Italian Journeys | Page 5

to vex them in their
decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the
gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave
signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the
reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old
cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with
the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with
the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to
restrain his sense of outrage at finding them inhabited, and their rest
broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness; at seeing places that
would gladly have had done with history still doomed to be parts of
political systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides
and caricatures of the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against her
will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion
of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its day long
before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords; and then,
its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its fall,
and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the
right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended
with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope declared it reverted to
the Holy See; and I always fancied that it must have received with a
spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which
bloody-handed France distributed to the Italian cities in 1796; that it
must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid

transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan
Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic, and the
Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk back again under the rule
of the Popes with gratitude and relief at last--as phantoms are reputed
to be glad when released from haunting the world where they once
dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as
from personal feeling; for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past,
and must be inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly
domination, assured that though it consumed my substance, yet it
would be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to feel that
my old churches were safe from demolition: that my old convents and
monasteries should always shelter the pious indolence of friars and
nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint
corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle, snuff-taking abbés
writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating
them to the present heirs of past renown; while the thinker and the
reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being myself done with
war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they are under the
Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the Legates taxed
them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get my soul
out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in
the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as
sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and
that under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being
in any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted,
but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of
Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many
of her streets without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a
whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always
strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world worthy to compete with

Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It
is the newer part of the town--the modern quarter built before Boston
was settled or Ohio was known--which is loneliest; and whatever
motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the
ancient holds of life--about the street before the castle of the Dukes,