famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these
dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along
the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the
emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman
amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian
provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses
abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by
an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On
that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary,
the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from
another direction across an open space, the Piazza Bra, but I think the
contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more
overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the
seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier
above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very
top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has
clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or
seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no
cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking
outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of
the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops,
battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward
cypresses; then the blue hills--blue as cobalt, although so near--striped
in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications,
marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the
architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther
off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like
pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure
brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly
mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as
gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of
daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.

It is easy enough to fix the different events and periods of the local
history by the monuments they have created or destroyed, but the
influence of an Italian city is wholly against a systematic study