RNOVO_

In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the
past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny
and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and
disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor
of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the
palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in
it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The
princely _sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of these
unfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendour of their
purfled silks and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has
yielded to sullen cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin and
unreverend age. All that was satisfying to the senses and distracting
to the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away, leaving a
sinister and naked shell. Remembrance can but summon up the crimes,
the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders. An
atmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though the
tainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, on
which his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of their
misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of
which I spoke. It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in
the year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese
with Margaret of Austria. Giambattista Aleotti, a native of
pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders of
the galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof,
marked out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into the
whole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic neo-Latin style. Vast,
built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats of
arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings all
in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and mildew and
discoloured gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now that
ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is
yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand
Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and
abide in the memory like a nightmare,--like one of Piranesi's weirdest
and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at
noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers
of those hi