between those two cities continued to exist until a late period of the middle ages. This kind of hostility was quite common among the Italian towns. In the case of large cities, this feeling may to some extent be excused, though it cannot be justified; but at present, when those towns are altogether devoid of character, that hatred is the only thing which has been propagated to them from better and more glorious times. Verona was the first Italian town in which I made a stay, and in which I had any conversation with the people; they very soon began to speak contemptuously of the other cities, to each of which some abusive name was applied. Such were the first things I heard in Italy; the idea that they are all countrymen and Italians is treated by them with ridicule; and even the inhabitants of different towns under the same sovereign have no fellow-feeling. When you speak to a Milanese, you find that he does not regard the Veronese as his countrymen; the inhabitants of some districts in Tuscany appear to him much more in that light, and he feels as foreign to the Lombards as to the French. It is distressing to see this distracted state of Italy. A Florentine treats it as a heresy and flies into a passion, when you speak to him of a _favella Italiana_, he cannot hear of anything but a _favella Toscana_. It is well known, that the emperor Frederic Barbarossa afterwards destroyed Milan, and compelled the inhabitants to live in five scattered villages; but they returned nevertheless. Subsequently, the wars at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century brought such severe sufferings upon Milan, that it would necessarily have perished, if this were possible. It fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and in the sixteenth century was visited by a plague which carried off three-fifths of its inhabitants. In the seventeenth century, the plague again made sad ravages, and destroyed half the population. At present, it is still constantly increasing. He who has a taste for classical antiquity cannot regard these Lombard towns as belonging to it; for their importance does not commence until the decline of the Romans. COMUM was situated at a distance of about twenty miles from Milan; it was a town of Alpine tribes of the Raetian race, and not Gallic. The modern Como is not the same as the ancient Comum, but is identical with the _Novocomum_ of ancient geography which was founded and honored with privileges at a later period by Cn. Pompeius Strabo and Julius Caesar. BERGAMUM also was not a Gallic town, but belonged to the mountain tribes of the district. Brixia, like the whole district between Lodi and Mantua belonged to the Cenomani. LAUS POMPEIA, now Lodi, was founded by Cn. Pompeius Strabo, not, however, as a Roman town, but “as a colony in a place already existing” in the Roman dominion.[59]