MARGINAL COMMENT
By itAROLD NICOLSON
rit AHI Pisa! " wrote Dante in vituperation, but to us his invec-
tive echoes as an anxious sigh. For days the lovely, lonely city has lain as a small brown nut between the crackers of the Allied and the German armies: it is still uncertain how much of it has been preserved. It is customary, it seems, to regard the leaning tower as little more than a hackneyed curiosity, suggestive to us, not of the wide blue sweep of Tuscan sea and mountain, but of a small thermo- meter upon the rectory mantelpiece. Yet how beautiful, when one had climbed the tilted stairs and reached the tilted platform, were the great black bells against the shining marble and the bends of the ochre Arno as it twisted through vines and pines towards the sea! And how strange it was to lean out over the parapet and to reflect that, 35o years ago, Galileo had propped his velvet doublet against that very same 'Yard of marble and leant over to watch and note the velocity of objects falling to the ground below. It would be sad indeed had such curious and lovely sites been reduced to marble-dust, and were the frescoes under the cloisters of the Campo Santo to be scarred and blotched. Even as it is, the river frontage of Pisa has been defaced, and the old brown bridges have fallen into the old brown stream. Of all Italian cities Pisa had remained the most secluded, the most intimate, and the most unchanged. And as one stood upon the eastern bridge, the Ponte alla Fortezza, and gazed upon the quays- and buildings on each side, there was not a roof-line, not a chimney- stack, which had not stood there in 1821 or 1822. * * * *
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