e 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
incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which
Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and
out of which we are come; the only monument that remains to us of
those confused and half barbaric centuries which lie between Antiquity
and the Middle Age.

Mysteriously secured by nature and doubly so after the failure of the
Roman administration, Ravenna was the death-bed of the empire and its
tomb. To her the emperor Honorius fled from Milan in the first years
of the fifth century; within her walls Odoacer dethroned the last
emperor of the West, founded a kingdom, and was in his turn supplanted
by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. It was from her almost impregnable
isolation that the attempt was made by Byzantium--it seemed and
perhaps it was our only hope--to reconquer Italy and the West for
civilisation; while her fall before the appalling Lombard onset in the
eighth century brought Pepin into Italy in 754, to lay the foundation
of a new Christendom, to establish the temporal power of the papacy,
and to prophesy of the resurrection of the empire, of the unity of
Europe.

But though it is as the imperishable monument of those tragic
centuries that we rightly look upon Ravenna: before the empire was
founded she was already famous. It was from her silence that Caesar
emerged to cross the Rubicon and all unknowing to found what, when a