“There is, first, this blue Lombardic plain, wide as the sea, and in the very centre of it, at about twelve miles away from you, a little cluster of domes and towers, with a gleam of white water round them. That is Mantua. Look beyond its fretted outline, and you will see that in that direction the plain, elsewhere boundless, is ended by undulations of soft hills. Those are the Apennines above Padua. Then look to the left, and just beyond the roots of the Alps, you will see the cluster of the cones of the Euganean hills, at the space at their feet in which rests Padua, and the gleam of the horizon beyond them in which rests Venice. Look then, north-eastward, and touched into a crown of strange rubies as the sun descends, there is the snowy cluster of the Alps of Friuli. Then turn to the north-west, and under the sunset itself you will see the Adige flow from its enchanted porch of marble, and in one strong and almost straight stream, blanched always bright by its swiftness, reflecting on its eddies neither bank nor cloud, but only light, stretch itself along the vines, to the Verona lying at your feet; there first it passes the garden wall of the church of S. Zeno, then under the battlements of the great bridge of the Scaligers, then passes away out of sight behind the hill on which, though among ghastly modern buildings, here and there you may still trace a grey fragment of tower and wall--the remnants of the palace of Theodoric of Verona--Dietrich of Bern. “Now I do not think that there is any other rock in all the world, from which the places and monuments of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its ages can be visible, as from this piece of crag, with its blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath you at once, the birthplaces of Virgil and of Livy; the homes of Dante and Petrarch; and the source of the most sweet and pathetic inspiration of your own Shakespeare; the spot where the civilization of the Gothic kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric, and where whatever was strongest in the Italian race redeemed itself into life by its league against Barbarossa. You have the cradle of natural science and medicine in the schools of Padua; the central light of Italian chivalry in the power of the Scaligers; the chief stain of Italian cruelty in that of Ezzelin; and, lastly, the birthplace of the highest art; for among these hills, or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna, Titian, Coreggio, and Veronese.”[53]