|
Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy
vine shone green and bright, making unusual shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves. Past
quays and terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and repassing, and where idlers were
reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps. Past bridges, where there were idlers
too; loitering and looking over. Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the loftiest
windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of garden, theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of architecture -
Gothic - Saracenic - fanciful with all the fancies of all times and countries. Past buildings that were high,
and low, and black, and white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong. Twining
among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last into a Grand Canal! There, in the errant
fancy of my dream, I saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with shops and
humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for Desdemona's, leaned down through a
latticed blind to pluck a flower. And, in the dream, I thought that Shakespeare's spirit was abroad upon
the water somewhere: stealing through the city.
At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin, in a gallery outside the great
cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light,
and that its whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting themselves in splendid
coffee-houses opening from it - which were never shut, I thought, but open all night long. When the
bronze giants struck the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation of the city were all
centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with
sleeping boatmen wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.
But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking at their walls, and welling up into
the secret places of the town: crept the water always. Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and round it,
in its many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when people should look down into
its depths for any stone of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress.
Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona. I have, many and many a time,
thought since, of this strange Dream upon the water: half-wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be
VENICE.
CHAPTER VIII - BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS
OF THESIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
I had been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet.
But, I was no sooner come into the old market-place, than the misgiving vanished. It is so fanciful,
quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety of fantastic buildings,
that there could be nothing better at the core of even this romantic town: scene of one of the most
romantic and beautiful of stories.
It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House of the Capulets, now
degenerated into a most miserable little inn. Noisy vetturíni and muddy market-carts were disputing
possession of the yard, which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered geese; and
there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a doorway, who would certainly have had Romeo by
the leg, the moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times. The
orchard fell into other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but there used to be one attached to the
house - or at all events there may have, been, - and the hat (Cappęllo) the ancient cognizance of the
|
