The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 24

Some of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Venice from

Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were

expected every day. We heard of no casualties among them, and no

sickness.

We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we rattled through a

good deal of country by rail without caring to stop. I took few notes.

I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we

arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the

place is so justly celebrated.

Pistoia awoke but a passing interest.

Florence pleased us for a while. I think we appreciated the great figure

of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape

of the Sabines. We wandered through the endless collections of paintings

and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course. I make that

statement in self-defense; there let it stop. I could not rest under the

imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles

of picture galleries. We tried indolently to recollect something about

the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose

quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine

history, but the subject was not attractive. We had been robbed of all

the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of

railroading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of

daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence. We had

seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed

the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because

his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a

damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had

accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great

men, they had still let him rot there. That we had lived to see his dust

in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of

literati, and not to Florence or her rulers. We saw Dante's tomb in that

church, also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that

the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give

much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor

to herself. Medicis are good enough for Florence. Let her plant Medicis

and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was

wont to lick the hand that scourged her.

Magnanimous Florence! Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in

mosaic. Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world. Florence

loves to have that said. Florence is proud of it. Florence would foster

this specialty of hers. She is grateful to the artists that bring to her

this high credit and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she

encourages them with pensions. With pensions! Think of the lavishness

of it. She knows that people who piece together the beautiful trifles

die early, because the labor is so confining, and so exhausting to hand

and brain, and so she has decreed that all these people who reach the age

of sixty shall have a pension after that! I have not heard that any of

them have called for their dividends yet. One man did fight along till

he was sixty, and started after his pension, but it appeared that there

had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up

and died.

These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a

mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud,

so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color

the pieces bear, as to form a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals

complete, and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had

builded it herself. They will counterfeit a fly, or a high-toned bug, or

the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle of a breastpin, and do it

so deftly and so neatly that any man might think a master painted it.

I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence--a little

trifle of a centre table--whose top was made of some sort of precious

polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the figure of a flute, with

bell-mouth and a mazy complication of keys. No painting in the world

could have been softer or richer; no shading out of one tint into another

could have been more perfect; no work of art of any kind could have been

more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multitude of little

fragments of stone of which they swore it was formed would bankrupt any

man's arithmetic! I do not think one could have seen where two particles

joined each other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness. Certainly we could

detect no such blemish. This table-top cost the labor of one man for ten

long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand

dollars.

We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to

weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli,

(I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside

elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties--such being the fashion

in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and

admire the Arno. It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great

historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating

around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water

into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a

river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the

delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good

to wade.

How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices

sometimes! I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence

and find it all beautiful, all attractive. But I do not care to think of

it now, at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy

marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe

--copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be

shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of. I

got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that

labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all

alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning. It was a pleasant

night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were

cheerful lights about. Later, I grew accustomed to prowling about

mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with

coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face,

and not finding it doing any thing of the kind. Later still, I felt

tired. I soon felt remarkably tired. But there was no one abroad, now

--not even a policeman. I walked till I was out of all patience, and very

hot and thirsty. At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I came

unexpectedly to one of the city gates. I knew then that I was very far

from the hotel. The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and

they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets. I said:

"Hotel d'Europe!"

It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was

Italian or French. The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me,

and shook their heads and took me into custody. I said I wanted to go

home. They did not understand me. They took me into the guard-house and

searched me, but they found no sedition on me. They found a small piece

of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,

seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity. I continued to say Hotel

d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young

soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something. He said he

knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent

him away with me. We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it

appeared to me, and then he got lost. He turned this way and that, and

finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder

of the morning trying to find the city gate again. At that moment it

struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.

It was the hotel!

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there

that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the

government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly

and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the

people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies

with friends. My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant. I

will change the subject.

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has

any knowledge of--the Leaning Tower. As every one knows, it is in the

neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high--and I beg to observe

that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four

ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a

very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to,

even when it stands upright--yet this one leans more than thirteen feet

out of the perpendicular. It is seven hundred years old, but neither

history or tradition say whether it was built as it is, purposely, or

whether one of its sides has settled. There is no record that it ever

stood straight up. It is built of marble. It is an airy and a beautiful

structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns,

some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were

handsome when they were new. It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a

chime of ancient bells. The winding staircase within is dark, but one

always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally

gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or

dip of the tower. Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on one end;

others only on the other end; others only in the middle. To look down

into the tower from the top is like looking down into a tilted well. A

rope that hangs from the centre of the top touches the wall before it

reaches the bottom. Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether

comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your

breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out

far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your flesh creep, and

convinces you for a single moment in spite of all your philosophy, that

the building is falling. You handle yourself very carefully, all the

time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling

weight will start it unless you are particular not to "bear down" on it.

