From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north of Venice).  We were very glad of the ride across the country.  By the time we reached the town it was nine o’clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love.  Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life.  Our ride through the twilight landscape had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and turrets and battlements in great plenty.  What town it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to learn any thing about it.

The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain.  Indeed, as we drew near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture.  The barber and the bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the caffetiere at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to see.  As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language, which was yet harder than the German.  The German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian! Corpo!

At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi.  You pass a bridge to get out of Bassano—­a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano.  All along the road to Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines.  Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist government.  Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted.