In the poem called The Marine and Commercial Cities of Italy (Le Città Italiane Marinare e Commercianti), Aleardi recounts the glorious rise, the jealousies, the fratricidal wars, and the ignoble fall of Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in strains of grandeur and pathos; he has pride in the wealth and freedom of those old queens of traffic, and scorn and lamentation for the blind selfishness that kept them Venetian, Florentine, Pisan, and Genoese, and never suffered them to be Italian. I take from this poem the prophetic vision of the greatness of Venice, which, according to the patriotic tradition of Sabellico, Saint Mark beheld five hundred years before the foundation of the city, when one day, journeying toward Aquileja, his ship lost her course among the islands of the lagoons. The saint looked out over those melancholy swamps, and saw the phantom of a Byzantine cathedral rest upon the reeds, while a multitudinous voice broke the silence with the Venetian battle-cry, “Viva San Marco!” The lines that follow illustrate the pride and splendor of Venetian story, and are notable, I think, for a certain lofty grace of movement and opulence of diction. There thou shalt lie, O Saint!{1} but compassed round Thickly by shining groves Of pillars; on thy regal portico, Lifting their glittering and impatient hooves, Corinth's fierce steeds shall bound;{2} And at thy name, the hymn of future wars, From their funereal caves The bandits of the waves Shall fly in exile;{3} brought from bloody fields Hard won and lost in far-off Palestine, The glimmer of a thousand Arab moons Shall fill thy broad lagoons; And on the false Byzantine's towers shall climb A blind old man sublime,{4} Whom victory shall behold Amidst his enemies with thy sacred flag, All battle-rent, unrolled. Notes: {1} The bones of St. Mark repose in his church at Venice. {2} The famous bronze horses of St. Mark's still shine with the gold that once covered them. {3} Venice early swept the Adriatic of the pirates who infested it. {4} The Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though blind and bowed with eighty years of war, was the first to plant the banner of Saint Mark on the walls of Constantinople when that city was taken by the Venetians and Crusaders.