When we arrived at the summit of the road the weather cleared [Disraeli continued his account in his letter to his father] and we found ourselves surrounded by snow. The scenery here and for a mile or two before was perfect desolation, cataracts coursing down crumbled avalanches whose horrible surface was only varied by the presence of one or two blasted firs. Here in this dreary and desolate scene burst forth a small streak of blue sky, the harbinger of the Italian heaven. The contrast on descending into Italy is wonderfully striking…the purple mountains, the glittering lakes, the cupola’d convents, the many-windowed villas crowning luxuriant-wooded hills, the undulation of shore, the projecting headland, the receding bay, the roadside uninclosed, yet bounded with walnut and vine and fig and acacia and almond trees bending down under the load of their fruit, the wonderful effect of light and shade, the trunks of every tree looking black as ebony…the thousand villages each with a tall, thin tower, the large melons trailing over walls, and, above all, the extended prospect, are so striking after the gloom of alpine passes.7
By way of Lake Maggiore, Disraeli and his friends came upon Lake Como, ‘a gem’, the shore of which was ‘covered with glittering palaces’, one of which was the Villa d’Este, the residence of the late Queen Caroline, the detested, lubricious German wife of King George IV, whose antics with her major-domo and others of her entourage had led to her conduct being examined by the House of Lords.
‘The Villa’s apartments are left in exactly the same state’ as she had left them to return to England to claim her rights as Queen five or so years before. ‘There is the theatre in which she acted Columbine, and the celebrated statues of Adam and Eve carved with the yet more celebrated fig leaves. It is a villa of the first grade, and splendidly adorned, but the ornaments are, without an exception, so universally indelicate that it was painful to view them in the presence of a lady…Here, if they possessed any interest, might you obtain thousands of stories of her late Majesty, but the time is passed, thank God, for them. Our riots in her favour are the laughing stock of Italy.’8
Having examined everything worth seeing in Milan, and admired the dress of his fellow dandy Count Gicogna – ‘the leader of the ton at Milan, a dandy of genius worthy of Brummell’9 – Disraeli and his friends moved on to Brescia, then to Verona, which was, so he said, ‘full of pictures which have never been painted’, then on to Vicenza, where the ‘famous Palladian palaces’ were ‘in decay’ and disgustingly smelly. ‘They are built of brick,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes plastered, occasionally white-washed; the red material is constantly appearing and vies in hideous colour with the ever offensive roof. It is a miserable thing that a man worthy of Athens or Rome should have worked with such materials.’ The Villa Rotunda, which had served as a model for the Earl of Burlington’s Chiswick House, was in an advanced state of dilapidation.
From Vicenza Disraeli and his friends set out for Padua and, following the course of the Brenta, arrived in Venice on 8 September as the sun was setting ‘on a grand fête day’.
They took a gondola to their hotel, which was, so Disraeli told his father,
once the proud residence of the Bernadinis, a family which has given more than one Doge to the old Republic;* the floors of our rooms were of marble, the hangings of satin, the ceilings, painted by Tintoretto and his scholars, full of Turkish triumphs and trophies, the chairs of satin and the gilding, though of two hundred years’ duration, as brightly burnished as the new mosaic invention. After a hasty dinner we rushed to the mighty Place of St Mark. It was crowded. Two Greek and one Turkish ship of war were from accidental circumstances in port and their crews mingled with the other spectators…Tired with travelling we left the gay scene but the moon was so bright that a juggler was conjuring in a circle under our window, and an itinerant Italian opera performing by our bridge. Serenades were constant during the whole night; indeed music is never silent in Venice. I wish I could give you an idea of the moonlight there, but that is impossible. Venice by moonlight is an enchanted city; the floods of silver light upon the moresco architecture, the perfect absence of all harsh sounds of carts and carriages, the never-ceasing music on the waters produced an effect on the mind which cannot be experienced, I am sure, in any other city in the world.10
The next five days were spent in sightseeing and, in a later letter to his father, Disraeli described his impressions of the Doges’ Palace – in which ‘in every room you are reminded of the glory and the triumphs of the republic’ – and of St Mark’s, that ‘Christian mosque’, ‘a pile of precious stones’, outside which the four ‘brazen horses’ – not long since returned from Paris, having been looted on Napoleon’s orders – ‘amble, not prance as some have described them’.
Napoleon had also given orders for the gates of the Ghetto to be pulled down and for the Jews to live where they liked. Many Jews had chosen to remain, however, and Disraeli’s great-aunt was still living there. If he knew of her presence, he made no effort to seek her out; nor did he try to see his Basevi cousins in Verona; nor yet did he go to Cento where his grandfather had been born.
‘According to common opinion,’ however, Disraeli ‘saw all that ought to be seen but never felt less inclined to quit a place’ than he felt on leaving Venice for Bologna. On his way there he made an excursion to the tomb of Petrarch at Arqua and from Ferrara he went to Tasso’s cell. ‘The door posts of this gloomy dungeon are covered with the names of its visitors,’ he wrote. ‘Here scratched with a great nail on the brick wall I saw scrawled “Byron” and immediately beneath it, in a neat banker’s hand was written “Sam Rogers”’.*11
Reluctant as he had been to leave Bologna also, Disraeli found Florence ‘a most delightful city’ and astonishingly cheap; ‘an English family of the highest respectability may live in Florence with every convenience and keep a handsome carriage, horses, liveries etc. for five hundred a year’, that was to say in present-day terms about £17,000 a year.
‘You may live in a palace built by Michael Angelo,’ he continued, ‘keep a villa two miles from the city in a most beautiful situation, with vineyards, fruit and pleasure gardens, keep two carriages, have your opera box, and live in every way as the first Florentine nobility, go to Court, have your own night for receiving company on less than a thousand a year.’12
‘There are some clever artists and sculptors in Florence,’ Disraeli told his father:
Among the latter since the death of Canova, Bertolini [Bartolini] is reckoned the most eminent in Italy.† He is a man of genius. I had the honour of a long conversation with him…He is a friend of Chantrey but the god of his idolatry, and indeed of all Italians, is Flaxman.
In one of my speculations I have been disappointed. In the Pitti Palace there is the most beautiful portrait of Charles I by Vandyke, the most pleasing and noble likeness that I have seen. It is a picture highly esteemed. I engaged a miniature painter here to make me an exquisite copy of this picture with which I intended to surprise you. After a week’s work he has brought it today, but has missed the likeness! And yet he was the Court painter,