Italian Hours

Ravenna

I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an

intense white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely

Italy; but as I jotted down the other day in the ancient capital

of Honorius and Theodoric the few notes of which they are

composed, I let the original date stand for local colour's sake.

Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a grateful glow in the

midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a depressed imagination

something tangible to grasp while awaiting the return of fine

weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, as I

edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the

empty, white streets. After a long, chill spring the summer this

year descended upon Italy with a sudden jump and an ominous hot

breath. I stole away from Florence in the night, and even on top

of the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in the rushing

train, one could but sit and pant perspiringly.

At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a

religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The

civil, that of the Statuto, was the one fully national Italian

holiday as by law established--the day that signalises everywhere

over the land at once its achieved and hard-won unification; the

religious was a jubilee of certain local churches. The latter is

observed by the Bolognese parishes in couples, and comes round

for each couple but once in ten years--an arrangement by which

the faithful at large insure themselves a liberal recurrence of

expensive processions. It was n't my business to distinguish the

sheep from the goats, the pious from the profane, the prayers

from the scoffers; it was enough that, melting together under the

scorching sun, they filled the admirably solid city with a flood

of spectacular life. The combination at one point was really

dramatic. While a long procession of priests and young virgins

in white veils, bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of the

streets, a review of the King's troops went forward outside the

town. On its return a large detachment of cavalry passed across

the space where the incense was burning, the pictured banners

swaying and the litany being droned, and checked the advance of

the little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista of the street,

between the porticoes, was festooned with garlands and scarlet

and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests,

the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens,

were resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of

colour, across which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as

if it had been a conquering army trampling on an embassy of

propitiation. It was, to tell the truth, the first time an'

Italian festa had really exhibited to my eyes the genial glow and

the romantic particulars promised by song and story; and I

confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they were

to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one

observes it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most

unmercifully at Guido and Domenichino.

For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles--grave,

reflective, philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord

with the historic dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness,

of the place. I arrived there in the evening, before, even at

drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the Statuto had altogether put

itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth from the inn, and

found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, chiefly at the

cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the light of

a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of the

palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed

and departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and

with an affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and

customs of Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing

confidence from prompt observation, suggested deferentially that

it was n't the liveliest place in the world, and my friend

admitted that it was in fact not a seat of ardent life. But had I

seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did n't exhaust the

possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer night, had

an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in an

upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion's footsteps

and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight.

The suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I

walked in the Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague,

through a city which had lost half its population by pestilence

and the other half by flight. I turned back into my inn

profoundly satisfied. This at last was the old-world dulness of a

prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose.

The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the

following day; but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit

to give precedence to another--the lively perception, namely, of

the thinness of my saturation with Gibbon and the other sources

of legend. At Ravenna the waiter at the caf and the coachman who

drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to Galla Placidia and

Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; wherever you

turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic presence of

mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to so

ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of

prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked

up at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again

for some intenser light on the court of Justinian; but I can

imagine that to a visitor more intimate with the originals of the

various great almond-eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the

churches these extremely curious works of art may have a really

formidable interest. I found in the place at large, by daylight,

the look of a vast straggling depopulated village. The streets

with hardly an exception are grass-grown, and though I walked

about all day I failed to encounter a single wheeled vehicle. I

remember no shop but the little establishment of an urbane

photographer, whose views of the Pineta, the great legendary

pine-forest just without the town, gave me an irresistible desire

to seek that refuge. There was no architecture to speak of; and

though there are a great many large domiciles with aristocratic

names they stand cracking and baking in the sun in no very

comfortable fashion. The houses have for the most part an all but

rustic rudeness; they are low and featureless and shabby, as well

as interspersed with high garden walls over which the long arms

of tangled vines hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here

and there in all this dreariness, in some particularly silent and

grassy corner, rises an old brick church with a front more or

less spoiled, by cheap modernisation, and a strange cylindrical

campanile pierced with small arched windows and extremely

suggestive of the fifth century. These churches constitute the

palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal interest,

after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, resides

in their unequalled collection of early Christian mosaics. It is

an interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, and

leads one's attention along a straight and narrow way. There are

older churches in Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums,

are more variously and richly informing; but in Rome you stumble

at every step on some curious pagan memorial, often beautiful

enough to make your thoughts wander far from the strange stiff

primitive Christian forms.

Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her

monuments and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the

first century she possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a

disciple of Peter, to whom her two finest places of worship are

dedicated. It was to one of these, jocosely entitled the "new,"

that I first directed my steps. I lingered outside a while and

looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, so rusty, so

crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to ring in another

century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the shining

marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi and

the long mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the

wall of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its

companions, is a magazine of early Christian odds and ends;

fragments of yellow marble incrusted with quaint sculptured

emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the

bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn

narrow by centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person;

slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven

hierogylphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness--lambs and stags

and fishes and beasts of theological affinities even less

apparent. Upon all these strange things the strange figures in

the great mosaic panorama look down, with coloured cheeks and

staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and answer your

wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that it was

in such and such a fashion they believed and worshipped. First,

on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and various old

landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on one side,

of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi,

terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded

by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male

saints (twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and

leading to a Saviour enthroned between angels of singular

expressiveness. What it is these long slim seraphs express I

cannot quite say, but they have an odd, knowing, sidelong look

out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, though not without

sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a defensive prayer or

so were I to find myself alone in the church towards dusk. All

this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and

brilliantly preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they

had been inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is

executed almost too much in the modern manner to be interesting;

for the charm of mosaic work is, to my sense, confined altogether

to the infancy of the art. The great Christ, in the series of

which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains

enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the

simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, even as an

emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows

arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as

the popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian.

