e streams descending from the mountains, has now
silted up her harbour, and Classis, the maritime suburb of Ravenna,
which, in the days of Odovacar and Theodoric, was a busy sea port on the
Adriatic, now consists of one desolate church--magnificent in its
desolation--and two or three farm-buildings standing in the midst of a
lonely and fever-haunted rice-swamp. Between the city and the sea
stretches for miles the glorious pine-forest, now alas! cruelly maimed
by the hands of Nature and of Man, by the frost of one severe winter and
by the spades of the builders of a railway, but still preserving some
traces of its ancient beauty. Here it was that Theodoric pitched his
camp when for three weary years he blockaded his rival's last
stronghold, and here by the deep trench (_fossatum_), which he had dug
to guard that camp, he fought the last and not the least deadly of his
fights, when Odovacar made his desperate sortie from the famine-stricken
town. Memories of a gentler kind, but still not wanting in sadness, now
cluster round the solemn avenues of the Pineta. There we still seem to
see Dante wandering, framing his lay of the "selva oscura", through
which lay his path to the unseen world, and ever looking in vain for the
arrival of the messenger who should summon him back to ungrateful
Florence. There, in Boccaccio's story, a maiden's hapless ghost is for
ever pursued through the woods by "the spectre-huntsman", Guido
Cavalcanti, whom her cruelty had driven to suicide. And there, in our
fathers' days, rode Byron, like Dante, an exile, if self-exiled, from
his country, and feeding on bitter remembrances of past praise and
present blame, both too lightly bestowed by his countrymen.

We leave the pine-wood and the desolate-looking rice-fields, we cross
over the sluggish streams--Ronco and Montone--and we stand in the
streets of historic Ravenna. Our first thoughts are all of
disappointment. There is none of the trim beauty of a modern city, nor,
as we at first think, is there any of the endless picturesqueness of a
well-preserved mediaeval city. We look in vain for any building like
Giotto's Campanile at Florence, for any space like that noble,
crescent-shaped Forum, full of memories of the Middle Ages, the Piazzo
del Campo of Siena. We see some strange but not altogether beautiful
bell-towers and one or two brown cupolas breaking the sky-line, but that
seems to be all, and our first feeling as I have said, is one of
disappoin