In Lombardy the standard was the Luitprandi foot (pié Aliprandi) = 20·28 inches, with a corresponding pertica or rod of 12 _piedi_, usually = 20·23 feet. Legend refers this measure to the foot-length of a giant Lombard king; but it is evidently a cubit, probably a variant of the Egyptian royal cubit, for 2/3 of it gave the Lombard foot, = 13·52 inches; and this, as also the Venetian foot, = 13·69 inches, seems referable to the Egyptian royal foot, = 13·76 inches. But everywhere and always the people object to a long foot-standard. Whether in ancient Egypt or in modern Italy, they will take a more convenient length; they will halve the cubit so as to get a short foot, or take some span, or some ell divisible into spans. So in Italy there was generally a local foot and also a span. Sometimes the span was 3/4 of the foot, at other times it was a fraction of a braccio or ell; and both foot and span might be called a _palmo_. This term was equivalent to the L. _palmus major_ as distinguished from the ordinary _palmus_ of 4 digits. In Rome there is, or was till recently, a series the same as that of ancient Rome, on the basis of a foot = 11·72 inches, slightly longer than the ancient foot = 11·67 inches; 5 feet made a _passo_, and 1000 _passi_ a mile. The foot was of 16 digits, usually called _oncie_, inches, and 12 of these digits were taken for a palmo = 8·79 inches. Three of these palmi made the braccio, the cloth-ell, = 26·38 inches. The Roman field-measures were a mixture of decimal chain-units and of lengths derived from seed-measures of land. In Tuscany the standard was the braccio, = 22·98 inches, half of which was the palmo, = 11·49 inches. The braccio was divided, as if it were a money-pound, into 20 soldi, of 12 denari. In the kingdom of Naples, with its population of Greek origin, the standard of length was the meridian mile, divided into 1000 Olympic fathoms or passi. But the passo was divided, not into six long feet, but, like the Egyptian royal cubit, into 7 palmi, = 10·4 inches. The usual standard was the Canna of 8 palmi, a reversion to the common Mediterranean measure of the reed of 8 spans. In Genoa there was, and perhaps is still, a palmo = 9·764 inches, a length exactly that of the pán in several cities of Provence. It has changed but little since the time of Recorde’s ‘Pawn of Geans’ (1543) or since John Greaves (1647) gave it as = 9·78 inches.[45] Footnote 45: In this ‘pawn’ (the spelling of which shows that English had already lost the _a_ sound of the first vowel and had to represent it by _aw_) I see the fusion of two words etymologically different, the Italian _palmo_, L. _palmus_, and the Provençal _pán_, side, panel. See, in Chaps. IV and XXI, ‘The Pán of Marseilles.’ Genoa, the language of which district is a dialect of Provençal, has measures of the Provençal type. The measures of Provence will be described at length in Chap. XXI. _Spain_