Returning to the inn, we passed a magnificent palace on one of the squares, upon whose marble steps and column-bases, sat hundreds of brutish Austrian troops, smoking and laughing at the passers-by. This is a sight you may see now through all Italy. The palaces of the proudest nobles are turned into barracks for foreign troops, and there is scarce a noble old church or monastery that is not defiled with their filth. The German soldiers are, without exception, the most stolid and disagreeable looking body of men I ever saw; and they have little to soften the indignant feeling with which one sees them rioting in this lovely and oppressed country.
We passed an hour before bedtime in the usual amusement of travellers in a foreign hotel--reading the traveller's record-book. Walter Scott's name was written there, and hundreds of distinguished names besides. I was pleased to find, on a leaf far back, "Edward Everett," written in his own round legible hand. There were at least the names of fifty Americans within the dates of the year past--such a wandering nation we are. Foreigners express their astonishment always at their numbers in these cities.
On the afternoon of the next day, we went to Arqua, on a pilgrimage to Petrarch's cottage and tomb. It was an Italian summer afternoon, and the Euganean hills were rising green and lovely, with the sun an hour high above them, and the yellow of the early sunset already commencing to glow about the horizon.
We left the carriage at the "pellucid lake," and went into the hills a mile, plucking the ripe grapes which hung over the road in profusion. We were soon at the little village and the tomb, which stands just before the church door, "reared in air." The four laurels Byron mentions are dead. We passed up the hill to the poet's house, a rural stone cottage, commanding a lovely view of the campagna from the portico. Sixteen villages may be counted from the door, and the two large towns of Rovigo and Ferrara are distinguishable in a clear atmosphere. It was a retreat fit for a poet. We went through the rooms, and saw the poet's cat, stuffed and exhibited behind a wire grating, his chair and desk, his portrait in fresco, and Laura's, and the small closet-like room where he died. It was an interesting visit, and we returned by the golden twilight of this heavenly climate, repeating Childe Harold, and wishing for his pen to describe afresh the scene about us.