Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series — Story, Setting & Ideas

Landscape as Historical Stage

In the Fornovo chapter, Symonds describes the Taro riverbed as a 'wilderness of boulders' where a wagon drawn by white oxen crosses the shallow stream. He then pivots to the 1495 battle, explaining how Charles VIII had no choice but to descend into that rocky pass. The landscape itself dictated the military options: 'No road remained for Charles and his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro.' Symonds treats topography not as mere backdrop but as an active force in history.

Similarly, the Ravenna essay traces how the city's lagoon and causeway shaped its development from Roman naval station to medieval capital. The physical setting—marshes, canals, shifting coastlines—is presented as both a practical reality and a source of the city's distinctive character.

The Weight of a Single Battle

Symonds's account of Fornovo is notably decisive: he calls the Italian failure to crush Charles VIII 'the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice.' This is a strong interpretive claim, linking a single engagement to Italy's subsequent vulnerability. The excerpts do not reveal whether Symonds sustains this argument across the full chapter, but the passage shows his willingness to assign large historical consequences to a specific event.

The description of the battlefield itself—a narrow valley with hills 'throttling' the river—reinforces the sense of a trap that the Italians failed to spring. Symonds's language is vivid: the hills 'send down their spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a tranquil sea.'

Recurring Motifs: Water, Stone, and Cultivation

Across the excerpts, Symonds returns to the interplay of water and stone. Ravenna's canals and lagune, the Taro's 'pebbly river-bed,' the 'ghiara' or stony bottom—these details accumulate. He also notes how human cultivation responds to these conditions: the fertile islands of Ravenna, the vines and corn of the Lombard plain. In the Fornovo passage, a contadino in goatskin leggings guides oxen through the stream, a momentary human figure amid the geological scale.

These recurring observations ground Symonds's historical reflections in tangible, sensory detail. They also suggest a method: he reads the landscape as a palimpsest, where natural features and human interventions together tell a story.

Symonds writes as a traveler who has read deeply in the history of the places he visits. Readers will find that his essays reward attention to the physical settings he describes—the shape of a valley, the course of a river—because these details are never incidental. The volume's second series continues a project of connecting Italian and Greek landscapes to the events that made them famous, without losing sight of the present moment of observation.