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
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
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 THE
SIMPLON 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 vetturini 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 (Cappello) the ancient cognizance of the
family, may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the
yard. The geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog,
were somewhat in the way of the story, it must be confessed; and it
would have been pleasanter to have found the house empty, and to
have been able to walk through the disused rooms. But the hat was
unspeakably comfortable; and the place where the garden used to be,
hardly less so. Besides, the house is a distrustful, jealouslooking
house as one would desire to see, though of a very moderate