10 THE STONES OF VENICE

from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of the ruins of ages.

§ 4. I will not tax the reader’s faith in modern science* by insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the main fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona.¹ The finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of the great chain, they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the

* I wish I could now appeal to his faith in anything else. [1879.]

¹ [The reference is to the Battle of Custozza (1848), near Verona, in which the Austrians defeated the Piedmontese, driving them back upon Milan and Novara: see A Joy for Ever, § 77, “heaped pebbles of the Mincio divide her fields to this hour with lines of broken rampart, whence the tide of war rolled back to Novara.” Ruskin would have heard many particulars of the campaign during his sojourns at Venice, 1849-1850 and 1851-1852, for he saw something of Field-Marshal Radetsky and his staff (see above, Introduction, p. xxxi.), and was on friendly terms with other Austrian officers (see letter of June 6, 1859, in Arrows of the Chace, 1880, ii. 6).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]