Venice, Tuesday, July 8.

I never saw and cannot hope to see hereafter a region more blessed by Nature than the great plain of Upper Italy, whereof the Po is the life-blood. It is very fertile and beautiful where I first traversed it near its head, from the foot of Mount Cenis by Turin to Alessandria and Novi, on my way down to Genoa; yet it is richer and lovelier still where I have just recrossed it from the foot of the Apennines by Bologna, Ferrara, Rovigo and Padua on my way from Florence to Venice. Irrigation, which might easily be almost universal in Piedmont, seems there but an occasional expedient, while here it is the breath of life. From Bologna to Rovigo (and I presume on to Padua, though there night and drowsiness prevented my observing clearly), the whole country seems completely intersected by Canals constructed in the palmier days of Italy on purpose to distribute the fertilizing waters of the Po and the Adige over the entire face of the country and dispense them to every field and meadow. The great highway generally runs along the bank of one of these Canals, which are filled from the rivers when they have just been raised by rains and are thus surcharged with fertilizing matter, and drawn off from day to day thereafter to refresh and enrich the remarkably level plain they traverse. Thus not only the plain and the glades lying nearer the sources of the rivers, but the sterile, rugged crests of the Alps and Apennines which enclose this great basin are made to contribute evermore to the fruitfulness of its soil, so that Despotism, Ignorance, Stolidity, Indolence and Unthrift of all kinds vainly strive to render it other than the Garden of Europe. The banks of the Canals and the sides of the highways are generally lined with trees, rows of which also traverse many if not most of the fields, so that from certain points the whole country seems one vast, low forest or "timbered opening" of Poplar, Willow, Mulberry, Locust, &c. There are a few Oaks, more Elms, and some species I did not recognize, and the Vine through all this region is trained on dwarfed or shortened trees, sometimes along the roadside, but oftener in rows through one-fourth of the fields, while in a few instances it is allowed thus to obtain an altitude of thirty or forty feet. Of Fruit, I have seen only the Apricot and the Cherry in abundance, but there are some Pears, while the Orange and Lemon are very plentiful in the towns, though I think they are generally brought from Naples and the Mediterranean coast. But finer crops of Wheat, Grass, Hemp, &c., can grow nowhere than throughout this country, while the Indian Corn which is abundantly planted, would yield as amply if the people knew how to cultivate it. Ohio has no better soil nor climate for this grain. Of Potatoes or other edible roots I have seen very little. Hemp is extensively cultivated, and grows most luxuriantly. Man is the only product of this prolific land which seems stunted and shriveled. Were Italy once more a Nation, under one wise and liberal government, with a single tariff, coinage, mail-post, &c., a thorough system of common school education, a small navy, but no passports, and a public policy which looked to the fostering and diversifying of her industry, she might easily sustain and enrich a population of sixty millions. As it is, one-half of her twenty-five millions are in rags, and are pinched by hunger, while inhabiting the best wheat country in Europe, from which food is constantly and largely exported. There are at least one hundred millions of dollars locked up in useless decorations of churches, and not one common school-house from Savoy to Sicily. A little education, after a fashion, is fitfully dispensed by certain religious and charitable foundations, so that the child lucky enough to be an orphan or illegitimate has a chance to be taught to read and write; but any such thing as a practical recognition of the right to education, or as a public and general provision for imparting it, is utterly unknown here. Grand and beautiful structures are crowded in every city, and are crumbling to dust on every side; a single township dotted at proper intervals with eight or ten school-houses would be worth them all. With infinite water power, cheaper labor, and cheaper food than almost any other country in the civilized world, and millions of children at once naked and idle because no one will employ them at even six-pence a day, she has not one cotton or woolen factory that I have yet seen, and can hardly have one at all, though her mountains afford vast and excellent sheep-walks, and Naples can grow cotton if she will. England and Germany manufacture nearly all the few fabrics of cotton or wool worn here, because those who should lead, instruct, and employ this people, are blind to their duty or recreant to its obligations. Italy, once the light of the world, is dying of aristocratic torpor and popular ignorance, whence come indolence, superstition, and wide-spread demoralization and misery.

