Gothic king. His
palace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter
Amalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of
Belisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels
of Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediaeval
wars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous
with marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around
them.

As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated to such a
distance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens were cultivated on
the spot where once the galleys of the Caesars rode at anchor. Groves
of pines sprang up along the shore, and in their lofty tops the music
of the wind moved like the ghost of waves and breakers plunging upon
distant sands. This Pinetum stretches along the shore of the Adriatic
for about forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between the
great marsh and the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems and
velvet crowns of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover an
oasis on Arabian sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detach
themselves from an inferior forest-growth of juniper and thorn and ash
and oak, the tall roofs of the stately firs shooting their breadth of
sheltering greenery above the lower and less sturdy brushwood. It is
hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful and impressive scene than
that presented by these long alleys of imperial pines. They grow so
thickly one behind another, that we might compare them to the pipes of
a great organ, or the pillars of a Gothic church, or the basaltic
columns of the Giant's Causeway. Their tops are evergreen and laden
with the heavy cones, from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth.
Scores of peasants are quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whose
business it is to scale the pines and rob them of their fruit at
certain seasons of the year. Afterwards they dry the fir-cones in the
sun, until the nuts which they contain fall out. The empty husks are
sold for firewood, and the kernels in their stony shells reserved for
exportation. You may see the peasants, men, women, and boys, sorting
them by millions, drying and sifting them upon the open spaces of the
wood, and packing them in sacks to send abroad through Italy. The
_pinocchi_ or kernels of the stone-pine are largely used in cookery,
and those of Ravenna are prized for their good quality and aromatic
flavour. When roasted or pounded, they tas