Xenia
To reach Pisa was another day’s journey. Their carriage turned west and followed a narrow track through a sleepy, folded-up forest landscape where the river passed in and out of view between files of low trees. The same mountain hung perpetually on their right hand, though each time Keats looked up it had changed shape. His companions were now a young gentleman and lady who made a point of ignoring him and half whispered to each other in the dialect he’d first heard in Florence. Casa was hasa here, amico became amiho. Everyone said this was the purest strain of Italian, but Keats tried to imagine Dante talking this way and couldn’t—not unless he dressed Dante in the same wasp-waisted coat and trousers that the gentleman had squeezed himself into. He looked out the window at the slow
