Part 9 (1/2)

Our afternoon drive was more picturesque and noteworthy. Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator. As we approached it nearer and nearer, it looked like the barrenest great rock that ever protruded out of the substance of the earth, with scarcely a strip or a spot of verdure upon its steep and gray declivities. The road kept trending towards the mountain, following the line of the old Flaminian Way, which we could see, at frequent intervals, close beside the modern track. It is paved with large flag-stones, laid so accurately together, that it is still, in some places, as smooth and even as the floor of a church; and everywhere the tufts of gra.s.s find it difficult to root themselves into the interstices. Its course is straighter than that of the road of to-day, which often turns aside to avoid obstacles which the ancient one surmounted. Much of it, probably, is covered with the soil and overgrowth deposited in later years; and, now and then, we could see its flag-stones partly protruding from the bank through which our road has been cut, and thus showing that the thickness of this ma.s.sive pavement was more than a foot of solid stone.

We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it. Pa.s.sing through a town called Rignano, we found it dressed out in festivity, with festoons of foliage along both sides of the street, which ran beneath a triumphal arch, bearing an inscription in honor of a ducal personage of the Ma.s.simi family. I know no occasion for the feast, except that it is Whitsuntide.

The town was thronged with peasants, in their best attire, and we met others on their way thither, particularly women and girls, with heads bare in the suns.h.i.+ne; but there was no tiptoe jollity, nor, indeed, any more show of festivity than I have seen in my own country at a cattle-show or muster. Really, I think, not half so much.

The road still grew more and more picturesque, and now lay along ridges, at the bases of which were deep ravines and hollow valleys. Woods were not wanting; wilder forests than I have seen since leaving America, of oak-trees chiefly; and, among the green foliage, grew golden tufts of broom, making a gay and lovely combination of hues. I must not forget to mention the poppies, which burned like live coals along the wayside, and lit up the landscape, even a single one of them, with wonderful effect.

At other points, we saw olive-trees, hiding their eccentricity of boughs under thick ma.s.ses of foliage of a livid tint, which is caused, I believe, by their turning their reverse sides to the light and to the spectator. Vines were abundant, but were of little account in the scene.

By and by we came in sight, of the high, flat table-land, on which stands Civita Castellana, and beheld, straight downward, between us and the town, a deep level valley with a river winding through it; it was the valley of the Treja. A precipice, hundreds of feet in height, falls perpendicularly upon the valley, from the site of Civita Castellana; there is an equally abrupt one, probably, on the side from which we saw it; and a modern road, skilfully constructed, goes winding down to the stream, crosses it by a narrow stone bridge, and winds upward into the town. After pa.s.sing over the bridge, I alighted, with J----- and R-----, . . . . and made the ascent on foot, along walls of natural rock, in which old Etruscan tombs were hollowed out. There are likewise antique remains of masonry, whether Roman or of what earlier period, I cannot tell. At the summit of the acclivity, which brought us close to the town, our vetturino took us into the carriage again and quickly brought us to what appears to be really a good hotel, where all of us are accommodated with sleeping-chambers in a range, beneath an arcade, entirely secluded from the rest of the population of the hotel. After a splendid dinner (that is, splendid, considering that it was ordered by our hospitable vetturino), U----, Miss Shepard, J-----, and I walked out of the little town, in the opposite direction from our entrance, and crossed a bridge at the height of the table-land, instead of at its base.

On either side, we had a view down into a profound gulf, with sides of precipitous rock, and heaps of foliage in its lap, through which ran the snowy track of a stream; here snowy, there dark; here hidden among the foliage, there quite revealed in the broad depths of the gulf. This was wonderfully fine. Walking on a little farther, Soracte came fully into view, starting with bold abruptness out of the middle of the country; and before we got back, the bright Italian moon was throwing a shower of silver over the scene, and making it so beautiful that it seemed miserable not to know how to put it into words; a foolish thought, however, for such scenes are an expression in themselves, and need not be translated into any feebler language. On our walk we met parties of laborers, both men and women, returning from the fields, with rakes and wooden forks over their shoulders, singing in chorus. It is very customary for women to be laboring in the fields.

TO TERNI.--BORGHETTO.

May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly, till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed.

This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the objects that interest him.

Sometimes we pa.s.sed through wildernesses of various trees, each contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also, marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to gaze at us as we pa.s.sed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road.

After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the road that we had pa.s.sed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered with b.u.t.tercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet.

Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them; on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur, like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched pet.i.tion at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanct.i.ty that used to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it meritorious to do nothing for his support.

Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle, he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous mountain-gorge; winding its narrow pa.s.sage between high hills, the broad sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery, that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept in excellent repair. A long winding street pa.s.ses through Narni, broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as its princ.i.p.al street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We pa.s.sed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,-- walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing that need be recorded.

Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to give them up.

Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon, and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . . We are in the Hotel delle tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists, who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had coffee, eggs, and bread and b.u.t.ter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner, an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, frica.s.seed, and a hind quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more decanters of the wine aforesaid.

This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court; around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy, probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids; nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns of Italy. In the alb.u.m of the hotel I find the names of more English travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think, even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber.

After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets, paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low, compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we pa.s.sed through it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain again, we at last inquired of a person in the princ.i.p.al piazza, and found our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood.

FOLIGNO.

