Из книги: ITALIAN FANTASIES
Not that there is a word to be said against the charming and intelligent young man who presides over Italy, and who has signalised himself among his peers by founding an International Agricultural Institute. But what a climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting of King and Czar! To be sure Italy had already made friends with Austria in the very year after Garibaldi’s death—“in the interests of the peace of Europe.”
Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call it peace.
“_Songs before Sunrise_”—yes, but where is the sun?
V
More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent tablets to the Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of hatred to Austria rudely chalked up by anonymous hands, especially on the Adriatic side. “Down with Austria!” “Death to Austria!” “Death to Trent and Trieste!” is the general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph scrawled between skulls and crossbones. ’Tis a strange comment on the Triple Alliance, and the authorities do not seem hurried to remove this glaring contradiction. Even “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.
But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of “the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgimento.
Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely christened _Dante Alighieri_!
Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.
And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new” architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century.
I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi!) and see a white minaret and a white campanile gleaming fantastically in the moonlight over a panorama of russet roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom and no chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediæval: dull stone colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church a grotesque griffin ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet through these cumbersome stone forms I feel the new Italy struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town shelters with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and the chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles have no more congruity with the new spirit than the old seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with the poor “tenement families” whom they house to-day. Presently life will slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle like that of Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or Pistoja can be tamed to civic uses, it becomes a town-hall; where no old building is available, an adequate modern form is created, as in the handsome post-offices with their almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.
At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop’s Palace with “steam-heat, telephone, electric light in all the chambers, garage for automobiles, motor omnibus to all the trains!” Palatial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious that the dining-room was only accessible through vast, empty, domed and frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting in my bedroom, where I slept with a sense of camping out under the infinities. I had no notion that provincial churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not wonder that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the Franciscans of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses and straw, without pillows or bedsteads, burst into tears, exclaiming: “We wretches use so many unnecessary things!” And yet the Cardinal did not use a single thing advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.
Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disagreeably than in Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared colonnades are painted red, and meet continuations in new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded and flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient campanile a tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza, church, picture-gallery and war-monument swear at one another. The Ducal Palace is a military school, the moat round the old rampart—where once resounded that archaic song of the war-sentinels—is a public laundry.
And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second Risorgimento begin to vie with those of the first. _Pro Nervi_, painted on the benches on that desolate cactus-grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks by the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a society created to boom the summer resort, while a tablet celebrates the Marchese who, foreseeing the future of Nervi, put up the first hotel and died with the name of the municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked miles along its tramway amid monotonous streets, with no sign of an end. Indeed the tram-line reaches Genoa.
Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgimento. Trust Carrara for that—Carrara and Guglielmo Walton!
And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of the Renaissance in costliness. Where in all Europe will you find a street as luxurious as Genoa’s Via XX Settembre—the long colonnade, the granite pillars, the gilded and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest may tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.
And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan, what is it but a secular parody of the Cathedral it faces—nave, transept, dome, complete even to the invisible frescoes, a _Cathédrale de luxe_? Very sad and solemn looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its fairy fretwork, as Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.
VI
I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to myself—is the one spot in Italy that is _not_ Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to Mazzini.
I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after dragging myself through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the brink of a sheer precipice, into—the Via Garibaldi! And in a bedroom looking down on it—for the only hotel is in a Piazzetta abutting on it—I passed the night.
In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a Caffè Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and a Garibaldi bas-relief and two Garibaldi tablets; item, a tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial tablet and street to Mazzini, even a Via of Giosuè Carducci, the laureate of the Risorgimento.
Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge here in 1849, escaping from “the Roman Republic” to the Ravenna pine-wood where poor Anita died, and his order for the day—“Soldiers, we are on a Soil of Refuge,” and his letter of thanks from Caprera—“I go away proud to be a citizen of so virtuous a Republic”—are reproduced on the tablets. But the deeper cause of this sympathy is that San Marino is Italian through and through, and its hoary independence, real enough in the days of the city states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate postage stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia, peers, commons, Home and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons, orders, treaties, extradition treaties and a diplomatic corps in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and Italy, all to cover its budget of £11,000 and its population of 10,422 souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and decreasing by dozens. ’Tis a game into which all Europe has entered in high good humour, the grand _farçeur_, Napoleon, even proposing to extend the Republic’s boundaries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles. But the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater realm would be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as the seat not of a toy capital but of something answering less humorously to its name, would cease to be a joke, whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from the eternal earnestness of the sword, might even save Europe’s self-respect as a region of civilisation, regardful of treaties and ancient rights. So serious in fact did the Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken seriously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Napoleonic inflation stands immortalised as Pater Patriæ.
No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have been the origin of San Marino’s existence in those dim days of the Diocletian persecution, when the Roman Matron, Felicita, whom the stone-cutter Marinus had converted to Christianity, “made him a present of the mountain.” And the same inaccessibility which suited it for a Christian colony contributed later to the success of its traditional policy of balancing between the Rimini Malatestas and the Dukes of Urbino. But what prevented Austria from following Garibaldi into San Marino? What but its enjoyment of the game, or its desperate clinging to that shred of self-respect? To-day when the cycle of history has brought us round again to the period of Ezzelino, when the intellectual or religious concepts, which anciently veiled usurpations, are contemptuously thrown aside, and the iron hand crushes in mockery of the combined Jurists of Europe, what stands between San Marino and extinction? Only the environing Italy. And Italy plays with the tiny Republic as a father plays with a child. San Marino has two mortars in the fortress of La Rocca—for what is a State without artillery to fire on solemn occasions?—and these mortars were presented by Victor Emmanuel III. Italy also receives the more desperate criminals, who are boarded out in its prisons, as it supplies the police from its reserve soldiers, and the Judge from its lawyers. Italy has provided its only distinguished citizens—they are honorary,—its national hymn was taken from Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of the musical scale, and when the beautiful if mimetic Palazzo Pubblico for the Regents and the Council was opened in 1894, it was with a speech of Carducci.
Yet “Liberty,” I found, was the keynote of San Marino. Liberty was the motto of its arms, with their three mountains and plumed towers. Liberty waved in the white and blue flag and was painted on the shields of the palace corridors. S. Marino, the author of Liberty, was commemorated in the cathedral façade with its flourish of Sen. P. Q., and Liberty cried from the scroll his statue flourished. “In tuenda Libertate vigilis” warned the inscription over the court room; “animus in consulendo Liber” counselled the medallion near the tribune, and in choice Latin epigraphs the transient tyrant, Cæsar Borgia, impugner of Liberty, was denounced and derided. Sublime it was to stand before the Gothic Palace of the Regents, on this dizzy Piazza della Libertà with its gigantic statue of Liberty (her hand on her bannered spear), and to behold the sheer abyss below, and as from an aeroplane the marvellous panorama of sea and mountain around, Liberty written in every rugged convolution and glacial peak, and shimmering in every masterless wave. And yet my imagination refused to play the game; refused to take with becoming reverence the crowned and gilded pew of the Regents, the historic frescoes and friezes, the blue and orange of the “Guarda Nobile,” the képis and bayonets of the militia, the red facings of the police. All this parade of “Libertas” was in inverse proportion to the substance, or even to the power of securing it. The Republic appeared like a banknote without gold behind it, and an Italian banknote at that; never so essentially Italian as in the lapidary literature asserting its separateness. This grand Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built only within the last few years simultaneously with the motor road that has destroyed the last semblance of isolation, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which so often precedes extinction. And I thought that conquering nations might well mark how easily love can melt what hate would only harden. Imagine if Italy had brought her mortars against San Marino instead of presenting them to it, or if she had made a road for her mortars instead of for her motors!
