When we reached the Italian frontier, our progress assumed an aspect of triumph, for it was vintage time, and we were constantly encountering peasants in the gayest dresses, driving wine-carts with casks and skins full of ruddy liquor, the drivers carrying branches of vine and ivy, as if Bacchus held high revelry. On our arrival at Ravenna, besides the magnificence of the churches and basilica, with their wealth of mosaic and their pride of tradition, there was the interest of a pilgrimage to the tomb of Dante, and it would have been impossible to see Ravenna under a more bewitching aspect, for it was the three-days’ festival. Every house in the principal street had its balcony adorned with rich silks, tapestry, and velvet, not unfrequently embroidered with gold, while all the citizens were in gala dress, and the women, remarkable for personal beauty and dignity of bearing, had donned their richest garb and displayed their choicest ornaments of gold and silver, their magnificent hair transfixed by bodkins, or spadini (of the sword and target shape), many of them wearing innumerable rows of pearls round their stately throats. Even in those days the national costume had been much tampered with, but nothing was too good to do honour to their beloved Pontiff, and the jewel-boxes of every household had been ransacked for the occasion. All along our road the same scene presented itself, making allowance, of course, for the difference of locality.
RAVENNA
We spent a morning of exquisite delight in the pine-forest in the neighbourhood of Ravenna. Alas! I hear with deep concern that the chief part of those magnificent trees is mouldering to decay. I remember sitting at my mother’s feet for several hours, drinking in the calm and beauty of the scene, while Shelley’s lines rose to my lips in his description of another Pineta, the one at Pisa—
“How calm it was! The silence there
By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy Woodpecker
Made stiller by her sound
The unviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew,
With its soft motion made not less