Upper Italy

“ I never cast my eyes over this poor map of Italy, capriciously rent into unequal fragments, without one consoling reflection.
Nature, which has done everything for the Italians, has taken care to surround their country with magnificent barriers. The Alps and the sea protect it on all sides, isolate it, bind it together as a distinct body, and seem to design it for an individual existence. To crown all, no internal barrier condemns the Italians to form separate nations. ”

“ On very early spring days a mantle was suddenly lifted; the Alps were an apex of natural glory, towards which, in broadening spaces of light, the whole of Europe sloped upwards. Through them, on the right hand, as he journeyed on, were the doorways to Italy, to Como or Venice, from yonder peak Italy's self was visible!—as, on the left hand, in the South-german towns, in a high-toned, artistic fineness, in the dainty, flowered ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. ”

“ The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star shines like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria; they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby, spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so prodigal of this old Italy of theirs—and ours. All this I have been watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance at the end of every street. ”

“ For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. ”

“ I see everywhere the gardens, the vineyards, the orchards, with the various greens of the olive, the fig, and the orange. It is always picturesque, because the country is broken and even rugged; it is always interesting, because of the contrast with the mountains and the desert; it has the color that makes Southern Italy so poetic. It is the fairest field for the experiment of a contented community, without any poverty and without excessive wealth. ”

“ The new life of Italy is apparent in its cities more than in the country. A change of government does not change the face of nature. The hills that bear the olive and the vine, were as fresh and green under the rule of Austria as they are now under that of Victor Emmanuel. ”

“ Oh, Florry, does not your heart yearn toward benighted Italy? Italy, once so beautiful and noble—once the acknowledged mistress of the world, as she sat in royal magnificence enthroned on her seven hills; now a miserable waste, divided between petty sovereigns, and a by-word for guilt and degradation! The glorious image lies a ruin at our feet: for the spirit that gave beauty and strength, and shed a halo of splendor round its immortal name, has fled afar, perhaps forever ”

“ But Italy—the Niobe of nations—defending with half-broken heart, the youngest child, hope, in her bosom; Italy, after long, dark centuries, awakened to new life, languishing after light, liberty, a higher humanity; longing to become herself, a pure harmonious note in the choir of free peoples—this Italy attracted me with irresistible power. ”

“ Its hard yet beneficent climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. ”

“ On my passage through Milan, a great people aroused was for a moment opening its eyes. Italy was recovering from her sleep, and remembering her genius as it were a heavenly dream: useful to our reviving country, she brought to the shabbiness of our poverty the grandeur of the Transalpine nature, nurtured as she was, that Ausonia, on the master-pieces of the arts and the lofty reminiscences of the famous motherland. Austria has come; she has again laid her cloak of lead over the Italians; she has forced them back into their coffin. Rome has re-entered her ruins, Venice her sea. ”

“ From these events emerged modern Italy—the rise of her vigorous republics, Pisa, Genoa, Flor [Pg viii] ence, Venice; the dawn, meridian splendor and decline of her great schools of sculpture, painting and architecture, the power and beauty of which have held the world in subjection; her literature, to which also the world has become a willing captive; her splendid municipal spirit; a Church, whose influence has circled the globe, and in which historians, in a spiritual sense, have seen a survival of Imperial Rome. ”

“ Bologna, Padua and Vicenza, and Siena, which I saw mainly in the summer.
It is curious how one's associations change: nowadays Italy means mainly certain familiar effects of light and cloud, certain exquisitenesses of sunset amber against ultramarine hills, of winter mists among misty olives, of folds and folds of pale blue mountains; it is a country which belongs to no time, which will always exist, superior to picturesqueness and romance. ”

“ Italy, France, and Spain
In Italy a variety of changes were made. The Pope got back the States of the Church; Tuscany was restored to its king; the same was the case with Naples, King Murat being driven from his throne and put to death. Piedmont, increased by the Republic of Genoa, was restored to the king of Sardinia. Some smaller states were formed, as Parma, Modena, and Lucca. Finally, Lombardy and Venice, much the richest regions of Italy, were given to Austria, which country was made the dominant power in the Italian peninsula. ”

“ 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, superstitious; 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. ”

“ The history of Southern Italy indeed is mainly a foreign one, the history of modern Rome merges in that of the Papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities—points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the minuteness of private life. ”

“ Northern Italy is the home of the old masters in art and literature and of a new industrialism that is bringing renewed prosperity to Milan and Turin. Here the virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative, reliable race. ”

