till in the perfect stillness of this retreat we come to the seashore, and there lies the white city of Luna glistening in the sun.  As I take my leave, reluctantly, for, I would stay longer, my hostess is so sweet, my host so charming, I catch sight of the name of the villa cut into the rosy marble of the gates:  “Ad Vigilias Albas” I read, and then and then ...  Why, what is this?  I must have fallen asleep in that old theatre among the debris and the fine grass.  Ad Vigilias Albas—­“White Nights,” nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, certainly.  But it is with the ancestors of Marius I seem to have been talking in the old city of Luna, that in his day had already passed away.[14]

It was sunset when I found myself at the door of the Inn in Sarzana.

FOOTNOTES: 

[11] Even the name is uncertain.  In the Duomo here, in Cappella di S. Tommaso, you may find his mother’s grave, on which she is called Andreola dei Calandrini.  His uncle, however, is called J.P.  Parentucelli.  In two Bulls of Felix V he is called Thomas de Calandrinis; cf.  Mansi, xxxi. 190.

[12] Muratori, Rer.  Ital.  Scrip., III. ii. 107.

[13] Sed deverticulo fuimus fortasse loquaces: 
     Carmine propositum jam repetamus iter. 
     Advehimur celeri candentia moenia lapsu: 
     Nominis est auctor sole corusca soror. 
     Indigenis superat ridentia lilia saxis,
     Et levi radiat picta nitore silex. 
     Dives marmoribus tellus, quae luce coloris
     Provocat intactas luxuriosa nives.

[14] You may see the place to-day—­but it is of plaster now—­as Pater describes it.—­Marius the Epicurian, vol. i. 20.

V. CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO

And truly it is into a city of marble that you come, when, following the dusty road full of the ruts of the bullock-wagons, past Avenza, that little city with a great castle of Castruccio Castracani, after climbing into the gorge where the bullocks, a dozen of them it may be, yoked to a single dray, take all the way, you enter the cold streets of Carrara, that are always full of the sound of falling water.  And strangely enough, as one may think, in this far-away place, so close to the mountains as to be littered by their debris, it is an impression of business and of life that you receive beyond anything of the sort to be found in Spezia.  Not a beautiful city certainly, Carrara has a little the aspect of an encampment, an encampment that has somehow become permanent, where everything has been built in a hurry, as it were, of the most precious and permanent material.  So that, while the houses are of marble, they seem to be with but few exceptions mere shanties without beauty of any sort, that were built yesterday for shelter, and to-morrow will be destroyed.  It is true that the Church of S. Andrea is a building of the thirteenth century, in the Gothic manner, with a fine facade and sculptures of a certain merit, but it fails to impress itself on the town, which is altogether alien from it, modern for the most part in the vulgar way of our time, when ornament is a caprice of the rich and merely ostentatious, the many living, without beauty or light, in barracks or huts of a brutal and hideous uniformity.