Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy. George Edmund Street
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George Edmund Street
Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066234317
Table of Contents
BRICK AND MARBLE
IN THE
M I D D L E A G E S.
CHAPTER I.
“Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,
And I will see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.”
Tennyson.
Routes to Italy—Paris—Strasburg—Rouffach—Basel.
AN architectural tour in Italy seems to afford about as much prospect of pleasure and information combined as any which it is possible for an English student to take. He may see, if time allows, so much on his road, that whether one thinks of the journey or the end of it all is, at any rate in the perspective, charming. And in these days when, what with railways, through-tickets, and Cook’s and other guides for timid tourists, the journey from one end of Europe to the other is made so quickly and so cheaply as to be within most educated men’s reach, it is no wonder if most of us in our turn make the venture.
Many are the ways by which one may reach the North of Italy, but one or two only of them seem now to be commonly used, to the exclusion of all others, and with great loss of pleasure to all travellers who make the journey more than once. The natural, because the quickest, road is now by the Mont Cenis tunnel to Turin, and for the country described in these pages nothing can be more convenient. But when my first journey was made, it was more easy to take one of the passes leading to Milan, and so I went by the Splügen. Since those days I have found my way to and from Italy by other roads which I recommend strongly to others. I pass by such a well-known road as that by railway over the Brenner, in order to suggest three other roads, either of which brings the traveller down upon Venetia in the happiest possible frame of mind if he is at all capable of being moved to pleasure by the sight of exquisite scenery, pleasant and religious people, and roads and country not too much crowded with tourists.
The first of these is by the Lake of Constance, the Vorarlberg, and the Vintschgau to Botzen; the next by the Brenner pass as far as Franzensfeste, and thence by the Ampezzo pass through Cortina and Cadore—Titian’s country—to Conegliano, and so by railway to Venice, a road lighted up by the wild beauty of the Dolomite mountains and now unaccountably neglected by English tourists; the third, and perhaps the most charming, though somewhat indirect, and requiring more time, again by the Brenner as far as Franzensfeste, thence by railway to Lienz—stopping to see the fine church and Dolomite mountains at Innichen on the way—and then by country carriages from the Pusterthal into the Gailthal where there is the most charming combination I know of pastoral and picturesque scenery, seasoned by interesting old churches; and thence to Ober Tarvis and by the stern and magnificent Predil pass to the head of the Adriatic at Gorizia, whence—after seeing Aquileja and Grado—the traveller may, with halts at Udine and Pordenone, reach his goal at Venice by railway.
But in this my first journey to Italy, I was sufficiently happy in finding the Splügen prescribed for me as on the whole the most convenient mode of reaching in succession all the spots which had most special interest for me. My scheme was to make myself fairly well acquainted with some of the most interesting Italian cities north of the Apennines, and for this purpose to descend from the Splügen on Bergamo, and from thence to go on to Venice, halting as often as necessary by the way, and then to return by Mantua, Cremona, and Pavia, or by Ferrara, Bologna, Parma, and Piacenza to Milan, and so home. And railways, if they have made the journey somewhat more easy than it was, and have deprived it now and then of the charm which always attends the recollection of impediments and difficulties on the road, have not in any way altered the advantages of such a route for those whose tastes are at all akin to those which I carried abroad with me in those days, and carry still with undiminished strength. Whether, however, one enters Italy by one pass or another, the first part of one’s journey is by the well-worn road to Paris, which, by reason, I suppose, of its being the prelude to nearly every holiday tour that I make, never seems to be stale, old, or too well-known.
There is something very novel, and it strikes me more every time it is seen, in the aspect of everything directly you have crossed the Channel; indeed, there is no country in Europe so much as France, and no city, perhaps, so much as Paris, which strikes an Englishman as being foreign in its aspect, and new in all its customs and proceedings. The dress of every one, the arrangements of the railways, the harnessing and character of the horses, the mode of life in hotels, and the ordinary habits and pleasant traits of the middle classes are all quite fresh to the English eye. Nor is the aspect of the country less so: fields cut up into small strips of a dozen kinds of crops; unprosperous-looking cows, each feeding discontentedly and drearily, tethered to a man or woman on a small patch of grass; corn cut and then stacked in small cocks for a month or two of exposure to the pleasant changes of the atmosphere; and the entire absence of hedge-rows and other trees than poplars, all go to make up a thoroughly un-English picture.
After skirting the coast and its dreary expanse of sandhills, reminding one very much of those singular sands on the north coast of Cornwall, which are so often shifting about, covering up new churches, or uncovering the old oratory of some early British saint, we reach the banks of the Somme, and then travel along a poor peaty tract of country until the famous west front and short but lofty nave of Abbeville come