As far back as 1255 the people of Reggio destroyed the castle; nor did the nobles of Canossa distinguish themselves in subsequent history among those families who based their despotisms on the debris of the Imperial power in Lombardy.  It seemed destined that Canossa and all belonging to it should remain as a mere name and memory of the outgrown middle ages.  Estensi, Carraresi, Visconti, Bentivogli, and Gonzaghi belong to a later period of Lombard history, and mark the dawn of the Renaissance.

As I lay and mused that afternoon of May upon the short grass, cropped by two grey goats, whom a little boy was tending, it occurred to me to ask the woman who had served me as guide, whether any legend remained in the country concerning the Countess Matilda.  She had often, probably, been asked this question by other travellers.  Therefore she was more than usually ready with an answer, which, as far as I could understand her dialect, was this.  Matilda was a great and potent witch, whose summons the devil was bound to obey.  One day she aspired, alone of all her sex, to say mass; but when the moment came for sacring the elements, a thunderbolt fell from the clear sky, and reduced her to ashes.[12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of the Holy Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances, should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire upon the vanity of earthly fame.  The legend in its very extravagance is a fanciful distortion of the truth.

* * * * *

FORNOVO

In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past.  The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city’s name.  The squalor of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses.  The princely sprezzatura of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendour of their purfled silks and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has yielded to sullen cynicism—­the cynicism of arrested ruin and unreverend age.  All that was satisfying to the senses and distracting to the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away, leaving a sinister and naked shell.  Remembrance can but summon up the crimes, the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders.  An atmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though the tainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, on which his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of their misdeeds.  Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of which I spoke.  It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in the year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese with Margaret