BAEDEKER says that Pisa has a population of twenty-seven thousand two hundred people and that it is a quiet town. It is. I caught the spell of a score of places like this as I walked out into the open square facing the depot¹. The most amazing botch of a monument I ever saw in my life I saw here—a puffing², swelling³, strutting⁵ representation of Umberto I, legs apart, whiskers rampant⁶, an amazing cockade, all the details of a gaudy⁷ uniform, a breast like a pouter-pigeon—outrageous! It was about twelve or thirteen times as large as an ordinary man and not more than twelve or fifteen feet from the ground! He looked like a gorgon⁸, a monster to eat babies, ready to leap upon you with loud cries. I thought, “In Heaven’s name! is this what Italy is coming to! How can it brook⁹ such an atrocity¹⁰?”

 

With the spirit of adventure strong within me I decided¹¹ to find the campanile and the cathedral for myself. I had seen it up the railroad track, and, ignoring appealing guides with urgent, melancholy¹² eyes, I struck up walled streets of brown and gray and green with solid, tight-closed, wooden shutters¹³, cobble pavements and noiseless, empty sidewalks. They were not exactly narrow, which astonished me a little, for I had not learned that only the older portions of growing Italian cities have narrow streets. All the newer sections which surround such modern things as

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