Ravenna
ENTERING Ravenna, I seemed to be penetrating into emptiness. Here, not a house seems alive; there is an odor in the air which is like the smell of earth or of graves; the people shiver in the streets, or walk muffled to the mouth in ample cloth cloaks with collars of fur; there is a feverish red in the hollow cheeks, and a brightness of fever in the eyes.
After Venice, where I had seen strong and comfortable men, naked to the waist, carrying heavy burdens between the wharves and the ships, one seemed to have come into a city of sick people. And the city, too, is as if worn out, languid with fever; it has not aged gracefully. Its miraculous mosaics, so nearly imaging, are housed inside rough walls, through which the damp creeps, staining the marble columns with strange, lovely colors of decay. The streets are chill, narrow corridors for the wind; earth-colored, left to accumulate the natural dinginess of things. Here and there a great basilica, a tower, the fragment of an ancient palace, rises out of a cluster of dull-brown roofs. The Cathedral square is half overgrown with grass; grass grows up the six steps in front of the one old and solid house there; all around the red plaster is peeling off the walls; through two of the five roads which lead out of the square you see the green and brown of trees and the dingy beginnings of the city wall.
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Interior of S. Apollinare in Classe
