I Am Sure That The Handsome Mother With The Pretty
Daughter Who Lingered So Long Over Their Choice Of Little Cakes Could
Not Have Imagined Any One Was Looking, Or She Would At Once Have Taken
Macaroons And Hurried Away:
At that cafe they have macaroons almost
three inches across, and delicious.
The whole keeping was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the
lengthening shadows from the other shore, but we were to drive down the
Arno into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with the
foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that we could,
even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting morsel. But it was all
joy, and I should like, at this moment, to be starting on that
enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to imagine the lovely scenery
for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve; but I will
supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in
everybody's way. We noted the great number of anglers who lined the
opposite bank, with no appearance of catching anything, and I asked our
driver if they never happened to get a bite. "Not in the daytime," he
explained, compassionately, "but as soon as the evening comes they get
all the fish they want."
I could pour out on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they
would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again
almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness,
when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We
ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from
their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair
noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with
streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the
rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of
resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long
past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was
always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions
within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find
her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now
Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these
republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles
in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten
or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under
the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet
the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean
strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left
them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at
one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the
liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as
long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold
of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths,
which you may almost hear as you pass; and I hope the prospect of
increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not
look as if it would.
We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one
cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not
wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and
would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was
born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and
in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only
a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pass about this
time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and
playing before it. He proudly pointed them out with his whip, and one of
the little ones followed on foot far enough to levy tribute. They were
sufficiently comely children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was
both black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of the
mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child of his
first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten them, but we
made our romance to the effect that the boy, to whose beautiful eyes we
now imputed a lurking sadness, was not happy with his step-mother, and
that he took refuge from her on the box with his father. They seemed
very good comrades; the boy had shared with his father the small cakes
we had given him at the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his
hapless lot, I gave him half a franc. By that time his father was
radiant from the small extortion I had suffered him to practice with me,
and he bade the boy thank me, which he did so charmingly that I almost,
but not quite, gave him another half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not.
Pisa was worth it.
IX
BACK AT GENOA
There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her
step-sister republic, "If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa,"
which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on
our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as
apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided
that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had
been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad
connection between the two cities.
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