Campagna

“ Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the west is the empty west always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide heavens above, and that one long sword of light laid on its farther bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. ”

“ More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls and the great view opens out before you- -the rolling green-brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by their scattered towns. ”

“ The very Campagna to-day, driving out beyond Cecilia Metella, little as I knew it before, seems quite familiar, leaves no impression. Yes, the fences tied like that with reeds, overtopped by sprouting elders, the fat weeds on wall and tomb, the undulations of sere green plain, the white snow-masses floating, as it were, in the blue of the sky; the straddling bits of aqueduct, the lumps of masonry. ”

“ The long, calm journey across the Campagna—that desert in which Rome lies like a gigantic monument—was to me the greatest pleasure of this excursion. You see on all sides, along the immense, waving grass-covered plain, lying between Rome and the mountain barrier-line of the horizon, nothing but herds of cattle grazing, ruins and tombs, aqueducts, some solitary ruined towers, and here and there, a little farm. The wind travels over the plain, which no tree, nor rock, nor town diversifies. ”

“ Before us expands the Campagna, ninety miles in length and twenty-seven in breadth. The undulating plain stretches away in all directions until it sinks into the sea; thickly studded is the superb picture with prosperous cities and “every rood of ground maintains its man.” ”

“ The Campagna is always quite green. He who has not seen it can have no conception of the loveliness of spring. The soil of England is crisped like the waves of the sea when the wind moves them lightly. ”

“ Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of ruin being plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through the arches of the broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining through them in the melancholy distance. When we have traversed it, and look back from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies below us like a stagnant lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing round the walls of Rome, and separating it from all the world! ”

“ With them I went many delightful expeditions into the distant Campagna: to Ostia, with its then still gorgeous marbles and melancholy tower and pine; to Castel Fusano, with its palace, like that of the Sleeping Beauty, rising lovely from its green lawns, with its pine avenue and decaying vases with golden-flowered aloes, and beyond all the grand old forest with its deep green recesses and gigantic pines and bays and ilexes, its deep still pools and its abysses of wood, bounded on one side by the Campagna, and on the other by the sea ”

“ We stooped in passing under the low archway, and emerged into the round chamber within, a lofty room, open to the sky, in the circular wall of which there is a niche for a single body. Nothing could exceed the delicacy and fancy with which Childe Harold muses on this spot.
The lofty turrets command a wide view of the Campagna, the long aqueducts stretching past at a short distance, and forming a chain of noble arches from Rome to the mountains of Albano. Cole's picture of the Roman Campagna, as seen from one of these elevations, is, I think, one of the finest landscapes ever painted. ”

“ As they rise from the plain, gray buildings upon gray rocks, standing out against the blue of the sky, they perfectly fulfil one's idea of a fortress town of the middle ages.
The guide-books are all written for those who reach Rome from the north, but however the Eternal City may appear from other approaches, we felt that we were fortunate in our first view of her spires and domes across the green and blossoming Campagna. ”

“ The Campagna is beneath you continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and twisted cordon ”

“ Translation of Edmund Spenser. Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374.
389 THE CAMPAGNA OF ROME. Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. ”

“ On another easel is a stretch of the Campagna, seen beyond and through some near ruins. There are patches of sunlight on the grass, not paint, but the warm, intangible sunbeams that drop from the sky to the earth—that wonderful Campagna! ”

“ The first of these is, that the causes, whatever they are, which produced the desolation of the Campagna, had begun to operate, and their blasting effect was felt, in ancient times, and long before a single squadron of the barbarians had crossed the Alps. In fact, the Campagna was a scene of active agricultural industry only so long as Rome was contending with its redoubtable Italian neighbours—the Latins, the Etruscans, the Samnites, and the Cisalpine Gauls. ”

“ On the bank was a little mould of lighter colour, but no vegetation, no gravel, no volcano ashes, and round about was the great desert of the Roman Campagna.
It was not raining as yet, but the vapours from the river and the moist sirocco had imparted a certain dampness to the old bridge, and as he touched the wall at a casement where he was standing, Sangiorgio felt the trickling wet; the elbows of his coat were soaking and dirtied. He scanned the Campagna intently, but neither the poorest specimen of a tree nor the meanest specimen of a human being was in sight ”

“ The ruins of this famous temple stand in the Forum.
But the Campagna has its attractions. It fascinates imaginative tourists and draws them to its heart. Three or four together, their knapsacks filled with food and drink, often take long trips through this wild region, whose eternal quiet speaks peace to the weary mind, whose delicate, ever-changing tints of sky and field appeal to the taste for natural beauty, whose ruined villas and towns awaken historical memories of the rise of Rome from a little settlement on the Tiber to a worldwide power and a fame that cannot die. ”

