One of the earliest—and very possibly, too, one of the best—representations of Verona is to my mind that visible in the background of the painting of the deposition of our Saviour from the cross, by Paolo Morando, better known as Cavazzola. In that picture the artist gives us a wonderfully vivid impression of his native town, as a pile of old masonry incasing a hill that rises up from the bank of a river—the Adige—against the cold clear sky of an evening of spring. This picture was painted about 1520, a few years after the restoration of Verona to the Venetian Government by Francis I of France, after wresting it from the Emperor of Germany, Maximilian of Hapsburg. Thenceforth its history was comparatively uneventful, that of an appanage of Venice, until the Napoleonic era, when the French took the town, afterwards sharing it for a space with the Austrians, 1798-1800. From then on the allegiance of Verona was claimed—and enacted—in turn by France and Austria until it became part of the King of Sardinia’s territories after the peace of Nikolsburg in 1866. But it is in the history of Verona’s earlier days that we find her greatest glories side by side with her greatest suffering, from the nightmare of the attempt upon her sovereignty by Ezzelino da Romano to the “Golden Age” of the Scaligeri. Ezzelino, hereditary lord of Bassano, was one of the leaders of the party of the Ghibellines against the Guelphs, and a supporter of the Hohenstaufens in their unavailing contest for the supremacy in Italy. Never has any human being earned so dark a character for cruelty as Ezzelino; never, until our own day, in which (1906) the “Viedomosti” of Moscow suggested the massacre of a million people as the means of quieting the Russian revolution, has any one aspired to rival Ezzelino’s record as a slayer of unarmed people. Beside this man, such small fry as Cromwell, Gilles de Retz, and their kind sink into insignificance. The Florentine historian, Villani, describes Ezzelino as “the cruelest and most terrific tyrant that ever existed among Christians. By his might and tyranny he lorded it for a long time over the March of Treviso and the town of Padua and a great part of Lombardy. He made away with a fearful part of the citizens of Padua, and blinded a great number, even of the best and noblest among them, taking away their possessions and sending them adrift to beg through the world. And many others by divers torments and martyrdoms he put to death, and in one hour caused eleven thousand Paduans to be burnt.”