Grand Duke Cosimo seems to have loved her.  It was there he founded his Order of the Knights of St. Stephen to harry the pirates in the Mediterranean.  Still she was a power on the sea, though in the service of another.  And though dead, she yet lived, for she is of those who cannot die.  The ever-glorious name of Galileo Galilei crowns her immortality.  Born within her walls, he taught at her University, and his first experiments in the knowledge of the law of gravity were made from her bell-tower, while, as it is said, the great lamp of her Duomo taught him the secret of the pendulum.

Looking on her to-day, remembering her immortal story, one thinks only of the beauty that is from of old secure in silence on that meadow among the daisies just within her walls.

III

It is with a peculiar charm and sweetness that Pisa offers herself to the stranger, who maybe between two trains has not much time to give her.  And indeed to him she knows she has not much to offer, just a few things passing strange or beautiful, that are spread out for him as at a fair, on the grass of a meadow in the dust and the sun.  But to such an one Pisa can never be more than a vision, vanished as soon as seen, in the heat of midday or the shadow of evening.

But for me, of all the cities that grow among the flowers in Tuscany, it is Pisa that I love best.  She is full of the sun; she has the gift of silence.  Her story is splendid, unfortunate, and bitter, and moves to the song of the sea:  still she keeps her old ways about her, the life of to-day has not troubled her at all.  In her palaces the great mirrors are still filled with the ghosts of the eighteenth century; on her Lung’ Arno you may almost see Byron drive by to mount his horse at the gate, while in the Pineta, not far away, Shelley lies at noonday writing verses to Miranda.

It is on the Lung’ Arno, curved like a bow, so much more lovely than any Florentine way, that what little world is left to Pisa lingers yet.  Before one is the Ponte di Mezzo, the most ancient bridge of the city, built in 1660, but really the representative of its forerunners that here bound north and south together:  En moles olim lapidea vix aetatem ferrus nunc mormorea pulchrior et firmior stat simulato Marte virtutis verae specimen saepe datura, you read on one of the pillars at the northern end.  For indeed the first bridge seems to have been of wood, partly rebuilt of stone after the great victory off the coast of Sicily, and finished in 1046[47].  This bridge, called the Ponte Vecchio, took ten years to build, and any doubt we might have as to whether it was of wood or stone is set at rest by Tronci,[48] who tells us that in 1382, “Pietro Gambacorta, together with the Elders and the Consiglio dei Cittadini, determined to rebuild in stone the bridge of wood which passed over Arno from the mouth of the Strada del Borgo to that of S. Egidio, for