Ferrara

“ Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. ”

“ But the truth is different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. ”

“ In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign, the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of old romance. ”

“ We walked out in the evening, and found Ferrara enchanting. Of all the places I have seen in Italy, it is the one by far I should most covet to live in. It is the ideal of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar. The grass grows in the well-paved streets. ”

“ The Ferrara of the Middle Ages, like the Ferrara of to-day, is a paradox. No Italian State of similar power and magnificence ever exerted such disproportionate influence upon mediæval Italy; no city in United Italy in which are so combined the fascinating treasures of the past and modern political and industrial enterprise is so ignored by the casual traveller. ”

“ Foresti was born at Conselice in the Ferrarese. Few American travellers linger in Ferrara. Fresh from the more imposing attractions of Florence or Venice, this ancient Italian city offers little in comparison to detain the eager pilgrim; and yet to one cognizant of its history and alive to imaginative associations, this neglect might increase the charm of a brief sojourn. ”

“ The poets, however, who originated the romantic epic in Italian were much more important than the writers of Latin verse. The brilliant and sensuous court of Ferrara, together with the fascinating romance of the house of Este—which really belongs to the Middle Ages—and the charming nobility and modern chivalry, all contributed to the production of the epic, while the city of Ferrara, with its eventful history and its striking style of architecture, was a most favorable soil for it. Monuments of Roman antiquity are as rare in Ferrara as they are in Florence; everything is of the Middle Ages. ”

“ If I had been murdered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could forget it.
More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any city of the solemn brotherhood! The grass so grows up in the silent streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while the sun shines. ”

“ Think of it, lady, think of it."
"I will," said Olimpia, who had already done so. There is no doubt that she and the Mosca understood each other.
They were now riding up the long lime-tree avenue which leads to the Sea-Gate of Ferrara; soon they entered Ferrara itself, that city of warm red brick, of broad eaves, of laughter, and, as it were, a fairy-tale, bowered in rustling green. The streets ran wide between garden walls and the massy fronts of great square houses; they were full of a traffic which seemed that of a prosperous people bent upon pleasure. ”

“ We can imagine the beauty of the great hall at Ferrara when hung with this brilliant series, which was completed in 1523 by the “Bacchus and Ariadne” of the National Gallery. The whole company of bacchanals is given up to wanton merrymaking. Above them broods the deep blue sky and great white clouds of a summer day. The deep greens of the foliage throw the creamy-white and burning colour of the draperies and the fair forms of the nymphs into glowing relief, while by a convention the satyrs are of a deep, tawny complexion. ”

“ But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass through the places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the squares.
I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor feel as if the beating hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy! I wonder why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with unnecessary doors that can’t be shut, and will not open, and abut on pitchy darkness! ”

“ Under the House of Este, Ferrara was famous throughout Italy for its gayety and splendor. No city enjoyed more brilliant and more frequent public shows. Nowhere did the aristocracy maintain so much of feudal magnificence and chivalrous enjoyment. The square castle of red brick, which still stands in the middle of the town, was thronged with poets, players, fools who enjoyed an almost European reputation, court flatterers, knights, pages, scholars and fair ladies. ”

“ The town remained a part of the states of the Church, the fortress being occupied by an Austrian garrison from 1832 until 1859, when it became part of the kingdom of Italy.
A considerable area within the walls of Ferrara is unoccupied by buildings, especially on the north, where, the handsome Renaissance church of S. Cristoforo, with the cemetery, stands; but modern times have brought a renewal of industrial activity. Ferrara is on the main line from Bologna to Padua and Venice, and has branches to Ravenna and Poggio Rusco (for Suzzara) . ”

“ But no man avoids his destiny, because few draw wisdom from the past and none foresee the future. To Ferrara Tasso went with a blithe heart. Inclination, the custom of his country, the necessities of that poet's vocation for which he had abandoned a profession, poverty and ambition, vanity and the delights of life, combined to lure him to his ruin.
He found Ferrara far more magnificent than Urbino. ”

“ Ferrar, Robert, an English prelate, born at Halifax, was prior of the monastery of St. Oswald's, embraced the Reformation, and was made Bishop of St. David's by Edward VI.; suffered martyrdom under Mary in 1555.
Ferrara, a broadsword bearing the name of Andrea Ferrara, one of an Italian family famous in the 16th and 17th centuries for the quality of their swords.
Ferrara (31) , a fortified and walled Italian city, capital of the province of the name, situated on a low and marshy plain between the dividing branches of the Po, 30 m. from the Adriatic ”