The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in Europe. It

is eight hundred years old. Its grandeur has outlived the high

commercial prosperity and the political importance that made it a

necessity, or rather a possibility. Surrounded by poverty, decay and

ruin, it conveys to us a more tangible impression of the former greatness

of Pisa than books could give us.

The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a

stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure. In it

hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum.

It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of

science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it

has. Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a crazy

universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this sedate parent.

He appeared to have an intelligent expression about him of knowing that

he was not a lamp at all; that he was a Pendulum; a pendulum disguised,

for prodigious and inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not

a common pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendulum--the

Abraham Pendulum of the world.

This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes

we have read of. The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an

octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most

melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine. It

was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by

distance. I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be the case

my ear is to blame--not my pen. I am describing a memory--and one that

will remain long with me.

The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher

confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of

the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and

which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy

by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one

of the cemeteries of Pisa. The tombs are set in soil brought in ships

from the Holy Land ages ago. To be buried in such ground was regarded by

the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation than many masses

purchased of the church and the vowing of many candles to the Virgin.

Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old. It was one of the

twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that commonwealth which has left

so many monuments in testimony of its extraordinary advancement, and so

little history of itself that is tangible and comprehensible. A Pisan

antiquarian gave me an ancient tear-jug which he averred was full four

thousand years old. It was found among the ruins of one of the oldest of

the Etruscan cities. He said it came from a tomb, and was used by some

bereaved family in that remote age when even the Pyramids of Egypt were

young, Damascus a village, Abraham a prattling infant and ancient Troy

not yet [dreampt] of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol of a

household. It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos

more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the

long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar

footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the

chorus, a vanished form!--a tale which is always so new to us, so

startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how

threadbare and old it is! No shrewdly-worded history could have brought

the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age before us clothed with human

flesh and warmed with human sympathies so vividly as did this poor little

unsentient vessel of pottery.

Pisa was a republic in the middle ages, with a government of her own,

armies and navies of her own and a great commerce. She was a warlike

power, and inscribed upon her banners many a brilliant fight with Genoese

and Turks. It is said that the city once numbered a population of four

hundred thousand; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, now, her

ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead. Her battle-flags

bear the mold and the dust of centuries, her marts are deserted, she has

shrunken far within her crumbling walls, and her great population has

diminished to twenty thousand souls. She has but one thing left to boast

of, and that is not much, viz: she is the second city of Tuscany.

We reached Leghorn in time to see all we wished to see of it long before

the city gates were closed for the evening, and then came on board the

ship.

We felt as though we had been away from home an age. We never entirely

appreciated, before, what a very pleasant den our state-room is; nor how

jolly it is to sit at dinner in one's own seat in one's own cabin, and

hold familiar conversation with friends in one's own language. Oh, the

rare happiness of comprehending every single word that is said, and

knowing that every word one says in return will be understood as well!

We would talk ourselves to death, now, only there are only about ten

passengers out of the sixty-five to talk to. The others are wandering,

we hardly know where. We shall not go ashore in Leghorn. We are

surfeited with Italian cities for the present, and much prefer to walk

the familiar quarterdeck and view this one from a distance.

The stupid magnates of this Leghorn government can not understand that so

large a steamer as ours could cross the broad Atlantic with no other

purpose than to indulge a party of ladies and gentlemen in a pleasure

excursion. It looks too improbable. It is suspicious, they think.

Something more important must be hidden behind it all. They can not

understand it, and they scorn the evidence of the ship's papers. They

have decided at last that we are a battalion of incendiary, blood-thirsty

Garibaldians in disguise! And in all seriousness they have set a

gun-boat to watch the vessel night and day, with orders to close down on

any revolutionary movement in a twinkling! Police boats are on patrol

duty about us all the time, and it is as much as a sailor's liberty is

worth to show himself in a red shirt. These policemen follow the

executive officer's boat from shore to ship and from ship to shore and

watch his dark maneuvres with a vigilant eye. They will arrest him yet

unless he assumes an expression of countenance that shall have less of

carnage, insurrection and sedition in it. A visit paid in a friendly

way to General Garibaldi yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of

our passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions the

government harbors toward us. It is thought the friendly visit was only

the cloak of a bloody conspiracy. These people draw near and watch us

when we bathe in the sea from the ship's side. Do they think we are

communing with a reserve force of rascals at the bottom?

It is said that we shall probably be quarantined at Naples. Two or three

of us prefer not to run this risk. Therefore, when we are rested, we

propose to go in a French steamer to Civita and from thence to Rome, and

by rail to Naples. They do not quarantine the cars, no matter where they

got their passengers from.