Italian Hours eBook

At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy.  It contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the homelier Venetian spirit.  The plain beneath it stretched away like a purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white campanili of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse like scattered sails of ships.  The rumbling carriage, the old-time, rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great Giorgione.  Here also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers of romance.  It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history.  The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give.  But such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them—­only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes.  Mrs.

Bronson’s case was beautifully different—­she had come altogether for others.

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN

Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambery—­but four hours from Geneva—­that I accepted the situation and decided there might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun.  I found my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the smile of anticipation.  If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least more Italian than anything but Italy—­more Italian, too, I should think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers.  The light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on.  It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery.  But the vegetation, assuredly,