Bologna is a walled city of Seventy Thousand inhabitants, with about as much trade and business of all kinds as an American village of ten to twenty thousand people. I doubt that thirty persons per day are carried into or brought out of it by all public conveyances whatever. It is well built on narrow streets, like nearly all Italian cities, and manifests considerable activity in the way of watching gates and visÉing Passports. Though in the Papal territory, it is under Austrian guardianship; an Austrian sentinel constantly paced the court-yard of the "Hotel Brun" where I stopped. Though the second town in the Pope's temporal dominions, strongly walled, it has no Military strength, being commanded by a hill a short mile south of it—the last hill I remember having seen till I reached Venice and looked across over the lagoons to the Euganian hills on the main land to south-west. The most notable thing I saw in Bologna was an awning of sheeting or calico spread over the centre of the main street on a level with the roofs of the houses for a distance of half a mile or so. I should distrust its standing a strong gust, but if it would, the idea is worth borrowing.

After a night-ride over the Apennines from Florence, and a detention of twenty-one hours at Bologna, I did hope that our next start would be "for good"—that there would be no more halt till we reached Padua. But I did not yet adequately appreciate Italian management. A Yankee stage-coach running but once a day between two such cities as Bologna and Ferrara would start at daylight and so connect at the latter place as to set down its passengers beside the Railroad in Padua (86 to 90 miles of the best possible staging from Bologna) in the evening of the same day. We left Bologna at 10 A. M., drove to Ferrara, arrived there a little past 2; and then came a halt of four hours—till six P. M. when the stage started for a night-trip to Padua—none running during the day. But a Yankee stage would have one man for manager, driver, &c., who would very likely be the owner also of the horses and a partner in the line; we started from a grand office with two book-keepers and a platoon of lackeys and baggage-smashers, with a "guard" on the box, and two "postillions" riding respectively the nigh horses of the two teams, there being always three horses at the pole and sometimes three on the lead also, at others only two. We had half a dozen passengers to Ferrara; for the rest of the way, I had this extensive traveling establishment to myself. I do not think the average number of passengers on a corresponding route in our country could be so few as twenty. Such are some of the points of difference between America and Italy.

We crossed the Po an hour after leaving Ferrara, and here passed out of the Papal into the unequivocally Austrian territory—the Kingdom of Venice and Lombardy. There were of course soldiers on each side (though all of a piece), police officers, a Passport scrutiny and a fresh look into my carpet-bags, mainly (I understand) for Tobacco! When any tide-waiter finds more of that about me than the chronic ill breeding of traveling smokers compels me to carry in my clothes, he is welcome to confiscate all I possess. But they found nothing here to cavil at, and I passed on.

There is no town where we crossed the Po, only a small village on either side, and we followed down the left bank in a north-easterly direction for several miles without seeing any considerable place. The river has here, as through nearly its whole course, a strong, rapid current, and was swollen and rendered turbid by recent rains. I judge that its surface was decidedly above the level of the adjacent country, which is protected from inundation (like the region of the Lower Mississippi) by strong embankments or levees, at first natural doubtless—the product of the successive overflows of centuries but subsequently strengthened and perfected by human labor. The force of the current being strongest in the center of the river, there is either stillness or an eddy near the banks, so that the sediment with which the current is charged tends constantly to deposition on or against the banks. When the river rises so as to overflow those banks, the downward current is entirely unfelt there and the deposition becomes still more rapid, the proportion of earthy matter to that of water being much greater then than at other times. Thus great, rapid rivers running through vast plains like these gradually form levees in the course of many centuries, their channels being defined and narrowed by their own deposits until the surface of their waters, at least in times of flood, is raised above the level of the surrounding country, often several feet. When the great swamps of Louisiana shall have been drained and cultivated for ages, they too will doubtless be fertilized and irrigated by canals, as the great plain traversed by the Po now is. And here too, though the acres are generally well cared for, I saw tracts of considerable extent which, from original defect or unskillful management, stand below the water level of the country, and so are given over to flags, bogs and miasma, when only a foot or two of elevation is needed to render them salubrious and most productive.

There are many more good dwellings on this plain than in the rural portion of Lower Italy. These are generally built of brick, covered with stucco or cement and white-washed, and, being nearly square in form, two stories high, and without the long, sloping roofs common with us, are rather symmetrical and graceful, in appearance. Their roofs are tiled with a long, cylindrical brick, of which a first course is laid with the hollow upward, and another over the joints of this with the hollow down, conducting the water into the troughs made by the former and so off the house. The peasants' cottages are thatched with flags or straw, and often built of the latter material. Of barns there are relatively few, most of the wheat being stacked when harvested, and trodden out by oxen on floors under the open sky. I have not seen a good harness nor a respectable ox-yoke in Italy, most of the oxen having yokes which a Berkshire hog of any pretensions to good breeding would disdain to look through. These yokes merely hold the meek animals together, having no adaptation to draft, which is obtained by a cobbling filigree of ropes around the head, bringing the heaviest of the work upon the horns! The gear is a little better than this—as little as you please—while for Carts and Waggons there are few school-boys of twelve to fifteen in America who would not beat the average of all I have seen in Italy. Their clumsiness and stupidity are so atrocious that the owners do well in employing asses to draw them: no man of feeling or spirit could endure the horse-laughs they must extort from any animal of tolerable sagacity. To see a stout, two-handed man coming home with his donkey-load of fuel from a distant shrubbery, half a day of the two having been spent in getting as much as would make one good kitchen-fire, is enough to try the patience of Job.

