Francis Carton

“ A few capacious farm-houses rising here and there over the plain, shelter the household gods of the fattore or steward, until the malaria drives his sickly children to the city or to the mountains. No other human habitation is visible, unless we choose to dignify by that title some conical sheds resembling exaggerated mushrooms in colour, and not unlike them in shape. ”

“ No modern shepherd would dream of doing the things his predecessors did, or of using the language they used. Who, in a spot where a tree is hardly to be seen, would speak of Tityrus as reclining under the shade of a spreading beech? ”

“ Every one who is acquainted with the environs of Rome, and especially if he enters the Eternal City from Viterbo, necessarily preserves for some time an unpleasant recollection of the pastures of the Campagna. ”

“ Thus spoke a Roman Cardinal, one day in my hearing, to some persons whom he desired to encourage in a work undertaken by them for the benefit of the rural population of the Campagna. “The barbarians outside the Porta Pia!” thought I, in surprise. Has time retreated some cycles, and are Attila’s hordes once more at the gates of Rome? The whole world was once either Roman or barbarian; has the Roman world so shrunk up that it can fit within the compass of the seven-hilled city? When did the pomœrium become the limit of civilisation? Rome once held the sovereignty “Urbis et Orbis;” ”

“ It is time to bring the flocks to the valleys and low-lying pastures, where they may roam undisturbed until the month of May drives them back to the hills. The note of preparation is sounded among the shepherd families, and after a few days of preparation all is made ready for the journey. It cannot, however, be said that they leave their household gods behind them, for the simple reason that they carry their household along with them. ”

“ The fairest landscape the earth can show could not require a more worthy background than is there: so clearly do the blue Latin hills rise against the sky; so soft is the sunny beauty of their sides broken here and there by a ravine, or flecked by the shadow flung by passing clouds or by some taller peak beyond ”

“ It would be an unprofitable task to endeavour to trace in the shepherds of Virgil’s Eclogues the types of those shepherds whom I have been describing. Fearful of giving offence to the fastidious, the rules of art vigorously exclude from pastoral poetry many details which occur every day in pastoral life. But even when allowance is made for the enormous difference between the ideal and the real, in every case, the Italian pastoral life as described by the great Roman poet is marvellously unlike what we find near Rome in our own day. ”

“ Of themselves we know nothing. In this less fortunate than the very bricks of the walls, which still bear impressed upon them the mark of the furnace in which they were burned, the owners of this place have left no certain traces of themselves behind. There are, indeed, some handsful of ashes in the mortuary urns close by, but who shall say whether they belong to master or to slave? All that remains of the history of Ficulea and of its long career of activity is written in shattered mosaics, mutilated marbles, and human ashes. ”

“ At length they arrive at the appointed pastures; the sheep are turned out, and in a short time the whole plain is dotted with their white fleeces. The shepherds then put up their huts; some building in solitary places, others sociably near each other. Thus settled for the season, they move about in search of new pastures when the wants of the flocks render such a step necessary. For a circuit of about six miles round Rome, the vast expanse of meadow is inhabited for six or eight months of the year by this nomadic population. ”

“ But when the traveller, charmed into expectant hope that this promise of loveliness is to be realised in the foreground, turns his attention to what immediately surrounds him, he finds that he has hoped in vain. A dreary expanse of parched grass, hardly diversified at intervals by corn-fields, is all that meets his gaze. ”

“ Silence is broken only by the lark at morn and even, and by the grasshopper which chirps its song all the hot day through. To be sure there are deep ruts worn into the basalt pavement of the old Roman road, and ruts in pavements are suggestive of iron-shod waggon-wheels and noisy traffic. ”

“ He had learned to read from one of his fellow shepherds, who in his younger days had attended a school specially founded for boys of his station. The education thus received was liberally bestowed by him in turn on his companions. Every evening at sunset, surrounded by a group of boys, this excellent man held a reading school. Never was the task of teaching more generously undertaken; never did scholars apply with more ardour to learn. ”

“ To their tastes nothing beyond what we have described remains to witness, save a marble head crowned with laurel, two heads of aged women, and some crushed fragments of a large and exquisitely chiselled statue. ”

“ The women and children, laden with the utensils and little necessary domestic property, bring up the rear. We may be certain that they have classed under the latter head of necessary articles, huge necklaces, each bead of which is as large as a pigeon’s egg, heavy pendants for the ears, and flaming red and green gowns, to make a brave show on Sundays and festivals. ”

“ In each of the four corners chubby heads, with winged temples and swollen puffy cheeks, proclaim themselves to be the four winds. On the floor of the next apartment, Theseus and the Minotaur are engaged in deadly combat in the Labyrinth, the winding mazes of which, by a graceful treatment, form as it were a frame for the group depicted within. Neptune and Antiope figure in the third room; the fourth exhibits a man of colossal size, in a state of the most intense nervous agitation. ”