But as an antique curio San Marino is delightful. I love to muse on the pomp of its Regents who are elected—like the Doges of Venice—by a mixture of choice and chance, and go in state to celebrate mass, clothed in satin breeches and velvet mantle, in doublet and sword and ermined cap, accompanied by the Noble Guard and the high officers of State, and then from the Cathedral, still to the clashing of church bells and the strains of military music, to their semestral thrones in the Palazzo Pubblico; there to hear a speech from the Government Orator—whose fee is four shillings—and to take the Latin oath not to tamper with the Libertas of the Constitution, and to receive the State seals and keys and the insignia of Grand Masters of the Order of San Marino, perhaps even the first instalment of the royal budget of a pound a month.
No autocrats are these Regents, despite their regal salary. They are mere constitutional monarchs, official headpieces to the Arringo or sovereign Council in which the real power resides. But though Republican, San Marino is not Democratic, for the Arringo fills up its vacancies by option. Liberty is not flouted however, for may not every head of a family—after the half-yearly elections—give the Arringo a piece of his mind? Time was when the citizen could stroll into its sittings and tender it the benefit of his advice, but this form of Liberty seems to have been found too excessive and cumbersome even for the land of Libertas.
Happy are the nations that have no history, and San Marino seems to have escaped almost without an anecdote. In 1461 Pope Pius II invited it to make war with the Magnificent Monster, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, and rewarded its aid with four castles. Cæsar Borgia came and went in 1503, a nocturnal attack by Fabiano del Monte was repulsed in 1543, and after that nothing appears to have happened till 1739, when the Cardinal Legate, Giulio Alberoni, occupied the Republic. But the Republic having appealed to the Pope was left free again, Clement XII thus becoming a national hero with his bust in the Palazzo. But national heroes of its own it has none. It has adopted the cult of Garibaldi, though he preaches Italian Unity, and made honorary citizens of Canova, Rossini and Verdi, and it has almost appropriated the famous numismatist, Bartolommeo Borghesi, who did at least live here, if he omitted to be born here, and who dominates one of the wonderful mountain-terraces, holding a book and gazing carefully at the only point where there is no view. But as to the “Viri Clarissimi et Illustres Castri Sancti Marini” blazoned on the Palazzo staircase, between shields of “Libertas,” I fear their celebrity had not reached me. Doctors, artists, counts, dignitaries of the Church—I was impartially ignorant of them all.
What is to account for this paucity of personalities? Had a great saint or a great poet arisen here, we should have explained it glibly by the pious isolation among the eternal mountains, looking down upon the eternal sea, under the everlasting stars. Had a new Acropolis or a new Parthenon risen on this hill of the Titan, we should not have lacked proofs of the inevitability of the new Athens. But nothing has arisen. Giambittisti Belluzzi, the military architect of its walls and of the Imperial Castle at Pesaro, is San Marino’s highest name in art, while in literature its chroniclers point to Canon Ignazio Belzoppi, “letterato di molta fama,” born in 1762, author of the heroi-comic poem, “Il Bertuccino” (The Little Monkey)—_unpublished_!
For life to be perfect then, small circles are not enough, _pace_ my friend Boëthius. They must tingle with life, perhaps even with death. Can it be that the _advocatus diaboli_ was right, and that the snug security of a diplomatic mountain-fastness has bred mediocrity? I tell him angrily that the place is a Paradise and he answers calmly that it is only a Parish. Can it be that the only Paradise possible is a Fools’ Paradise?
But a serpent has entered Eden, crawling probably by the motor-car road. He has insinuated doubt of holy authority and the Sammarinese begin to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. _Il Titano_ is the organ of the Socialists—a Titan in revolt—and the _Somarino_ serves the Clericals—with the accent on the Santo. “Preti!!!” is the ejaculatory title of an article in the number of _Il Titano_ that came into my hands (April 24, 1910). “We might say impostors, falsifiers, _canaille_,” it begins pleasantly, “but we say instead ‘Priests,’ which is a substantive that comprises all the others.”
And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands with “Young Italy,” whose programme according to the organ of that name embraces the exiling of the Vatican beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away of the bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage there are even Futurists in San Marino.
