CHAPTER V. "Am I in Italy? Is this the Mincius? And shall I sup where Juliet at the masque Saw her loved Montague, and now sleeps by him?" Palazzuolo-Coccaglio-Bresc'a: new and old Cathedrals, Broletto-Churches Donato Desenzano OUR drive from Bergamo to Brescia was strikingly unlike what we had hitherto been so much enjoying. Mile after mile of straight roads, between fields so closely planted with fruit-trees that one never sees more than the merest glimpse of anything beyond them, are certainly not pleasant; and the hot sun above us, and the thirsty and dry beds of rivers which we crossed on our way, made us feel glad when evening drew on, and we found ourselves rapidly nearing Brescia. I made notes at two or three places on the way. At Palazzuolo is a great circular belfry, ornamented with a large figure at the top and divers others about its base, built of brick rusticated to look like stone, and altogether about as base a piece of architecture as could well be found, but pardoned here because of the pure blue of the sky I saw behind it, and partly on account of the view which it commands, reaching, it is said, as far as Milan, and including the great plain out of which, upon a slight hill, it rises. Palazzuolo is nicely situated, and upon the first of the many rivers which we had passed from Bergamo which had any water in its bed. The houses, too, were almost all supported on arcades, giving pleasant shelter from the sun. Beyond this we came to Coccaglio, a small village with a wretchedly bad modern church, glorying in a glaringly sham front, and faced on the opposite side of the street by the remains of a medieval church-whose place it has taken -and which is now shut up and rapidly going to ruin. The new church is built north and south--the old one orientating properly; but then the west front was the great feature of the new church, and therefore it was necessary, of course, to place it towards the road! Coccaglio still has, however, some very valuable remains of mediæval domestic work in its houses, of which I was able to obtain some sketches. They were entirely executed in brick and terra-cotta, except, of course, the capitals and shafts of the windows, and appeared to be of the fourteenth century. The upper portion of the house of which I give a sketch remains very fairly perfect, though its lower story has been entirely modernized. It will be seen that it is very uniform in its design, the large and small windows alternating DETAIL OF WINDOWS AND CORBELLING FOR CHIMNEYS-COCCAGLIO. regularly; and that semi-circular arches are used in the windows in connection with ogee trefoils. This is one of the apparent inconsistencies which occur in almost all Italian Gothic work; and might seem to give us ancient authority for any amount of licence in our combination of the elements of what we ordinarily consider to be thoroughly different styles. The windows are marked by the same elaboration F |