nflowers droop their heavy
golden heads among tall stems of millet and gigantic maize, and here
and there a rice-crop ripens in the marshy loam. In vintage time
the carts, drawn by their white oxen, come creaking townward in
the evening, laden with blue bunches. Down the long straight roads,
between rows of poplars, they creep on; and on the shafts beneath
the pyramid of fruit lie contadini stained with lees of wine. Far off
across that 'waveless sea' of Lombardy, which has been the battlefield
of countless generations, rise the dim grey Alps, or else pearled
domes of thunder-clouds in gleaming masses over some tall solitary
tower. Such backgrounds, full of peace, suggestive of almost infinite
distance, and dignified with colours of incomparable depth and
breadth, the Venetian painters loved. No landscape in Europe is more
wonderful than this--thrice wonderful in the vastness of its arching
heavens, in the stillness of its level plain, and in the bulwark of
huge crested mountains, reared afar like bastions against the northern
sky. The little town is all alive in this September weather. At every
corner of the street, under rustling abeles and thick-foliaged planes,
at the doors of palaces and in the yards of inns, men, naked from the
thighs downward, are treading the red must into vats and tuns; while
their mild-eyed oxen lie beneath them in the road, peaceably chewing
the cud between one journey to the vineyard and another. It must not
be imagined that the scene of Alma Tadema's 'Roman Vintage,' or what
we fondly picture to our fancy of the Athenian Lenaea, is repeated in
the streets of Crema. This modern treading of the wine-press is a
very prosaic affair. The town reeks with a sour smell of old casks and
crushed grape-skins, and the men and women at work bear no resemblance
whatever to Bacchus and his crew. Yet even as it is, the Lombard
vintage, beneath floods of sunlight and a pure blue sky, is beautiful;
and he who would fain make acquaintance with Crema, should time his
entry into the old town, if possible, on some still golden afternoon
of autumn. It is then, if ever, that he will learn to love the glowing
brickwork of its churches and the quaint terra-cotta traceries that
form its chief artistic charm.

How the unique brick architecture of the Lombard cities took its
origin--whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliest
middle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed of
Galli