Under the cathedral of Bologna is a _subterranean confession-chapel_ --as singular and impressive a device as I ever saw. It is dark like a cellar, the daylight faintly struggling through a painted window above the altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving a most ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved with tombstones, the inscriptions and death's heads of which you feel under your feet as you walk through. The roof is so vaulted that every tread is reverberated endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the confession-boxes, with the pierced plates, at which the priest within puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and at one of the sides is a deep cave, far within which, as in a tomb, lies a representation on limestone of our Saviour, bleeding as he came from the cross, with the apostles, made of the same cadaverous material, hanging over him!
We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an extraordinary day in Bologna--a _festa_, that occurs but once in ten years. We went out as usual after breakfast this morning, and found the city had been decorated over-night in the most splendid and singular manner. The arcades of some four or five streets in the centre of the town were covered with rich crimson damask, the pillars completely bound, and the arches dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness and taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets themselves were covered with cloths stretched above the second stories of the houses from one side to the other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making in each street one long tent of a mile or more, with two lines of crimson columns at the sides, and festoons of gauze, of different colors, hung from window to window in every direction. It was by far the most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all there in their gayest dresses, and we probably saw in the course of the day every woman in Bologna. My friends, the painters, give it the palm for beauty over all the cities they had seen. There was a grand procession in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands of the Austrian army made the round of the decorated streets, playing most delightfully before the principal houses. In the evening there was an illumination, and we wandered up and down till midnight through the fairy scene, almost literally "dazzled and drunk with beauty."