In the way of Italian stories, we have Hans Andersen’s _Improvisatore_, Whyte Melville’s _Gladiators_, and the series of Marion Crawford, beginning with _Saracenesca_, which are full of older days in Rome, the middle portion of this century. Bulwer too has given us _Rienzi_ and _The Last Days of Pompeii_. _Romola_ by George Eliot, and many of Lever’s novels, picture for us a Florence which has passed away. Nor must we forget _John Inglesant_, and its remarkable picture of an Italy in the middle ages. In Italian we have the famous novel, _I Promessi Sposi_, _Marco Visconti_, and many much more modern books, including those of Silvio Pellico, Amicis, which are all interesting, and written also in Italian of a more modern style, which has taken on some shades of difference from the French. If you intend going to Italy, you should by all means try to get a few Italian lessons, if only to accustom your ear to the sound of the spoken tongue. The Venetian school of painters is famous for their colouring. The best known of the great Venetian masters are, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian; and you must know something of them. The last half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth were the great periods of Italian art, and besides Varsari’s great works, you should read Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography; and also a good history of Italian art, such as Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s _History of Painting in Italy_. Nor must you omit to learn something of the early history of music, which has so much of Italian in its origin; and poetry which numbers Dante and Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso, in its ranks. You should likewise understand something of Italian architecture, and of its three schools, Venetian, Florentian, and Roman. I remember well my own burning desire to learn something of the meaning of the things which surrounded me, and how I devoured everything that came in my way, so that the book list in my note-book and the copious notes surprise me to this day: Sismondi’s _Italian Republics_, Roscoe’s _Life of Lorenzo di Medicis_, Sir William Gell’s works, Mrs. Jameson’s books, and the lives of all the painters I could reach in English, French, and Italian. If we wander away from the more modern side of life in Italy, we are even more interested. The Etruscans and their cities, the early days of Rome, Rome in Christian days, and the wars and tumults of the middle ages, have all in turn swayed the Peninsula, and have all had their historians too. The Etruscans are the most mysterious people of antiquity, and in the Etruscan museum at Florence you will first be able to gauge the artistic products of this ancient people in bronze and earthenware. Their power attained its zenith in the sixth century B.C., and you ought to know something about them in order to comprehend better the Roman civilisation.