Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/677

Rh bears his name was the palace of the Guiccioli, and Byron lived there, as cavaliere servente of the Countess, from June, 1819, to October, 1821. Across the square, now the Piazza Byron, is the Café Byron, and an inscription over the door tells us that Byron, when he first came to Ravenna, chose to live in this house because it was near the tomb of Dante. The tablet calls him "splendore del secolo decimonono."

In the country about Ravenna there is a luxurious harshness. The bank of wall, on which you may walk round the city, looks outwards over wide, flat, marshy plains, and, as far as you can see, the plains broaden, set with thin trees, which I saw desolately shedding their last leaves, on a day late in November. There was a faint mist; the air was damp and cold. Straight roads, going between narrow alleys of these thin and almost leafless trees, stretched across the plain with a dusty monotony. Dry stalks rattled in the fields, beyond hedges of faded green and yellow bushes; field after field lay in long narrow strips, side by side, color by color, dull greens and browns, spotted by sudden gleams of autumn coloring; with here and there a garden of white chrysanthemums, a garden of vegetables surrounded by trellised vines, or a plot of weedy grass, with fruit-trees around it. White bullocks passed on the roads, dragging primitive carts of singular shape, painted all over with pictures in bright colors. Here and there women worked with bare feet in the fields; old men scraped together the fallen leaves out of the ditches; small black donkeys waited for their little carts to be filled. In the air, the feel of the earth; in all these gestures, in the color of the day, in the attitude of Ravenna, heaped there so like a funeral monument, I felt the winter.

Between Ravenna and the sea the land is almost half water. Marshes lie on each side of the narrow path by the canal, and the canal turns aside into many creeks and channels, with rushy mud banks around them, and, beyond, pools of water with brown reedy grass growing up out of it. The land is flat to the horizon, dull brown or green where there is not the glitter of water, bright white, or blue like lapis lazuli. In the distance thin lines of stone-pines stand up against the sky; here and there, not far from the road, the pines cluster; on the left, beyond the canal and the moor-land, there is the dense wall of the Pineta, green-black above, with shadowy tints of lavender about the stems. Along the canal, men are fishing with strange nets hoisted on cranes, like vast insects with endless tentacles, two reaching forwards and two backwards, webbed with one immense net of delicate meshes: it dips with a slow and stealthy motion into the water, and, as it is hoisted again, you see the fish leaping in its midst. Some of these fantastic, almost living creatures hang over the sea itself, from the planks and heaped stones which go out in a long double line into the water to form a narrow harbor; fishing-boats with orange and ochre sails lie along both sides of it; and beyond, the coast is flat, dreary, unvaried, a line of dark sand and short brown weedy grass along the edge of the gray sea.

Outside Ravenna, by whatever gate one leaves it, there is, for a certain space around the walls, a monotonous dreariness, out of which one gradually distinguishes, first, the thin lines of white trees, then the vines festooned from tree to tree around the fields, the white oxen ploughing the black earth, yoked two by two in eights; then, ruddy or orange sails seen across the fields from the direction of the harbor; and, in the midst of the plain, the tower, like a lighthouse tower, of the church of S. Maria in Porto Fuori, and the bare bulk and tall round campanile of S. Apollinare in Classe, as if forgotten by the side of a road that no longer leads anywhere. Soon after S. Apollinare in Classe, woods begin. There are long and white trails of bright and painted bushes, with young pine-trees in their midst, and tangles of grass, and taller trees with gray steins and delicate branches. It is long before the stone-pines begin, and they begin one by one, each spreading its sunshade of green lace over its own circle of grass. They stand in lines and thin clusters beside the canal; and their mass thickens and darkens towards the sea, making the gentle and windless shade which Dante speaks of.