204 FIRST JOURNEY IN EUROPE. [1839, 
through the night, with only a boy with me, through a 
country which some years ago would not have been 
deemed safe. But I felt not the slightest alarm, and 
slept as soundly as possible. 
Ferrara is famous for possessing the tomb and chair 
of Ariosto, but except this is as uninteresting as you 
can imagine. It was Sunday, and I spent the day 
within doors as well as I could. 
By making a very early ride I succeeded in reach- 
ing Padua at ten o’clock this morning; visited the 
university so famed of old, the churches, the splendid 
Caffe Pedrocchi, the Botanic Garden, —the most an- 
cient in Italy, of which Alpinius, the elder and the 
younger, and Pontedera were the directors. It is un- 
der the care of Visiani,! to whom I brought a letter 
from Bentham, and who politely showed me all I 
wished to see. The university is a queer old place 
indeed, and the lecture-rooms the most dark, gloomy, 
and incommodious places you can conceive; every- 
thing is as old as the fifteenth century. I wish I 
sonia describe the anatomical theatre, which is the 
most curious specimen of antiquity I have seen. The 
Museum of Natural History is so-so. There is still 
a goodly number of students, but nothing to what 
there was in the olden time. The Duomo is a 
small affair, but the church of ‘St. Antonio is like 
a mosque, the most Saracenic building I ever saw, — 
with its seven or eight balloon-shaped domes of vari- 
ous sizes, and three or four tall and slender minarets. 
I am sorry I can’t get a decent print of it. The 
interior is noble, and very rich in tombs and shrines 
and sculptures. Here are tombs of many of the old 
1 Roberto de Visiani, coup professor of botany at Padua; 
author of a Flora Dalmat 
