is est auctor sole corusca soror.
Indigenis superat ridentia lilia saxis,
Et levi radiat picta nitore silex.
Dives marmoribus tellus, quae luce coloris
Provocat intactas luxuriosa nives.

[14] You may see the place to-day--but it is of plaster now--as Pater
describes it.--_Marius the Epicurian_, vol. i. 20.

V. CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO

And truly it is into a city of marble that you come, when, following the
dusty road full of the ruts of the bullock-wagons, past Avenza, that
little city with a great castle of Castruccio Castracani, after climbing
into the gorge where the bullocks, a dozen of them it may be, yoked to a
single dray, take all the way, you enter the cold streets of Carrara,
that are always full of the sound of falling water. And strangely
enough, as one may think, in this far-away place, so close to the
mountains as to be littered by their debris, it is an impression of
business and of life that you receive beyond anything of the sort to be
found in Spezia. Not a beautiful city certainly, Carrara has a little
the aspect of an encampment, an encampment that has somehow become
permanent, where everything has been built in a hurry, as it were, of
the most precious and permanent material. So that, while the houses are
of marble, they seem to be with but few exceptions mere shanties without
beauty of any sort, that were built yesterday for shelter, and to-morrow
will be destroyed. It is true that the Church of S. Andrea is a building
of the thirteenth century, in the Gothic manner, with a fine facade and
sculptures of a certain merit, but it fails to impress itself on the
town, which is altogether alien from it, modern for the most part in the
vulgar way of our time, when ornament is a caprice of the rich and
merely ostentatious, the many living, without beauty or light, in
barracks or huts of a brutal and hideous uniformity.

It was a Sunday evening when I came to Carrara; all that world of
labouring men and women was in the streets; in the piazza a band played;
close to the hotel, in a tent set up for the occasion, a particularly
atrocious collection of brass instruments were being blown with might
and main to attract the populace to a marionette performance. The whole
world seemed dizzy with noise. After dinner I went out into the streets
among the people, but it was not any joy I found there, only a mere
brutal cessation from toil, in which amid noise an