From the fresco in the Baptistery, Castiglione d'Olona From the painting attributed to LEONARDO DA VINCI, CERTOSA DI PAVIA. (Photo, ALINARI) ON THE ROAD THE BRIDGE, PAVIA 136 148 From the painting by CORREGGIO, Gallery of Parma. 262 278 FRANCESCO D'Este, Duke of Modena. 296 From the painting by VELASQUEZ, in the Gallery, Modena. (Photo, ANDERSON) THE CITIES OF LOMBARDY CHAPTER I CISALPINE GAUL HEN I think of Lombardy, there comes back WHEN into my mind a country wide and gracious, watered by many a great river, and lying, a little vaguely, between always far-away mountains; a world that is all a garden, where one passes between fair hedgerows, from orchard to orchard, among the vines, where the fields are green with promise or shining with harvest, and there are meadows on the lower slopes of the mountains. And the whole of this wide garden seems to me, as is no other country in the world, to be subject to the sun, the stars and the great and beautiful clouds of an infinite sky; every landscape is filled with them, and beneath them the cities seem but small things, not cities truly, but rather sanctuaries, hidden in that garden for our delight, reverence and meditation, at the end of the endless ways, where only the restless poplars tell the ceaseless hours. It is my purpose in this book to consider the nature and the history of this country, to recapture and to express as well as I may my delight in it, so that something of its beauty and its genius may perhaps disengage itself from my pages, and the reader feel what I have felt about it though he never stir ten miles from |