There is little to be seen at Massa that is not just the natural beauty of the place, set like a flower among the woods, that climb up to the marble peaks.  Not without a certain interest you come upon the Prefettura, which once was the summer castle of Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister, who as a gift from him held Lucca, and was much beloved, from 1805 to 1814.  And joyful as the country is under that impartial sun, before that wide and ancient sea, among her quiet woods and broken shrines, it is not without a kind of hesitation and shame almost that you learn that the great fortress which crowns the city is now a prison in which are many half-witted unhappy folk, who in this transitory life have left the common way.  It is strange that in so many lands the prison is so often in a place of the greatest beauty.  At Tarragona, far away over the sea looking towards Italy, the hospital of those who have for one cause or another fallen by the way is set by the sea-shore, almost at the feet of the waves, so that in a storm the momentary foam from those restless, free waters must often be scattered about the courtyard, where those who have injured us, and whom in our wisdom we have deprived of the world, are permitted to walk.  It is much the same in Tangier, where the horrid gaol, always full of groans and the torture of the bastinado, is in the dip of the Kasbah, where it joins the European city with nothing really between it and the Atlantic.  In Massa these prisoners and captives can see the sea and the great mountains, and must often hear the piping of those who wander freely in the woods.  Even in Italy, it seems, where the criminal is beginning to be understood as a sick person, they have not yet contrived to banish the older method of treatment:  as who should say, you are ill and fainting with anaemia, come let me bleed you.

It is at Massa that on your way south you come again into the highroad from Genoa to Pisa, for while, having left it at Spezia, you found it again at Sarzana, it was a by-road that led you to Carrara and again to Massa Ducale.  Now, though the way you seek be the highway of the pilgrims, it is none the better as a road for that.  For the wagons bringing marble to the cities by the way have spoiled it altogether, so that you find it ground with ruts six inches deep and smothered in dust; therefore, if you come by carriage, and still more if you be en automobile, it is necessary to go warily.  On foot nothing matters but the dust, and if you start early from Massa that will not annoy you, for in the early morning, for some reason of the gods, the dust lies on the highway undisturbed, while by ten o’clock the air is full of it.  It is a bad road then all the way to Pietrasanta, but most wonderful and lovely nevertheless.  For the most part the sea is hidden from you, for you are in truth on the sea-shore, though far enough from the waves, a land of fields and cucumbers coming between road and water.  Swinging along in the dawn, you