tuto delle Scienze, and gave it a library of almost 200,000 volumes; to which, in 1825, the abbate Mezzofanti, professor of oriental languages, was appointed librarian. This learned man spoke a large number of living languages correctly and fluently (for instance, German in several dialects, Russian, Hungarian, Walachian, the language of the gipsies, &c.) without ever having left Bologna. The foreign troops in Italy gave him opportunities for learning them. Count Marsigli founded and endowed, also, an observatory, an anatomical hall, a botanical garden, and accumulated valuable collections for all branches of science and art. These are at present connected with the Academia Clementina of Pope Clement XI. In the sixteenth century, the famous painters and sculptors, Carracci, Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Albano, founded a school, to which their works have given great reputation. There were, even as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great painters in this city. Francesco, called Il Francia, was famous in the fifteenth century.

The chief place of the city is adorned by several venerable buildings; among them are the senate-hall (which contains a number of excellent pictures and statues, and the two hundred folio volumes of the famous natural philosopher, Ulysses Aldrovandus, written with his own hand, as materials for future works), the palace of justice of the podesta, and the cathedral of St. Petronio, with its unfinished front, and the meridian of Cassini drawn upon a copper-plate in the floor. Among the seventy-three other churches, the following are distinguished: St. Pietro, St. Salvatore, St. Domenichino, St. Giovanni in Monte, St. Giacomo Maggiore, all possessed of rich treasures of art. The collections of works of art are splendid and numerous. The galleries Sampieri and Zembeccari formerly exceeded all others, but are now surpassed by those of Marescalchi and Ercolani. The collection of the academy of painting, endowed, in modern times, by the municipality, principally with the treasures of abolished churches, is rich, and full of historical interest. The admired fountain of the market is deficient in nothing but water. It is adorned with a Neptune in bronze, by John of Bologna. The towers degli Asinelli and Garisenda were formerly objects of admiration; the former for its slenderness, which gave it the appearance of an oriental minaret; the latter for its inclination from the perpendicular, which amounted to fourteen feet. It has since, however, been reduced to one third of its former height, from precaution. Bologna has always been famous for cheap living, and has been chosen as a residence by many literary men. Gourmands praise it as the native country of excellent macaroni, sausages, liquors, and preserved fruits. The schools for training animals enjoy, likewise, some reputation. The pilgrimage to the Madonna di St. Lucca, whose church is situated at the foot of the Apennines, half a league from the city, and to which an arcade of six hundred and forty arches leads, attracts a great number of people from all parts of Italy.

Distant View of Venice from the Sea.

VENICE. The celebrated city of Venice is situated near the northern extremity the Adriatic. It was built in the fifth century; and from the smallest beginnings it rose to such eminence as to become one of the most important states in Europe. For several centuries, until the discovery of a passage to India by the cape of Good Hope, it became immensely opulent by engrossing most of the trade to the East.

Venice has seventy churches, thirty-nine monasteries, twenty-eight nunneries, and seventeen hospitals, and the religion of the people is that of the church of Rome. St. Mark's patriarchal church is the cathedral of Venice; it is situated in the grand piazza, and is accounted one of the richest and most magnificent in the world. The Venetians pretend that they possess the body of the evangelist Mark; and in the treasury of relics they believe they have the original copy of the gospel written by that inspired evangelist's own hand.

The architecture of the church of St. Mark is of a mixed kind, mostly of the Gothic order, yet many of the pillars are Grecian. The outside is incrusted with marble; the inside ceiling and floor are all of the most beautiful marble, as are the numerous pillars, and the whole is crowned with five domes. But all this expense and labor has been directed by a very moderate share of taste. The steeple of the cathedral stands insulated from the church, built of brick, square, twenty-five feet broad on each side. and three hundred and fifty feet high.

The front of the cathedral, which looks to the palace, has five brazen gates, with historical basso-relievoes; over the principal gates are placed the four celebrated bronze horses, gilt with brass, and of the incomparable workmanship, said to have been executed by the famous Lysippus. They were given to Nero the Roman emperor, by Tesides, king of Armenia, to be put to the chariot of the sun, for adorning his triumphal arch, after he had conquered the warlike Parthians. The fiery spirit indicated by their countenances, and their animated attitudes, are perfectly agreeable to their original and fanciful destination. Nero placed them on the triumphal arch consecrated to him. They were removed by Constantine the Great to the Hippodrome at Constantinople, and remained there till the capture of that city by the French and Venetians, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, when they were conveyed to Venice.

They were taken by the French soon after their successes in Italy placed Venice in their power, and removed to a prominent situation in Paris. A new political mutation, however, caused their restoration to Venice in 1815.

