tter cease to exist, the former also perish
with them. The _Giuoco del Ponte_ was a relic of popular chivalry, one
of the innumerable knightly games which adorned the simple, artistic,
warlike life of the hundred Republics of Italy.... What have we to do
with the arms and banners of the tourneys? At most we may rub the
cobwebs away and shake off the dust and lay them aside in a museum."[73]

To come out of the Museo, that graveyard of dead beauty, of forgotten
enthusiasms, into the quiet, deserted Piazza di S. Francesco, where the
summer sleeps ever in the sun and no footstep save a foreigner's ever
seems to pass, is to fall from one dream into another, not less
mysterious and full of beauty. How quiet now is this old city that once
rang with the shouts of the victors home from some sea fight, or
returned from the Giuoco. Only, as you pass along Via S. Francesco and
turn into Piazza di S. Paolo, the children gather about you, reminding
you that in Italy even the oldest places--S. Paolo al Orto, for
instance, with its beautiful old tower that is now a dwelling--are put
to some use, and are really living still like the gods who have taken
service with us, perhaps in irony, to console themselves for our
treachery in watching our sadness without them.

It is certainly with some such thought as this in his heart the
unforgetful traveller will enter S. Pierino, not far from S. Paolo al
Orto, at the corner of Via Cavour and Via delle belle Torri. Coming into
this old church suddenly out of the sunshine, how dark a place it seems,
full of a mysterious melancholy too, a sort of remembrance of change and
death, as though some treachery asleep in our hearts had awakened on the
threshold and accused us. The crypt has long been used as a charnel
house, the guide-book tells you, but maybe it is not any memory of the
unremembered and countless dead that has stirred in your heart, but some
stranger impulse urging you to a dislike of the darkness, that dim
mysterious light that is part of the north and has nothing to do with
Italy. How full of twilight it is, yet once in this place a temple to
Apollo stood, full of the sun, almost within sound of the sea, when, we
know not how,[74] the Pisans received news of Jesus Christ, and,
forgetting Apollo, gave his temple to St. Peter. Then in 1072 they
pulled down that old "house of idols,"[75] and built this church,
calling it S. Pietro in Vincoli, perhaps because of the presence of the
old go