Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/671



On market-day Ravenna awakens for a whole morning. The people come in great numbers through all the gates of the city, on foot, and in their tiny carts slung together with netted string. The Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is thronged with rough, red, wrinkled peasants, muffled in their great cloaks, and in the Piazza Dante Alighieri, which opens out of it, there is a sort of small fair. Stalls are set up all over the rocky ground; cloths of bright color, especially certain fiery yellows and reds, are heaped upon them; they hang in strips, blazing in the midst of dull hanks of hemp, of wooden utensils, of earthenware, of beaten copper. Women with bright handkerchiefs over their heads, with something red always in kerchief or bodice, stand at the stalls; there is a slow heaving of people to and fro in the square. The women who pass have serious yet slightly ironical faces,—sometimes with that steady, ambiguous look which one sees in the Jewess and in the Gipsy. They hold themselves proudly, like conscious animals,—differing (how strangely!) from the Venetians, their neighbors, who are unconscious animals. It is all a little sombre and feverish; there is no gayety, no lightness, but rather something serious, almost uneasy, in the watchful aspect of the people.

All life forsakes Ravenna, which lives on with an unholy charm, like one really dead, kept in a semblance of life by witchcraft. The sea has ebbed from it, life has ebbed out of it, splendor and power have forsaken it; it remains the lovely and unhappy ghost of itself. The streets themselves are as if cut out of the ground; they have the color and chill feel of the earth; the sun rarely soaks into them; one seems to be walking in a city dug up out of ruins. There is a strange, shivering silence everywhere; in these roughly paved streets on which there is so rarely a sound of wheels or of footsteps; in these vast and solid houses, from behind whose bars and shutters so few faces look out; in these empty squares; these sumptuous churches with closed doors, opened for curious strangers; these