Europe in the Looking Glass by Robert Byron Jan Morris Page B

that always assails him on his entry into Italy. What is it that arouses this emotion in English people, in men and women who have not a drop of foreign blood in their veins? An emotion that, far from being the result of habit, can only be stirred to the full by the initial rapture of the first arrival, of the first vision of the cypresses and campaniles, the hummock-borne fortress towns of Umbria, the wild stretches of the Campagna and the ultimate incarnation of Vesuvius and her stone-pine? What is it? Do all nationalities experience this conviction that Italy is their birthright, just as great works of art are the heritage of civilization? Or is there a something akin between the island and the peninsula, a something not similar, but which by reason of its very distinction from the rest of Europe, constitutes an affinity? It may be a quality too subtle for definition. But the fact remains, English people live in Italy because, unlike the Riviera and apart from the artistic monuments, they can love the country as a home. In France the resorts become Anglicised; in Italy the visitors Italianised. The English resident is not liked; but in his sincerity must be sought his absolution from the charge of ‘living cheaply on the natives’. He loves the country.
    Thus it was with this inevitable exhilaration that I left the hotel on the morning of my third arrival in Italy and turning a corner, entered the market place of Verona, a large square, flooded with huge flapping white umbrellas, under which stood stalls of fruit and flowers and other necessaries. I dranka cup of coffee and bought myself a buttonhole; Simon then appeared. We decided to stay another night. He was interested, as he had not visited Italy before.
    Verona shows strong traces of the Venetian domination. The windows of the older palaces are built in that form of graceful Gothic arcading, so beautiful in its legitimate setting of delicate unrelieved brick, so repellent as popularised by Ruskin amid the walls of the miniature Chantillys and Rambouillets with which he decorated the cities where his influence was paramount. Weatherbeaten lions of St Mark are to be seen prowling above the doors of the municipal buildings; and the towers are roofed with those foursided cones that are peculiar to the north-east corner of the country.
    At the back of the hotel, in a little courtyard attendant on a small and very ancient church, we came upon the tombs of the della Scala family. Of the three most important, each is surmounted by an elaborate Gothic baldochino , some twenty-five feet high, on top of which is perched an equestrian statue. The finest of these, that of Can Grande, is an exceptional work of art that can only be compared with the equestrian fresco in the Palazzo Publico, at Siena, by Simone Martini. The horses in both are draped to the fetlock; and there is something unusual, and at the same time satisfying, in the implied movement of an animal beneath the conventional but now unfamiliar folds of formal drapery. The riders, too, communicate something of their complacency to the beholder.
    The courtyard is enclosed by a low wall, on top of which is stretched a kind of gigantic wrought-iron chain mail, introducing into its design the family badge, the ladder. Though dating from the fourteenth century, it is still as flexible as a gold purse. Verona has adopted the ladder as her badge; it appeared in blue and orange on the stained-glass windows of the hotel.
    A guide, who spoke French, showed us round the tombs. He then pointed to three windows in an overlooking palace, and said that behind them Danté had composed the Divina Commedia . Moving his podgy forefinger a few degrees further round the compass, he fixed upon a low red-brick shell of a house, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a wheelwright’s shop. This, he said, was the palace of Romeo’s family, where Romeo had actually lived. There is always a certain unreasonable humour about the reverence