For all
these we must go to Pompeii and to Rome, or to Florence, Siena,
Assisi, and Venice; in Ravenna we shall find something more rare, but
not these. She remains a city of the Dark Age, of the fifth, sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries, and she is full of the churches, the
tombs, and the art of that time, early Christian and Byzantine things
that we shall not find elsewhere, or, at any rate, not in the same
abundance, perfection, and beauty.
And yet though so much remains, her story since the time of
Charlemagne might seem to be little else but a long catalogue of
pillage and destruction. Charlemagne himself began this cruel work
when he carried off the mosaics and the marbles, the ornaments of the
imperial palace, to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle, and since his day not a
century has passed without adding to this vandalism; the worst
offenders being the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, which by rebuilding, by frank
pillage, by mere destruction, by earthquakes, by contempt, and worst
of all by restoration have utterly destroyed much that should have
remained for ever, and have altogether spoilt and transformed most of
that which, almost by chance it might seem, remains.
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