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Updated: June 21, 2025
To Alice, accustomed to the vulgarity of suburban villas with Italian campaniles, a florid lodge a stone's throw from the house, darkened too with smoke and tawdry with paint, this old-world dwelling was a patch of wonderland. Her eyes drank in the beauty of the place the great blue backs of hill beyond, the acres of sweet pasture, the primeval woods. "Is this Glenavelin?" she cried.
George of the Seaweed." As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
The earth does not wish one to treat it with either timidity or brutality." The Ave Maria rang in all the campaniles, seeming to make of the sky an immense instrument of religious music. "Darling," said Miss Bell, "do you observe that the air of Florence is made sonorous and silvery at night by the sound of the bells?"
Half an hour after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the suggestion of sound.
By degrees the old ambition stirred, and she began to sketch the slow panorama of July clouds, built of mist and foam into the likeness of domes of burnished copper, and campaniles of silver; the opaque mountain masses, stratified along the horizon, leaden in hue, with sullen bluish gorges where ravening January winds made their lair; the intricate, graceful tracery of gnaried bare boughs and interlacing twigs, that would serve as a framework when May hung up her green portieres to screen the down-lined boudoirs where happy birds nestled; the gray stone arches of the bridge in the valley below, the groups of cattle couched on the rocky hillside, up which the pine forest marched like ranks of giants.
It is situated on a rising ground, just where the river Ybar enters the plain of Karanovatz. The environs are beautiful. The hills are of moderate height, covered with verdure and foliage; only campaniles were wanting to the illusion of my being in Italy, somewhere about Verona or Vicenza, where the last picturesque undulations of the Alps meet the bountiful alluvia of the Po.
Now the proud Italian architects, disdainful though they were of the arts of the rude Northern builders, could not but admit the expressiveness of the pointed roof; so they placed a form of it on some of their campaniles, as on those of Venice and Cremona, in both these instances making it a third of the whole height.
The campaniles of Italy rise above the churches and houses like the sentinels of a sleeping camp nor is their strangely human aspect wholly imaginary: these giants of mountain and campagna have eyes and brazen tongues; rising four square, story above story, with a belfry or lookout, like a head, atop, their likeness to a man is not infrequently enhanced by a certain identity of proportion of ratio, that is, of height to width: Giotto's beautiful tower is an example.
Then came a long spell of calms or baffling winds, and it was a fortnight before the campaniles of Venice were seen rising apparently from the water. "I have been anxious about you," Signor Polani said when Francis arrived.
The hour was very silent; the little towns and hamlets scattered beside Como, like clusters of white and rosy shells, dreamed on until thin music broke from their campaniles. Bell answered bell and made a girdle of harmony about the lake, floating along the water and ascending aloft until no louder than the song of birds. Two women climbed together up the great acclivity of Griante.
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