“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639deaths. Milton’s stay in Milan itself was brief, but the city would have held many
points of interest for him: the splendid Duomo; the library of the Ambrosiana with
its 15,000 manuscripts and precious editions of Virgil, Boccaccio, and Bembo;
Petrarch’s house; and many sites associated with Saint Ambrose and Saint Augus-
tine.^91 Evelyn termed it “one of the princliest citties in Europe” with 100 churches,
71 monasteries, 40,000 inhabitants, “sumptuous Palaces,” circular walls, and a strong
citadel.^92
Milton crossed the Pennine Alps into Switzerland either by the Great Saint Bernard
pass or by the Simplon. Though the vistas were spectacular, contemporary travelers
like Evelyn registered their wonder only from below and at a distance. The passage
itself was so arduous (on foot or muleback) that Evelyn’s impressions are taken up
with the freezing snow, the “strange, horrid & fierfull craggs,” the “terrible roar-
ing” of the cataracts, the extreme cold, and the fierceness of the mountain dwell-
ers.^93 Whichever route Milton took he experienced those conditions; then he passed
through part of the Valais and Savoy, to Lake Geneva.
Arriving in sober Calvinist Geneva, after being for so long both attracted and
repelled by Catholic Italy, must have afforded Milton some psychic relief. He could
again speak openly about religion and politics, though he may have chafed under
some of the restraints in this Calvinist theocracy. Also, Switzerland offered him
experience of another republic, of a unique kind, with loosely federated cantons,
some Catholic, some Protestant, which variously contained French, German, and
Italian populations. Milton’s chief associate in Geneva was Charles Diodati’s uncle,
Giovanni Diodati, biblical scholar and translator, theologian, and educator of Prot-
estant princes, among them Charles Gustavus of Sweden and the scions of several
German houses.^94 Milton states that he was “daily” in his society so he may have
stayed with him; here he surely learned the specifics (whatever they were) about his
friend’s death, and could grieve for him with the family.^95 Through Diodati he
probably met some of the distinguished scholars and theologians at Geneva: Theodore
Tronchin, Frederick Spanheim, and perhaps even Alexander More, professor of
Greek in the university, whom he was later to denounce vehemently in the Defensio
Secunda. One known acquaintance was Camillo Cerdogni, a Neapolitan Protestant
nobleman who was a refugee and teacher in Geneva; he kept an album of visitors’
autographs which Milton inscribed on June 10, 1639 with two wholly characteris-
tic epigraphs: the conclusion of his own Maske, “if Vertue feeble were / Heaven it
selfe would stoope to her”; and a line adapted from Horace: “I change my sky but
not my mind when I cross the sea.”^96 Writing later of his arrival in Geneva, Milton
insisted that he had remained faithful to sound religion and morals in all those
perilous papist places he had now passed through: “[I] call God to witness that in all
these places, where so much licence exists, I lived free and untouched by the slight-
est sin or reproach, reflecting constantly that although I might hide from the gaze of
men, I could not elude the sight of God” (CPW IV.1, 620). Probably he again
bought books.^97