CHAPTER IV.

Milan-The Arena - The country house of Prince Eugene Napoleon - His personal habits Illness in 1812-The sights

of Milan.

ONE of the sights of Milan (in 1816) was the Arena, an open circus, the work of Canonici, said to be capable of containing 30,000 spectators, adapted for chariot races and other ancient games. The area can be flooded for the exhibition of "naumachia" on a small scale. This is the unfinished work of Napoleon, who was present at one of the games the year after he was crowned King of Italy. For some time after the change of government the circus was neglected, and the races discontinued ; but the velvet throne of Napoleon, and two figures in the ceiling representing him and his empress Josephine, were shown at our first visit. At my next visit, in 1822, the empress was become a Minerva, and the former master of the iron crown was an old man with a beard. The Austrian government, after an interval, continued the work on the circus, and a few days before my third visit, in September, 1828, a boat-race was exhibited, the performers being gondoliers brought from Venice. Even then, however, the Arena was not finished: some of the stone-work being incomplete.

The passion for copying the ancients was encouraged by Napoleon, not only in Italy, but in France; but he wished his subjects to confine their imitations to the artists of Greece and Rome. The writers it was not so safe to hold up as models; and, accordingly, his Milanese edition of the classics was to have excluded all passages of a democratic tendency. Such an insane project is more than a set-off against the wish to amuse the Lombards with the shows of the amphitheatre. The Austrians are, I believe, not so apprehensive of the text of the old authors, but they are very suspicious of commentators; and the new editions of Virgil and Cornelius Nepos were sent to Vienna for the inspection of the Aulic Council. Monti, who told me of the projected castration of the classics by Napoleon, was also my authority for the sage precaution of his German suc

cessors.

I may here mention that, at this time (1816), strangers were taken to the vice-regal country house of Prince Eugene, built originally by Marshal Belgioioso, commonly called the Villa Buonaparte. We went there. It was as handsome a palace as could be made out of a barrack. The rooms appeared as if the late owners had just risen from their chairs, and left them, shortly to return. In the theatre the scenes were standing, and a transparent sun which had shone on the last play acted before the French Viceroy was still dimly seen in the canvas heaven. Those who visited Lombardy at this time saw many similar tokens of the