ssitude, the city is again
almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness,
when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We
ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from
their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair
noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with
streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the
rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of
resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long
past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was
always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions
within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find
her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now
Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these
republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles
in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten
or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under
the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet
the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean
strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left
them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at
one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the
liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as
long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold
of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths,
which you may almost hear as you pass; and I hope the prospect of
increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not
look as if it would.

We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one
cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not
wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and
would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was
born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and
in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only
a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pass about this
time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and
playing before it. He