In _L'lllustrasione Italiana_ this distinguished Italian author expresses his indignation at the bombardment of Ravenna by Austrian aviators, when the ancient Basilica of Sant' Apollinare narrowly escaped destruction. Translated for _Current History_. I write with a feeling of relief. My beautiful Sant' Apollinare is uninjured, or nearly so. A blind bomb may have furrowed the April sky of my city, in this marvellous foretaste of Spring; but the criminal attempt has been in vain. And, with me, innumerable citizens of Ravenna have breathed a sigh almost of content. It is true that there were human victims. But our pity for them is too deep for any comment to be adequate; the only way to commemorate them worthily is to avenge them. But it is not of this wrong we wish to speak to-day. We wish only to bring together and to distill into a brief comment the living essence of the spirit of Ravenna, as it has affirmed itself in this historic, solemn hour. The people of Ravenna have felt a lightning flash of sudden revolt because of the outrage perpetrated on their monuments. The citizens of Ravenna, if they have not, for the antique glories of their city, the fully conscious veneration which we shall hardly expect to find among them, nevertheless do breathe in from these monuments a deep impression of exaltation and well-founded pride. Our readers will remember those "Monologues" which Gigi Easi wrote with such grace and such penetrating humour. In one, "The Art of Delivering a Monologue," he introduces as speakers the inhabitants of the various capital cities of Italy, each of whom magnifies the beauty of his own city. So it happens that, along with the Florentine, the Neapolitan, the Venetian, and the rest, there is not lacking a good citizen of Ravenna who, with vibrant words and potent adjectives, in intense and enthusiastic exaltation, energetically affirms the supremacy of his mosaics and his basilicas. The scene is not only most exhilarating, but also, from the point of view of psychology, profoundly true. Our populace lives, and feels that it lives, with its mighty memories and with its great historic personages, whose moral significance at least it knows how to estimate, and whose remoter glory it understands by a kind of natural and traditional intuition, and respects it, I might almost say, by a distant residuum of atavistic suggestion.