d cloud, and
seemingly so full of ruinous or deserted things like the beautiful great
Church of Settimo, whose tower you may see far away in the golden summer
weather standing quite alone in a curve of the river; so that you leave
the highway and following a little by-road come upon Pieve di S.
Cassiano, a basilica in the ancient Pisan manner set among the trees in
a shady place, and over the three doors of the facade you find the
beautiful work of Biduino da Pisa, as it is said, sculptures in relief
of the resurrection of Lazarus, the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, a
fight of dragons, and certain subjects from the Bestiaries.

Another lonely church, set, not at the end of a byway by the river, but
on the highroad itself, greets you as you enter Cascina. It is the
Chiesa della Madonna dell' Acqua, rebuilt in the eighteenth century. In
this wide plain there are many churches, some of them of a great
antiquity, as S. Jacopo at Zambra and S. Lorenzo alle Corti, and in the
hills you may find a place so wonderful as the Certosa di Calci, a
monastery founded in 1366, but altered and spoiled in the seventeenth
century, and the marvellous Church of S. Giovanni there. Cascina itself
is as it were the image of this wide flat country between the hills and
the Maremma, where the sun has so much influence and the shadows of the
clouds drift over the fields all day long, and the mist shrouds the
evening in blue and silver. Desolate and sober enough on a day of rain,
when the sun shines this gaunt outpost of Pisa, for it is little more,
is as gay as a flower by the wayside. The road runs through it, giving
it its one long and almost straight street, while behind the poor houses
that have so little to boast of, lies a beautiful old Piazza, with a
great palace seemingly deserted on one side and an old tower and a
church with a beautiful facade on another. Always a prize of the enemy,
Cascina in the Pisan wars fell to Lucca, to the Guelph League, and to
Florence. Its old walls, battered long ago, still remain to it, so that
from afar, from the Pisan hills, for instance, it looks more picturesque
than in fact it proves to be.

The high road, Via Pisana, as it is still called, though, indeed, it was
more often the way of the Florentines, sometimes almost deserted,
sometimes noisy with peasants returning from market, finds the river
again at Cascina only to lose it, however, till after a walk of some
five miles you come to Pontedera, a wi