is a fountain, originally of great
antiquity; near by it the market-cross; close to that a marble column on
which once stood the lion of St. Mark, set up by the Venetians when they
seized the city, and thrown down when the republic of Venice fell in 1799.
Not far from these two pillars is a sort of stone dais beneath a stone
canopy, which was the very focus of the historic and municipal life of the
place in mediaeval days. Here, when Verona was a free city, the _capitano
del popolo_ was inaugurated; proclamations were read from it; criminals
heard their sentences pronounced from it. Here people who did not pay
their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the
Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the
pavement--_in puris naturalibus_ as to the sitting portion of the person:
flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the
delinquent convexity.

The buildings which enclose the square are of the utmost diversity of
style and period--rich palaces of the Late Renaissance, cumbered with
ornament; modern houses of light-colored stucco, with striped awnings and
Venetian shutters; solemn old bits of architecture of sterner times;
frescoed facades, arcades, balconies. And what balconies! Not the poor
railing to which we give that name, but projecting parapets of stone,
pierced into trefoils, quatrefoils, rosaces, cusps, brackets,
balustrades--sometimes running across the whole house-front, more often
guarding a single window, itself lofty, arched, mullioned and rich with
tracery. It is here that, for the traveller coming from the North,
Venetian architecture begins--not Byzantine of course, but the purest,
noblest Cisalpine Gothic. It imparts a highly patrician air to the streets
with their long lines of deserted palaces, which keep their caste through
every change of fortune. Verona has not the fallen look of some old
Italian capitals, nor the forsaken air of others, but suggests the idea
that once her aristocracy closed their houses and withdrew to some retreat
where they maintain their traditions, waiting for better times to return
to their former homes. Many of the vaulted carriage-ways frame a glimpse
of the rushing river which washes the massive foundations of the
courtyards, the blue hills and lines of forked battlement.

In Verona one first sees Venetian painting too, on canvases which are to
Titian and Tintoretto as the colors of dawn are to those of s