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I shall always remember with pleasure the day when I met an unknown relation." "The Albergo di Napoli will not forget that Prince Saracinesca has been its guest," replied Giovanni politely, a smile upon his thin lips. He shook hands with both his guests, and ushered them out to the door with a courteous bow.
His course had now become one of aimless wandering; for prudence still forbade his return to Pianura, and his patron's indifference left him free to come and go as he chose. He had brought from Rome that albergo d'ira a settled melancholy of spirit, which sought refuge in such distractions as the moment offered.
Luzzara has also a great tower, which I had seen in the distance from Dosalo, and the only albergo in the place gives you an excellent Italian dinner. The wine might please one of the greatest admirers of sherry, and if you are not given feather beds, the beds are at least clean like the rooms themselves.
I cannot but mention a most wretched team of vettura-horses which stopped at the door of our albergo: poor, lean, downcast creatures, with deep furrows between their ribs; nothing but skin and bone, in short, and not even so much skin as they should have had, for it was partially worn off from their backs.
It is as sharp and trim as its own map, and that map is as clear as a geometrical problem. Everything in Lucca is good. I went with a short shadow, creeping when I could on the eastern side of the street to save the sunlight; then I came to the main square, and immediately on my left was the Albergo di Something-or-other, a fine great hotel, but most unfortunately right facing the blazing sky.
I went to the Albergo Samuel Butler, named after the author of Erewhon, who often stayed there when writing The Authoress of the Odyssey, and was well known in the town. Owing to the death of Don Paolo who, with his wife, Donna Maria, used to manage the hotel, it is now , I regret to say, closed, and the traveller must do the best he can at one of the other inns.
Indeed he thought he had bought it; but there was a hitch. He describes it in a letter as "the most beautiful house in Venice." The next, the Brandolin Rota, which adjoins it, was, as a hotel, under the name Albergo dell'Universo, Browning's first Venetian home. Later he moved to the Zattere and after that to the Palazzo Rezzonico, to which we are soon coming, where he died.
I had come from the Albergo, where I had heard Miss Bell's cook improvise magnificently twelve hundred verses on Spring. I was inundated by a celestial joy which the sight of you made me lose. It must be that a profound truth is enclosed in the curse of Eve. For, near you, I felt reckless and wicked. I had soft words on my lips. They were lies.
It is not without significance that the first modern eclogues were from the same pen as the sonnet 'Fontana di dolore, albergo d'ira, expressive of the shame with which earnest sons of the Church contemplated the captivity of the holy father at Avignon; for thus on the very threshold of Arcadia we are met with those bitter denunciations of ecclesiastical corruption which strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton.
I stopped at this albergo for a considerable period, that a sufficient alibi might be established and the moment of my arrival there prove uncertain, should any future question ever arise concerning it. Then the crash came. I returned home suspecting nothing to fall like Lucifer, to find all lost, to hold my dead wife in my arms and know that, without her, life was ended for me.
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