utiful graveyards of Italy.

Of Viareggio itself there is little to be said. It is a town by the
seaside, full in summer of holiday-making Tuscans from Florence and the
cities round about. A pretty place enough, it possesses an unique
market-place covered in by ancient twisted plane trees, where the old
women chaffer with the cooks and contadine. But nothing, as it seems to
me, and certainly not so modern a place as Viareggio, will keep you long
from Pisa. Even on the dusty way from Pietrasanta, at every turn of the
road one has half expected to see the leaning tower and the Duomo. And
it is really with an indescribable impatience you spend the night in
Viareggio. Starting at dawn, still without a glimpse of Pisa, you enter
the Pineta before the sun, that lovely, green, cool forest full of
silver shadows, with every here and there a little farm for the pine
cones, about which they are heaped in great banks. Coming out of this
wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers,
you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city. Then you
cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river
out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa
rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream. As you turn to look
behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains,
those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost in
the distance and the sky; and so, with half a regret, full of expectancy
and excitement nevertheless, you quicken your pace, and even in the heat
set out quickly for the white city before you,--Pisa, once lord of the
sea, the first great city of Tuscany.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] I no longer believe it is possible to be certain of the place. At
any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong,
though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that
Boccaccio was a "little priest," and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo,
and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley's body was
found at Lerici, and that he was burned close by.

[16] See Carmichael, _The Old Road_, etc., pp. 183-202.

VI. PISA

I

To enter Pisa by the Porta Nuova, coming at once into the Piazza del
Duomo, is as though at midday, on the highway, one had turned aside into
a secret meadow full of a strange silence and dazzling light, where have
been abandoned among the wild flowers the statues of