Where men have built churches to saints, a place may sometimes be found in them, where monuments to intellectual men may be set up. The bust of Cardinal Bembo stands between Ionic columns. It is a handsome face, strongly drawn in, if I may use the expression, and with a copious beard. The inscription runs thus: "Petri Bembi Card. imaginem Hier. Guerinus Ismeni f. in publico ponendam curavit ut cujus ingenii monumenta æterna sint, ejus corporis quoque memoria ne a posteritate desideretur."
With all its dignity the University gave me the horrors, as a building. I am glad that I had nothing to learn in it. One cannot imagine such a narrow compass for a school, even though, as the student of a German university, one may have suffered a great deal on the benches of the Auditorium. The anatomical theatre is a perfect model of the art of pressing students together. The audience are piled one above another in a tall pointed funnel. They look down upon the narrow space where the table stands, and, as no daylight falls upon it, the Professor must demonstrate by lamplight. The botanic garden is much more pretty and cheerful. Several plants can remain in the ground during the winter, if they are set near the walls, or at no great distance from them. At the end of October the whole is built over, and the process of heating is carried on for the few remaining months. It is pleasant and instructive to walk through a vegetation that is strange to us. With ordinary plants, as well as with other objects that have been long familiar to us, we at last do not think at all, and what is looking without thinking? Amidst this variety which comes upon me quite new, the idea that all forms of plants may, perhaps, be developed from a single form, becomes more lively than ever. On this principle alone it would be possible to define orders and classes, which, it seems to me, has hitherto been done in a very arbitrary manner. At this point I stand fast in my botanical philosophy, and I do not see how I am to extricate myself. The depth and breadth of this business seem to me quite equal.
The great square, called _Prato della Valle_, is a very wide space, where the chief fair is held in June. The wooden booths in the middle of it do not produce the most favourable appearance, but the inhabitants assure me that there will soon be a _fièra_ of stone here, like that at Verona. One has hopes of this already, from the manner in which the _Prato_ is surrounded, and which affords a very beautiful and imposing view.