One of the most interesting edifices in Venice is the Bridge of Sighs. It is thus described by Mr. Hollier in his journal of a tour through this and other countries, a

work which strongly exhibits the most desirable qualifications of a traveller-acute, persevering, and impartial observation: "Our next walk was to the Bridge of Sighs, and then down to view the dungeons. The Bridge of Sighs was, without question, a very correct appellation for that miserable path, which led the poor unfortunate objects of tyrannical hatred or superstition to such a Tartarus of wo as is there witnessed. Descending by a steep and narrow stone staircase, just wide enough to admit one person at a time to walk, we arrived, after traversing a passage of the same dimensions, at some holes, ranged in rows along this horribly confined place, and withal so low as obliged us to stoop our chins nearly to our knees to enter them, and when in, we found it impossible to stand upright; some of them were all but dark, the greater number of them completely so. And below these another range, inferior in every sense, more close, more loathsome, and into which neither the light nor breath of heaven could possibly enter, as they are situated below the level of the canals. Surely the poor creatures destined to be inmates of these abodes of wretchedness must, on entering them, have bid a final adieu to hope in this world." The Bridge of Sighs is the avenue from this prison to the palace. It is a covered bridge or gallery, considerably elevated above the water, and divided by a stone wall into a passage and a cell; it was into the latter that prisoners were taken, and there strangled.

The most interesting of the public buildings, the ducal palace, remains to be noticed. This magnificent structure was for ages the seat of one of the most powerful and terrible governments of Europe. “It is built," says Mr. Forsyth, "in a style which you may call arabesque, if you will, but it reverses the principles of all other architecture; for here the solid rests upon the open; a wall of enormous mass rests upon a slender fretwork of shafts, arches, and intersected circles." Near the principal entrance is a statue of the doge Foscaro in white marble; and opposite to the entrance are the magnificent steps called "the giant's staircase," from the colossal statues of Mars and Neptune, by which they are commanded. Here the doges of Venice received the symbols of sovereignty; and upon the landing-place of these stairs the doge Marino Faliero was beheaded. Here," says Mr. Roscoe, "the senate, which resembled a congress of kings rather than an assemblage of free merchants, the various councils of state, and the still more terrible inquisitors of state, the dreaded 'ten,' held their sittings. The splendid chambers in which the magnificent citizens were accustomed to meet, where their deliberations inspired Christendom with hope, and struck dismay into the souls of the Ottomans, are still shown to the stranger; but the courage, the constancy, and the wisdom, which then filled them, are fled."

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The bridges are generally of but small span, as they merely serve to bestride the narrow canals of the city, and are profusely decorated with small statues. Venice is now under the dominion of Austria. It is one hundred and fifty miles east of Milan, and two hundred and forty-six north of Rome.

MILAN, the capital city of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, is situated in a fertile plain on the left bank of the river Olona. It is a large and elegant city, but having been twice razed to the ground, first by Attila and then by Frederick Barbarossa, it contains no remains of its ancient greatness. It possesses, however, many handsome palaces, the second cathedral in Italy, several fine theatres, good streets and promenades, and some valuable collections of paintings, statues, and books. The cathedral called the Duomo is a most superb structure, and its gorgeous external decorations are, perhaps, unrivalled in the world. From its want of a tower or dome, however, corresponding to the size of the church, it yields in majesty to many which might be enumerated; but in the richness of its materials, and the profusion and beauty of its ornaments, it far outshines them all. It is a Gothic edifice, nearly as long as our largest cathedrals, and wider than any of them, built entirely of white marble; its nave and double aisles are supported by fifty-two clustered columns, and. fifty half columns; and on the exterior its roof is encircled by a triple row of pinnacles or spires, each about sixty feet high, of the lightest and most elegant form, and crowned by statues as large as life. Its walls, buttresses, and spires, are crusted with a profusion of tracery and statues, of which latter there are said to be no less than three thousand four hundred; and these being elegantly disposed, do not encumber the building, but give it an effect the most florid and beautiful. The pinnacles are one hundred and twenty in number, and they are all modern, except two, which are ancient. Six or eight were added in the time of Napoleon, who nearly

completed the edifice, after it had been more than four centuries in an unfinished state. The Duomo is in the form of a Latin cross, and it has an octagonal tower rising to a small elevation above the roof, and then suddenly contracting into a slen der tower of the same form, which is itself terminated by a spire, and a statue of the Virgin. This is extremely elegant, but it is too light to have anything of majesty.

The interior of the building is vast and rich, but unfortunately of very different styles of architecture, the Greek having been mixed with the Gothic; one conse quence of which is, that the large window usually placed at the western end of Gothic churches, is left out, thereby diminishing the light, and destroying the har mony of the building. This mixture of styles is to be found in most of the cathe drals of Italy, and is to be accounted for by the length of time required for their erection, and the various architects employed. The greatest curiosity in the Duomo is the subterranean chapel of St. Carlo Borromeo, the celebrated archbishop of Milan, who died in 1584, and who endeared himself to his fellow-citizens by his munificent charity to the poor, and by his fearless administration of the sacrament to the dying, when a plague raged in the city.

One of the oldest churches in Milan, that of St. Ambrose, into which the visiter descends by several steps, is remarkable for a number of antiquities, but is dark, and without beauty. Of the numerous other churches, many are splendid. The former Dominican convent, Madonna delle Grazie, contains in its refectory the celebrated fresco of Leonardo da Vinci, the Last Supper, now much injured, but still beautiful. The former Jesuits' college of Brera, a magnificent building, remarkable, also, for its observatory, still contains several establishments for the arts and sciences; among them a picture-gallery and a library.

The military geographical institute of Milan, founded in 1801, has published an atlas of the Adriatic sea, and other charts. Among the charitable institutions, the great hospital is the most remarkable, on account of its architecture, magnitude, and the care taken of the patients. The Lazaretto, a large quadrangular building, for