A Jay of Italy by Bernard Capes — Read

The castle at the Porta Giovia had its glooms as well as its pleasances. Indeed, it may be questioned if the latter were not rather in proportion to the former as a tiger's gay hide is to the strength and ferocity it clothes. Built originally for a great keep, or, as it were, breakwater, to stem the rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from the north-west, its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the curtains which divided its inner and outer wards, a whole warren of human 'runs' could honeycomb without appreciably weakening them. Hidden within its screens and massy towers, like the gnawings of a foul and intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret-places not guessed at in the common tally of its rooms. These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories; rotten with the dew of suffering; eloquent in their terror and corruption and darkness, of that same self-sick, self-blinded tyranny which, in place of Love and Justice, the trusty bodyguards, must turn always to cruelty and thick walls for its security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fire, the grinding of low-down grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water, oozed from a stagnant moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars, -- these were sounds that spoke even less of grief to others than of the hellish ferment in the soul of him who had raised them for his soul's pacifying. Himself is for ever the last and maddest victim of a despot's oppression.

There had been stories to tell, could the coulter of Time once have cut into those far-down vaults, and his share laid open. Now this was so far from promising, that their history and mystery were in process of being still further overlaid and stifled under accumulations of superstructure. Francesco, the great Condottiere, the present Duke's father, had been the first to realise dimly how a tyrant, by converting his self-prison into a shrine for his aestheticism, might enjoy a certain amelioration of his condition. It was he who, yielding an older palace and its grounds to the builders of the cathedral, had transferred the ducal quarters to the great fortress, which henceforth was to be the main seat of the Sforzas. Here the first additions and rebuildings had been his, the first decorations and beautifyings -- tentative at the best, for he was always more a soldier than a connoisseur. The real movement was inaugurated by his successor, and continued, as cultivation was impressed on him, on a scale of magnificence which was presently to make the splendour of Milan a proverb. Galeazzo, an indifferent warrior, to whose rule but a tithe of the territory once gathered to the Visconti owned allegiance, contented his ambitions by rallying an army of painters and sculptors and decorators to the glorification of his houses at Milan, Cremona, and his ancestral petted Pavia, -- after all a worthier role than the conqueror's for a good man; but then, this man was so bad that he blighted everything he touched. It is true that the disuse of secret torture would have been considered, and by men more enlightened than he, so little expedient a part of any ethical or aesthetical 'improvement' of an existing house, as that a premium would be put thereby on assassination. Yet Galeazzo's death-pits were never so much a politic necessity as a resource for cruelty in idleness. He would descend into them with as much relish as he would reclimb from, to his halls above, swelling and bourgeoning with growth of loveliness. The scream of torture was as grateful to his ears as was the love-throb of a viol; the scum bubbling from his living graves as poignant to his nostrils as was the scent of floating lilies. He continued to make his house beautiful, yet never once dreamt, as a first principle of its reclamation to sweetness, of cutting out of its foundations those old cesspools of disease and death.