Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy. George Edmund Street
alternately over each other, and common in most Italian brick buildings, are very ugly; there is, however, a good simple cloister attached to the church on the north; it is of the same design as almost all in this part of the world, having simple round shafts with carved caps and circular arches. An inner
cloister which I remember of old as occupied by the ever present Austrian soldiers, is now (1872) open to all the world, and neither cared for nor used. Here the south side of the cloister is of two stories in height, the lower similar to the our just mentioned, the upper having two arches to one arch of that below, and the arches picturesquely shaped, being cinquefoils, with the central division of ogee form, and with moulded terminations to the cusps. There is a fair campanile here, with brick traceries and strings, but with a modern belfry-stage.
A little bit of cloister, or gallery, on the north side of Sta. Afra, has arcading of similar character in its upper gallery, but the arches are trefoiled.
In the Contrada della Pace there remains a very bold fragment of a castle tower. It is built of very roughly-jointed stone, and is perfectly plain till near the top, where it has a bold machicolation with tall square angle-turrets, the whole battlemented with a forked battlement. Out of the centre of the tower a tall thin tower rises to some height above the battlements.
One of the most picturesque spots in the city is the Piazza, at the end of which stands the Palazzo della Loggia; the effect on coming into it from the narrow streets in which we had been wandering was very pleasant, the large open space being surrounded with rather elaborate Renaissance work with rich coloured sun-blinds projecting from the windows over the sunny pavement, which in its turn was thronged with people in picturesque attire selling fruit and vegetables. The streets are all arcaded, and some of them have very considerable remains of frescoes on the exterior, giving much interest to the otherwise ugly walls; they have, however, suffered very greatly from exposure, and are only in places intelligible; still they give traces of brilliant external colour, and are therefore much valued in my recollections of Brescia.
Compared with Bergamo, Brescia has the air of a smart and busy place; its streets are wider and better paved, and the smells which still greeted us were not quite so bad as there. The staple manufacture of the city seems to be that of copper vessels; shop after shop, indeed street after street, is full of coppersmiths’ shops; the men all sitting at work, and keeping up a ceaseless din of hammering, in open shops, so that all the world may see them. Nor is the coppersmiths’ the only trade that loves publicity, for here as elsewhere the barbers’ shops are very amusing, quite open in front, with perhaps a yellow curtain hanging down half way, affecting only to conceal the inviting interior, which however is always sufficiently visible, occupied in the centre by a chair, on which sits the customer gravely holding a soapdish to his chin whilst the barber operates; and this going on all day makes one think that shaving is, after all, one of the great works of an Italian’s time!
When we left Brescia the heat was intense; the road, too, was deep in dust to an extent not to be understood in England. There had been a drought of some weeks’ duration, and the much-travelled road from Milan to Verona, along which our way now lay, plainly told the tale which the dry, parched, cracked-looking earth on each side of our way, and the sad faces of every one as they talked about the failure of the vintage, amply confirmed. Unluckily for ourselves we had not taken the advice of our driver to have a close vehicle, but had insisted upon having an open carriage, the consequence of which piece of self-will was that we had hard work, even with the aid of umbrellas, to protect ourselves from coups de soleil. We now learnt that in hot weather in Italy it is not always the best plan to have as much of the sun as one can get. In England it always is, but he who acts on his English experience in Italy will surely repent his mistake.
We managed, however, to exist through the clouds of dust, relieved perhaps by the sight of a regiment of swarthy and unpleasant looking Austrian soldiers marching through the sun and dust, many of them with their knapsacks and arms, but all with great-coats on to preserve their white uniforms. When we saw them we could not help contrasting our relative lots, and then, feeling how much worse off they were than ourselves, we went on a little more contentedly than before. The road, too, became slightly more interesting; instead of miles upon miles of straight lines, we had a more winding way, and after a time occasional beautiful glimpses of the mountains which marked to us the situation of the Lago di Garda.
We drove without stopping through Donato, a place of no interest apparently save for the huge dome of its church, and then passing under a very fine viaduct resting upon a long range of pointed arches, (which carries the railway which soon after our return was opened, and now whisks only too many travellers from Milan to Venice and back without a halt on the way,) we commenced the descent towards the town of Desenzano, beyond and above whose roofs stretched the beautiful expanse of fair Lago di Garda, with its great calm surface, and fine group of distant mountains hemming in with picturesque and irregular outline, its upper end.
We soon reached the poor and desolate streets of the town, and diving into the dark court of the not over-clean looking hotel, gave ourselves up for a time to the contemplation of the quiet loveliness of the scene. The contrast between the flat shores of the lower part of the lake and the mountains which crowd around its head is very striking, and to this it is that Desenzano owes all that it has of interest. We strolled out for a short time, looked at washerwomen kneeling in small tubs on the edge of the lake, and washing their linen upon the smooth face of the stones which pave its shore, and then went on, as in duty bound, to look into the church. This we found to be neither very old nor very interesting, but curious as illustrating the extent to which, in Italy, the practice is sometimes carried of putting altars in every direction without reference to their orientation. Here the high altar and some others faced due south, whilst most of the remainder faced east, and I think scarcely one turned to the west.
The remains of an old castle rise picturesquely above the little harbour, from which steamboats sail for the tour of the lake, and bidding farewell for a time to dusty roads, let us embark on one of these for Riva at the head of the lake on our way to Trent, which is, artistically speaking, the northernmost really national city and cathedral in Italy.
Our steamboat kept to the west side of the lake, touching at a few villages and towns, and for the most part ploughing its way along beneath some of the highest and most precipitous rocks that I know. We took a band on board on the way, and discharged them into a big barge under a cliff, on the top of which was being held a village festa, at which they were to perform; and we all looked with no little compassion upon the heavily weighted performers as we saw the people who had preceded them climbing the steep mountain sides above us.
The Lago di Garda seems to me to be in its upper reach one of the most beautiful of Italian lakes. But it should always be taken in the way we went, for the contrast between the sublimity of the upper end and the tameness of the lower end is so great that nothing but disappointment would be felt by those who saw the head of the lake first.
One or two of the towns on the western shore have churches of some interest. At Salo there is a Gothic church with windows which have a wide external splay and an enriched brick moulding or label all round them. The windows are of one light, and have ogee-cusped heads. Another church, at (I think) Gargnano, is of much more importance. It is cruciform, with a domical lantern at the crossing. The nave has a simple clerestory and aisles, and the west end, built in black and white courses, has one great arch which encloses the doorway, above this a lancet window, and above this again a circular window without tracery.
From Riva—one of the most pleasant resting-places on the Italian lakes—a good road through fine scenery leads to Trent, a journey of some six or eight hours. The descent upon Trent is very fine. The town standing by itself well away from the fine mountains which form the background to the view, the old walls and towers around it, and the interest of the cathedral and other buildings behind them, combine to give a sense of the importance and grandeur of the city which the facts of the case hardly justify.