With the Pinetum the name of Byron will be for ever associated.  During his two years’ residence in Ravenna he used to haunt its wilderness, riding alone or in the company of friends.  The inscription placed above the entrance to the house he occupied alludes to it as one of the objects which principally attracted the poet to the neighbourhood of Ravenna:  ‘Impaziente di visitare l’ antica selva, che inspiro gia il Divino e Giovanni Boccaccio.’  We know, however, that a more powerful attraction, in the person of the Countess Guiccioli, maintained his fidelity to ’that place of old renown, once in the Adrian Sea, Ravenna.’

Between the Bosco, as the people of Ravenna call this pine-wood, and the city, the marsh stretches for a distance of about three miles.  It is a plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out into innumerable rice-fields.  For more than half a year it lies under water, and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour, which renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet in springtime this dreary flat is even beautiful.  The young blades of the rice shoot up above the water, delicately green and tender.  The ditches are lined with flowering rush and golden flags, while white and yellow lilies sleep in myriads upon the silent pools.  Tamarisks wave their pink and silver tresses by the road, and wherever a plot of mossy earth emerges from the marsh, it gleams with purple orchises and flaming marigolds; but the soil beneath is so treacherous and spongy, that these splendid blossoms grow like flowers in dreams or fairy stories.  You try in vain to pick them; they elude your grasp, and flourish in security beyond the reach of arm or stick.

Such is the sight of the old town of Classis.  Not a vestige of the Roman city remains, not a dwelling or a ruined tower, nothing but the ancient church of S. Apollinare in Classe.  Of all desolate buildings this is the most desolate.  Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolo beyond the walls of Rome can equal it.  Its bare round campanile gazes at the sky, which here vaults only sea and plain—­a perfect dome, star-spangled like the roof of Galla Placidia’s tomb.  Ravenna lies low to west, the pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east.  There is nothing else to be seen except the spreading marsh, bounded by dim snowy Alps and purple Apennines, so very far away that the level rack of summer clouds seem more attainable and real.  What sunsets and sunrises that tower must see; what glaring lurid afterglows in August, when the red light scowls upon the pestilential fen; what sheets of sullen vapour rolling over it in autumn; what breathless heats, and rainclouds big with thunder; what silences; what unimpeded blasts of winter winds!  One old monk tends this deserted spot.  He has the huge church, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddy bell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself.  At rare intervals, priests from Ravenna come to sing some special