history of the coming century will be a series of extracts from the diary of a keen-witted French gentleman, travelling for pleasure, Michel de Montaigne, who, in the company of some friends, spent several months in Italy (1580-81). They crossed the Alps over the Brenner Pa.s.s and went by way of Trent. Montaigne's diary is sometimes written in the second and sometimes in the third person. He describes many of the princ.i.p.al cities.

VERONA (within the territory of the Republic of Venice).

"Without health certificates which they had got at Trent they could not have entered the city, although there was no rumour of any danger of pest; but it is the custom (in order to cheat us of the few pennies they cost). We went to see the cathedral, where Montaigne deemed the behaviour of the men at High Ma.s.s very peculiar; they chatted even in the choir of the church, standing up, with their hats on and their backs turned to the altar, and did not seem to pay any attention to the service except on the elevation of the Host. There were organs and violins to accompany the ma.s.s.... We went to see the castle and were shown all over by the lieutenant in charge. The [Venetian] government keeps sixty soldiers there, rather, according to what they said to Montaigne, against the people of the city than against foreigners. We also saw a congregation of monks called the Gesuati of St. Jerome [not Jesuits]. They are not priests; they neither say ma.s.s nor preach; most of them are ignorant, but they carry on a business of distilling lemon-flower water, both in Verona and elsewhere. They are dressed in white, with little white caps, and a dark brown gown over it; good-looking young men." They visited the Ghetto (Jews' quarter), and the Roman amphitheatre, which Montaigne thought the n.o.blest building he had ever seen.

VICENZA. "It is a big city, a little smaller than Verona, all full of palaces of the n.o.bility." The fair, which was held twice a year, was going on upon the parade-ground; booths had been built on purpose, and no shops in the city were allowed to keep open. In the town there was another establishment of the Gesuati, selling their perfumes and also medicines for every ailment. "These monks tell us that they whip themselves every day; each one has his switch at his post in the oratory, where they meet at certain hours of the day and pray, but they have no singing.... The old wine has given out, which vexed me, as it is not good for me, on account of my colic, to drink the new wines, though they are very good in their way." From Vicenza they journeyed by a broad straight road, ditched on either side and raised a little, which ran through a fertile champaign with mountains in the distance, to PADUA. The inns here could not be compared with German inns except that they were cheaper by a third. "The streets narrow and ugly, not many people, few handsome houses. We went about all the next day and saw the schools of fencing, dancing, and riding, where there were more than a hundred French gentlemen together." In fact, young men went in great numbers, young Frenchmen in particular, to the schools of Padua, less to acquire a knowledge of books than to acquire the accomplishments which were then the mode. One of Montaigne's party stopped here and found good lodging for seven crowns a month, and "he might have lodged a valet for five crowns more; ordinarily, however, they do not have valets, only a general servant for the house, or else maids; every one has a nice bedroom, but fire and lights in the bedroom are extra. The accommodation was very good, and you can live there very reasonably, and that, I think, is the reason why many strangers go there to live, even those who are not students."

VENICE. Here he dined with the French amba.s.sador "very well;"

among other things "that the amba.s.sador told him this seemed odd, that he had no social relations whatever with anybody in the city, because the people were so suspicious that a [Venetian] gentleman who should speak to him twice would fall under distrust." One is inclined, however, considering the fate of Milan, to regard a certain distrust of foreigners as not unnatural. Montaigne thought that the four most remarkable things about Venice were the situation, the police, the Piazza of St. Mark's, and the crowds of foreigners. He received as a gift a little book of "Letters" from a Venetian lady, one of that celebrated cla.s.s of Venetian women who were outside the matrimonial pale yet lived in ostentatious luxury, recognized by the government and by masculine society. This lady at mid-life had changed her ways and devoted herself to literature, and hearing of the famous French author, sent him her book.

Returning by way of Padua, Montaigne pa.s.sed the sulphur springs, frequented in May and August by the fas.h.i.+onable sick, who took mud or vapour baths and drank the waters. He noted the ca.n.a.ls; the system of irrigation in the plains, where rows of vine-laden trees intersected fields of wheat; the big, strong, gray oxen; the broad mud flats, once swamps, which the government was struggling to reclaim.

ROVIGO, a little town in Venetian territory near the Adige.

"There is as great abundance of meat here as in France, whatever it may be the custom to say, and though they use no lard for the roast, they do not take away the savour. The bedrooms, because there is no gla.s.s and they don't shut the windows, are not so clean as in France; the beds are better made, smoother, and well supplied with mattresses, but they have nothing but coa.r.s.e coverings, and they are very sparing of white sheets; if a man travels alone, or with little style, he won't get any. It is about as dear as in France, or a little dearer."

He crossed the Po, as he had crossed the Adige, upon some kind of pontoon bridge, and went on to

FERRARA (duchy of Ferrara), where he was delayed on account of his health certificate. The ducal regulations on this point were very particular. On the door of every room in the inn was written up, "Remember the health certificate;" immediately on arrival, names of travellers were reported to the magistrates. Montaigne found most of the streets broad and straight, all paved with bricks; there were many palaces, but few people, and he missed the porticos of Padua, so convenient against the rain. He _did_ the town, paid his respects to the duke, saw Ta.s.so in the madhouse, and found the lemon-flower distilling Gesuates again.

At BOLOGNA (in the Papal States), a large, fine city, bigger than Ferrara, and with many more people; he also found young Frenchmen come to learn riding and fencing. He admired the fine porticos, that covered almost every sidewalk, the handsome palaces, the buildings of the _School of Sciences_, the bronze statue of Neptune designed by John of Bologna, and enjoyed a company of players. "The cost of living was about the same as at Padua, very reasonable; but the city is less peaceful in the older quarters, which make debatable land between the partisans of different nations, on one side always the French, and on the other the Spaniards, who are there in great numbers."

This unpeaceful and factional condition was not confined to Bologna, but spread throughout the Papal States. Even fifty years later a perplexed visitor to Ravenna wrote: "The city is divided, as you know, into Guelfs and Ghibellines, so much so that one man won't go to another's church, and each side has its place in the public square; a tailor who works for one need not look for employment from the other, and so with all the trades; they distinguish one faction from the other by the way they wear their hair, their caps," etc. But these pale shadows of the great old parties were slight inconveniences compared with the banditti, who also decked themselves with old names, and, under pretence of fighting one another, robbed, burnt, pillaged, and murdered with perfect impartiality. The soldiers and the common people united against these rascals, but they were too strong to be utterly extirpated. In the Papal States, one Piccolomini, a member of a famous Sienese family, raided where he chose, and once led a band of two hundred men within a mile or two of the walls of Rome. Terms were made with him, for he was under the protection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and although he confessed to three hundred and seventy murders within twenty-five years, he was pardoned and absolved.

Leaving Bologna, Montaigne hesitated in his choice of roads on account of brigands, and chose wisely for he was not molested. He crossed the Apennines by a road, which he says is the first that could be called bad, and entered the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. One village on the way, still in papal territory, was famous for the knavery of the innkeepers, who made wonderful promises till the traveller was safely housed, and then rendered the scantest performance. At the next village, which was in Tuscany, rival hosts rode out to meet the traveller, and struggled to secure him, promising everything. One offered to serve a rabbit for dinner free, if Montaigne would lodge with him. The party prudently rode about to all the inns on a tour of inspection, examining food and wine, and making their bargain before dismounting; the host, however, managed to put extras on the bill, it being impossible to remember beforehand every item, wood, candles, linen, hay, etc.