Pleiades
Asolando
Tufnin was a Venetian lady (had she that Venetian hair of old red gold ?) who, at the end of the Middle Ages, became by marriage Queen of Cyprus. When her husband died, and there was no heir, the city of Venice, after waiting quietly for a few years, gently ousted her from her island ; and she departed, not without royal provision for her needs, to live at Asolo, a little hill-town under the shadow of the Alps, some thirty or forty miles to the west of her birth-place. At Asolo she had a secretary called Bembo, afterwards a cardinal and a scholar of some fame ; and Bembo, loving the little town and the winding walks around it, among the foothills of the Alps, is said to have coined a new verb asolare (from which Browning drew the title of his Asolando), to signify the art of strolling and taking delight in the open air. Every visitor to Asolo embraces the verb, or at any rate the action it signifies, with a natural aptitude ; and as he strolls, and looks abroad, he cannot but charge his mind with beauty and with memory.
To the north, a few miles away (but it would take some ten hours to walk there), there rises the wall of the Alps. And what a wall it is ! For mile upon mile, as the train runs eastward along the plain from Milan to the Adriatic, you see it piled aloft --a solid wall, rising straight from the great plain, thousands and thousands of feet in height. To it, for century upon century, the peasant of the plain has lifted his eyes, and there he has seen what for hint must be the moenia naindi—the end of the tilth and the order and the life he knows ; the end of his world ; the barrier of his universe. Not that it has been an impregnable barrier. The Plain has always known its invaders, and they have generally come over the eastern end of the wall. From Asolo, which lies towards that end, you may see, on a clear day, the passes and the defiles through which the peoples of the north have tumbled and struggled, like a torrent, towards the plain. It has always been so, since the days of Stilicho, fifteen hundred years ago ; it was so during the last great Was: (this part of Italy has known many great wars) but a dozen years ago. The memories of the Austrian. armies, "awfully arrayed" with heavy artillery, are still vivid round Asolo. You can see for yourself how the Alps are scarred with the military roads made during the War ; you are told how, underneath, they are tunnelled with saps and ways and galleries ; you are told how, in those galleries, now turned into a cemetery, the dead of Italy lie sleeping.
It is a comfort to swing the eyes round to the south, and to look and look at the great green Lombard plain, which stretches level and unending to the furthest faint horizon. Here are the works of men and the patient labours of the oxen among the immemorial fields ; here is peace, and a great calm, and an illimitable space. The campanili of the churches rise dotted over the plain ; here and there villages emerge from the green ; but it is all as quiet as a summer sea. You know, but you cannot see, that it is all busy with a happy activity of rural industry. Man is going about his appointed business of tilling and replenishing the earth. The maize is growing as tall as if it were growing in a dream ; the grapes are plumping their skins ; the men are busy leading the waters along their fields, as they did in Virgil's time ; the great patient cream-coloured oxen are drawing their loads of hay along the roads. You cannot but think of the Georgics; and thinking of them you cannot but feel that here is a good and utterly satisfying way of life—to till your fields, to reap your crops, and in the cool of the evening to sit outside the inn and drink your wine. It is a way of life almost as old as the plain ; Catullus knew it before Virgil, and forgotten singers knew it before Catullus ; it is a way of life that will go on enduring—and unregarding—whatever the noisy plashing of the waters of polities around its old sanctities, You do not think of Fascism, or of any of the political problems of Italy, when you look on the Lombard plain or wander down the leafy avenues of its roads ; you only think, with admiration and affection, of the Italian peasant, busiest of
men in the happiest of men's avocations :— •
0 fortunatos niminm, sua si bona florist, - Agricolas ! quibus ipsa, procul discordibus armis, fundit hutno facilom victum justissima tcllus.
There is a range of hills that rises front the Lombard plain as you look south front Asolo—a, curious range, rising inex- plicably, and on most days dimly, from the level green. They are the Euganean Hills. To see them for the first time is to feel a happy thrill. It is to remember, With a passion of delight, the most lovely poem that even Shelley ever wrote : it is almost to see his delicate airy shape, standing tiptoe on the hills, watching the sunrises—watching, all the live-long day, the changing face of Nature. The lines "written in the Euganean Hills" blend and intertwine, as they come floating back to the mind, with the landscape which gave them birth : they are like an essence floating over the "waveless plain, bounded by the vaporous air," which they celebrate. And yet (one reflects) they are also something more—or perhaps something less. For the plain is a plain of peace ; but Shelley's poem is instinct with the anguish of his own fiery, restless spirit—the spirit which burned through everything it touched, each new love and each new hope, and came out on the other side, still hungry and unappeased, never finding a satisfaction, and only knowing—even when a green isle had been found "in the deep wide sea of misery "—that here we have no continuing city of delight, and never can have.
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As he lay on the Euganean Hills, Shelley saw, in vision or imagination, the sun-girt city of Venice, "Ocean's child, and then his queen." It would be a treason to Venice to speak of this Eastern plain of Lombardy, and not to remember its ancient mistress. For Venice ruled, century upon century, from the end of the Middle Ages down to the French Revolu- tion, over all this plain and its cities ; and she ruled over it and them like a mother, a bountiful and ample mother— sometimes scolding, never oppressing, always protecting, never unloving, and certainly never unloved. If there is an historical genius which pervades the whole scene which you can see from Asolo, it is the genius of Venice. And what a rich, warm genius it was—like the genius of Giorgione himself and the great Venetian painters who followed him ! As you wander through the cities which it has pervaded (Vicenza, Verona, Padua and many others), and as you look on the lion of St. Mark which you will see here and there in the cities, you cannot but feel an affection for that Venetian symbol. He is a kindly lion : and the gospel which you see in front of him is a gospel of charity. Forget the rigours of the Council of Ten (which are largely a figment) and forget the Bridge of Sighs (which is altogether one) ; for they are not Venice. The true Venice is the mother to whom her subject cities—allies as much as subjects— clung faithfully when the League of Canbrai beat her to her knees at Agnadello : she is the city of the sunny piazza, who feeds the pigeons that cluster round St. Mark's : she is the sunny, kindly genius of all that Browning ever saw from Asolo, or Shelley front the Euganean Hills.
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Perhaps this is to speak too generously, and too partially, of the great city of the Lagoons. But there is a historical sympathy evoked by Venice which the other great Italian cities cannot match. Milan under the Viseonte and the Sporzas was something of a city of iron, a military city, a Prussian city, a city of the frowning Castello. Rome, for nearly two thousand years, has never been a city proper, never a city at the head of a City-State, but a eosmopolis, theocratic capital, at the last a national capital. Florence in the Middle Ages was restless, a city divided against herself, unkind : the grave of her Dante is that of an exile, and Savonarola was burned in her streets ; nor, when she gathered cities around her, was she able to keep them true : Pies revolted from the lilies, in haste, as soon as the French appeared in Italy. Venice alone has been the maternal city of a loyal State that embraced other allied and faithful Cities; and Venice, snore than all, has left a name that still "blossoms in the dust:" But Venice is not dust. She is still flourishing root and blossoming branch ; and still, in her lagoons, she, is, the loveliest and kindest of Italian cities—
which, perhaps, ixto say, of all the cities here are. Oatoi.r.
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