I

THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF RAVENNA


Upon the loneliest and most desolate shore of Italy, where the vast
monotony of the Emilian plain fades away at last, almost
imperceptibly, into the Adrian Sea, there stands, half abandoned in
that soundless place, and often wrapt in a white shroud of mist, a
city like a marvellous reliquary, richly wrought, as is meet,
beautiful with many fading colours, and encrusted with precious
stones: its name is Ravenna.

It stands there laden with the mysterious centuries as with half
barbaric jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid,
hieratic, constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini
by the lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from
Ferrara through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the
endless marsh from Bologna or Faenza, its wide and empty horizons, its
astonishing silence, and the difficulty of every approach will seem to
you but a fitting environment for a place so solitary and so
imperious.

For this city of mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics
glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious
marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but
indestructible, of tottering _campanili_, of sumptuous splendour and