The names of the engines on this railway are very unlike the kind of nomenclature indulged in at home; we were drawn to Verona, I believe, by the Titian, and saw, as we rushed along, engines named after Dante, Sansovino, and other artistic and literary celebrities.
We reached Verona at ten o'clock; the station, however, is so much out of the town, and the day was so intensely hot, that we gave up the idea of again going into it, and, contenting ourselves with the general view of its quaint and picturesque walls rising over the rugged hills which girt the city on its northern side, we sat down to a breakfast of iced lemonade and some of those deliciously light cakes which are never had in such perfection as in Italy, and amused ourselves by watching the way in which the guards and drivers of the train by which we had travelled proceeded to solace themselves with a game at billiards, upon a table provided, I suppose, by the very considerate directors of the railway company.
The railway from Verona to Mantua crosses a country which is thoroughly uninteresting in point of scenery; it carried us on well into the great plain of Lombardy, rich, teemingly rich, in its produce, but flat, arid, and sultry to a degree. This was altogether one of our hottest days, and took us fairly into a kind of district in which the heat is most oppressively felt.
On the road we passed Villa Franca, a small town which has a rather striking castle, with battlemented walls and a good many square towers, still very fairly perfect; the whole built in brick, and with battlements finished square at the top, and not forked like those at Verona.
We reached the station at Mantua by twelve o'clock, but, as this was very far from the city, it was nearly an hour later before we were fairly landed at one--I forget which--of the abominably dirty and bad inns to which sojourners
[Illustration: 39.--DUCAL PALACE, MANTUA. Page 255.]
within its walls have to submit with the best grace that they can.
Mantua is nearly surrounded by water; two large shallow and unwholesome-looking lakes giving it this far from pleasant kind of isolation. Over a long mediæval bridge between these waters the way into the city from the terminus lies. One of the lakes is higher than the other, and accordingly twelve mills, each adorned with a statue of an apostle, are formed upon the bridge, and give it its name of Ponte Mulina.