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The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her and, for that matter, so am I." Later he speaks of having got his horses from Venice, and riding or driving daily in the scenery reproduced in the third canto of Don Juan: Sweet hour of twilight! in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood.
Nor should any one omit to visit the Casa Polentana near Porta Ursicina and the Casa Traversari in the Via S. Vitale, grand old thirteenth-century houses that speak to us, not certainly of Ravenna's great days, but of a greater day than ours, and one, too, in which the most tragic of Italians wandered up and down these windy ways eating his heart out for Florence.
And lastly, with Pierian pipe he was making the pasture lands resound, black Atropos, alas, broke off the work of joy. For him ungrateful Florence bore the dismal fruit of exile, harsh fatherland to her own bard. But Ravenna's piety rejoices to have gathered him into the bosom of Guido Novello, her illustrious chief. So far Boccaccio.
This the one link That binds the wan old man that now I am To the wild lad who followed up the hounds Among Ravenna's pine-woods by the sea.
"The Lombard tooth with fang impure Did gore the bosom of the Holy Church Under its wings, victorious, Charlemagne Sped to her rescue." Nor is Dante forgetful of Ravenna's other claims to glory.
And she whose flank is washed of Savio's wave As 'twixt the level and the steep she lies, Lives so 'twixt tyrant power and liberty." All Romagna with its untamable fierceness and confusion lies in these lines which, as Dante wrote them, seem as unalterable as those in which the creation of the world is described. Nor is Dante forgetful of the great destiny that had been Ravenna's.
Strabo in his account of Ravenna, which I have quoted above, emphasises the fact rather of its situation among the marshes than of its position with regard to the sea. This is perhaps natural. No journey was too long to make if thereby the sea passage might be avoided, no road too rough and rude if to take it was to escape the unstable winds and waters. That too was a part of Ravenna's strength.
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