The snow the next day had subsided into sleet and rain, and the air was chill and foggy— so that we no longer saw
the snowy Alps bounding the northern horizon, nor the low mountains to the west which descend from the Apennines to the plain. Our day's journey, in consequence, was dreary and uninteresting, until we came to the walls of Piacenza, where we re-crossed the Po by a bridge of boats and entered the duchy of Parma. On leaving the lately restored dominions of his imperial majesty, and entering those lately acquired by her lately imperial majesty, we had again to shew our passports, and again to declare we had no contraband articles among our baggage,—though I honestly own we did not know what articles were there contraband, and what were not. It is very tormenting to an Englishman, accustomed to roam at will about his own country without any one challenging his motions, to have his passports eternally demanded in every varying tone of insolence, and to find himself so frequently taken for an itinerant dealer in contraband goods. But these minor evils of travelling must be borne, and it is better to bear them with patience, for neither sacres nor diavolos do any good. On every account, indeed, a traveller will do wisely, when he lodges his money at his banker's to obtain letters of credit, not to omit lodging within the bank of his mind, a stock of that practical virtue, on which he may draw to as large an amount as necessary, in bills payable on demand. For he will often have as much occasion to expend patience as money; and if he find his stock of either beginning to fail, and is unable to replenish it, he had best turn back without delay.
The day was dreary and comfortless, and the appearance of Piacenza, in consequence, foully belied its name. The heavens seemed descending to the earth in torrents. To walk about the town was therefore totally impossible; but, after some demurs, a carriage was procured, in which we drove to see its sights.
It is a handsome, though not a large city, containing some very fine looking palaces, for every town in Italy, however small, can boast its own noble families. Yet such a city, unenlivened by the residence of any court, and only the secondary town of a secondary state, must be at best dull and stupid; and though the Piacenzan nobility are both numerous, and, comparatively speaking, wealthy, the society here, however much interlarded with counts and marquises, or perhaps even princes, must be, in fact, very little better, or more correctly speaking, not quite so good, as that of an English market town. In point of appearance, however, the market town must yield the palm; for few streets, even in London, can vie with the elegance of architecture which even the smallest cities of Italy
can boast.
The great square of Piacenza is a remarkable instance of the truth of this assertion. It is ornamented with two fine equestrian statues in bronze, of Alessandro Farnese duke of Parma, the able general of Philip II. of Spain, and his son Ranuccio. They are the work of John, or as he is oftenest called, Jan of Bologna, and appeared to me to be extremely beautiful. Perhaps I should have admired them less, had I seen them after the admirable statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome. But I had not then beheld that ancient master-piece, and the only statues of the kind with which I could compare them, were those hapless kings of England, the two Charleses and William the Third, whom the loyalty of the three capitals of the British empire has elevated on horseback in their respective cities; apparently for the purpose of exciting the derision of the spectators, by shewing that, however uneasily they might sit on their thrones, they sat still worse on the backs of their horses. With such statues in my mind it is no wonder I should carry my admiration of those of the Farnese to a great height. They stand about the centre of the square in front of the ancient Palazzo Publico, a singular structure, with trebly-arched windows adorned with various curious devices in brick, and supported on a row of heavy stone arches. The modern town-house, a plain unobtrusive stone building, stands on the opposite side of the square; and a third is nearly occupied by a large church, in which so many dead bodies have been interred, that the building was obliged to be half ruined, to have the roof taken off and the doors and windows torn from their hinges, in order to preserve the town from pestilence. A church, however, is never any great loss in an Italian city, for there are always abundance left; and notwithstanding the fate of this unlucky structure, Piacenza still contains a great many more than I can now remember, though we were carried in the rain to visit the greater part of them. For the coachman and laquais de place being paid according to the length of time they spent in our service, it was very natural they should think, or at least say, that a great many things were well worth seeing, which we did not even stop to look at when we got to them. This is a disaster of constant recurrence in all foreign countries, and is, I fear, irremediable from its very nature; for it is impossible to know whether things are really worth seeing or not till we do see them,—and it would be idle indeed, to refuse visiting every object of curiosity because we are sure beforehand that some of them will not repay the trouble. Of the churches of Piacenza, I can only remember, that San Agostino has a very fine façade, which is now used to cover a corn granary,—so plentiful are churches here; and that there are some good fresco paintings in the Madonna della Campagna, a building which, notwithstanding its rural title, has now, like our St. Martin's-inthe-Fields, got entangled amid the streets of the town. The cathedral, also, a noble structure in something like Saxon architecture, is adorned with numerous frescos by Annibale Caracci, Guercino, and Franceschini, few of which have escaped injury. This mode of painting is almost unknown in England, where I do not remember even one example of it; and it requires some habit and repeated observations to discover its excellencies, while its disadvantages are but too apparent at the first glance. And, though it cannot be denied that it combines a greater richness, freshness and splendour of colouring, and is more consistent with the hues of nature, than oil-painting, I can hardly help regretting that so many of the great masters should have employed their transcendent talents in a style which, however pleasing and capable of producing the finest effect, is so very perishable in its nature. Having satisfied our curiosity by the sight of every thing that was said to be worth seeing at Piacenza, we departed from thence in the afternoon, expecting to sleep at Parma the following evening,—for people can never be cured of reckoning on their intentions coming to pass as surely as if nothing could possibly happen to disconcert them,—quite forgetting that pithy scrap of copy-book morality which informs us that
"Between the cup and the lip
There's many a slip."
—But I must not ante-date my history.
We now entered on an ancient Roman way, the Via Emilia, constructed under the consulate of Paulus Emilius Lepidus afterwards the triumvir, along which our road lay as far as Bologna. Modern travellers owe a great deal to the old Romans in this respect; almost all the best roads of Italy are those formed by their useful labours, merely requiring such slight occasional repairs as even their degenerate successors have been able to afford.
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