After about five minutes’ walk from our hotel we found ourselves in the Piazza delle Erbe, the fruit-market of Verona. This fine open square was completely filled with stalls, with funny old white umbrellas covering them. On one side of these stalls were little stools about six or seven inches high, on which were seated the oldest of old women, generally knitting. How very ancient these women looked, how wrinkled and furrowed were their countenances! Indeed, we could almost have imagined that these crones were in existence when the palaces and tower of the piazza were being built, and that they have been perched on their stools selling their wares during the centuries that have crumbled the buildings, and reduced the fortunes of Verona, formerly one of the most brilliant cities of Italy, the abode of Dante, Sammicheli the architect, and Paul Cagliari, or Veronese, the last great genius of the North Italian school of painting. We were anxious to see how these women conducted business, and going up to a particularly old one we asked the price of some oranges. As we could not understand her patois (of which there are over a hundred in Italy—the country of a confusion of tongues!) the older bachelor took up a franc, in exchange for which she was about to present him with two oranges! Fancy this old creature, who had probably lived all her life amidst the beautiful buildings of Verona, and who was at least eighty years of age, attempting to swindle two (as she thought) unwary foreigners. We were walking away disgusted when the woman shouted after us, offering three oranges for the franc; and seeing we were still discontented, she offered four, then five, then six oranges, which last we took, much to the delight of the woman, who even then had probably got double the value of her wares. Strolling out of the Piazza delle Erbe, we entered the Piazza dei Signori, where there was much to interest us. On one side is the Palazzo del Consiglio, the grandest in Verona. It is built in the early Renaissance style of the fifteenth-century, and is covered with rich and exquisite detail. Near to this palace is the fine marble statue of Dante, erected in 1865. The poet is standing, with his head resting on his right hand. The features are extremely intellectual, but rather stern, such as one would expect in the writer of the “Divina Commedia.” After the Piazza dei Signori we visited for the second time the tombs of the Scaligers. Our girls will remember from our last article what a very important part the families of the Visconti and Sforza took in the history of Milan. Now, an almost equally important position was occupied for nearly a century and a half by the Scaligers, or della Scalas, in Verona.