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And you've been with her to the Jewish burying-ground at the Lido, and the Spanish synagogue in the Ghetto, and the fish-market at the Rialto, and you've shown her the house of Othello and the house of Desdemona, and the prisons in the ducal palace; and three nights you've taken us to the Piazza as soon as the Austrian band stopped playing, and all the interesting promenading was over, and those stuffy old Italians began to come to the caffès.
It gladdens one's heart to watch them, as they walk arm in arm of an evening, singing in chorus, or fill the pits of the cheaper theatres, or sit down at fashionable caffés in their jackets, with a self-confidence and freedom of manner pleasant to behold. The play of free institutions is not counteracted here, thank God, by the despotism of conventionalities.
"Not the custom!" Why not, I wondered. A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you! It has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years. If I had a thousand dollars, a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the pen, I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best memoir on this question: "Why is buttered toast excluded from the caffés of Turin?"
All around the great piazza are arches with caffès and shops under them. Off at one end rises the massive front of Santa Giustina. The broad paved space between the arcades and the moat of the statues was the scene of a horse-fair.
A group of officers, of the cavalry, with a few infantry uniforms skirting them, were sitting in the pleasant cooling evening air, fanned by the fresh springing breeze, outside one of the Piazza Bra caffes, close upon the shadow of the great Verona amphitheatre.
I confess I augured ill of a city from whose caffés, unlike all others throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished. I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty. My mother bless her soul! brought me up in the faith of buttered toast. I had breakfasted upon it all my life. I could conceive of no breakfast without it. Hence the shock I felt.
You would be going in a gilded barge, with songs and fiddles and dancing, instead of a common gondola, and you would stay a month, walking, going to parties and caffes, drinking chocolate and lemonade gaming, sonneteering, and butterflying about generally." "It was doubtless a beautiful life," answered the priest, with simple indifference.
"At caffes, where silly young men murder reputations, it was said that Rossini was madly in love with the beautiful prima donna; and of course he was; for he could not help being in love, in his way, with every brilliant woman he met.
Men, women, dogs, cats, pigs, goats, &c. no glass in the windows doors shattered truckle-beds a few earthen pots; and with all this filth, we find, perhaps, half a dozen velvet or brocade covered chairs; a broken mirror, or a marble slab-table; these are the articles plundered in former days of terror and revolution. All caffés and hotels in the villages are thus furnished.
The other less celebrated caffès do the same thing. One immediately opposite to Florian's, on the other side of the piazza Quadri's has almost as large a spread of chairs and tables as Florian himself.
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