Italy, the Magic Land Part 22

As Florence is pre-eminently the city of culture, so is Milan of activities. Her keynote is _modernite_. The visitor is at once impressed by her energy, her enterprise, and her commercial prosperity. Milan has the best munic.i.p.al facilities and conveniences in all Italy. The electric lighting of streets, public buildings, and residences, the street transit, the arrangement and conduct of shops and all industrial matters, are in such contrast to any other city in Italy as to lead the sojourner to ask himself whether he can still be on the southern side of the Alpine range. In the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele Milan has the most wonderful structure in all Europe. This arcade was built in 1865, and under the magnificent gla.s.s dome it includes nearly one hundred of the most attractive and well-stocked shops, bazaars, and establishments. The dome is decorated with frescoes and caryatides, and with the statues of numbers of eminent men, among whom are Dante, Raphael, Savonarola, and Cavour. The offices and banks in Milan are centres of incessant energy.

For all this stress of activity the visitor does not, however, forget the art features; the visit to the antique Church of St. Ambrosio; to the old convent where Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated fresco, "The Last Supper," is to be seen, though so faded that it is now difficult to discern all the figures. Nor does he fail to climb the wonderful cathedral that lifts its airy grace, as if about to float upward in the skies. Every flight of the steps, in the ascent, brings one to a new vision of beauty. On the roof of this cathedral one wanders as in a very forest of sculpture. Its scheme of decoration includes more than two thousand statues, two of which are by Canova. From the summit, when the air is clear, there are beautiful views of the Alps.

To the savant and scholar the Ambrosian library in Milan is one of the special treasures of Europe. It contains some of the most rare and valuable ma.n.u.scripts in the entire world,--some of Virgil's with annotations from Petrarcha; a ma.n.u.script of Dante's; drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and other interesting matters of which no other copies exist.

The Magic Land is seen under its most bewitching spell in the region of the Italian lakes. The palace of Isola Bella; the charming gardens; the lake of Como, green-walled in hills whose luxuriant foliage and bloom form a framework for the white villas that cl.u.s.ter on their terraced slopes,--all form a very fairyland of ethereal, rose-embowered beauty.

At night the lakes are a strange, unreal world of silver lights and shadows.

The completion of the Simplon tunnel has opened between Italy and Paris a route not only offering swifter facilities for transit, but adding another to the regions of beauty. This route has also still further increased the commercial importance of Milan, the portal and metropolis of Northern Italy. Milan has become the national centre of all scientific and technical pursuits, and it is fairly the Mecca for young men of Central and Southern Italy who are entering into the professions, or into civil and electrical engineering and other of the technical arts and industries.

Bologna, with her historic University, with the long covered arcades of the streets, the fountain, which is the work of Giovanni di Bologna, and the gallery where many of Guido's best works are placed, has its individual interest for the tourist; and Verona, Pavia, Modena, Parma, and Turin all repay a visit from the leisurely saunterer in Italy.

Pisa offers to the visitor four interesting architectural monuments in the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, all of which are unique. The cathedral has unique designs in its black and white marbles that render it almost as much an object of artistic study as is the cathedral in Siena. The view from the summit of the Leaning Tower reveals the Mediterranean six miles in the distance, gleaming like a sea of silver. The Campo Santo dates from the thirteenth century, when the earth of which it is composed was brought (in 1228) from the holy places in Jerusalem, conveyed to the city (then a seaport) by fifty galleys sent out by the Republic of Pisa. The interior walls of the Campo Santo are covered with fresco paintings by Orcagna which are one of the artistic spectacles of the country in their extravagant portrayal of theological beliefs, so realistically presented in their dramatic scenes from Paradise and from Hades, as to leave nothing to the imagination. The fantasies in this emblematic sculpture of memorial monuments over a period of seven hundred years can be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa,--a strange and often a most grotesque medley.

Genoa is well named La Superba. Her thoroughfares are streets of palaces. Her terraced gardens and villas, reached by the subterranean funicular street railway, are regions of unique and incomparable beauty, with the blue Mediterranean at their feet. Genoa is the paradise for walking. The streets are largely inaccessible to carriages, but the admirable street electric railway penetrates every locality. It pa.s.ses in dark tunnels under the hills, reappears on the high terraces, and climbs every height. From the crest of one of these Corsica can often be seen. All the hill-slopes are a dream of pictorial grandeur, with their terraces, their palaces, their sculpture, fountains, and flowers. On the summit of almost every hill there is a fortress, and often ramparts which are silhouetted, in dark ma.s.ses, against the sky. Orange groves abound on the terraces, often showing the golden fruit, buds, and blossoms all at the same time.

