great gateways shutting in the city upon itself. And light, when it comes into the city, is itself disquieting. Sometimes, after a day's resignation or dull waiting, Ravenna begins to awaken, like a
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Sepulchre of Theodoric the Great (Sixth Century)
convalescent, as the afternoon brightens towards sunset. Seen from the walls, the colors of the sky seem to soak down upon the city; it flushes, seems to respond to the light. Standing in the Piazza Byron at sunset, one sees the red walls of the church of S. Francesco as if flaming against a sky from which the fires of sunset are reflected; every leaf of the little tree that stands in the corner of the square burns with a separate flame, and the red glow extends to the tomb of Braccioforte, where Dante lies buried among the sarcophagi.
Ravenna is full of ancient monuments, which seem to last on, after so unthinkably many centuries, like very old people, blind and deaf, and feeble in hands and feet, who still sit by the hearth of their old homes, dressed in ancient finery, and tolerating the youth of the world with an impeccable courtesy. They frighten the younger people a little, who feel their own flimsy modernness, and a youth which is not likely to grow distinguished, as they consider the ghastly beauty of their ancestors.
In Ravenna there are the tombs of all the ages: sarcophagi of the early martyrs of the Church; the sepulchre of Theodoric, King of the Goths; the tomb of Dante. Has any structure in which people were to live ever lasted so long as those in which for so much longer (as, in their wisdom, they realized) they were to lie dead? There are only a few arches and a few broken walls left of the palace of Theodoric, but the tomb of Theodoric still stands, with its impregnable walls, its roof of a single slab of Istrian granite, solid as a prison, like a work of Titans. And, everywhere, with a strange and lovely placidity which seems natural and at home only in Ravenna, there are the sarcophagi of stone and marble,—in churches and museums, around the tomb of Dante, and, once only, though empty, in the mausoleum which was built to cover it: the vast and rocky sarcophagus of Galla Placidia. They are a part of the place, beautiful
