The best preserved relic of princely feudal life in Italy is this Castello of the Este family, with its sombre moat, chained drawbridges, doleful dungeons, and unnumbered tragedies, each one of which may be compared with Parisina’s history.  I do not want to dwell on these things now.  It is enough to remember the Castello, built of ruddiest brick, time-mellowed with how many centuries of sun and soft sea-air, as it appeared upon the close of one tempestuous day.  Just before evening the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out across the misty Lombard plain.  The Castello burned like a hero’s funeral pyre, and round its high-built turrets swallows circled in the warm blue air.  On the moat slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and gable.  Then the sky changed.  A roof of thunder-cloud spread overhead with the rapidity of tempest.  The dying sun gathered his last strength against it, fretting those steel-blue arches with crimson; and all the fierce light, thrown from vault to vault of cloud, was reflected back as from a shield, and cast in blots and patches on the buildings.  The Castle towered up rosy-red and shadowy sombre, enshrined, embosomed in those purple clouds; and momently ran lightning forks like rapiers through the growing mass.  Everything around, meanwhile, was quiet in the grass-grown streets.  The only sound was a high, clear boy’s voice chanting an opera tune.

PETRARCH’S TOMB AT ARQUA

The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arqua takes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because of its contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain.  It is not a grand landscape.  It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alps and Apennines sublime.  Its charm is a certain mystery and repose—­an undefined sense of the neighbouring Adriatic, a pervading consciousness of Venice unseen, but felt from far away.  From the terraces of Arqua the eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern slopes, to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches and tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over ’the foam of perilous seas forlorn.’  Let a blue-black shadow from a thunder-cloud be cast upon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight strike a solitary bell-tower;—­it burns with palest flame of rose against the steely dark, and in its slender shaft and shell-like tint of pink all Venice is foreseen.

The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a full stream of clearest water flowing by.  On the little square before the church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time—­open to the skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream—­is Petrarch’s sepulchre.  Fit resting-place for what remains to earth of such a poet’s clay!  It is as though archangels, flying, had carried the