I have travelled so frequently from Trent to Verona by the railway that I always regard it as one of the most natural and obvious roads of approach to Italy for Englishmen. It takes its course through so fine a country that one does not easily tire of the journey, and finally, it sets travellers down in the city which, perhaps more than any other in northern Italy, charms the cultivated traveller by the beauty, interest, and grandeur of its buildings. Who that has taken this way to Verona does not remember with pleasure the last quarter of an hour of his journey, as the railway, making a circuit round two-thirds of the city, reveals first a mixed group of lofty steeples, presently the great church of San Zenone, then Sta. Anastasia, anon San Fermo, then crosses the swift-flowing Adige, and at last lands one at the station, full of anxiety to make the nearer acquaintance of the buildings of “Verona la degna,” which from afar look so wondrous brave and fine? CHAPTER VI. “Come, go with me. Go, sirrah, trudge about Through fair Verona.” _Romeo and Juliet_, act i. scene 2. Verona: Campanile of the Palazzo dei Signori--Sta. Anastasia--Monuments--Piazza dell’ Erbe--The Duomo--The Baptistery--Sta. Maria l’Antica--Cemetery and Palace of the Scaligers--Domestic Architecture--Piazza di Brà--The Austrians--Ponte di Castel-Vecchio--San Zenone--San Fermo Maggiore--Chapel near the Duomo--Romeo and Juliet--Dwarfs--Wells. We reached Verona in the evening, and were up early on the next morning, anxious to get a general idea of the city. But I was no sooner out of my bed than I saw from my window, over the roofs of the opposite buildings, the campanile of the Palazzo dei Signori, a lofty, simple, and almost unbroken piece of brickwork, rising, I suppose, at least three hundred feet into the air, and pierced with innumerable scaffold-holes, in and out of which, as I looked, flew countless beautiful doves, whose choice of a home in the walls of this tall Veronese tower will make me think kindly of putlog-holes for the future. Certainly, if the Italian and English principles of tower-building are to be compared with one another, the Italian need give no fairer example of its power than this simple and grand erection. It rises, as we found afterwards, out of a large pile of buildings, and for a short distance above their roofs is built in alternate courses of brick and a very warm-coloured stone, [Illustration: 11.--CAMPANILE, PALAZZO SCALIGERI, VERONA. Page 84.]