Italian Journeys | Page 8

the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way,
we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the
end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was
not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that
long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective,
and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous
meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent
their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood.
There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country
girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of
corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found the house
inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty
as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch's
house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past is never molested by the
small household joys and troubles of the present. That house is vacant,
and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet's visitors may look down
from its windows over the slope of vines and olives which it crowns;
and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara, where the houses are so many and
the people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be left to him.
Parva sed apta mihi, he has contentedly written upon the front; but I
doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern
housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you
go up to the second story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear
of the building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room,
and looks down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden
the poet spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and
transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow
three months in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision.
It was probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason
that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to
describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house:
"It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his
poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It is
oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the
poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure
the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet's burly
great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library.

But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question
but it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet
kept a copy of his "Furioso," subject to the corrections and advice of
his visitors.
The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored
out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place
in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after
infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly
French-windowed.
Our portier said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul, who
had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
"Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
the noble families of Ferrara."
VI.
The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad
and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the
moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive
walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four
great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging
cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in
all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal
times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took
nothing of this charm from it; for the castle stands isolated in the midst
of the city, as its founder meant that it should [The castle of Ferrara was
begun in 1385 by Niccolò d'Este to defend himself against the
repetition of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded.
One of his tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before,
made himself so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity,
that they rose against him and demanded his life.