great
round tower at the foot of it, not forked in battlements, but with
embrasures for guns. "The battlemented wall was the cradle of civic
life. That low circular tower is the cradle of modern war and of all its
desolation. It is the first European tower for artillery; the beginning
of fortification against gunpowder--the beginning, that is to say, of
the end of _all_ fortification."

232. After noticing the beautiful vegetation of the district, Mr. Ruskin
described the view from the promontory or spur, about ten miles long, of
which the last rock dies into the plain at the eastern gate of Verona.
"This promontory," he said, "is one of the sides of the great gate out
of Germany into Italy, through which the Goths always entered, cloven up
to Innspruck by the Inn, and down to Verona by the Adige. And by this
gate not only the Gothic armies came, but after the Italian nation is
formed, the current of northern life enters still into its heart through
the mountain artery, as constantly and strongly as the cold waves of the
Adige itself." ... "The rock of this promontory hardens as we trace it
back to the Alps, first into a limestone having knots of splendid brown
jasper in it as our chalk has flints, and in a few miles more into true
marble, colored by iron into a glowing orange or pale warm red--the
peach-blossom marble, of which Verona is chiefly built--and then as you
advance farther into the hills into variegated marbles very rich and
grotesque in their veinings."

233. After dilating on the magnificent landscape viewed from the top of
this promontory, embracing the blue plain of Lombardy and its cities"
Mr. Ruskin said:--

"I do not think that there is any other rock in all the world from which
the places and monuments of so complex and deep a fragment of the
history of its ages can be visible as from this piece of crag with its
blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath you at once the
birthplaces of Virgil and of Livy--the homes of Dante and Petrarch, and
the source of the most sweet and pathetic inspiration to your own
Shakespeare--the spot where the civilization of the Gothic kingdoms was
founded on the throne of Theodoric; and there whatever was strongest in
the Italian race redeemed itself into life by its league against
Barbarossa; the beginning of the revival of natural science and medicine
in the schools of Padua; the center of Italian chivalry, in the power
of the Scaligers; of Italian cruelty, i