VII
I must confess to a smiling sympathy with this “Youngest Italy” party—if the little half-baked literary and artistic clique of Futurists can be called a party. I can understand the oppression of all the glorious Italian past, all those massive buildings and masterpieces, and stereotyped forms of thought. Like the son of a genius, modern Italy is cramped and overshadowed. Hence the rabid yearning for some new form of energising, this glorification of the moment and perpetual change. In a fantastic fury of iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction of the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives—they would make an art-pyre as fervently as Savonarola. Climbing the Clock Tower of St. Mark’s Square, they threw down coloured handbills repudiating the vulgar voluptuous Venice of the tourist. “Hasten to fill its fetid little canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous palaces. Burn the gondolas, those see-saws for fools!” So far so good. But mark the beatific vision that is to replace this putrefying beauty. “Raise to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges, and manufactories with waving hair of smoke. Abolish everywhere the languishing curves of the old architectures.” How characteristic of the Second Risorgimento! It must be by an oversight that the smoke is still permitted to be “waving.” I imagine that the resurrection of the old Campanile of Venice must have been the last straw. For ten hundred and fourteen years this gloomy old tower had impended, and when it did at last fall of its own sheer decrepitude, lo! it must be stood up again, exact to the last massy inch, and even with the same inscription—_Verbum caro factum est_—on its bells. As if a bell could have no new message after a millennium! Let the historian, at any rate, mark that the Futurists did not rise till the Campanile was not allowed to fall. The police, taking the Futurists seriously, prohibit their meetings, which will end in making them take themselves seriously. But they are a useful counteractive to the Zealots of the Zona Monumentale, who, in their passion for the ruins of Rome, forget the claims of life. When the Present says, “I must live,” the artist and the archæologist too often reply: “_Je n’en vois pas la nécessité_.” Carducci even called on Fever to guard the Appian Way. But cities exist for citizens, not for spectators, and when the telephone bell of the Present rings, we should reply like the Italian waiter: “_Pronto! Desidera?_” We cannot do in Rome as the Romans do, for they have to live, not look at Ruins. And let us not expect the Romans to do in Rome as we do. If tramways _must_ run along the Via Appia, at least Fever will retire before them. How long is it our duty to guard the ruins of the Past? Suppose the tombs and temples of the Appian Way should threaten to collapse altogether, have we to keep them in a state of artificial ruin? Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and made it marble. If the industrial Risorgimento found Rome marble and made it brick, I suppose there are compensations for Augustus. Imperial Rome never thought of dedicating a slab of that marble to the nameless pauper dead, worn out in the obscure service of their country, as Industrial Rome has done in a touching inscription. And should Rome extend the tale of its bricks to house the homeless troglodytes who pig in the remains of that ancient marble, I will throw up my cap with the Futurists.
Pisa is to me a dream-city, but to the Pisans it is a centre of the glass industry and the cloth industry, with municipalised gas. They have done handsomely in leaving me my dream-city outside the town life. If topographical obstacles prevent other ancient cities from thus surviving themselves, let me be thankful for small mercies. There was one old inn at Perugia which had escaped the electric light and the pleasure-pilgrims, and where the porter peeled the potatoes, but as I sat this very Spring, dining in the quaint courtyard, lo! to my chagrin the light of modernity flooded it for the first time. But there chanced too that night so joyous a band of University students, on gymnastic business bent, the old courtyard resounded with such pranks, and songs, and cheers, such fulness of young new life, that I felt Perugia could not for ever live on griffins and Peruginos and Baglioni horrors. In that moment even the joyous madness of the Futurists appeared to me saner than the gloom of a Gissing concluding his Italian journeys “By the Ionian Sea” with the wish that he could live for ever in the Past, the Present and its interests blotted out.
It is a cheap æsthetic to retire to the Past, too blind to see beauty in the Present, and too anæmic to build it for the Future. But humanity is not a museum-curator; the cult of ancestors, once the backbone of Hindu-Aryan civilisation, survives only in China. The cult of descendants has taken its place, the Golden Age is before, not behind, and the debt we owe to our fathers we pay to our sons, not necessarily in the same currency. No doubt the Past is ivy-clad, the Present raw and the Future dim. But as happiness does not come from the search for happiness, neither does beauty come from the search for beauty. “Rather seek ye the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.”
