recent whitewash is upon them. All the boys have blonde hair. They
are naked, with scrolls or ribbons wreathed round them, adding to the
airiness of their continual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room
used to stow away the lumber of the church--old boards and curtains,
broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of
festival adornments, and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten
bier.

THE PIAZZA OF PIACENZA.

The great feature of Piacenza is its famous piazza--a romantically,
picturesquely perfect square, surpassing the most daring attempts of the
scene-painter, and realizing a poet's dreams. The space is
considerable, and many streets converge upon it at irregular angles. Its
finest architectural feature is the antique Palace of the Commune:
Gothic arcades of stone below, surmounted by a brick building with
wonderfully delicate and varied terra-cotta work in the round-arched
windows. Before this facade, on the marble pavement, prance the bronze
equestrian statues of two Farnesi--insignificant men, exaggerated
horses, flying drapery--as _barocco_ as it is possible to be in style,
but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their _bravura_
attitude, and so happily placed in the line of two streets lending far
vistas from the square into the town beyond, that it is difficult to
criticise them seriously. They form, indeed, an important element in the
pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cotta work of the facade, by the
contrast of their color.

The time to see this square is in evening twilight--that wonderful hour
after sunset--when the people are strolling on the pavement, polished to
a mirror by the pacing of successive centuries, and when the cavalry
soldiers group themselves at the angles under the lamp-posts or beneath
the dimly lighted Gothic arches of the palace. This is the magical
mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns
of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western
lights with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half-shadow over any
crudeness and restores the injuries of time; the hour when all the tints
of these old buildings are intensified, etherealized, and harmonized by
one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all
day; and ere sun-down a clearing had come from the Alps, followed by
fresh threatenings of thunderstorms. The air was very liquid. There was
a tract of yellow sunset sk