For the age, the Dark Age, of her glory is illumined by no other city
in Italy or indeed in the world. She was the splendour of that age, a
lonely splendour. And because, when that age came to an end, she was
practically abandoned--abandoned, that is, by the great world--just as
about the same time she was abandoned by the sea, much of her ancient
beauty has remained to her through all the centuries since, even down
to our own day, when, lovelier than ever in her lonely marsh, she is a
place so lugubrious, so infinitely still and sad, full of the autumn
wind and the rumours of silence of the tomb, of the most reverent of
all tombs--the tomb of the empire.
We shall not find in Ravenna anything at all, any building, that is,
or work of art, of classical antiquity; all she was, all she did, all
she possessed in the great years of the empire has perished. Nor shall
we find much that may have been hers in the smaller life that came to
her in the beginning of the Middle Age, or that was hers in the time
of the Renaissance; the memory and the dust of Dante, a few churches,
a few frescoes, a few pictures, a few palaces; nothing beside.
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