Italian Journeys | Page 6

and in the elder and narrower streets branching away from the piazza of
the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In
the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and people wanted to sell us
things, with an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping
apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the presence of strangers spending
two days in Ferrara when they could have got away sooner, was the
only emotion which the whole population agreed in expressing with
any degree of energy, but into this they seemed to throw their whole
vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns
the gratification of their curiosity, from which no consideration of
decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us
with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at
street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were
English or German. We might have thought this interest a tribute to
something peculiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended
other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of
craving to know more of us all, when on the third day the whole city
assembled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry,
the departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our
luggage from their midst.
IV.
I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the Four
Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for its quaint,
rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that beloved
Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we continually
wandered back to it from other more properly interesting objects. It is
horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors soon drove us
forth, after we had looked at the Last Judgment by Bastianino. The
style of this painting is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's
notion of putting his friends in heaven and his foes in hell is by no

means novel; but he has achieved fame for his picture by the original
thought of making it his revenge for a disappointment in love. The
unhappy lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, in the
attitude of supplicating the pity and interest of another maiden in
Paradise who accepted Bastianino, and who consequently has no mercy
on her that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value than this
fresco the sincere old sculptures on the façade of the cathedral, in
which the same subject is treated, beginning from the moment the
archangel's trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly out of
their graves at the summons are all admirable; but the best among them
is the excellent man with one leg over the side of his coffin, and
tugging with both hands to pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles
off behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of this early riser is
clean, for he makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few
thousand years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of
doom, but some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final
reward of the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in
the lap of a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in
Abraham's bosom; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and
feeling upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of
immense pots. It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly
bliss as figured in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether
the artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic
as it is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here
punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as well as
their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an
undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us well
as agony.
We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the
Duomo toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a
Ghetto to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and,
throughout the government of the Dukes, were free to live where they
chose in the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a
separate quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of

Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four
synagogues for the four languages,--Spanish, German,