Scarcely a parish of it, from Rivoli in the west, to Aquileia in the east, but has, at one time or another—and, in many instances, not once but again and again—been deluged with the blood of armies and of individuals in public and private struggles during the course of the centuries. From Rivoli, rock-bound in the shadow of the Savoy and Alps, across to sad Aquileia, slowly decaying among its fever-stricken rice-fields by the Adriatic lagoons, shades of Masséna’s Frenchmen may well look over to where their hereditary foes first poured into the southern “Mayland,” as they named it under the leadership of Attila, a thousand and three hundred and forty-five years earlier; whilst, between the two, the dust of innumerable armoured condottieri and “Landsknechte” of the middle ages and the Renaissance is mingled with that of hundreds of thousands—Latins, Teutons, Slavs, and Magyars—since fallen in this, the cloth-and-bullet age of our development from the days of Pavia to those of Solferino and Custozza. Truly, this “Mayland” of the Gothic invaders—whence, as some hold, is derived the name of Milan—is one of the most fertile of all soils for those endowed with the gift of what Sir Thomas Browne so quaintly styled, “the art of reminiscential evocation.” Its history has been made familiar to us, moreover, by many writers and painters and sculptors, all along the road of the centuries; and yet, for me, at least, the very essence of its fascination lies in some of the less known recesses of its treasure-house of human vicissitudes and human good and evil. Its towns and castles, its villas and churches, have their tales of glory or of terror, of sorrow or triumph to tell; and the story of them is the story of a people, and of a society, that have preserved their characteristics intact throughout more changes of government and of ideas than have fallen to the lot of any others in all the world, with the possible exception of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Naples. There are in this world of ours certain spots that, on first beholding them, cause our hearts to thrill and glow with an extraordinary gladness, by reason of their perfect beauty and the exquisite harmony of them with their surroundings; until, suddenly, we learn the name of the place—and then it seems to us as though the loveliness at which we have been gazing changes under our very eyes, and, as we draw closer to it, becomes swiftly hideous with all the loathsomeness of some dead thing first seen from afar. Such a one was once, for Victor Hugo, on viewing it of a summer’s evening from the window of a railway train, the town of Sedan, and just such another, for the wanderer who comes into sight of it for the first time, is to be found in a little old bourg at the foot of the mountains in western Lombardy, nestling among poplars and gardens, and crowned by the spire of an ancient church that rises from near the remains of a contemporary castle, once the citadel of the place.