In geographical position Varallo is the most western city of North
Italy in which painting and sculpture were endemic. Turin, Novara,
Vercelli, Casale, Ivrea, Biella, Alessandria, and Aosta have no
endemic art comparable to that of the cities east of Milan. Bergamo,
Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, not to mention Venice and the cities
of the Friuli, not only produced artists who have made themselves
permanently famous, but are themselves, in their architecture and
external features generally, works of art as impressive as any they
contain; they are stamped with the widely-spread instinctive feeling
for beauty with which the age and people that reared them must
assuredly have been inspired. The eastern cities have perhaps
suffered more from war, nevertheless it is hard to think that the
beauty so characteristic of the eastern Lombardic cities should fail
so conspicuously, at least by comparison, in the western, if the
genius of the places had been the same. All cities are symptomatic
of the men who built them, towns no less than bodily organisation
being that unknown something which we call mind or spirit made
manifest in material form. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and
Italians--to name them in alphabetical order, are not more distinct
in their several faults and virtues than are London, Paris, Berlin,
and Rome, in the impression they leave on those who see them. How
closely in each case does the appearance of the city correspond with
the genius of the nation of which it is the capital. The same holds
good more or less with the provincial cities of any country. They
have each in a minor degree their distinctive evidences of character,
and it will hardly be denied that while the North Italian genius is
indebted to the cities of Piedmont for perhaps its more robust and