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Updated: May 18, 2025
A letter from Joseph Scaliger, who ruled literary Europe like a King, from his chair at Leyden, sent Peiresc off to Verona, where he hunted up evidence in support of the wild story that the Scaligers were the representatives of the Ducal line of La Scala.
"Because for many centuries Italy was made up of small states, each one governed by a different ruler, sometimes a family, and sometimes a Doge, as here in Venice. The Scaligers were a famous family which ruled Verona for many years during the middle ages.
And the Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in.
This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear, the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.
The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona.
"I have heard that it rained last Easter-time, and that the burning was not so good as usual," she said with a smile, "perhaps your friends will not find plentiful harvests." Rafael smiled in answer, and looked at Edith's letter, where his eyes fell upon her words about the tomb of the Scaligers. "Why do foreigners always find it hard to understand our Italian history?" he asked.
Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after studying the shrine, or arca as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.
Close to this piazza is a little church, also in the Byzantine style, where, enclosed by a wonderful network railing of very curious design and beautiful workmanship, are the finely sculptured sarcophagi of the Scaligers, the founders of the city.
True, there are numerous cases such as that of the Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is just this How does the genius come in the first place to be developed at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is ultimately to be seen?
We had seen Romeo's house, towering picturesquely behind the Scaligers' tombs; but I wanted to see where Juliet had lived, and where she had been buried. "The Prince says it's all nonsense," exclaimed Aunt Kathryn. "If there was a slight foundation for the story in a great family scandal here about Shakspere's time, anyhow there's none for the houses or the tomb " Beechy stopped her ears.
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