Nearly all the streets in Padua are flanked with arcades, which add much to the picturesqueness of its thoroughfares. We, of course, sought out Il Salone, the palace celebrated for its huge hall, said to be the largest unsupported by columns in the world. The walls of this hall are completely covered with frescoes, nearly 400 in number, more remarkable for their strange subjects than their value as works of art. At one end of the hall is a huge wooden horse; very ugly, the bachelors thought, though it was designed by the great Florentine, Donatello. After seeing Il Salone the bachelors wandered about for an hour or so, and at last came in sight of the monstrous church of St. Antonio. As this is the work of the greatest architect of the Gothic period in Italy, Nicolo Pisano, we suppose that we ought to have been much struck by it; but we confess that we were not, at any rate by its exterior. The domes, seven in number, bear a most unfortunate resemblance to so many dish-covers, and the kind of circular drums or towers on which they are placed have a kind of truncated look, as if they have been cut short, and were intended to have been much higher. The west front, though adorned with Gothic arcades, has a bald, sprawling look about it, and does not seem to “fit” the church properly. The sides of the building, moreover, are positively ugly, and there is only one point from which it really looks well, and that is a garden near the east end, where the domes are seen rising up over a group of trees. The first impression of the interior is rather one of baldness, but when one arrives halfway up the church, and the exquisite chapel of St. Antonio in one of the transepts, a most lovely work by Sansovino, and the very beautiful Gothic altar and screen in the opposite transept are opened out to the view, the first impression is at once corrected. Perhaps in the whole of Italy there is not to be found a more perfect example of the Renaissance than the exquisite chapel of St. Antonio. It opens from the transept by five arches, the detail and proportion of which are simply perfect. On the opposite wall are five similarly-treated blank arches, filled in with extremely elaborate bas-reliefs, beneath the centre of which is the altar. A semicircular barrelled vault, adorned with detail, perfectly bewildering from its intricacy and delicacy, covers the space between the two arcades. It is certainly a matter for regret that the Renaissance architecture of Italy did not stand still at this beautiful epoch, instead of developing into the wildness and eccentricity of the later school.