The Tuscan, With A Cigar In His Mouth, Went Loitering Off,
Carrying His Hat In His Hand That He Might The Better Trail Up The
Ends Of His Dishevelled Moustache.
And the brave Courier, as he
and I strolled away to look about us, began immediately to
entertain me with the private histories and family affairs of the
whole party.
A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is. A deserted, solitary,
grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches,
which afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that wander about
them; and streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other
houses over the way. The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go
wandering about, with the double curse of laziness and poverty,
uncouthly wrinkling their misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of
children play with their impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the
feeblest of gutters; and the gauntest of dogs trot in and out of
the dullest of archways, in perpetual search of something to eat,
which they never seem to find. A mysterious and solemn Palace,
guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the place, stands
gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king with the marble
legs, who flourished in the time of the thousand and one Nights,
might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy, in
his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out.
What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to
ramble through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun!
Each, in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreary, God-
forgotten towns in the wide world, the chief.
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