Of
all the buildings that together made up the Castello of Classe and the
suburb of Caesarea nothing remains to us but the mighty church of S.
Apollinare and its great and now tottering campanile. For Classe and
Cassarea seem to have been finally destroyed in the long Lombard wars,
either as a precautionary measure by the people of Ravenna and the
imperialists or by the attacking Lombards, while the sea which once
washed the walls of Classe has retreated so far that it is only from
the top of her last watch tower it may now be seen.
Nothing can be more desolate and sad than the miserable road across
the empty country between Ravenna and that lonely church of S.
Apollinare. In summer deep in dust that rises, under the heavy tread
of the great oxen which draw the curiously painted carts of the
countryside, in great clouds into the sky; in winter and after the
autumn rains lost in the white curtain of mist that so often surrounds
Ravenna, it is an almost impassable morass of mud and misery. Even at
its best in spring time it is melancholy and curiously mean without
any beauty or nobility of its own, though it commands so much of those
vast spaces of flat and half desolate country which the sea has
destroyed, on the verge of which stands the lonely church.
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