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Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood- carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.
You find their traces abundantly in the antique Etruscan museum at Florence; you find them on the mediæval Campo Santo at Pisa; you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the Tuscan revels in.
They admired Palazzo Publico within and without; chiefly from without, for they could never walk from the Cathedral to their hotel without pausing for a time to look down into the picturesque Piazza del Campo where it stands, and admire its lofty walls, so mediæval in character, with battlemented cornice and ogive windows. They walked down the narrow streets and then climbed them.
The ground-tier of the baptistery is round-arched, and has no pinnacles; but look at its first story. The clerestory of the Duomo of Pisa has no traceries, but look at the cloister of its Campo Santo. I pause at the words; for they introduce a new group of thoughts, which presently we must trace farther. The Holy Field; field of burial. The "cave of Machpelah which is before Mamre," of the Pisans.
At one end of the facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch, supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a statue of mediaeval sculpture. The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena.
The Vervains had passed out of his world; he knew that they had been in it only by the torment they had left him. He wondered in a listless way that he should see nothing of Don Ippolito. Once at midnight he fancied that the priest was coming towards him across a campo he had just entered; he stopped and turned back into the calle: when the priest came up to him, it was not Don Ippolito.
The day of the 18th Fructidor had, without any doubt, mainly contributed to the conclusion of peace at Campo Formio. On the one hand, the Directory, hitherto not very pacifically inclined, after having effected a 'coup d'etat', at length saw the necessity of appeasing the discontented by giving peace to France.
There I spent a delightful day principally in wandering about that glorious group of buildings situated so near to each other the Cathedral, the Baptistery, the Campo Santo, and the Campanile or Leaning Tower. What interested me most at the Cathedral was the two bronze lamps suspended at the end of the nave, which suggested to the mind of Galileo the invention of the pendulum.
So had the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury even less than I needed news.
Being stone-broke when you go on board doesn't matter if you ship forward; but aft, to start with bare pockets may get you a bad name. I had maundered out to the Campo Santo that last day, and on the road back, just after passing through the walls, an Englishman who had lost himself asked the way to the market-place.
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