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The serpent, the well-known cognizance of the Visconti, had already coiled itself around all those fair and clustering cities which were once the Lombard republics, and had poisoned their vigorous life. The Ezzelinos, Carraras, Gonzagas, Scalas, had crushed the spirit of liberty in the neighborhood of Venice.
Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the Carraras.
The executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies, wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.
To a man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped from the pozzi by every artifice of fact and figure. The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history.
The story of the imprisonment and after adventures of the Carraras is one of the most romantic of the Middle Ages. Francesco Novello da Carrara and his devoted wife, Taddea d'Este, escaped from the castle where they were immured by the Visconti, and after a series of almost incredible adventures they reached Florence.
And then, the war being over, the race of Ezzelin expelled, and the lords of the soil, the Carraras, strong in power, they see how the holy body is brought into the town to protect it for ever, and a fair temple is built above its resting-place to prove the people's gratitude to the power that set them free.
What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.
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