We had lunch at the Hotel Byron, in a vast salon, on the polished floor of which I seemed to hear his capricious lordship's club foot; for this was his home for two years, in 1819-1821, when it was called the Palazzo Rasponi, and here he consoled himself with his large, blonde, stupid Guiccioli; here he wrote myriad letters to Murray; and here Shelley stayed with him and despatched that amusing missive to Thomas Love Peacock, detailing not only the spoiled poet's extraordinary habits but also his extraordinary house-mates. "Lord Byron gets up at _two_. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom, but one must sleep or die, like Southey's sea-snake in 'Kehama,' at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don't suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.'s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it.... After I have sealed my letter, I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes." Odd to have this letter in one's mind in this now highly respectable building, where the only animals are men, women, and waiters. For the rest, I think now of Ravenna chiefly as a city of mosaic churches under a sky of brass, and wonder and wonder how--even with the Pinetum and the abounding Guiccioli--Byron can have been willing to stay there so long. We returned from the little wayside station of Classe, a mile or so outside Ravenna, in order to visit the vast deserted fane of Sant' Apollinaris in Classe Fuori, which rears its huge bulk from the plain like a mammoth. This basilica was built in the sixth century and seems likely to stand for fourteen centuries more, if permitted to; it is empty and forlorn, with a wretched old custodian to open the doors upon its lost magnificence, for though the mosaics remain, our friend Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini carried off its marble in 1449. Past this church rode Byron almost daily on his way to the pine forest. On another day we drove from Rimini to San Marino--a day ill-spent indeed, for the sun shone, and our backs were to the sea all the way there, and returning it was too late for bathing. Why does one do these things? In England one can resist the deadly lure of the excursion; but abroad, no.