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Chapters (26)
  1. Feature
  2. PREFACE
  3. VENICE
  4. THE GRAND CANAL
  5. VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION
  6. TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN
  7. CASA ALVISI
  8. FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN
  9. THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK
  10. ITALY REVISITED
  11. A ROMAN HOLIDAY
  12. ROMAN RIDES
  13. ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS
  14. THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME
  15. FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK
  16. A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS
  17. A CHAIN OF CITIES
  18. SIENA EARLY AND LATE
  19. THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE
  20. FLORENTINE NOTES
  21. TUSCAN CITIES
  22. OTHER TUSCAN CITIES
  23. RAVENNA
  24. THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS
  25. You are reading a Deluxe Edition:
  26. Copyright

They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which comes back to what I was a moment ago saying - that just in proportion as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found this last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite contentedly spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified felicity of such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung' Arno, taken up or down its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where the quay drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting perspective of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and careless bosky grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very turbidity pleases, to a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant rural industry and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan Lung' Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine, but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen massive specimens, the last word of the anciently "handsome," are of the essence of the physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which retrospective admission I ask myself how I came, under my first flush, reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic architecture - in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh Hunt, as commemorated in the latter's Autobiography, came out to join him in an odd journalistic scheme.