University of Virginia Library

41. LETTER XLI.

I left Florence in company with the five artists
mentioned in my last letter, one of them an Englishman,
and the other four pensioners of the royal academy
at Madrid. The Spaniards had but just arrived
in Italy, and could not speak a syllable of the language.
The Englishman spoke everything but French,
which he avoided learning from principle. He “hated
a Frenchman!”

There are two roads to Rome. One goes by Sienna,
and is a day shorter; the other by Perugia, the
Falls of Terni, Lake Thrasymene, and the Clitumnus.
Childe Harold took the latter, and his ten or twelve
best cantos describe it. I was compelled to go by Sienna,
and shall return, of course, by the other road.

I was at Sienna on the following day. As the second
capital of Tuscany, this should be a place of some
interest, but an hour or two is more than enough to
see all that is attractive. The public square was a gay
scene. It was rather singularly situated, lying fifteen
or twenty feet lower than the streets about it. I should
think there were several thousand people in its area—
all buying or selling, and vociferating, as usual, at the
top of their voices. We heard the murmur, like the
roar of the sea, in all the distant streets. There are
few sights more picturesque than an Italian fair, and I
strolled about in the crowd for an hour, amused with
the fanciful costumes, and endeavoring to make out
with the assistance of the eye what rather distracted
my unaccustomed ear—the cries of the various wandering
venders of merchandise. The women, who
were all from the country, were coarse, and looked
well only at a distance.

The cathedral is the great sight of Sienna. It has
a rich exterior, encrusted with curiously wrought marbles,
and the front, as far as I can judge, is in beautiful
taste. The pavement of the interior is very precious,
and covered with a wooden platform, which is
removed but once a year. The servitor raised a part
of it, to show us the workmanship. It was like a
drawing in India ink, quite as fine as if pencilled, and
representing, as is customary, some miracle of a saint.

A massive iron door, made ingeniously to imitate a
rope-netting, opens from the side of the church into the
library. It contained some twenty volumes in black
letter, bound with enormous clasps, and placed upon
inclined shelves. It would have been a task for a man
of moderate strength to lift either of them from the
floor. The little sacristan found great difficulty in
only opening one to show us the letter.

In the centre of the chapel, on a high pedestal,
stands the original antique group, so often copied, of
the three Grecian Graces. It is shockingly mutilated;
but its original beauty is still, in a great measure, discernible.
Three naked women are an odd ornament
for the private chapel of a cathedral.[1] One often
wonders, however, in Italian churches, whether his
devotion is most called upon by the arts or the Deity.

As we were leaving the church, four young officers
passed us in gay uniform, their long steel scabbards
rattling on the pavement, and their heavy tread disturbing
visibly every person present. As I turned to
look after them, with some remark on their coxcombry,
they dropped on their knees at the bases of the
tall pillars about the altar, and burying their faces in
their caps, bowed their heads nearly to the floor, in attitudes
of the deepest devotion. Sincere or not, catholic
worshippers of all classes seem absorbed in their religious
duties. You can scarce withdraw the attention
even of a child in such places. In the six months
that I have been in Italy, I never saw anything like irreverence
within the church walls.

The public promenade, on the edge of the hill upon
which the town is beautifully situated, commands a
noble view of the country about. The peculiar landscape
of Italy lay before us in all its loveliness—the
far-off hills lightly teinted with the divided colors of
distance, the atmosphere between absolutely clear and
invisible, and villages clustered about, each with its
ancient castle on the hill-top above, just as it was settled
in feudal times, and just as painters and poets
would imagine it. You never get a view in this “garden
of the world” that would not excuse very extravagant
description.

Sienna is said to be the best place for learning the
language. Just between Florence and Rome, it combines
the “lingua Toscano,” with the “bocca Romana”—the
Roman pronunciation with the Florentine
purity of language. It looks like a dull place, however,
and I was very glad after dinner to resume my
passport at the gate and get on.

The next morning, after toiling up a considerable ascent,
we suddenly rounded the shoulder of the mountain,
and found ourselves at the edge of a long glen,
walled up at one extremity by a precipice, with an old
town upon its brow, and a waterfall pouring off at its
side, and opening away at the other into a broad gently-sloped
valley, cultivated like a garden as far as the
eye could distinguish. I think I have seen an engra

