PISA also appears to have been Etruscan, but it never was a sovereign city. It is regarded as a colony of Pisa in Elis (whence _Pisae Alpheae_ in Virgil); but this is a groundless fancy, and it is an undoubted fact that Pisa was an ancient Tyrrhenian place. In the Hannibalian war, it was an important military station to the Romans, who succeeded in remaining masters of it. Afterwards it became a military colony. The great importance of the place is manifest from the number of ruins and remains of every description, although the town is not often spoken of. In the middle ages it rose rapidly and became great at once, just as the gods in the Aeneid step forth from the clouds, without any one having anticipated them. In the eleventh century, when the Pisans constructed their cathedral with its baptistery and tower, Pisa must have been a city of gigantic power and greatness. Its inhabitants possessed a wonderful taste for the arts even during the darkest periods of the middle ages, when at Venice (I will not mention Rome which was quite barbarous) not the slightest trace of such a taste was perceptible. The Venetians, as late as the thirteenth century, melted down all the Greek works of art in bronze which they could carry away; the preservation of the colossal horses from Chios, in the Piazza S. Marco, is almost a mere accident: the strange deliberation as to whether they should be melted down or not, is well known. For half a century afterwards the horses stood neglected in some shed, until civilisation advanced, and they were set up in their present place. At Pisa, on the other hand, the taste for the arts was so far developed that, as early as the eleventh century, the city employed an architect, probably from the south of France (his name is Bruschetti, as is stated in the excellent inscriptions), to build a church, which is as magnificent as any structure belonging to the period of the emperors of declining Rome, or of the Byzantine rulers. The Pisans, moreover, carefully collected during their expeditions, especially at Rome, columns and other antiquities, and obtained similar treasures as presents from the emperors. During the twelfth century they collected fragments of ancient architecture, sculptures, and especially sarcophagi which they put together in their cemetery (Campo Santo); they then surrounded the cemetery with a wall and a portico, and thus affectionately preserved the remains of antiquity. The bodies of men of rank were buried in these sarcophagi. Such was the spirit in which Nicolo Pisano, a gigantic genius of the middle of the thirteenth century, made bas-reliefs more beautiful than any that were produced at Rome during the third century of our era; not only does he show great genius in invention, but also in the beauty of his sculptures. The civic laws of the Pisans were based upon remnants of the Roman law, nay, edicts of praetors, which had not been introduced into the Justinianean Code, were preserved there; so