VIII
So despite the slow black cigar, the ubiquitous _farmacia_ and _pasticceria_, despite the pervasive petrifaction of past glory, I feel that a vigorous breeze of young thought moves through Italy, and that Mazzini is not entirely swallowed up in the belly of the Great Horse. “_Il nullismo_” was an Asti election-poster’s shrewd summary of the programme of the Clerical Moderates, “_lo star quieti—forma ipocrita di reazione_.” If Italy escapes the reaction involved in standing still, we may yet see a Third Risorgimento that will resurrect Mazzini. Even a Republican Congress has met freely, if with closed doors.
The popular Italian newspapers, like the windows of the bookshops, are far more intellectual than our own, and there is a healthy readiness to try social experiments under the popular referendum. If the nationalisation of the railways does not yet pay, on account of the multiplicity of officials, it has at least provided a more punctual service than of yore, and the third-class passenger is treated as a human being. A Jew as Premier and another as Syndic of Rome constitute an _amende honorable_ for the Italy which established the Ghetto and, cramping a prolific race, produced in Venice the first specimen of the American sky-scraper. Capital punishment is abolished—the apostle, Beccaria, duly petrified at Milan—and despite the legend of the stiletto and the vendetta nobody demands its restoration. Phlebotomy prevails alarmingly, through the habit of using a knife as if it were the mere point of the fist, but it is a peaceable and polite people. The _niente_ with which the veriest vagabond deprecates your thanks, the _prego_ of the courtlier defence against gratitude, are the outer and audible sign of an inner gentleness. Irritatingly vague as regards time and space and money, a foe to definite agreements, a lover of the horizon and the _buona mano_, running restaurants with unpriced menus, and shops with unmarked goods, the Italian has always the saving grace of respect for things of the mind. Who ever saw a picture of Tennyson labelled—like the photographs of Carducci—“Mighty Master, Sublime Poet, Refulgent National Glory!” There are moods in which I could applaud even the stones.
But it is the revolt against Rome which stirs most furiously the _intelligenza_ of Italy—as of all the Latin world. While in England the fight against Christianity is confined to a few guerilla papers in low esteem, in Italy it is a pitched battle. And the modern Anti-Pope is far more formidable to the Vatican than the mediæval, being a rival idea, not a rival man. The Vatican handicaps itself superfluously by sneering at the Risorgimento—though I am told its haughty refusal to recognise the Unity of Italy brings in shekels from Mexico, Colombia, and other strongholds of the spirit. Instead of joining in the recent Garibaldi jubilation, it asked through its organ whether the prosperity of the South had not been sacrificed to the interests of the North. And so far from making concessions to Modernism, it is sitting tighter than ever, issuing lamentable Syllabuses and Encyclicals, accumulating lists of suspects. It censured Minocchi for allegorising the first three chapters of Genesis, and excommunicated Murri for saying the Pope ought not to play at politics. The freethinkers complain uneasily of its aggressiveness, lamenting—with unconscious humour—that it makes propaganda! The army itself—ay, even the old Garibaldians—are not safe from its guiles! As if the Congregation of the Propaganda were of to-day!
But the confiscation of monasteries and churches to military and civil uses—to barracks, agricultural colleges, gymnasia, hospitals, what-not—the transformation of elaborate historic shrines into State Monuments, are indications of the ground lost to the Church in its own peculiar land. Strange was it to see squads of half-nude lads at gymnastics in the old Renaissance church of St. Mary Magdalen at Pesaro. Still more surprising to see a carpenter sawing away in the lofty, well-preserved Church of the Jesuits in Pavia, his wood stacked in the forsaken frescoed chapels, as in a strange return of Christendom to its origins, or an illustration of the new _Logion_, “Cleave the wood and ye shall find me.” I bought coal at a still more decayed church, taking off my hat involuntarily.