There are two Pisas: one in which people are bored and where they have lived in a provincial manner since the decadence; this is the greater part of the city, with the exception of a secluded corner: the other is this corner, a marble sepulchre, where the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower and the Campo-Santo repose silently like beautiful things that are dead. The true Pisa is here, and in these relics of an extinguished life, you find a world. A renaissance before the renaissance, a second and almost antique budding of an antique civilization, a spring-time after six centuries of snow,--such are the ideas and words that crowd into the mind. Everything is of marble, white marble, whose immaculate whiteness shines in the azure. On all sides are large solid forms, the cupola, the full wall, the balanced stories, the firmly-planted round or square mass; but over these forms, revived from the antique, like delicate foliage that clothes an old tree-trunk, there is spread an individual invention and a new decoration of the small columns surmounted by arcades, and the originality and grace of this architecture thus renewed cannot be described. [Illustration: DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, BAPTISTERY AND CAMPO SANTO, ITALY] In 1083, to honour the Virgin who had given them the victory over the Saracens of Sardinia, the Pisans began to build their Duomo. This is almost a Roman basilica, I should say a temple surmounted by another temple, or if you like better, a house having its gable for a façade, and this gable is cut off at the peak to support a still smaller house. Five stories of columns cover the entire façade with their superimposed porticoes. Two by two they are coupled together to support the little arcades; all these lovely columns of white marble under their black arcades make an aërial population that is most graceful and unexpected. In no place here do you perceive that sorrowful reverie of the Mediæval north; it is the holiday of a young nation that is awakening, and, in the joy of its newly acquired wealth, honours its gods. She has gathered from the distant shores to which her wars and trade led her, capitals, ornaments and entire columns and these fragments of antiquity fit into the work without any incongruity; for the work is instinctively cast into the ancient mould and is only developed with a grain of fantasy on the side of delicacy and charm. All the antique forms re-appear, but remodelled in the same spirit, by a new and original vivacity. The exterior columns of the Greek temple are reduced, multiplied and elevated into the air and are not only a support but have become an ornament. The Roman or Byzantine dome is elongated and its natural heaviness diminished beneath a crown of slender little columns with a mitre ornament which girds it in the centre with its delicate gallery. On the two sides of the great door two Corinthian columns are enveloped with the luxuriant leaves, buds