At Rho, where I stopped to dine, stands a remarkably ancient tree said to have been planted in the time of Augustus.  The country presents a perfect plain, highly cultivated, all the way from Sesto to Milan.  The chaussee is broad and admirably well kept up and lined on both sides with poplars.  The roads in Lombardy are certainly the finest in Europe.  I entered Milan by the gate which leads direct to the esplanade between the citadel and the city, and drove to the Pension Suisse, which is in a street close to the Cathedral and Ducal palace.

MILAN, 12 October.

I am just returned from the Teatro della Scala, renowned for its immense size:  it certainly is the most stupendous theatre I ever beheld and even surpassed the expectation I had formed of it, so much so that I remained for some minutes lost in astonishment.  I was much struck with the magnificence of the scenery and decorations.  An Opera and Ballo are given every night, and the same are repeated for a month, when they are replaced by new ones.  The boxes are all hired by the year by the different noble and opulent families, and in the Parterre the price is only thirty soldi or sous, about fifteen pence English, for which you are fully as well regaled as at the Grand Opera at Paris for three and a half francs and far better than at the Italian theatre in London for half a guinea.  The opera I saw represented is called L’Italiana in Algieri, opera buffa, by Rossini.

The Ballo was one of the most magnificent spectacles I ever beheld.  The scenery and decorations are of the first class and superior even to those of the Grand Opera at Paris.  The Ballo was called Il Cavaliere del Tempio.  The story is taken from an occurrence that formed an episode in the history of the Crusades and which has already furnished to Walter Scott the subject of a very pleasing ballad entitled the Fire-King, or Count Albert and Fair Rosalie.  Battles of foot and horse with real horses, Christians and Moslems, dancing, incantations, excellent and very appropriate music leave nothing to be desired to the ravished spectator.  In the Ballo all is done in pantomime and the acting is perfect.  The Italians seem to inherit from their ancestors the faculty of representing by dumb show the emotions of the mind as well as the gestures of the body, and in this they excel all other modern nations.  The dancing is not quite so good as what one sees at the Paris theatre, and besides that sort of dancing they are very fond in Italy of grotesque dances which appear to me to be mere tours de force.  But the decorations are magnificent, and the cost must be great.