"At Borgo San Donnino, Madame de Chateaubriand came running into my room in the middle of the night: she had seen her clothes and her straw hat fall off the chairs over which they were hung. She had concluded from this that we were in an inn haunted by ghosts or inhabited by robbers. I had noticed no shock as I lay in bed; nevertheless it was the case that an earthquake had been felt in the Apennines: that which overturns cities is able to throw down a woman's clothes. I said as much to Madame de Chateaubriand; I also told her that, in Spain, in the Vega del Xenil, I had passed without accident through a village which had been turned upside down the day before by a subterranean concussion. These lofty consolations did not have the smallest success, and we hastened to leave this cave of murderers. "The continuation of my journey has displayed to me on every hand the flight of men and the inconstancy of fortune. At Parma, I found the portrait of Napoleon's widow that daughter of the Cæsars is now the wife of Count Neipperg; that mother of the conqueror's son has presented that son with brothers[508]: she allows the debts which she piles up to be guaranteed by a little Bourbon[509] who lives at Lucca and who, if it is expedient, is to inherit the Duchy of Parma. "Bologna appears to me less deserted than at the time of my first journey. I have been received here with the honours with which ambassadors are pestered. I have visited a fine cemetery: I never forget the dead; they are our family. "I have never so much admired the Carraccis[510] as in the new gallery at Bologna. It seemed to me as though I were seeing Raphael's St. Cecilia for the first time, so much more divine is it here than at the Louvre, under our sooty sky." "RAVENNA, 1 _October_ 1828. "In the Romagna, a country which I did not know, a multitude of towns, with their houses coated with marble lime, are perched on the tops of different little mountains, like coveys of white pigeons. Each of those towns possesses a few master-pieces of modern art or a few monuments of antiquity. This canton of Italy contains the whole of Roman history: the traveller should go through it with his Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius in his hand. [Sidenote: Dante's tomb.] "I passed through Imola, the bishopric of Pius VII.[511], and Faenza. At Forli I went out of my road to visit Dante's tomb at Ravenna. As I approached the monument, I was seized with that thrill of admiration which a great renown gives, when the master of that renown has been unfortunate. Alfieri, who bore on his forehead _il pallor della morta e la speranza_, flung himself prone upon that marble and addressed to it his sonnet, _O gran Padre Alighier!_ Standing before the tomb, I applied to myself this verse from the _Purgatorio_: