The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable RuinsAllen, Grant
History
The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
Allen, Grant
Europe, Southern -- Description and travel; Mediterranean Region -- Description and travel
required "any object then cast ashore to be burned, as a precaution
against plague," so, by the help of friends, the body of Shelley was
committed to the flames "with fuel and frankincense, wine, salt, and oil,
the accompaniments of a Greek cremation," in the presence of Byron Leigh
Hunt, and Trelawny. The corpse of Williams had been consumed in like
fashion on the previous day. "It was a glorious day and a splendid
prospect; the cruel and calm sea before, the Appennines behind. A curlew
wheeled close to the pyre, screaming, and would not be driven away; the
flames arose golden and towering." The inurned ashes were entombed, as
everyone knows, in the Protestant burial ground at Rome by the side of
Keats' grave, near the pyramid of Cestius. Much as there was to regret in
Shelley's life, there was more in his death, for such genius as his is
rare, and if the work of springtide was so glorious, what might have been
the summer fruitage?
As the Gulf of Spezzia is left behind, the Magra broadens out into an
estuary as it enters the sea, the river which formed in olden days the
boundary between Liguria and Etruria. Five miles from the coast, and less
than half the distance from the river, is Sarzana, the chief city of the
province, once fortified, and still containing a cathedral of some
interest. It once gave birth to a Pope, Nicholas V., the founder of the
Vatican Library, and in the neighborhood the family of the Buonapartes had
their origin, a branch of it having emigrated to Corsica. Sarzana bore
formerly the name of Luna Nova, as it had replaced another Luna which
stood near to the mouth of the river. This was in ruins even in the days
of Lucan, and now the traveller from Saranza to Pisa sees only "a strip of
low, grassy land intervening between him and the sea. Here stood the
ancient city. There is little enough to see. Beyond a few crumbling tombs
and a fragment or two of Roman ruins, nothing remains of Luna. The fairy
scene described by Rutilus, so appropriate to the spot which bore the name
of the virgin-queen of heaven, the 'fair white walls' shaming with their
brightness the untrodden snow, the smooth, many-tinted rocks overrun with
laughing lilies, if not the pure creation of the poet, have now vanished
from the sight. Vestiges of an amphitheater, of a semicircular building
which may be a theater, of a circus, a _piscina_, and fragments of
columns, pedestals for statues, blocks of pavement and inscriptions, are
all that Luna has now to show."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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