When I reached the Arno, as I did by following this dull vacant street, I was delighted to stop and look at its simple stone bridges, its muddy yellow water not unlike that of the New River in West Virginia, the plain, still, yellow houses lining its banks as far as I could see. The one jarring note was the steel railroad bridge which the moderns have built over it. It was a little consoling to look at an old moss-covered fortress now occupied as a division headquarters by the Italian army, and at a charming old gate which was part of a fortified palace left over from Pisa’s warring days. The potential force of Italy was overcoming me by leaps and bounds, and my mind was full of the old and powerful Italian families of which the Middle Ages are so redolent. I could not help thinking of the fact that the Renaissance had, in a way, its beginning here in the personality of Niccolò Pisano, and of how wonderful the future of Italy may yet be. There was an air of fallow sufficiency about it that caused me to feel that, although it might be a dull, unworked field this year or this century, another might see it radiant with power and magnificence. It is a lordly and artistic land--and I felt it here at Pisa. Wandering along the banks of the Arno, I came to a spot whence I could see the collection of sacred buildings, far more sacred to art than to religion. They were amazingly impressive, even from this distance, towering above the low houses. A little nearer, standing on a space of level grass, the boxing of yellow and brown and blue Italian houses about them like a frame, they set my mouth agape with wonder and delight. I walked into Pisa thinking it was too bad that any place so dignified should have fallen so low as to be a dull, poverty-stricken city; but I remained to think that if the Italians are wise (and they _are_ wise and new-born also) they will once more have their tremendous cities and their great artistic inheritances in the bargain. I think now that perhaps of all the lovely things I saw abroad the cathedral and tower and baptistery and campo santo of Pisa grouped as they are in one lovely, spacious, green-sodded area, are the loveliest and most perfect of all. It does not matter to me that the cathedral at Pisa is not a true Gothic cathedral, as some have pointed out. It is better than that--it is Italian Gothic; with those amazing artistic conceptions, a bell-tower and a baptistery and a campo santo thrown in. Trust the Italians to do anything that they do grandly, with a princely lavishness.