Edward A. Freeman

“ The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. ”

“ But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch glimpses of the 224 Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. ”

“ We reach the station of Segni; we mark more than one town perched on the opposite heights; we have close by us, in the low ground—reminding us of Ninfa on a smaller scale—the walls of a forsaken fortress, with a shattered tower of wonderful height and slenderness; but the walls of Signia still keep themselves hidden among the mountains. It is not from the side of Velletri, but, as we afterwards learn, from the side of Anagni, that Segni on its 155 mountain height, and its satellite of Gavignano, perched on a smaller detached hill in front, form striking features in the landscape. ”

“ The church of most pretension lies without the walls; several within them keep their apses and the paintings on them, but little more. The whole is a wilderness of ruins, strange, impressive, but hardly venerable. As the ruin of a town, the wreck of many buildings crowded close together, fallen Ninfa has little of the solemnity of our own ruined castles and abbeys. As for the elements of wonder and mystery, they dwell in this region on the hill-top, among the mighty masses of stone which the men of an unrecorded age piled together to make Norba. ”

“ We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. ”

“ It is strange to step out the traces of a city whose position and extent are so unmistakably marked, but of which nothing is left which can be called a building, or even a ruin. The most memorable work in the circuit of Veii 74 is a work not of building but of boring—the Ponte Sodo, hewn in the rock for the better passage of the guardian stream. Besides these, some small fragments of the Etruscan wall, the signs of a double gate, some masonry of the small Roman tower which in after times arose within the forsaken walls, are pretty well all that remains of the life of Veii. ”

“ To be sold beyond the Tiber was the most frightful of all dooms which spared life and limb. If the debtor were sold to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win his freedom and become a denizen of a city of his own speech. To sell him 91 beyond the Tiber was like handing him over to bondage among Turks or Moors. But our path keeps us on the Latin side, in a land which, when it was inhabited at all, was inhabited by men of an intelligible speech. We peer under a rocky cliff, the riverward slope of the hill which rises just outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. ”

“ And he who looks curiously will find out, not indeed any more Roman gateways, but the jambs from which at least two other arches, either Roman or Etruscan, once sprang.
The walls and gateways of a city can hardly be called its skeleton, but they are in some sort its shell. And at Perugia the body within the shell was of no mean kind. Take away every great public building, church, or palace, and Perugia itself, its mere streets and houses, would have a great deal to show. ”

“ For within the wall all is, we cannot say desolate or forsaken, for the crops are there, full and green—"segetes, ubi Norba fuit"—but the ancient circuit is at least empty of all dwelling-places of man. We would fain believe that the space has stood as empty as it now does ever since the people of Norba—less wise, as the event showed, than their neighbours of Cora—embraced the cause of Marius with such desperate zeal that they slew themselves and burned their houses rather than let either themselves or their goods fall into the hands of Sulla. ”

“ The general old-world air, strong in some parts of Perugia, stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all at Spello, while at Spello there seems less eagerness than at Cortona to seize the stranger and make a prey of him. The look-out is perhaps the finest of all; it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked mountains and ranges deep with snow, which barely come into the other views, and the long series of hill-towns is pleasantly broken by the towers and cupolas of Foligno in the plain. ”

“ A town wall standing free, as those of Arezzo stand in nearly their whole range, is always a striking object, and one whose circuit 5 it is pleasant and instructive to make. And it has a special interest in some cities, of which Arezzo is one, which have, so to speak, a show side. One side lies open to the world; the ancient roads, the modern railway, approach it; the city dies away into the country by gradually descending suburbs. ”

“ Still worse indeed is it when the flinty paths have to be plodded down, and when the weary load needs all his theoretical philosophy to persuade him how thoroughly safe he really is, while the weakness of the flesh surrounds the descent with terrors which he knows to be unreal. At last the ancient wall rises immediately before him; the hill-side, a small height straight above the path, is climbed on his own feet, and he can presently contemplate at his ease both the wall itself and the prospect which it commands. ”

“ The remains of its death are more plentiful. There is the Roman columbarium, within the Etruscan site; there are the Etruscan tombs bored deep in all the surrounding hills. There is, above all, the famous painted tomb, shielding no such sculptures and inscriptions as those on which we gaze in the great Volumnian sepulchre, but within which one lucky eye was privileged for a moment to see the Lucumo himself, as he crumbled away at the entrance of the unaccustomed air. ”

“ A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome, an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. ”

“ At all events, there is the undoubted extent of a great city, a city clearly of an earlier type than Rome, a city which may well have reached its present extent while Rome had not spread beyond the Palatine. Such a site marks a great advance on the occupation of inaccessible hill-tops; but Veii itself must have seemed an old-world city in the eyes of those who had the highway of the Tiber below their walls. ”

“ We see signs of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns bearing such massive stilts. ”

“ At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. ”

“ At Beneventum we tread the battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day. There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the older and the later Pontius, known by one action 263 of their lives. The Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter ruin for one. ”

“ Nowhere do we better understand what men looked on as a great and strong city in days when they had not yet learned that an element of truer might lurked in what, judged by the standard of Norba, would seem a mere group of molehills by the yellow Tiber.
As the whole city lay on the top of the hill, the space taken in by the walls is necessarily greater than in those towns where the hill stands distinct, the arx alone crowns the top, and where the town walls are placed lower down. The nature of the construction adapts itself to the needs of the different parts of the circuit. ”

“ At Florence, at Arezzo, at Cortona, at Perugia, the collections which each city has brought together make us familiar, if we are not so already, with much of Etruscan art and Etruscan life. Or shall we say that what they really make us familiar with is more truly Etruscan death? Our knowledge of most nations of remote times comes largely from their tombs and from the contents of their tombs, and this must specially be the case with a people who, like the Etruscans, have left no literature behind them. ”

“ Not a few buildings stand out with arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which, on its northern side, shows a 182 range of windows which savour of France or England rather than of Italy. ”

“ The ordinary scholar is half-amused, half-provoked, at long lines of alphabetic writing, of which, as far as the mere letters go, he can read a great deal, but of which, save here and there a proper name, he cannot understand a word. He knows that one ingenious man has read it all into good German and another into good Turkish. He curses every Lucumo whose image he sees for sticking like a Frenchman to his own tongue. Why could they not write up everything in three or four languages? How happy he would be if he could light on a Latin or Greek crib which would give life to the dead letter. ”

“ The bridge at Arezzo is not one of those to which we instinctively go the first thing to take a general view of the city as a whole. The hill is a more real thing, as any one will say who climbs some of its steeper streets. Still it is one of those hills which seem to borrow height and steepness from the fact of being built upon. If it were covered with green grass, it would simply pass as one of several small hills which break the flat of the rich plain, girded in on all sides by higher mountains, which rise, in February at least, into vast snowy heights in the further distance. ”

“ The last part of the ass-track has become so like a lane anywhere else that we are amazed when we reach the other side of the immediate height of Norba, and find how far below lies the plain from which the almost perpendicular cliffs spring to bear up the forsaken city. For at Norba the curiosity will be almost wholly on the side of the stranger; in cannot be returned in kind, as at 139 Cori; a lone shepherd or two may come to look at him; he cannot bring together the least approach to a triumphal procession. ”

“ But if the earlier Pontius of Telesia should prove—though the guess is a simple guess—to be in truth two Pontii, perhaps a father and a son, no doubt seems to have fixed itself on the identity of the last Pontius at the Colline gate of Rome. The rising again of Samnite life at the last moment of all, when the war with the allies seemed to have lost itself in the deeper whirlpool of the war of Marius and Sulla, is really the most striking thing in the whole history, such as we have it, of the Samnite people. ”

“ The lie of the town is good; it stands well on its hill, of no great elevation among its brighter neighbours. Besides the bell-tower, it has little to show in the ecclesiastical line, save only the eccentricity of having its cathedral church placed as if we were in Wales instead of in Italy, at the bottom of the city instead of at the top. One or two ancient houses and modern palaces may claim some attention, but Velletri, truly 128 barren in Roman remains, cannot be said to be fruitful in those of mediæval times. ”