THE CARRARESI. "Si trova sulla terra delle catastrofi."-FERRARI. ITALY, it has often been said, is not the country of chivalrous romance. In nothing is the truth of the observation more clearly shown than in the history of her great families. There is no lack of adventure, and often an excess of startling incidents; but the aroma of romance is not there, the peculiar charm of chivalry is wanting; there is no mystery. Italian character is true to Italian landscape, "the little bluehilled, pastoral, sceptical landscape," perfect in form, delicious and delicate in colour, but grand or mysterious seldom. Italy never had a feudal system; and people of Northern temperament miss that sympathetic thrill that even now runs through us as we read of actions gentle, loyal, knightly, or true.* No doubt much of the charm in our family history is due to its vague outline. We look at the deeds of our forefathers that begat us through the obscurity of ages. The lines grow mellowed and softened, toned to fit subjects for a ballad; the traditions of family history * This whole category of words is wanting in Italian. They are flowers of a foreign soil, and have to be transplanted from the North. They pine and droop, as "leale," or change their nature altogether, as "virtu" and "onore." live as sacred legends, of deep interest to the family, but still legends, myths robbed of the cold clearness of an historical outline. In Italy family story emerges only to become at once an integral portion of the country's history, to pass directly into the cold light, to be immediately tested by the critical standards of historical accuracy; it has from the moment of its birth that clearness and crudeness which belongs to fact. The early deeds of the Visconti, the Scala family, or the Carraresi live not in ballads but in chronicles, our main fountain-heads for picturesque Italian history generally. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these chronicles are devoid of interest or of fascination. They have, after all, many of the qualities of the ballad; they make their pictures, they touch the human passion with that simplicity which is consummate art, and, almost in spite of the deeds they relate, there is a tenderness about them. No one can read the Perugian chronicle of Matarazzo,* or the Paduan history of the Gattari, without feeling that they have a charm and romance of their own—not the clannish romance of feudalism, steeped in mystery and weirdness, but the charm of highly developed individualities in play with other characters their like. The men of these chronicles are beautiful as highly finished products of civilization; but we can never think of them as "Beauty making beautiful old rhyme." The family of Carrara, with whose intricate growth * See the essay "Perugia " in Mr. Symonds' "Sketches in Greece and Italy." and tragical death we have now to deal, lived in the very heart of that curious period of Italian history when the Signori rose to the height of their illegal power. The Carraresi grew up side by side with the Visconti, the Gonzaghi, the Estensi, the Polentani, the Rossi, the Scaligeri, and with the last of these they fell, Venice alone among all these princelings pursued a steady policy. In common with her neighbours she had passed through the crisis of the Signori, those pangs which issued in the birth of a despot for nearly every Italian town. But with her the revolution took a complexion peculiar to herself. When the ferment of the Tiepoline conspiracy subsided, Venice found herself not under the rule of a single tyrant, an individual who might be assassinated and who was doomed, sooner or later, to extinction with his whole race, but with the permanent, unassailable Ten as her lord. She was a republic only in name; the Ten was her despot, without the dangers of a despot's throne. Venice was secure; freed from the fatal need for incessant and feverish action, that curse on all the other Signori, she could bide her time and choose her moment to strike her foes. That moment was never chosen wantonly, but always with a distinct and reasoned. view to her own requirements. The Venetian Republic was the one stable element in all North Italy. It was an age of exciting change, of deep and riveting interest, and the Carraresi were typical of their period, not only in their politics and in the vicissitudes of their fortune, but in their private life as well. The men of those days were "born to strange sights; they sought them, courted them, delighted in them: nothing could be too strange or bizarre for that insatiable thirst for novelty with which they burned. They rung the joy out of violent changes and contrasts. All they touched was embraced with ardour, from a headlong debauch to a religious revival. At one moment these men were tearing along in a mad orgy, at the next they were covered with sackcloth and ashes, marching in the rear of the Bianchi procession,* joining fervidly in the cry, “ Repent! repent!" swelling the chorus of "Stabat Mater." Few were greater proficients in the invention of new arts, for public as for private life, than the Visconti. But nothing could save these men from the doom they dreaded; they were condemned to plagiarism, to repetition and sameness. Each draught of pleasure or of power only intensified the thirst that mocked their impotence to satisfy it. The forty days' tortures of Galeazzo Visconti were repeated by Francesco Carrara at Bassano; † but the master had at the same moment created and exhausted the idea. All that human bodies are capable of enduring he had forced them to endure. It was in vain that Carrara cried for a fiftieth day; the limit was *"Chronicon Patavinum," ap. Muratori, 66 Med. Ev.," tom. iv. ad. ann. 1399 (Milano: 1741). Antiquit. Ital. † Azzari, "Storia di Milano," ap. Muratori, Rer. It. Script., tom. xvi.; Galeazzo Gattaro, "Istoria Padovana," ap. Murat., Rer. It. Script., tom. xvii.; Verci, "Storia della Marca Trivigiana" (Venezia: 1789), bk. xvi. ad ann. 1373. The enormous learning of this work is too well known to require any praise from me, but I must here acknowledge my deep debt to it throughout this essay. reached; he was face to face with the impossible. At another time the operation of diverting all its rivers from an enemy's territory, or its converse of drowning the foe by piercing the banks of a river in flood, was devised. The labour was enormous, but delightful, for there was a new power to contend with, a new opposing element even more incalculable than man, and that was Nature. But the ruse became hackneyed at once, and we grow tired of reading the story of works on the Brenta, the Bachiglione,* the Mincio, unrelieved by any variation except that now and then Nature refuses to bow to the whims of a Lombard lord, and, bursting out, sweeps a Scala's or a Visconti's dams and embankments to perdition. Again, Can Signorio della Scala resolved to murder his brother-that was common enough; but coming from his mistress, there was the new touch. The plan succeeded, and was soon after adopted by Antonio Scala, who killed his brother Bartholomew on his way home from a rendezvous; and certain of the Carrara family proposed a like fate, under like circumstances, for the head of their house. The idea was run to death in a moment, but the honours remained with the inventor; Can Signorio alone put the finishing touch to his work by accusing his brother's mistress of the murder and torturing her till she died. The number of family murders was enormous. In seven generations of the Scala house we can count nine such treacherous deaths, an allowance of one and two-sevenths of a murder to * See Gattari, op. cit., ad ann. 1387, and passim; Verci, op. cit., bk. xv. ad ann. 1368. |