IN WHICH WE MAKE THE MISTAKE OF PREFERRING "RICH EYES" TO COMFORT,
AND TASTE THE QUESTIONABLE PLEASURES OF A MINUTE REPUBLIC
We made an excursion or so, but not with any avidity; the sea was too
good to leave, and it was the sea that we had come all this way to
enjoy, as one cannot enjoy it at home except on days that are so few
and far between as by their very rarity to make for misgivings rather
than delight. It was also so hot that to be in the train at all was
a distress, while to be in the train in the middle hours was
martyrdom; and to be in a strange town in the middle hours was
discomfort too. But as it seemed wrong to be so near Ravenna and not
see it, we made a great effort and were away before seven one lovely
morning. It was a day of interesting sights and associations; but
how the call of the placid, wet exhilarating Adriatic sounded in our
ears the while!
Ravenna has had two immense losses: first the sea, which gradually
withdrew from the town centuries ago; and then the Pinetum, which,
after centuries of existence, was burned down not many years since.
The nearness of such a forest must have both sweetened and cooled the
city; to-day its heat can be pitiless.
The two lodestars of Ravenna are the exile poets Dante and Byron--but
Dante, of course, far outshines that other. Byron is an accident
here; Dante gives Ravenna most of its lustre, for here he made his
home for many years after Florence turned him forth; here he wrote
most of the "Divine Comedy"; here he died. We saw his tomb, and
afterwards we saw his bones in their wooden coffin in the library of
the old Camaldulensian monastery of Classe, now a civic building with
an immense collection of Dante literature. Here, too, we were shown
by the custodian a little illuminated Book of Hours that belonged to
Mary Queen of Scots, and is as pretty as a Kate Greenaway calendar
and indeed rather like one; but how it came to be at Ravenna, I
cannot say. And where it ought to be, were there a general
restitution of foreign treasures to their rightful situations, I
cannot say either.
One other thing we saw in this museum--the bedstead on which
Garibaldi's wife, Anita, died in 1849, during the flight from the
Austrians; and a few minutes later we saw a little company of
Garibaldi's veterans, lame and decrepit, place a wreath on the
patriot's statue, just by the Hotel Byron, amid apathy which would be
striking anywhere, but among Italians was astounding. Not a soul but
ourselves and some errand boys watched or followed.
We had lunch at the Hotel Byron, in a vast salon, on the polished
floor of which I seemed to hear his capricious lordship's club foot;
for this was his home for two years, in 1819-1821, when it was called
the Palazzo Rasponi, and here he consoled himself with his large,
blonde, stupid Guiccioli; here he wrote myriad letters to Murray; and
here Shelley stayed with him and despatched that amusing missive to
Thomas Love Peacock, detailing not only the spoiled poet's
extraordinary habits but also his extraordinary house-mates. "Lord
Byron gets up at _two_. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom,
but one must sleep or die, like Southey's sea-snake in 'Kehama,' at
twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till
eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from
the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in
the morning. I don't suppose this will kill me in a week or
fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.'s establishment
consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three
monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these,
except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then
resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the
masters of it.... After I have sealed my letter, I find that my
enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective, and
that in a material point. I have just met on the grand staircase
five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who
all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes."
Odd to have this letter in one's mind in this now highly respectable
building, where the only animals are men, women, and waiters.
For the rest, I think now of Ravenna chiefly as a city of mosaic
churches under a sky of brass, and wonder and wonder how--even with
the Pinetum and the abounding Guiccioli--Byron can have been willing
to stay there so long.
We returned from the little wayside station of Classe, a mile or so
outside Ravenna, in order to visit the vast deserted fane of Sant'
Apollinaris in Classe Fuori, which rears its huge bulk from the plain
like a mammoth. This basilica was built in the sixth century and
seems likely to stand for fourteen centuries more, if permitted to;
it is empty and forlorn, with a wretched old custodian to open the
doors upon its lost magnificence, for though the mosaics remain, our
friend Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini carried off its marble
in 1449. Past this church rode Byron almost daily on his way to the
pine forest.
On another day we drove from Rimini to San Marino--a day ill-spent
indeed, for the sun shone, and our backs were to the sea all the way
there, and returning it was too late for bathing. Why does one do
these things? In England one can resist the deadly lure of the
excursion; but abroad, no.
San Marino means two horses and a carriage with an awning--in our
case two carriages with awnings and four horses, at twenty-five lire
the carriage. And for what? For a long, dull, dusty drive between
vineyards to a baking rock and back again. This rock is the centre
of the republic of San Marino, and I do not deny that its little city
is piled bravely upon it; but the wise traveller will permit the
camera to make the journey for him. Having left Rimini at seven we
were there by half-past ten, and we had not been within the gates
twenty minutes before I found one of the drivers and told him that we
would return at once. Idle breath! No one returns at once, or does
anything at once, in these parts. Impossible, he said. The horses
were worn out with the journey. The sun was too powerful. We could
leave at three--not a moment sooner. Here then we remained, bound to
this blistering crag, like so many Prometheus's, for four hours;
while the sea sparkled for us only ten miles away. As a matter of
fact, we could have got off earlier had I known and insisted. It was
not the fatigue of the horses, it was not the heat, that detained us;
but one of the drivers was courting a San Marino girl.
I warn all intending visitors to San Marino that after having bought
some of its absurd postage-stamps, on the sale of which it subsists,
and attempted to eat its inferior food, there is, in hot weather,
nothing whatever to do. To climb to the citadel is too exhausting;
to explore the public buildings is impossible, after Rimini's
cathedral, for if there is one more ridiculous thing than another it
is a toy republic. San Marino once belonged to Urbino, and,
declining to be joined to the Papal states in 1631, it has remained
independent. The population is about ten thousand, chiefly peasants,
who scratch the rock with hoes and breed cattle, and the Government
consists of a Grand Council of sixty life members, of which a third
are nobles, while a smaller Supreme Council of twelve are chosen from
these. You see them on the picture post-cards, which compete with
the stamps for the money of the stranger, and it is a few minutes'
beguilement to endeavour to set the point of a pin between the nobles
and the others.
So what did we do? We sat on a little balcony of the inn,
overlooking a tiny piazza, and watched such life as the place has,
which became almost galvanic when, after a terrible cracking of
whips, a mule rounded the corner dragging behind it a water-cart, and
all the republicans swarmed about this cart with vessels in which to
carry off the precious fluid at so much a litre.
That was the last of our follies. For the rest of the time we were
in Rimini we made Rimini suffice--bathing or watching the sea and its
serene yellow sails all the day, and afterwards taking short lazy
walks in the cool of the evening--now beside the river, from the
bridge to the harbour mouth and back again, past all the activities
of this little port of fishermen; now round the walls of the town;
now in the by-streets; and now down to the sea again, after dinner,
to see the moon and perhaps hear a little music.
Except for mosquito bites we all kept well, in spite of the heat and
in defiance of the prophecies of many friends, who took the gloomiest
views of Italian drinking water. But the mosquitoes! There is no
preparation against mosquitoes sold by Italian chemists that we did
not rub on our luckless skins; yet all in vain. We came at last to
believe that it is an Italian form of humour, this preparation, under
the name of preventives, of expensive delicacies dear to the mosquito
palate--an Italian joke against the English. Be that as it may,
nothing did any good; while as for the little cones which we burned
at night, filling the room with a thick aromatic smoke guaranteed to
disgust these insects more than anything else, I used to wake up and
hear them drawing great draughts of it into their lungs as if it were
ozone.