THE AERIAL ATTACK ON RAVENNA
Told by Paolo Poletti
In L'lllustrasione Italiana this distinguished Italian author expresses his indignation at the bombardment of Ravenna by Austrian aviators, when the ancient Basilica of Sant' Apollinare narrowly escaped destruction. Translated for Current History.
I write with a feeling of relief. My beautiful Sant' Apollinare is uninjured, or nearly so. A blind bomb may have furrowed the April sky of my city, in this marvellous foretaste of Spring; but the criminal attempt has been in vain. And, with me, innumerable citizens of Ravenna have breathed a sigh almost of content. It is true that there were human victims. But our pity for them is too deep for any comment to be adequate; the only way to commemorate them worthily is to avenge them. But it is not of this wrong we wish to speak to-day. We wish only to bring together and to distill into a brief comment the living essence of the spirit of Ravenna, as it has affirmed itself in this historic, solemn hour.
The people of Ravenna have felt a lightning flash of sudden revolt because of the outrage perpetrated on their monuments. The citizens of Ravenna, if they have not, for the antique glories of their city, the fully conscious veneration which we shall hardly expect to find among them, nevertheless do breathe in from these monuments a deep impression of exaltation and well-founded pride. Our readers will remember those "Monologues" which Gigi Easi wrote with such grace and such penetrating humour. In one, "The Art of Delivering a Monologue," he introduces as speakers the inhabitants of the various capital cities of Italy, each of whom magnifies the beauty of his own city.
So it happens that, along with the Florentine, the Neapolitan, the Venetian, and the rest, there is not lacking a good citizen of Ravenna who, with vibrant words and potent adjectives, in intense and enthusiastic exaltation, energetically affirms the supremacy of his mosaics and his basilicas. The scene is not only most exhilarating, but also, from the point of view of psychology, profoundly true. Our populace lives, and feels that it lives, with its mighty memories and with its great historic personages, whose moral significance at least it knows how to estimate, and whose remoter glory it understands by a kind of natural and traditional intuition, and respects it, I might almost say, by a distant residuum of atavistic suggestion.
Galla, daughter and sister of Emperors; Theodoric sleeping, sleeping, according to these humble fancies, a secular sleep under his heavy monolith; Justinian, up-raiser of precious churches and reviser of the imperial idea and the laws of Rome; Theodora, the dancing girl become a Queen, speak a language incomprehensible to the rough minds of our people, yet a secret fascination emanates to them from the rich vaults, heavy with gold, of the antique basilicas; from those vaulted roofs toward which, in their time, rose the thunderous hosannas of triumphal victories, and the humble supplications of tragical misfortunes; those vaulted domes, dazzling with emerald and ruby, to which were raised hands wrung in despair and menace, or joined in the lowly adoration of prayer; toward which were raised foreheads tormented with gnawing hatred or consoled by illuminating love....
The basilica of Theodoric, made the target of the iniquitous attempt of the Barbarians, ever speaks to the people in the mysterious tongue of days long gone....
Oh, my beautiful Sant' Apollinare! we dreaded to see shattered thy gleaming mosaics; we dreaded to see cut in two and mutilated thy ten-centuries-old campanile, which sends forth joyful peals in the luminous evenings of May; we feared that the voice would be stilled, which arises from thee, to chant a profound poem of history and of art.
We recall your founder, Theodoric, and his reign in Ravenna; his wise and successful attempt to bring together in peaceful relations the conquerors and the conquered, engrafting into the ultimate stem of Latin civilization the young shoot of fresh barbaric energy; so that his terrible invasion did not interrupt the continuity of history, but proceeded to develop harmoniously in the integration of the old Roman elements with the new, blended in a single composed form of enduring life.
Of the art which reminds us, through the verses of Gabriel d'Annunzio, of the millenary of Ravenna, one might also speak of the "Purple night, gleaming with gold"; of the Virgins of Sant' Apollinare, in Francesca's passionate speech:
"The Virgins of Sant' Apollinare burn not so bright in their heaven of gold"; and the prophecy:
"Oh, Prisca, another hero will draw the bow from thy desert toward the infinite.... Clad in armour, he awaits the new days; thy warrior awaits the certain dawn, when a voice through the desert paths shall call forth the ancestral valour!"
We fit the augury to the new times; and, to meet the new Barbarians, we invoke the sacred vengeance of Italy here, from this furthest bourne of our Garibaldian land!