It is all very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that

interest which is inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all

early representations of our Lord. Practically they are no more

authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary

Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which they borrow a certain

value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact

that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the

original. It is something that this was the way the people in the

sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image has

suffered by so many the fewer accretions. The great purple-robed

monarch on the wall of Ravenna is at least a very potent and

positive Christ, and the only objection I have to make to him is

that though in this character he must have had a full

apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no apprehension

of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one's preference lies, for

distinctness' sake, between the old plainness and the modern

fantasy, one must admit that the plainness has here a very grand

outline.

[Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.]

I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the

hot yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches.

The greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on

vault and entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but

always brilliant and elaborate, and everywhere too by the same

deep amaze of the fact that, while centuries had worn themselves

away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes of coloured

glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their

freshness. I have no space for a list of the various shrines so

distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has

already become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The

total aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness, its

absorbing perfume of evanescence and decay and mortality,

confounds the distinctions and blurs the details. The Cathedral,

which is vast and high, has been excessively modernised, and was

being still more so by a lavish application of tinsel and cotton-

velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St. Apollinaris,

which befalls next month. Things on this occasion are to be done

handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me that a single family

had contributed three thousand francs towards a month's vesper-

music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the August

twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, and

look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine

chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall

basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or

custom-house--modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at

Constantinople. It has a great span of height and a great

solemnity, as well as a choir densely pictured over on arch and

apse with mosaics of the time of Justinian. These are regular

pictures, full of movement, gesture and perspective, and just

enough sobered in hue by time to bring home their remoteness. In

the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an artist

whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir

and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted

twinkling walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I

suppose, on the library wall of some person of taste; but even if

it is much better than is probable--I did n't look at it--all his

taste won't tell the owner, unless he has been there, in just

what a soundless, mouldering, out-of-the-way corner of old Italy

it was painted. An even better place for an artist fond of dusky

architectural nooks, except that here the dusk is excessive and

he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, is the

extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso,

otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is

perhaps on the whole the spot in Ravenna where the impression is

of most sovereign authority and most thrilling force. It consists

of a narrow low-browed cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every

inch of which except the floor is covered with dense symbolic

mosaics. Before you and on each side, through the thick brown

light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the

remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if history

had burrowed under ground to escape from research and you had

fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor

Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia,

a lady who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other side

rest the bones of Constantius III. The place might be a small

natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral substances, and

there is something quite tremendous in being shut up so closely

with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman

name broods upon the huge sepulchres and abides for ever within

the narrow walls.

But still other memories hang about than those of primitive

bishops and degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died

here, and the tomb of the one poet and the dwelling of the other

are among the advertised appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be

said, is anything but Dantesque, and the whole precinct is

disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste which distinguishes

most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The author of The

Divine Comedy commemorated in stucco, even in a slumbering

corner of Ravenna, is not "sympathetic." Fortunately of all

poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an

architect in diction and built himself his temple of fame in

verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante's tomb is not

Dantesque, so neither is Byron's house Byronic, being a homely,

shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly on the street, with as

little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron's time it

was an inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that "Cain" and

the "Vision of Judgment" should have been written at an hotel.

The fact supplies a commanding precedent for self-abstraction to

tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must declare indeed

that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased my

esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of

his inspiration. A man so much de son temps as the author

of the above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years

in this stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of

disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable

pastime--the various churches are adorned with monuments of

ancestral Guicciolis--but it is none the less obvious that

Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an intolerably dull

residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped with

intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron's memory

then is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one's self

as one turns away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of

his house and looks down the deadly provincial vista of the

empty, sunny street, the author of so many superb stanzas asked

less from the world than he gave it. One of his diversions was to

ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of miles from the

city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands of the

Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and

Boccaccio's, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions,

and for that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea.

Between the city and the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-

swamps, stands the finest of the Ravennese churches, the stately

temple of San Apollinare in Classe. The Emperor Augustus

constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which the ages have

choked up, and which survives only in the title of this ancient

church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They

opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go

wander up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous,

pearly columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase

of the choir and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I

passed a memorable half-hour sitting in this wave of tempered

light, looking down the cool grey avenue of the nave, out of the

open door, at the vivid green swamps, and listening to the

melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood of

Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the

pines, and beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the

wood and a view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the

sand-hills. It was infinitely, it was nobly "quaint," but, as the

trees stand at wide intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air

but a little parasol of foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring

summer day, the forest itself was only the more characteristic of

its clime and country for being perfectly shadeless.

1873.