from Cathedrals and Churches of Northern Italy by T. Francis Bumpus, 1907

But they are wearisome, these Lombard plains, spite of so much luxuriance and the nightingales, — who sing by day however, as not specified in poetry; they 'are up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with their gurgling and changeful music till twilight. At night, the hedges and fields are perfectly illuminated by fireflies, whom I found really quite companionable during a subsequent solitary and tedious ride from Parma to Piacenza, when I might as well have tried the poetical impossibility of "reading by the glow-worm's light" as endeavour to see anything by the finger glass which dimly illuminated the long third-class railway carriage.