LECTOR. It is good to know the names of the strange things one meets
with on one's travels.
AUCTOR. So I return to where I branched off, and tell you that the
river Po is here crossed by a bridge of boats.
It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is even a trifle
uncomfortable to be so near the rush of the water on the trembling
pontoons. And on that day its speed and turbulence were emphasized by
the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on the water showed the
rapidity of the current, and the silence of its fall framed and
enhanced the swirl of the great river.
Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza - a step through mud and
rain. On my right was that plain where Barbarossa received, and was
glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century; there the
renaissance of our Europe saw the future glorious for the first time
since the twilight of Rome, and being full of morning they imagined a
new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at Roncaglia, I think in spring,
and I wish I had been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain they
say is beautiful and generous, but in summer I know by experience that
it is cold, brutish, and wet.
And so in Piacenza it rained and there was mud, till I came to a hotel
called the Moor's Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it I
discovered a curious thing:
