The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities, is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then, doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire, followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the mediaeval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary, the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from another direction across an open space, the Piazza Bra, but I think the contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops, battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward cypresses; then the blue hills--blue as cobalt, although so near--striped in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications, marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly