Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/353

Rh building adorned with statues and figures of distinguished Veronese. In the centre of this square is a marble statue of the greatest poet of modern Italy. Dante stands in a contemplative mood, with a finger on his cheeks, and with that melancholy frown on his forehead which befits the poet of the Inferno.

Not far is a spot which every lover of English literature must regard with the deepest interest. It is the old palace or family house of the Capulets, from the window of which Juliet is supposed to have given away her soul to Romeo! The palace is a brick building and by no means an imposing one according to our modern ideas, but in those days must have been considered fine. Modern travellers are disappointed with the mediæval "Palaces" of Verona and Bologna, and even of Florence and Venice, as those palaces could hardly be compared to a rich man's residence in modern days. But in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these were the most superb private residences in Europe, and the histories of these families, then the most civilized in Europe, were the theme of the poet's song and the chronicler's narrative.

In the Franciscan cemetery (now a vegetable garden) near the Franciscan convent (now a magazine) they still shew a stone coffin within a railed chapel in which Juliet is said to have been buried. Hundreds of Englishmen and Americans have left their cards in this coffin, and one gentleman bearing the name of Shakespeare has left