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.