“ The blue Mediterranean with warm and buoyant waters laps and breaks around Italy’s peninsula, and Italy’s people are none the less fond of their fair and treacherous sea than we of our greyer and more boisterous Atlantic, even though theirs leaves them no passage northward into other lands, nor binds them about with her waves. ”

“ The peninsula of Italy, the central seat of the great Roman Empire, was, at the opening of the nineteenth century, as sadly broken up as Germany, a dozen weak states taking the place of the one strong one that the good of the people demanded. The independent cities of the mediæval period no longer held sway, and we hear no more of wars between Florence, Genoa, Milan, Pisa and Rome; but the country was still made up of minor states—Lombardy, Venice and Sardinia in the north, Naples in the south, Rome in the centre, and various smaller kingdoms and dukedoms between. ”

“ But, in Italy, they gain more by distance than majesty: they gain life. They cease to be the cold forgetful things they were; they hold the noble plains in their lap, and become venerable, as having looked down upon them, and watched over them for ever, unchanging; they become part of the pictures of associations; we endow them with memory, and then feel them to be possessed of all that is glorious on earth.
For these three reasons, then, the plains of Italy possess far more elevation of character than her hill scenery. ”

“ TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA.
There is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-road between Genoa and Spezzia. On one side: sometimes far below, sometimes nearly on a level with the road, and often skirted by broken rocks of many shapes: there is the free blue sea, with here and there a picturesque feluca gliding slowly on; on the other side, are lofty hills, ravines besprinkled with white cottages, patches of dark olive woods, country churches with their light open towers, and country houses gaily painted. ”

“ At the period of which we write, Italy had become the leading nation of Europe in all that pertained to literature and the arts; her painters, sculptors, and poets, had thrown over her people and history a glory, or rather a glamour, which was but the iridescence which whispered of decay. Within a century all had sunk into insignificance and palsy. To-day the world visits Italy to see with curious eyes what she has been, not what she is. ”

“ In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor ou are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man. ”

“ The peculiar landscape of Italy lay before us in all its loveliness—the far-off hills lightly tinted with the divided colors of distance, the atmosphere between absolutely clear and invisible, and villages clustered about, each with its ancient castle on the hill-top above, just as it was settled in feudal times, and 295 as painters and poets would imagine it. ”

“ CHAPTER XXII THE ITALIAN CITIES AND THE RENAISSANCE
Italy the center of European culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
117. While England and France were settling their differences in the wretched period of the Hundred Years' War, and the little German principalities, left without a leader, [212] were busied with their petty concerns, Italy was the center of European culture. Its cities,—Florence, Venice, Milan, and the rest,—reached a degree of prosperity and refinement undreamed of beyond the Alps. ”

“ The village itself is not pretty, but around it on the sea shore, with gardens sloping down into the very waves, and stone loggias and terraces whose feet stand in the water, above it on the hill-side, girt about with woods and vineyards, stand many a grand old palace or cool and pleasant villa. True, there are here, as everywhere else, in Northern Italy, queer examples of modern Italian architecture, in thin, tall houses, painted over with every crude tint of scarlet, orange, blue, and violet, bearing staring frescoes of horses and water-nymphs, and balconies out of perspective. ”

“ In fact, as I think of it, this lovely projection of land, no wider than to permit of a few small villages and cities crowding between the sea and the mountains, is a true projection of Italy itself, its palms, olive trees, cypresses, umbrella trees and its peasants and architecture. I understand that a bastard French—half French, half Italian—is spoken here and that only here are the hill cities truly the same as they are in Italy. ”

“ The Alps, now covered deep with snow, are close upon it, and here and there seem almost ready to tumble into the houses. The contrast this part of Italy presents to the rest, is amazing. Beautifully made railroads, admirably managed; cheerful, active people; spirit, energy, life, progress. In Milan, in every street, the noble palace of some exile is a barrack, and dirty soldiers are lolling out of the magnificent windows—it seems as if the whole place were being gradually absorbed into soldiers. In Naples, something like a hundred thousand troops. ”

“ Every traveller in Italy will recall the emotion with which he first saw Rome rising from the green stretches of the Campagna, recognised the domes and campaniles of Florence, or lifted up his eyes to one of those towered "cities set upon an hill, which cannot be hid"—Siena, Perugia, or Orvieto. Among the many appeals which Italy makes to æsthetic appreciation is that of infinite variety. In no country are the different styles and periods so wonderfully exemplified. ”

“ Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy. Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope, the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for unity. ”