Although the Po must be navigable and has been navigated by steamboats for many miles above this point, until obstructed by rapids, yet nothing like a steamboat was visible. The only craft I saw attempting to stem its current was a rude sort of ark, like a wider canal-boat, drawn by three horses traveling on a wide, irregular tow-path along the levee or bank. I presume this path does not extend many miles without meeting impediments. Quite a number of ruinous old rookeries were anchored in the river at intervals, usually three to six abreast, which I found to be grist-mills, propelled by the strong current, and receiving their grain from the shore and returning the flour by means of small boats. Our ferry-boat was impelled by what is termed (I think) a "rope ferry"—a series of ropes and boats made fast to some anchorage in the stream above, and moving it vigorously and expeditiously from one bank to the other by the mere force of the current. It is quite evident that modern Italy did not originate this contrivance, nor even the idea that a rapid river could be induced to move a large boat obliquely up its stream as well as down it. I should say the Po is here rather more than half a mile wide.

Three hours later, we crossed in like manner at Rovigo the Adige, a much smaller but still a large river, about the size of the Connecticut at Hartford. It has its source exclusively in the Tyrolean Alps, but for the last hundred miles of its course runs parallel with the Po, through the same plain, at a medium distance of about twenty miles, and has the same general characteristics. It was quite high and muddy when we crossed it.

As midnight drew on, I grew weary of gazing at the same endless diversity of grain-fields, vineyards, rows of trees, &c., though the bright moon was now shining, and, shutting out the chill night-air, I disposed myself on my old great-coat and softest carpet-bag for a drowse, having ample room at my command if I could but have brought it into a straight line. But the road was hard, the coach a little the uneasiest I ever hardened my bones upon, and my slumber was of a disturbed and dubious character, a dim sense of physical discomfort shaping and coloring my incoherent and fitful visions. For a time I fancied myself held down on my back while some malevolent wretch drenched the floor (and me) with filthy water: then I was in a rude scuffle and came out third or fourth best, with my clothes badly torn; anon I had lost my hat in a strange place and could not begin to find it; and at last my clothes were full of grasshoppers and spiders who were beguiling their leisure by biting and stinging me. The misery at last became unbearable and I awoke.—But where? I was plainly in a tight, dark box, that needed more air: I soon recollected that it was a stage-coach, wherein I had been making my way from Ferrara to Padua. I threw open the door and looked out. Horses, postillions and guard were all gone: the moon, the fields, the road were gone: I was in a close court-yard, alone with Night and Silence: but where? A church clock struck three; but it was only promised that we should reach Padua by four, and I, making the usual discount on such promises, had set down five as the probable hour of our arrival. I got out to take a more deliberate survey, and the tall form and bright bayonet of an Austrian sentinel, standing guard over the egress of the court-yard, were before me. To talk German was beyond the sweep of my dizziest ambition, but an Italian runner or porter instantly presented himself. From him I made out that I was in Padua of ancient and learned renown (Italian Padova), and that the first train for Venice would not start for three hours yet. I followed him into a convenient CafÉ, which was all open and well lighted, where I ordered a cup of chocolate and proceeded leisurely to discuss it. When I had finished, the other guests had all gone out, but daylight was coming in, and I began to feel more at home. The CafÉ tender was asleep in his chair; the porter had gone off; the sentinel alone kept awake on his post. Soon the welcome face of the coach-guard, whom I had borne company from Bologna, appeared; I hailed him, obtained my baggage, hired a porter, and, having nothing more to wait for, started at a little past four for the Railroad station, nearly a mile distant; taking observations as I went. Arrived at the dÉpÔt, I discharged my porter, sat down and waited for the place to open, with ample leisure for reflection. At six o'clock I felt once more the welcome motion of a Railroad car, and at eight was in Venice.