CHAPTER XXV

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.