“ What a mighty current of life has washed over this country!—breaking into billows round every spot with town and castle on it. And yet the mountains rise above it bare and desolate. Think of the endless number of ruins here in the Campagna only; of the stacks of books written on the history of Italy—and on the history of the whole world for that matter—and think of the hosts of dead people we know. Yet the result of all these waves of life, rolling one after the other, is very, very small. ”

“ The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole Campagna smiles and waves with flowers ”

“ There were more humps than I had remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the rounded and turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere showed their naked masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the passing centuries. At times a dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop up from the roadside ditches, followed us a little way with children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs that barked for pleasure in their joy. ”

“ Resting on the setting sun as on a pedestal, and paling that glory by its own more dazzling splendour, a gigantic cross flamed out across the cloudless sky, and as all gazed, terror-stricken and breathless, these words wrote themselves in fire against the blue: “In hoc vinces” [23] —“In this thou shalt conquer!” The portent hung for many minutes, some say for an hour, and then slowly withdrew into the empyrean, and the empty sky and the empty Campagna, the gleaming host and the proud rebel city, alone remained. ”

“ But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away.
The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. ”

“ The one unhealthy and dreary morsel of Italy, the Campagna, bred the people who mastered earth and established law, while the race which has now risen to the top of the world has been moaning for two centuries that it has neither navigable river nor convenient shore. ”

“ The Roman Campagna, which has been so much vaunted, is certainly singularly immense, but it is so bare, flat and deserted, so monotonous and sad, miles and miles of meadow-land in every direction, that the little brain one has left, after seeing the city, is almost overpowered by it all. ”

“ We have been walking all day over the bare and dreary Campagna, and it is a relief to look at last on the broad, blue expanse of the Tyrrhene Sea.
When we emerged from the cool alleys of Rome, and began to climb up and down the long, barren swells, the sun beat down on us with an almost summer heat. On crossing a ridge near Castel Guido, we took our last look of Rome, and saw from the other side the sunshine lying like a dazzling belt on the far Mediterranean. The country is one of the most wretched that can be imagined. ”

“ And behind the glittering windows of the royal balcony I saw in imagination a pale contracted brow, carved like the brow of the Corsican with the mark of a superhuman destiny.
But what signified this turbid seething of servile passions, seen through that silence which surrounds Rome with its nine circles like a river of Tartarus? I was consoled for all my disappointment by this sublime spectacle of the Campagna strewn with great dead things, where nothing ever springs up save blades of grass, germs of fever, and terrible thoughts. “Is there a new nation struggling within the walls of the city? ”

“ Scarcely real, and yet one of the oldest things in the world—the rolling Campagna, the arches of the aqueducts, Rome behind and the Sabines before. So it had been for centuries; thousands of human lives were wrapped up in it. That was its charm. The picture was not inanimate, but pathetically human. As she looked far off across the plain so mournfully beautiful in its desolation, a sudden rush of feeling swept over her, a rush of that insane love of Italy which has engulfed so many foreigners in the waters of Lethe. She knew now how Paul felt. Italy! Italy! ”

“ Schemes are now in contemplation to reclaim these wastes to cultivation, and to repeople them with an industrious peasantry. While every lover of Italy will rejoice over the successful accomplishment of such a beneficent reform, those who have known the Campagna in the days of its desolation, and have found in its weird loneliness and quiet beauty, in its monuments and memories of the past, an inexpressible delight, will perhaps be pardoned if they regretfully look back upon another of the charms of Rome which shall then have passed away. ”

“ The concert was over: and having made their acknowledgments to the Gonfaloniere for the pleasure they had received through his invitation, our two artists, lighting segars, walked up to the Pianillo, where the rising moon gave them a splendid view of the Campagna and mountain-bounded horizon. Thus ended their first day in Segni, and their first Sunday in the Campagna. ”

“ How many centuries of rest must it not have needed to erase from the minds of men all memory of a cataclysm so tremendous! In the days when doom was drawing near to the cities of the Campagna, an old tradition was current that fire had once been seen coming out of the summit of Vesuvius. Doubtless many people looking up at the green mountain pastures shrugged their shoulders at the tale. ”

“ The last is a most beautiful and interesting expedition, for, what with the distance—more than twelve miles—and the difficulty of finding the way, it is quite an enterprise. As one turns his horse's head away from the river, off the high-road, to the high grassy flats, the whole Campagna seems to lie before one like a vast table-land, with nothing between one's self and Soracte as he lifts his heavy shoulder from the plain—not half hidden by intervening mountains, as from some points of view, but majestic and isolated, thirty miles away to the north. ”