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It seems strange that they can never grasp it. We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner, the Via di Castello, and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend.
Filippo Eustachio, captain of the Castello of Milan, a brave and honest man, Corio tells us, who had refused to yield up the keys of the Rocca to Bona's minion, but whose brothers had been implicated in the plot against Lodovico's life, was one day arrested by the duke's orders, and imprisoned at Abbiategrasso; he was afterwards released, no evidence of his guilt being produced, but his post was filled by one of the Moro's servants.
The road skirted the coast through the oldest and most picturesque part of Sicily, and it amazed them to observe that however far they travelled Etna was always apparently next door, and within reaching distance. At Aci Castello they were pointed out the seven Isles of the Cyclops, which the blind Polyphemus once hurled after the crafty Ulysses.
Three times he turned round, while the tears streamed down his pale face, and looked at the stately pile, which held all that had been dearest to him in the world where Leonardo had painted his Last Supper, and where Bianca and Beatrice slept together. Then, in the dusk of the summer evening, he rode slowly back through the park and gardens of the Castello.
"The duchess," wrote Donato de Preti from Milan to his mistress Isabella d'Este, "has not yet arrived here, but is expected on Friday. All the rooms and furniture in the Castello are hung with black. To-day a man who came from Pavia is said to have brought word that Count Borella had been sent to ask the duchess for her son Francesco, but that she had refused to send him.
The ship which carried the corpse went up the Tiber to the Castello Sant' Angelo, where it was set down. At once the magnificent dress was fetched from the duke's palace which he had worn on the day of the procession, and he was clothed in it once more: beside him were placed the insignia of the generalship of the Church.
This involved giving back to Ferdinand II, King of Naples, all the palaces and fortresses of his kingdom; which indeed he did but enjoy for three months, dying of exhaustion on the 7th of September following, at the Castello della Somma, at the foot of Vesuvius; all the attentions lavished upon him by his young wife could not repair the evil that her beauty had wrought.
I commend this course, because it hath been used of old; notwithstanding Nicholas Vitelli in our dayes hath been known to demolish two Citadels in the town of Castello, the better to keep the State; Guidubaldo Duke of Urbin being to return into his State, out of which he was driven by Cæsar Borgia, raz'd all the Fortresses of that Countrey, and thought he should hardlyer lose that State again without them.
It was rumoured that the Marquis Gianfrancesco Gonzaga had himself been seen in the crowd assembled in the courtyard of the Castello, and, much to Isabella's surprise, Lodovico asked the marchioness, at the banquet which followed, if this report were true.
There remained Piedmont and Charles Albert. War with Austria was declared on the 23rd of March. It was midnight; a vast crowd waited in silence in Piazza Castello. At last the windows of the palace were opened, a sudden flood of light from within illuminating the scene. Charles Albert stepped upon the balcony between his two sons.
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