Excerpt from Italian Cities, Vol. 1 To find the vanished centuries that wrought this transformation one must ride northeast for seven hours more to the Adriatic marshes. Fourteen hundred years ago, when Italy flamed behind the horsemen of Alaric, the Emperor Honorius fled to the strongest city in the land, Ravenna, and with his corrupt and motley court went one noble fugitive, the genius of the Arts, who illustrates for all time the name of her asylum. In those days Ravenna was still a port; but the sea, which made her greatness, has by receding de stroyed her political importance, thus leaving her to hold the more surely, in her slow decay, the buildings of a time which she alone among cities fully repte sents, a time when pictorial Christian art had just emerged from her prenatal condition of the cata combs into the light of imperial favor, and the archi tecture of the Roman was beginning to be that of the Christian. Thus Ravenna became the splendid reliquary which preserved the dry bones of antique art to be quickened by the breath of the Renaissance. A unique link in the chain, she is the anomaly of Italian towns, a city of antitheses; of pure water in the midst of poisonous marshes, of impregnable refuge among treacherous morasses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.