We drove three miles beyond the city, to the Church of St. Apollinare
in Classe, a lonely edifice in a waste of marsh, a grand old basilica, a
purer specimen of Christian art than Rome or any other Italian town can
boast. Just outside the city gate stands a Greek cross on a small fluted
column, which marks the site of the once magnificent Basilica of St.
Laurentius, which was demolished in the sixteenth century, its stone
built into a new church in town, and its rich marbles carried to
all-absorbing Rome. It was the last relic of the old port of Caesarea,
famous since the time of Augustus. A marble column on a green meadow
is all that remains of a once prosperous city. Our road lay through the
marshy plain, across an elevated bridge over the sluggish united stream
of the Ronco and Montone, from which there is a wide view, including the
Pineta (or Pine Forest), the Church of St. Apollinare in the midst of
rice-fields and marshes, and on a clear day the Alps and Apennines.
I can imagine nothing more desolate than this solitary church, or the
approach to it. Laborers were busy spading up the heavy, wet ground,
or digging trenches, which instantly filled with water, for the whole
country was afloat. The frogs greeted us with clamorous chorus out of
their slimy pools, and the mosquitoes attacked us as we rode along.
I noticed about on the bogs, wherever they could find standing-room,
half-naked wretches, with long spears, having several prongs like
tridents, which they thrust into the grass and shallow water. Calling
one of them to us, we found that his business was fishing, and that he
forked out very fat and edible-looking fish with his trident. Shaggy,
undersized horses were wading in the water, nipping off the thin spears
of grass. Close to the church is a rickety farmhouse. If I lived there,
I would as lief be a fish as a horse.
The interior of this primitive old basilica is lofty and imposing,
with twenty-four handsome columns of the gray Cippolino marble, and an
elevated high altar and tribune, decorated with splendid mosaics of the
sixth century,--biblical subjects, in all the stiff faithfulness of the
holy old times. The marble floor is green and damp and slippery. Under
the tribune is the crypt, where the body of St. Apollinaris used to lie
(it is now under the high altar above); and as I desired to see where he
used to rest, I walked in. I also walked into about six inches of water,
in the dim, irreligious light; and so made a cold-water Baptist devotee
of myself. In the side aisles are wonderful old sarcophagi, containing
the ashes of archbishops of Ravenna, so old that the owners' names are
forgotten of two of them, which shows that a man may build a tomb
more enduring than his memory. The sculptured bas-reliefs are very
interesting, being early Christian emblems and curious devices,--symbols
of sheep, palms, peacocks, crosses, and the four rivers of Paradise
flowing down in stony streams from stony sources, and monograms, and
pious rebuses. At the entrance of the crypt is an open stone book,
called the Breviary of Gregory the Great. Detached from the church is
the Bell Tower, a circular campanile of a sort peculiar to Ravenna,
which adds to the picturesqueness of the pile, and suggests the
notion that it is a mast unshipped from its vessel, the church, which
consequently stands there water-logged, with no power to catch any wind,
of doctrine or other, and move. I forgot to say that the basilica was
launched in the year 534.
A little weary with the good but damp old Christians, we ordered our
driver to continue across the marsh to the Pineta, whose dark fringe
bounded all our horizon toward the Adriatic. It is the largest unbroken
forest in Italy, and by all odds the most poetic in itself and its
associations. It is twenty-five miles long, and from one to three in
breadth, a free growth of stately pines, whose boughs are full of music
and sweet odors,--a succession of lovely glades and avenues, with miles
and miles of drives over the springy turf. At the point where we entered
is a farmhouse. Laborers had been gathering the cones, which were heaped
up in immense windrows, hundreds of feet in length. Boys and men were
busy pounding out the seeds from the cones. The latter are used for
fuel, and the former are pressed for their oil. They are also eaten:
we have often had them served at hotel tables, and found them rather
tasteless, but not unpleasant. The turf, as we drove into the recesses
of the forest, was thickly covered with wild flowers, of many colors and
delicate forms; but we liked best the violets, for they reminded us
of home, though the driver seemed to think them less valuable than the
seeds of the pine-cones. A lovely day and history and romance united
to fascinate us with the place. We were driving over the spot where,
eighteen centuries ago, the Roman fleet used to ride at anchor. Here,
it is certain, the gloomy spirit of Dante found congenial place for
meditation, and the gay Boccaccio material for fiction. Here for hours,
day after day, Byron used to gallop his horse, giving vent to that
restless impatience which could not all escape from his fiery pen,
hearing those voices of a past and dead Italy which he, more truthfully
and pathetically than any other poet, has put into living verse. The
driver pointed out what is called Byron's Path, where he was wont to
ride. Everybody here, indeed, knows of Byron; and I think his memory
is more secure than any saint of them all in their stone boxes, partly
because his poetry has celebrated the region, perhaps rather from
the perpetuated tradition of his generosity. No foreigner was ever so
popular as he while he lived at Ravenna. At least, the people say so
now, since they find it so profitable to keep his memory alive and to
point out his haunts. The Italians, to be sure, know how to make
capital out of poets and heroes, and are quick to learn the curiosity of
foreigners, and to gratify it for a compensation. But the evident
esteem in which Byron's memory is held in the Armenian monastery of St.
Lazzaro, at Venice, must be otherwise accounted for. The monks keep his
library-room and table as they were when he wrote there, and like
to show his portrait, and tell of his quick mastery of the difficult
Armenian tongue. We have a notable example of a Person who became a monk
when he was sick; but Byron accomplished too much work during the few
months he was on the Island of St. Lazzaro, both in original composition
and in translating English into Armenian, for one physically ruined and
broken.