Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII | Page 5

twined around a column, a small rosebush, or a shrub glows beneath a gleam of sunshine. There is no noise; this quarter is deserted; only now and then is heard the voice of some promenader which reverberates as under the vault of a church. It is the veritable cemetery of a free and Christian city; here, before the tombs of the great, people might well reflect over death and public affairs.

THE WALLS AND "SKYSCRAPERS" OF PISA[5]
BY JANET ROSS AND NELLY ERICHSON
Few cities have preserved their medieval walls with such loving care as Pisa. The circuit is complete save where the traveler enters the city; and there, alas, a wide breach has been made by the restless spirit of modernity. But once past the paltry barrier and the banal square, with its inevitable statue of Victor Emanuel, that take the place of the old Porta Romana, one quickly perceives that the city is a walled one. Glimpses of battlements close the vistas of the streets, and green fields peep through the open gates, marking that abrupt transition between town and country peculiar to a fortified city.
The walls are best seen from without. An admirable impression of them can be had on leaving the city by the Porta Lucchese. Turning to the left, after passing a crucifix overshadowed by cypresses, we come to the edge of a stretch of level marshy meadows, gaily pied in spring with orchids and grape hyacinths. Above our heads the high air vibrates with the song of larks. Before us is the long line of the city walls. Strong, grim and gray, they look with nothing to break the outline of square battlements against the sky, but that majestic groups of domes and towers for whose defense they were built. At the angle of the wall to the right is a square watch-tower, backed by groups of cypresses that rise into the air like dark flames. Its little windows command the flat plain as far as the horizon. How easy to imagine the warning blast of the warder's trumpet as he caught sight of a distant enemy, and the wall springing into life at the sound. Armed men buckling on their harness would swarm up ladders to the battlements, the catapult groan and squeak as its lever was forced backward, and at the sharp word of command the first flight of arrows would be loosed.
But the dream fades, and we pass on to the angle of the wall where the cypresses stand. From the picturesque Jews' cemetery, to which access is easy, the structure of the walls can be studied in detail because the hand of the restorer has been perforce withheld within its gates. The wall is some forty feet high, built of stone from the Pisan hills, weathered for the most part to a grayish hue. The masonry of the lower half is good. The blocks of stone are large and well laid. Those of the upper half are smaller and the masonry is in places careless and irregular. The red brick battlements are square. At short intervals there are walled-up gateways, round-headed or ogival in form, and the whole surface is rent and patched. Centuries of war and earthquakes, rain and fire, have given it a pleasant irregularity, the record of violent and troublous times.
The city can be reentered by the Porta Nuova, only a few yards to the left of the cemetery. So venerable do these battered walls look that we need the full evidence of history to realize that they had more than one predecessor. The memory even of the first walls of Pisa, an ancient city when Rome was young, has been lost. The earliest record of which we know anything appears on a map of the ninth century drawn by one Bonanno; a map, we should rather say professing to be of the ninth century, for churches of the thirteenth century are marked upon it, so it must either have been made, or the churches inserted, then....
The ancient walls were practically swept away by the prosperity of Pisa. Beside the Balearic Islands she had conquered Carthage, the Lipari Islands, Elba, Corsica, and Palermo, and her galleys poured their spoils into the Pisan port. She traded with the East, and was successful in commerce as in war. Her inhabitants increased rapidly. They could no longer be penned within the narrow limits of the old wall, but overflowed in all directions beyond it. Not only was the Borgo thickly populated, but a whole new region called Forisportae, sprang up.
So masked was the wall by houses, built into it and huddling against it both on the outside and the inside, that it seems to have been actually invisible. So much so that contemporary chroniclers spoke of Pisa as without walls, and attributed her