WITH our face to the northward, we are now skirting along the western coast of Italy. The air is crisp and cold, the sky soft and clear. Yonder, scattered over the bare hillside to our right, are many rude huts and humble peasant homes. The smoke slowly rising from the low chimneys curls up and on, and still up, until it stands like so many slender columns leaning against the sky for support.
The peasants are at work, one feeding the chickens, the second holding the cow to grass, while the third is milking the goats. Everywhere the country is cut up into one, two, and three-acre plots by narrow ditches and low hedges which serve as fences to divide one peasant’s patch from another. Each plot of ground is a vineyard, a wheat field and a mulberry orchard, the three growing together.
The wheat is, of course, sown broadcast. The trees, twelve to eighteen feet high, are planted in straight rows, fifteen feet apart. The healthy vines clamber up the mulberries, and wreathe themselves into huge and rich festoons from tree to tree. The ground rapidly glides from under us, the orchards, the villages and peasant homes, one by one dash by us. Now the sun is bending low in the evening sky, and, looking out over the broad expanse of waters on our left, we see not far away the island of Elba, the first exiled home of Napoleon Bonaparte. But this beautiful island was too small for so great a spirit. After one year’s confinement here, Napoleon, rising up in his madness and might, broke the political fetters which the allied Powers had placed upon him, returned to Paris, gathered an army and marched to Waterloo. There his already waning star went down in blood to rise no more (1815).
As the dying day begins to wrap herself in the sombre folds of evening, we find ourselves in Pisa, a quiet little town of 26,000 inhabitants, beautifully situated on both banks of the Arno, six miles from the sea. The night comes and goes. Next morning I am standing on the top of Pisa’s “Leaning Tower,” in time to see the sun rise. This tower is one of the wonders, not of the ancient, but modern world. It is some thirty-three feet in diameter and one hundred and eighty feet in height, and leans thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. This oblique or leaning position gives it a very peculiar appearance. It looks as if it were falling; you expect every moment to see it dashed to pieces against the ground. But it has been in this position some 650 years, and, if we may argue from the past, many moons will wax and wane before it strikes the ground. No one knows whether the original design was to build a leaning tower, or whether in the course of construction one side of the foundation gave way, and thus left the tower in an oblique position. It was by dropping balls from the summit of this tower that Galileo verified his theories regarding the laws of gravitation. It was the swaying of the bronze lamp which still hangs in the cathedral at the foot of this tower that first suggested to Galileo the idea of a pendulum.
THE CATHEDRAL AND LEANING TOWER OF PISA.
The Campo Santo, or burial-ground, of Pisa is interesting because of its history. After the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land, in the year 1190, Archbishop Ubaldo had fifty-three ship-loads of earth brought hither from Mount Calvary in order that the dead might repose in “holy ground.” What men need to-day is not the earth of Calvary for their dead bodies, but the Christ of Calvary for their living spirits.