Genoa is fairly a metropolis of sculpture. The great families have themselves perpetuated in portrait statues rather than in painted portraits. In one of the grand ducal palaces in the Via Balbi the visitor may see, not only the life-size statues and the busts of the family ancestry, but one group comprising nine figures, where three generations are represented, in both sitting and standing poses, ingeniously combined.

The churches of Genoa are among the richest in Europe. That of the Annunziata, the special monument of the Lomellini family, glitters and gleams with its gold ceilings and rich frescoes. The cathedral has the special allurement of the emerald dish which King Solomon received as a gift from the Queen of Sheba. The little "street of the jewellers" is an alluring place,--so narrow that one can almost stand in the centre of the road and touch the shop windows on either hand, and these windows dazzle the eye with their fascinating glitter of gold and silver filigree work and their rich jewels.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAMPO SANTO, GENOA _Page 453_]

Beyond all other curious excursions that even a Magic Land can offer is that to the Campo Santo of Genoa. A cloistered promenade encloses a square, and above are terraced colonnades, each and all revealing statues, and monuments, and groups of sculpture whose varied beauty, oddity, or bizarre effects are a curious study. Some memorials--as one of an angel with outstretched wings; another of a flight of angels bearing the soul away; another combining the figure of Christ with the cross, and angels hovering near--are full of beauty. Others are a marvel of ingenious and incongruous combination. One of the latter represents the man whose memory it commemorates as lying on his bed in his last illness; the physician stands by, his fingers on the patient's pulse; on the opposite side a maid is approaching with a dish holding some article of food, and near the physician are grouped the wife, with a little child clinging to her skirts; the son, holding his hat with both hands and looking down on it, and the daughter, a young girl, with her eyes raised to heaven. Each of these figures is in life size; the bed is reproduced in marble, with the pillows and all the coverings in the most absolute realism, and the entire effect is so startling in its bizarre aspect that one could hardly believe in its existence until by personal observation he had verified so singular a monument.

Yet there is beauty and symbolic loveliness, too, in many of the memorial sculptures of this Campo Santo, and turning away from this cemetery in which lies the body of the n.o.ble Mazzini, one hears on the air the refrain of his words on Dante:--

"It appeared to him of more importance to hasten to accomplish his mission upon earth, than to meditate upon the inevitable hour which marks for all men the beginning of a new task. And if at times he speaks of weariness of life, it is only because he sees evil more and more triumphant in the places where his mission was appointed.

He concerned himself, not about the length or the shortness of life, but about the end for which life was given; for he felt G.o.d in life, and knew the creative virtue there is in action."

Eighty thousand people followed Mazzini to his tomb, and his name lives in the Italy of to-day as one to be a.s.sociated with that of Dante as prophet and inspirer.

The enchantment of approaching Genoa from the sea at night is an experience to remain as one of the pictorial treasures of memory. The magnificent _lanterna_, the lighthouse with its revolving light, that can be seen for fifty miles out from the coast; the brilliant illumination defining the _fortezza_ on the summit of one hill; the curving lights of the terraced residential district and the illumination of the very forest of s.h.i.+pping cl.u.s.tered in the bay,--all combine into a scene not easily effaced from the memories of foreign scenes.

It is only in close relations with Italian literature that Italy can be adequately enjoyed and that the sojourner may enter into sympathetic a.s.sociations with contemporary Italian life. Dr. Richard Garnett believes that the literature of Italy "is a less exhaustive manifestation than elsewhere of the intellect of the nation," and that "the best energies of the country are employed in artistic production.

It is, indeed, remarkable," he continues, "that out of the nine Italians most brilliantly conspicuous in the first rank of genius and achievement,--Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, t.i.tian, Galileo, Napoleon,--only one should have been a man of letters."

Contemporary Italian literature follows the trend of the day in reflecting the life of the people. The novels of Fogazzaro, the poems of Carducci, the biography and history written by Villari, to say nothing of several other writers who, while not approaching these authors, have still a definite place in the literature of the present, offer illumination on the outer scenery of life, and offer interpretation of the life itself. Art has declined; literature has advanced in Italy, even within the past decade. The law of progress is as inevitable as is the law of gravitation.

"Onward the chariot of the Unvarying moves; Nor day divulges him nor night conceals; Thou hear'st the echo of unreturning hooves, And thunder of irrevocable wheels."

The future of Italy inspires faith in the renewal of its n.o.blest ideals of achievement. Its ineffable beauty is a heritage of joy to every visitor who comes under the indescribable spell of its attraction and finds that, in all the panorama of foreign life which haunts his memory, it is Italy which s.h.i.+nes resplendent as the Magic Land!