stiffly to each other – a most extraordinary termination to the
perspective of some of the narrow streets. The colleges, and
churches too, and palaces: and above all the academy of Fine Arts,
where there are a host of interesting pictures, especially by
GUIDO, DOMENICHINO, and LUDOVICO CARACCI: give it a place of its
own in the memory. Even though these were not, and there were
nothing else to remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement
of the church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time
among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleasant
interest.
Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an
inundation which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was
quartered up at the top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room
which I never could find: containing a bed, big enough for a
boarding-school, which I couldn’t fall asleep in. The chief among
the waiters who visited this lonely retreat, where there was no
other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over the window,
was a man of one idea in connection with the English; and the
subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron. I made the
discovery by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the
matting with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at
that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been
much attached to that kind of matting. Observing, at the same
moment, that I took no milk, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, that
Milor Beeron had never touched it. At first, I took it for
granted, in my innocence, that he had been one of the Beeron
servants; but no, he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking
about my Lord, to English gentlemen; that was all. He knew all
about him, he said. In proof of it, he connected him with every
possible topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was
grown on an estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was
the very model of his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his
final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by which I
was going, had been Milor Beeron’s favourite ride; and before the
horse’s feet had well begun to clatter on the pavement, he ran
briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to tell some other Englishman
in some other solitary room that the guest who had just departed
was Lord Beeron’s living image.
I had entered Bologna by night – almost midnight – and all along
the road thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory:
which is not, in any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter’s
keys being rather rusty now; the driver had so worried about the
danger of robbers in travelling after dark, and had so infected the
brave Courier, and the two had been so constantly stopping and
getting up and down to look after a portmanteau which was tied on
behind, that I should have felt almost obliged to any one who would
have had the goodness to take it away. Hence it was stipulated,
that, whenever we left Bologna, we should start so as not to arrive
at Ferrara later than eight at night; and a delightful afternoon
and evening journey it was, albeit through a flat district which
gradually became more marshy from the overflow of brooks and rivers
in the recent heavy rains.
Page 46
Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I
arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental
operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar
to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it.
In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just
stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the
foreground was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the
parapet of a little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now
down into the water; in the distance, a deep bell; the shade of