the sun. But to such an
one Pisa can never be more than a vision, vanished as soon as seen, in
the heat of midday or the shadow of evening.

But for me, of all the cities that grow among the flowers in Tuscany, it
is Pisa that I love best. She is full of the sun; she has the gift of
silence. Her story is splendid, unfortunate, and bitter, and moves to
the song of the sea: still she keeps her old ways about her, the life of
to-day has not troubled her at all. In her palaces the great mirrors are
still filled with the ghosts of the eighteenth century; on her Lung'
Arno you may almost see Byron drive by to mount his horse at the gate,
while in the Pineta, not far away, Shelley lies at noonday writing
verses to Miranda.

It is on the Lung' Arno, curved like a bow, so much more lovely than any
Florentine way, that what little world is left to Pisa lingers yet.
Before one is the Ponte di Mezzo, the most ancient bridge of the city,
built in 1660, but really the representative of its forerunners that
here bound north and south together: _En moles olim lapidea vix aetatem
ferrus nunc mormorea pulchrior et firmior stat simulato Marte virtutis
verae specimen saepe datura_, you read on one of the pillars at the
northern end. For indeed the first bridge seems to have been of wood,
partly rebuilt of stone after the great victory off the coast of Sicily,
and finished in 1046[47]. This bridge, called the Ponte Vecchio, took
ten years to build, and any doubt we might have as to whether it was of
wood or stone is set at rest by Tronci,[48] who tells us that in 1382,
"Pietro Gambacorta, together with the Elders and the Consiglio dei
Cittadini, determined to rebuild in stone the bridge of wood which
passed over Arno from the mouth of the Strada del Borgo to that of S.
Egidio, for the greater ornament of the city, chiefly because there were
many shops on the bridge that impeded the view of the beautiful Lung'
Arno." One sees the bridge that was thus built, the foundations having
been laid with much ceremony, a procession and a sung mass, in a
seventeenth-century print in the Museo Civico.[49] There is a buttress a
quarter of the way from each end, on which houses were still standing.
Then in 1635 this bridge was carried away by a flood. A new bridge was
immediately built, only to be destroyed in the same way on 1st January
1644. In 1660 the present Ponte di Mezzo was finished by Francesco Nave
of Rome.

It was on these bridges that the g