present, and future, a
fig for them!

But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, artizans, and
humorists may think, there is in this Italy of the Renaissance something
besides Florence; there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the
realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian Petrarchisms of
Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, as they do, between the Northern
Apennine slopes of Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the
House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of
Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from
that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is
different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of
Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce
their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the
intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy:
industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the
defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent
valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este
stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the imaginative kingdom
of the Middle Ages. Mediaevalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very
modified sort; and as different from that of France and Germany as
differ from the poverty-stricken plains and forests and and moors of the
north these Italian mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long
trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed tiers of
terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the serf, but the equal
sharer in profits with the master of the soil. And on one of those
fertile hill-sides, looking down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue
shimmer with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the year 1434,
Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which gave him the title, one of
the highest in the Estensian dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in
the Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a castle,
doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, but mediaeval and feudal
nevertheless; but the name of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for
what reason, to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of
Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic
pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing a sweet tangled
orchard-garden; to all of which, being the place to which Duke Bors