ving of it in the Landscape Annual. Taken together,
it is positively the most beautiful view I ever saw,
from the road edge, as you wind up into the town of
Acquapendenk. The precipice might be a hundred
feet, and from its immediate edge were built up the
walls of the houses, so that a child at the window
might throw its plaything into the bottom of the ravine.
It is scarce a pistol-shot across the glen, and the
two hills on either side lean off from the level of the
town in one long soft declivity to the valley—the little
river which pours off the rock at the very base of the
church, fretting and fuming its way between to the
meadows—its stony bed quite hidden by the thick vegetation
of its banks. The bells were ringing to mass,
and the echoes came back to us at long distances with
every modulation. The streets, as we entered the
town, were full of people hurrying to the churches;
the women with their red shawls thrown about their
heads, and the men with their immense dingy cloaks
flung romantically over their shoulders, with a grace,
one and all, that in a Parisian dandy, would be attributed
to a consummate study of effect. For outline
merely, I think there is nothing in costume
which can surpass the closely-stockinged leg, heavy
cloak, and slouched hat of an Italian peasant. It is
added to by his indolent, and, consequently, graceful
motion and attitudes. Johnson, in his book on the
climate of Italy, says their sloth is induced by malaria.
You will see a man watching goats or sheep,
with his back against a rock, quite motionless for hours
together. His dog feels, apparently, the same influence,
and lies couched in his long white hair, with
his eyes upon the flock, as lifeless, and almost as picturesque,
as his master.

The town of San Lorenzo is a handful of houses on
the top of a hill which hangs over Lake Bolsena.
You get the first view of the lake as you go out of the
gate toward Rome, and descend immediately to its
banks. There was a heavy mist upon the water, and
we could not see across, but it looked like as quiet
and pleasant a shore as might be found in the world—
the woods wild, and of uncommonly rich foliage for
Italy, and the slopes of the hills beautiful. Saving the
road, and here and there a house with no sign of an inhabitant,
there can scarcely be a lonelier wilderness
in America. We stopped two hours at an inn on its
banks, and whether it was the air, or the influence of
the perfect stillness about us, my companions went to
sleep, and I could scarce resist my own drowsiness.

The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner,
and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have
floated in his time. They look like the tops of green
hills rising from the water.

It is a beautiful country again as you approach
Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with
glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of
great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of
one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough
to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is famous,
drinking it to the memory of the “German prelate,”
who, as Madame Stark relates, “stopped here
on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to excess.”
It has degenerated, probably, since his time,
or we chanced upon a bad bottle.

The walls of Viterbo are flanked with towers, and
have a noble appearance from the hill-side on which
the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything
of the place. As we were taking coffee at the café the
next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard
music in the street, and looking out at the door, we
saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with
flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal,
and half dancing as she went along. Three or four at
the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the
rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It
was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I
had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told
it was a procession to the vintage. They were going
out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to
make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the otherwise
perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers
at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their
heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The
measure was quick, and the step very fast. They
were gone in an instant. The whole thing was poetical,
and in keeping for Italy. I have never seen it
elsewhere.

We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning;
and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful
climate more thrillingly. The road was wild, and with
the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the
carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles
on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and
the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy perceptible
in the air. Half way up the mountain, I overtook
a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up
on his mule. I was passing him with a “buon giorno,”
when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his,
to keep him company. “It was the worst road for
thieves,” he said, “in all Italy,” and he pointed at
every short distance to little crosses erected at the
road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered
men on the spot. After he had told me several stories
of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of
other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long
a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his
finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He
looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hesitating
whether to trust me with his opinions on the
subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his
caution, and pointing off to the right, showed me a
lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It
was Lake Vico. From the midst of it rose a round
mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts—
the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the
hill on which we stood rising directly from the other
edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves.
The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the
views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in
mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strongly
of the country about the Seneca lake of America.
I was on the Cayuga at about the same season three
summers ago, and I could have believed myself back
again, it was so like my recollection.

We stopped on the fourth night of our journey,
seventeen miles from Rome, at a place called Baccano.
A ridge of hills rose just before us, from the top of
which we were told we could see St. Peter's. The
sun was just dipping under the horizon, and the ascent
was three miles. We threw off our cloaks, determining
to see Rome before we slept, ran unbreathed
to the top of the hill, an effort which so nearly exhausted
us, that we could scarce stand long enough
upon our feet to search over the broad campagna for
the dome.

Tho sunset had lingered a great while—as it does
in Italy. Four or five light feathery streaks of cloud
glowed with intense crimson in the west, and on the
brow of Mount Soracte, (which I recognised instantly
from the graphic simile[2] of Childe Harold), and along
on all the ridges of mountain in the east, still played
a kind of vanishing reflection, half purple, half gray.
With a moment's glance around to catch the outline
of the landscape, I felt instinctively where Rome should
stand, and my eye fell at once upon “the mighty
dome.” Jupiter had by this time appeared, and hung
right over it, trembling in the sky with its peculiar
glory, like a lump of molten spar, and as the color
faded from the clouds, and the dark mass of “the
eternal city” itself mingled and was lost in the shadows

of the campagna, the dome still seemed to
catch light, and tower visibly, as if the radiance of the
glowing star above fell more directly upon it. We
could see it till we could scarcely distinguish each
other's features. The dead level of the campagna
extended between and beyond for twenty miles, and it
looked like a far-off beacon in a dim sea. We sat an
hour on the summit of the hill, gazing into the increasing
darkness, till our eyes ached. The stars
brightened one by one, the mountains grew indistinct,
and we rose unwillingly to retrace our steps to Baccano.