Ravenna - Page 2

exhibited to my eyes the genial glow and
the romantic particulars promised by song and story; and I
confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they were
to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one
observes it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most
unmercifully at Guido and Domenichino.

For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles--grave,
reflective, philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord
with the historic dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness,
of the place. I arrived there in the evening, before, even at
drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the Statuto had altogether put
itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth from the inn, and
found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, chiefly at the
cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the light of
a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of the
palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed
and departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and
with an affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and
customs of Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing
confidence from prompt observation, suggested deferentially that
it was n't the liveliest place in the world, and my friend
admitted that it was in fact not a seat of ardent life. But had I
seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did n't exhaust the
possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer night, had
an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in an
upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion's footsteps
and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight.
The suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I
walked in the Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague,
through a city which had lost half its population by pestilence
and the other half by flight. I turned back into my inn
profoundly satisfied. This at last was the old-world dulness of a
prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose.

The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the
following day; but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit
to give precedence to another--the lively perception, namely, of
the thinness of my saturation with Gibbon and the other sources
of legend. At Ravenna the waiter at the café and the coachman who
drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to Galla Placidia and
Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; wherever you
turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic presence of
mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to so
ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of
prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked