April 21, 22. Milan.  Figs and pomegranates grow here, unsheltered, as I am told.  I saw none, and therefore suppose them rare.  They had formerly olives; but a great cold, in 1709, killed them, and they have not been replanted.  Among a great many houses painted al fresco, the Casa Roma and Casa Candiani, by Appiani, and Casa Belgioiosa, by Martin, are superior.  In the second, is a small cabinet, the ceiling of which is in small hexagons, within which are cameos and heads painted alternately, no two the same.  The salon of the Casa-Belgioiosa is superior to any thing 1 have ever seen.  The mixture called scagliuola, of which they make their walls and floors, is so like the finest marble, as to be scarcely distinguishable from it.  The nights of the 20th and 21st instant, the rice ponds froze half an inch thick.  Droughts of two or three months are not uncommon here, in summer.  About five years ago, there was such a hail as to kill cats.  The Count del Verme tells me of a pendulum odometer for the wheel of a carriage.  Leases here are mostly for nine years.  Wheat costs a louis d’or the one hundred and forty pounds.  A laboring man receives sixty livres, and is fed and lodged.  The trade of this country is principally rice, raw silk, and cheese.

April 23. Casino, five miles from Milan.  I examined another rice-beater of six pestles.  They are eight feet nine inches long.  Their ends, instead of being a truncated cone, have nine teeth of iron, bound closely together.  Each tooth is a double pyramid, joined at the base.  When put together, they stand with the upper ends placed in contact, so as to form them into one great cone, and the lower ends diverging.  The upper are socketed into the end of the pestle, and the lower, when a little blunted by use, are not unlike the jaw-teeth of the mammoth, with their studs.  They say here, that pestles armed with these teeth, clean the rice faster, and break it less.  The mortar, too, is of stone, which is supposed as good as wood, and more durable.  One half of these pestles are always up.  They rise about twenty-one inches; and each makes thirty-eight strokes in a minute; one hundred pounds of rough rice is put into the six mortars, and beaten somewhat less than a quarter of an hour.  It is then taken out, put into a sifter of four feet diameter, suspended horizontally; sifted there; shifted into another of the same size; sifted there; returned to the mortars; beaten a little more than a quarter of an hour; sifted again; and it is finished.  The six pestles will clear four thousand pounds in twenty-four hours.  The pound here is twenty-eight ounces:  the ounce equal to that of Paris.  The best rice requires half an hour’s boiling; a more indifferent kind, somewhat less.  To sow the rice, they first plough the ground, then level it with a drag-harrow, and let on the water; when the earth has become soft, they smooth it with a shovel under the water, and then sow the rice in the water.