III
At noon of such another day we set out from Rome for Caprarola.
The still air had a pearly quality and a mauve haze hung upon the hills. Our way lay north-westward, toward the Ciminian mountains. Once free of the gates, our motor started on its steady rush along the white highway, first past the walls of vineyard and garden, and then across the grey waste spaces of the Campagna. The Roman champaign is the type of variety in monotony. Seen from the heights of the city, it reaches in silvery sameness toward all points of the compass; but to a near view it reveals a dozen different physiognomies. Toward Frascati and the Alban hills it wears the ordered garb of fertility: wheat-fields, vineyards and olive-groves. South-eastward, in the direction of the Sabine range, its white volcanic reaches are tufted with a dark maqui of sullen and reluctant growth, while in the west the Agro Romano rolls toward Monterosi and Soracte in sere reaches of pasture-land mottled with hillock and ravine.
Gradually, as we left the outskirts of Rome, the grandeur of this stern landscape declared itself. To the right and left the land stretched out in endless grassy reaches, guarded here and there by a lonely tomb or by the tall gateway of some abandoned vineyard. Presently the road began to rise and dip, giving us, on the ascent, sweeping views over a wider range of downs which rolled away in the north-west to the Ciminian forest, and in the east to the hazy rampart of the Sabine hills. Ahead of us the same undulations swept on interminably, the road undulating with them, now engulfed in the trough of the land, now tossed into view on some farther slope, like a streak of light on a flying sea. There was something strangely inspiriting in the call of this fugitive road. From ever-lengthening distances it seemed to signal us on, luring us up slope after slope, and racing ahead of us down the long declivities where the motor panted after it like a pack on the trail.
For some time the thrill of the chase distracted us from a nearer view of the foreground; but gradually there stole on us a sense of breadth and quietude, of sun-bathed rugged fields with black cattle grazing in their hollows, and here and there a fortified farm-house lifting its bulk against the sky. These fortress-farms of the Campagna, standing sullen and apart among the pacific ruins of pagan Rome—tombs, aqueducts and villas—give a glimpse of that black age which rose on the wreck of the Imperial civilization. All the violence and savagery of the mediæval city, with its great nobles forever in revolt, its popes plotting and trembling within the Lateran walls, or dragging their captive cardinals from point to point as the Emperor or the French King moved his forces—all the mysterious crimes of passion and cupidity, the intrigues, ambushes, massacres with which the pages of the old chronicles reek, seem symbolized in one of those lowering brown piles with its battlemented sky-line, crouched on a knoll of the waste land which its masters helped to devastate.
At length a blue pool, the little lake of Monterosi, broke the expanse of the downs; then we flashed through a poor roadside village of the same name, and so upward into a hill-region where hedgerows and copses began to replace the brown tufting of the Campagna. On and on we fled, ever upward to the town of Ronciglione, perched, like many hill-cities of this region, on the sheer edge of a ravine, and stretching its line of baroque churches and stately crumbling palaces along one steep street to the edge of a lofty down.
Across this plateau, golden with budding broom, we flew on to the next height, and here paused to embrace the spectacle—beneath us, on the left, the blue volcanic lake of Vico in its oak-fringed crater; on the right, far below, the plain of Etruria, scattered with ancient cities and ringed in a mountain-range still touched with snow; and rising from the middle of the plain, Soracte, proud, wrinkled, solitary, with the ruined monastery of Sant’ Oreste just seen on its crest.
An Italian Sky in March
From this mount of vision we dropped abruptly downward by a road cut in the red tufa-banks. Presently there began to run along the crest of the tufa on our left a lofty wall gripping the flanks of the rock, and overhung by dark splashes of ivy and clumps of leafless trees—one of those rugged Italian walls which are the custodians of such hidden treasures of scent and verdure. This wall continued to run parallel with us till our steep descent ended in a stone-paved square, with the roofs of a town sliding abruptly away below it on one side, and above, on the other, the great ramps and terraces of a pentagonal palace clenched to the highest ledge of the cliff. Such is the first sight of Caprarola.
Never, surely, did feudal construction so insolently dominate its possessions. The palace of the great Farnese Cardinal seems to lord it not only over the golden-brown town which forms its footstool, but over the far-reaching Etrurian plain, the forests and mountains of the horizon: over Nepi, Sutri, Cività Castellana, and the lonely pride of Soracte. And the grandeur of the site is matched by the arrogance of the building: no villa, but a fortified and moated palace, or rather a fortress planned in accordance with the most advanced military science of the day, but built on the lines of a palace. Yet on such a March day as this, with the foreground of brown oak-woods all slashed and fringed with rosy almond-bloom; with the haze of spring just melting from the horizon, and revealing depth after depth of mountain-blue; with March clouds fleeing overhead, and flinging trails of shadow and showers of silver light across the undulations of the plain—on such a day, the insolent Farnese keep, for all its background of gardens, frescoes, and architectural splendour, seems no longer the lord of the landscape, but a mere point of vantage from which to view the outspread glory at our feet.