United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Notwithstanding all the expedition we could make, it was dark before we passed the Cerchio, which is an inconsiderable stream in the neighbourhood of Pisa, where we arrived about eight in the evening. The country from Sarzana to the frontiers of Tuscany is a narrow plain, bounded on the right by the sea, and on the left by the Apennine mountains.
Any one who has followed the sea-coast between Pisa and Sarzana can appreciate the enormous value of these concessions to the invader. They relieved him of the difficulty of forcing his way along a narrow belt of land, which is hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the highest and most abrupt mountain range in Italy.
We are not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees, itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana, you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it, among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while scattered on the grass softer than sleep, you may find perhaps the carved name of a goddess, the empty pedestal of a statue.
These mountains close the valley to south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and more celestial region. Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges.
We detect in him, at the first glance, the foreigner, the Italian, and something more, apart and beyond these, surpassing all similitude or analogy.-Italian he was through blood and lineage; first, through his paternal family, which is Tuscan, and which we can follow down from the twelfth century, at Florence, then at San Miniato; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it vegetates obscurely in provincial isolation, through a long line of notaries and municipal syndics.
'O mother, I can now confess to you the terror I have all along felt. 'My own heart assures me of it, my child, said Lady Annabel weeping; and they mingled their tears together, but tears not of sorrow. 'Poor George! said Lady Annabel, 'he will have a terrible journey to Sarzana, and be feeling so much for us! Perhaps he may meet them.
The 'Médici books' were catalogued by a humble bell-ringer, who lived to be a chief figure in the literary world. Thomas of Sarzana performed the task so well that his system became a model for librarians.
In this moment of peril he rode as fast as horses could carry him to the French camp, besought an interview with Charles, and then and there delivered up to him the keys of Sarzana and its citadel, together with those of Pietra Santa, Librafratta, Pisa, and Leghorn.
To the left foams the Taro, following whose rocky channel we should come at last to Pontremoli and the Tyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana. On a May-day of sunshine like the present, the Taro is a gentle stream. A waggon drawn by two white oxen has just entered its channel, guided by a contadino with goat-skin leggings, wielding a long goad.
Above all, his old friend Thomas of Sarzana had been made Pope, and had lent a mighty impulse to letters; had accumulated 5000 MSS. in the library of the Vatican, and had set Poggio to translate Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Laurentius Valla to translate Herodotus and Thucydides, Theodore Gaza, Theophrastus; George of Trebizond, Eusebius, and certain treatises of Plato, etc. etc.
Word Of The Day