“I love to hear the names of those / Who long ago have past away”
(MS VIII; Poems [1891];
Works [1903])—British
guidebooks highlighted
Lake Como as a harbinger of classical
Italy,
owing to the association of the “
Larian Lake”—the ancient name for
Lake Como—with
the “residence of the two Plinys, and the scene of the scientific researches of the elder
Pliny, the naturalist”
(
Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 225; and
see this connection made also in the poem,
“Como”, by
Samuel Rogers, in
Italy).
The
Villa Pliniana was built on the lakeshore in the sixteenth century around the supposed spring mentioned
by the elder
Pliny in the
Naturalis Historia,
and described at length by the younger
Pliny in a letter to
Licinius Sura
(
Epistulae, bk. 4, letter 30): “There is a spring which rises in the mountain, and running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting‐room,
from whence, after being detained a short time, it falls into the
Larian lake”.
Pliny
relishes reclining by the fountain, drinking the cool water and watching the spring “rise and fall by fixed and measured gradations”. He goes on to speculate about the cause
of the intermittent flow (
Pliny the Younger, Letters, 1:353, 355).
Visitors to the villa could read this letter inscribed on “two large tablets of black marble”, one in Latin and the other in an Italian translation
(
Mazzoni, The Travellerʼs Guide of Milan, 108).
Plinyʼs letter demonstrates engagement in the idealized pursuits of country villa life (see
Ackerman, The Villa, 37).
In
Ruskinʼs poem, not only is the point of
Plinyʼs refinement
missed in the clichés drawn from the vocabulary of the picturesque about the dead underfoot; the poem also perversely fails to look overhead at surroundings that impressed
Ruskinʼs cousin, just as it moved other English visitors, such as
Percy Shelley.
In
1818,
Shelley wrote to
Thomas Love Peacock about trying to procure the
Villa Pliniana for an extended stay on the lake. As published by
Mary Shelley
in
1840, the letter describes “a magnificent palace, . . . now half in ruins, . . . built upon terraces
raised from the bottom
of the lake, together with its garden at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of
chestnut.
The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cyprus‐trees
of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake.
On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the
Pliniana
are immensely large, but ill furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense
laurel‐trees
as deserve the epithet of
Pythian, are most delightful”
(
Letters, Essays from Abroad, 2:117;
and see
Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 44–45).
Four years after this poem, in
The Poetry of Architecture,
Ruskin
clung to the characterization of
Italy as “glorious in its death”. Here the picturesque view does rise from the “principal character of
Italian landscape” of melancholy to that of “elevation”; and a word picture traces “small fountains” such as those falling into the “Larian Lake”
to a broader vista of “peak, precipice, and promontory”. Appreciation of such scenes is necessary to the object of these essays, which is the “formation of taste”,
although later in the series Ruskin recurs to
Pliniana as an impractical model for the modern English villa,
when built in hill country: “The first thing . . . which the architect has to do in hill country is to bring his employer down from heroics to
common sense; to teach him that, although it might be very well for a man like
Pliny, whose whole spirit and life was wrapt up in that of Nature,
to set himself down under the splash of a cascade 400 feet high, such escapades are not becoming in English gentlemen; and that it is necessary, for his own satisfaction,
as well as that of others, that he should keep in the most quiet and least pretending corners of the landscape which he has chosen”. (The editors of the
Library Edition corrected these remarks, noting that the
Pliniana
“is not . . . on the site of that built by
Pliny; it is called after him from an intermittent spring which is asserted to be the one
minutely described by him” in the
Epistulae
[
Ruskin, Works, 1:18, 20, 29, 161].)