At First, Being An Honest Man,
He Is Shocked At The Thought Of Such A Thing; Next, Like A Sensible
Person, reconciled to the inevitable; lastly, as befits his virile race,
he learns to play the game so well that
The horrified officials
grudgingly admit (and it is their highest praise):
Inglese italianizzato -
Diavolo incarnato.
Yes; slowly the charm of law-breaking grows upon the Italianated Saxon;
slowly, but surely. There is a neo-barbarism not only in matters of art.
VI
AT VENOSA
There has always, no doubt, been a castle at Venosa. Frederick
Barbarossa lived here oftener than in Sicily; from these regions he
could look over to his beloved East, and the security of this particular
keep induced him to store his treasures therein. The indefatigable
Huillard Breholles has excavated some account of them from the
Hohen-staufen records. Thus we learn that here, at Venosa, the Emperor
deposited that marvel, that tentorium, I mean, mirifica arte
constructum, in quo imagines solis et lunce artificialiter motte, cursum
suum certis et debitis spatiis peragrant, et boras diei et noctis
in-fallibiliter indicant. Cuius tentorii valor viginti millium marcarum
pretium dicitur transcendisse. It was given him by the Sultan of
Babylonia. Always the glowing Oriental background!
The present castle, a picturesque block with moat and corner towers, was
built in 1470 by the redoubtable Pierro del Balzo. A church used to
occupy the site, but the warrior, recognizing its strategic advantages,
transplanted the holy edifice to some other part of the town. It is now
a ruin, the inhabitable portions of which have been converted into cheap
lodgings for sundry poor folk - a monetary speculation of some local
magnate, who paid 30,000 francs for the whole structure. You can climb
up into one of the shattered towers whereon reposes an old cannon amid a
wind-sown garden of shrubs and weeds. Here the jackdaws congregate at
nightfall, flying swiftly and noiselessly to their resting-place. Odd,
how quiet Italian jackdaws are, compared with those of England; they
have discarded their voices, which is the best thing they could have
done in a land where every one persecutes them. There is also a dungeon
at this castle, an underground recess with cunningly contrived
projections in its walls to prevent prisoners from climbing upwards; and
other horrors.
The cathedral of Venosa contains a chapel with an unusually nne portal
of Renaissance work, but the chief architectural beauty of the town is
the decayed Benedictine abbey of La Trinita. The building is roofless;
it was never completed, and the ravages of time and of man have not
spared it; earthquakes, too, have played sad tricks with its arches and
columns, particularly that of 1851, which destroyed the neighbouring
town of Melfi. It stands beyond the more modern settlement on what is
now a grassy plain, and attached to it is a Norman chapel containing the
bones of Alberada, mother of Boemund, and others of her race. Little of
the original structure of this church is left, though its walls are
still adorned, in patches, with frescoes of genuine angels - attractive
creatures, as far removed from those bloodless Byzantine anatomies as
from the plethoric and insipid females of the settecento.
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