“ Ferrara has a strong citadel which is still garrisoned by Austrian troops; and they will probably not easily be induced to evacuate it. The Austrian Eagle seldom looses his hold.
VENICE, 18th May.
On the 16th May at six o'clock in the morning I left Ferrara in a cabriolet to go to the Ponte di Lago oscuro, which is a large village on the south bank of the Po, three miles distant from Ferrara. A flying bridge wafted me across the river, which is exceedingly broad and rapid to the north bank, where a barge was in waiting to receive passengers for Venice. ”

“ Bologna, Nov. 5.—I fear I shall retain a disagreeable impression of Bologna, for here I am again ill. I have seen little of what the town contains of beautiful and curious: and that little, under unpleasant and painful circumstances.
Yesterday we passed through Ferrara; only stopping to change horses and dine. We snatched a moment to visit the hospital of St. Anna and the prison of Tasso—the glory and disgrace of Ferrara. Over the iron gate is written "Ingresso alia prigione di Torquato Tasso." The cell itself is miserably gloomy and wretched, and not above twelve feet square. ”

“ Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison [170] , has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the Gerusalemme. ”

“ Ferrara at that time perhaps the most attractive and desirable residence for a scholar, of any city in Italy.
DUKE HERCULES II.'S MARRIAGE.
Another circumstance occurred not many years after Morato's first establishment in Ferrara, which very notably contributed to impress a special character on the learned society there congregated, and to make that city a rallying point for the free thought, which was beginning yeast–like to heave the surface of Italian life. ”

“ Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city, admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before. In their stead arose, immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance, came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the solitary, grass-grown, withered town. ”

“ It is as timid as a nun's. Ferrara is the place of all the world for you. I look forward to your speedy establishment in a city where a girl may be like a flagstaff and yet not thought amiss."
Bellaroba looked humbly at herself in the glass; though she could see that she was pretty, it was not to be denied that she was thin. Ah, no; she did not take after her mother. Here she sighed to remember that her bosom friend, Olimpia Castaneve, took after hers only too well, and was to accompany her fortune-hunting in Ferrara for precisely opposite reasons. ”

“ It was, he perceived, an elaborated copy of Ferrara's room at Oxford; infinitely more spacious, of course, and by reason of the rugs, cushions and carpets with which its floor was strewn, suggestive of great opulence. But the littered table was there, with its nameless instruments and its extraordinary silver lamp; the mummies were there; the antique volumes, rolls of papyrus, preserved snakes and cats and ibises, statuettes of Isis, Osiris and other Nile deities were there; the many photographs of women, too (Cairn had dubbed it at Oxford "the zenana") ; above all, there was Antony Ferrara. ”

“ There indeed is a city and people unmistakably marked by Holy Mother Church, as her own; silence and solitude, decay, dilapidation, neglect, and sordid squallor, characterise the impress of her paternal hand. And yet more forcibly to point the moral of the spectacle, there remains sufficient traces of what Ferrara was in the young ungodly days of her lay government, to give all the force of contrast to her present condition. There is the gaunt frame of a city calculated to house four times the amount of its present population. ”

“ Pageants, hunting parties, theatrical entertainments, assumed fantastic forms of splendor in this capital, which no other city of Italy, except Florence and Venice upon rare occasions, rivaled.{29} For a long while past Ferrara had been the center of a semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry, emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique elements in a specific type of modern romance. ”

“ But so it is in Ferrara during November when the accompanying sketch was made, and every morning sees a thick coat of ice on the moat surrounding the castle. For although the good people wrapped themselves in heavy cloaks and thick coats and shivered over charcoal stoves, they still sat under their umbrellas. Habit breeds custom and custom lasts for ages.
The old city walls afford a delightful promenade of four miles or more in length. On one side, the town seems to be right in the middle of a huge market garden above the trees of which long red roofs and towers rise upwards. ”

“ Lovely in its Ruins—Number and Wealth of its Churches—Tasso's Prison—Renée's Palace—Calvin's Chamber—Influence of Woman on the Reformation—Renée and her Band—Re-union above—Utter Decay of its Trade, its Manufactures, its Knowledge.
Even in its ruins Ferrara is lovely. It wears in the tomb the sunset hues of beauty. Its streets run out in straight lines, and are of noble breadth and length. Unencumbered with the heavy arcades that darken Padua, the marble fronts of its palaces rise to a goodly height, covered with rich but exceedingly sweet and chaste designs. ”

“ It is not peopled in proportion to its size and grass is seen growing in several of the streets. I believe the unhealthiness of the environing country is the cause of the decrease of population, for Ferrara lies on a marshy plain, very liable to inundation In the centre of the city stands the ancient Palace of the Dukes of Ferrara, a vast Gothic edifice, square, and flanked with round towers, and a large court-yard in the centre. ”