May 26th.--At six o'clock this morning, we packed ourselves into our vettura, my wife and I occupying the coupe, and drove out of the city gate of Terni. There are some old towers near it, ruins of I know not what, and care as little, in the plethora of antiquities and other interesting objects. Through the arched gateway, as we approached, we had a view of one of the great hills that surround the town, looking partly bright in the early suns.h.i.+ne, and partly catching the shadows of the clouds that floated about the sky. Our way was now through the Vale of Terni, as I believe it is called, where we saw somewhat of the fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations; some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof, just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in short, so that n.o.body need be at a loss when he feels the religious sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level s.p.a.ce that lay between; they continually thrust themselves across the pa.s.sage, and appeared as if determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it, and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or gra.s.s-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate vicinity of an Italian home.

At Strettura (which, as the name indicates, is a very narrow part of the valley) we added two oxen to our horses, and began to ascend the Monte Somma, which, according to Murray, is nearly four thousand feet high where we crossed it. When we came to the steepest part of the ascent, Gaetano, who exercises a pretty decided control over his pa.s.sengers, allowed us to walk; and we all, with one exception, alighted, and began to climb the mountain on foot. I walked on briskly, and soon left the rest of the party behind, reaching the top of the pa.s.s in such a short time that I could not believe it, and kept onward, expecting still another height to climb. But the road began to descend, winding among the depths of the hills as heretofore; now beside the dry, gravelly bed of a departed stream, now crossing it by a bridge, and perhaps pa.s.sing through some other gorge, that yet gave no decided promise of an outlet into the world beyond. A glimpse might occasionally be caught, through a gap between the hill-tops, of a company of distant mountain-peaks, pyramidal, as these hills are apt to be, and resembling the camp of an army of giants. The landscape was not altogether savage; sometimes a hillside was covered with a rich field of grain, or an orchard of olive-trees, looking not unlike puffs of smoke, from the peculiar line of their foliage; but oftener there was a vast mantle of trees and shrubbery from top to bottom, the golden tufts of the broom s.h.i.+ning out amid the verdure, and gladdening the whole. Nothing was dismal except the houses; those were always so, whether the compact, gray lines of village hovels, with a narrow street between, or the lonely farm-house, standing far apart from the road, built of stone, with window-gaps high in the wall, empty of gla.s.s; or the half-castle, half-dwelling, of which I saw a specimen or two, with what looked like a defensive rampart, drawn around its court. I saw no look of comfort anywhere; and continually, in this wild and solitary region, I met beggars, just as if I were still in the streets of Rome. Boys and girls kept beside me, till they delivered me into the hands of others like themselves; h.o.a.ry grandsires and grandmothers caught a glimpse of my approach, and tottered as fast as they could to intercept me; women came out of the cottages, with rotten cherries on a plate, entreating me to buy them for a mezzo baioccho; a man, at work on the road, left his toil to beg, and was grateful for the value of a cent; in short, I was never safe from importunity, as long as there was a house or a human being in sight.

We arrived at Spoleto before noon, and while our dejeuner was being prepared, looked down from the window of the inn into the narrow street beneath, which, from the throng of people in it, I judged to be the princ.i.p.al one: priests, papal soldiers, women with no bonnets on their heads; peasants in breeches and mushroom hats; maids and matrons, drawing water at a fountain; idlers, smoking on a bench under the window; a talk, a bustle, but no genuine activity. After lunch we walked out to see the lions of Spoleto, and found our way up a steep and narrow street that led us to the city gate, at which, it is traditionally said, Hannibal sought to force an entrance, after the battle of Thrasymene, and was repulsed.

The gateway has a double arch, on the inner one of which is a tablet, recording the above tradition as an unquestioned historical fact. From the gateway we went in search of the Duomo, or cathedral, and were kindly directed thither by an officer, who was descending into the town from the citadel, which is an old castle, now converted into a prison. The cathedral seemed small, and did not much interest us, either by the Gothic front or its modernized interior. We saw nothing else in Spoleto, but went back to the inn and resumed our journey, emerging from the city into the cla.s.sic valley of the c.l.i.tumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After pa.s.sing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the base of the edifice we saw the c.l.i.tumnus, so recently from its source in the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of c.l.i.tumnus, except that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh profane in the urgency of their pet.i.tions; they absolutely fall down on their knees as you approach, in the same att.i.tude as if they were praying to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over.

I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town, where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could), I saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with a crown of edifices, terminating in a church-tower; while a part of the northern side was apparently too steep for building; and a cataract of houses flowed down the western and southern slopes.

There seemed to be palaces, churches, everything that a city should have; but my eyes are heavy, and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent its crumbling down, and enable it to support the platform of edifices which crowns it.

May 27th.--We reached Foligno in good season yesterday afternoon. Our inn seemed ancient; and, under the same roof, on one side of the entrance, was the stable, and on the other the coach-house. The house is built round a narrow court, with a well of water at bottom, and an opening in the roof at top, whence the staircases are lighted that wind round the sides of the court, up to the highest story. Our dining-room and bedrooms were in the latter region, and were all paved with brick, and without carpets; and the characteristic of the whole was all exceeding plainness and antique clumsiness of fitting up. We found ourselves sufficiently comfortable, however; and, as has been the case throughout our journey, had a very fair and well-cooked dinner. It shows, as perhaps I have already remarked, that it is still possible to live well in Italy, at no great expense, and that the high prices charged to the forestieri at Rome and elsewhere are artificial, and ought to be abated. . . . .

The day had darkened since morning, and was now ominous of rain; but as soon as we were established, we sallied out to see whatever was worth looking at. A beggar-boy, with one leg, followed us, without asking for anything, apparently only for the pleasure of our company, though he kept at too great a distance for conversation, and indeed did not attempt to speak.