Norba.
We will suppose that, the mutual curiosity of natives and strangers having been fully gratified at Cori, the strangers have set out on their way, on mule-back or otherwise. The mountain-track up and down, skirting the lower heights of the Volscian range, opens noble views of the higher mountains inland, of the wide flat below, and of the sea beyond. But these views are perhaps, on the whole, better enjoyed when the traveller has found a firm foothold within "Norba's ancient wall" than while he has personal experience how
The patient ass, up flinty paths,
Plods with his weary load.
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 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 Cori; a lone shepherd or two may come to look at him; he cannot bring together the least approach to a triumphal procession. 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. This inference might possibly be rash; for the ancient wall fences in at least one ruin which may be later than the days of the fortunate dictator. But it is clear that Norba, if it recovered from this great single blow, gradually dwindled away, to the profit, first of Norma by its side, which still abides, and of Ninfa, at its foot, which has perished only less utterly than Norba itself.
Cori and Norba are alike cities set on hills, and neither of them has any fear of being hid. But they are set on hills in different senses. Cori occupies the upper part of the sloping hill, and the houses spread down the slope. Norba occupies a large table-land on the edge of the mountains, and its outer wall is carried along the upper rim of a steep and lofty cliff. No dwellings could ever have spread themselves downwards on the side which looks toward the marshes and the sea. But we should hardly have said the outer wall; for the height was so carefully fortified that outlying defences were placed at various points on the side of the cliff wherever the primitive engineers deemed such defences needful. Within the circuit, again, the arx rose on several terraces; its highest point—crowned, we may believe, as usual, by a temple—must have formed a proud object indeed from the vast extent of land and sea which it looks down upon. No other of its ancient neighbours looks down so immediately on the great Pomptine flat as Norba does, as none looks down from so great a height. Cori rather occupies a hill thrown out in front of the mountain; Norba sits on the edge of the mountain itself, though of course at a much lower elevation than the huge masses further inland. The towers and temples of the city must have had a wonderful effect from the lands below; as it is, there is nothing to mark the place but the line of wall itself, which does not always stand out in a very marked way from the cliff. It is then perhaps in some sort well that the later Norma has taken the place of Norba. On the hill of Norba we see that Norma and Norba by no means join one another; there is a gap between them which, while we are on the mountain, might pass for a valley. But as we look from below, the winding outline of the hills puts this gap out of sight, and Norma and Norba become in appearance one whole. Norma looks like a continuation of Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited part, perhaps, as at Syracuse and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold within which the city had again shrunk up. From the points where the eye can take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of the cliff, and the further town of Sermoneta crowning a hill-top far lower than the height of Norba, the whole grouping is wonderful. The view from Norba itself takes in points with which we have become familiar since we first gazed on them from the height of the Latian Jupiter. But we see them in new groupings and new proportions; the islands, prisons for dangerous or discreditable members of the Imperial house, stand out in special prominence in front of the Circæan height—a height so nearly cut off from the mainland that it seems like the greatest of the island group. 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. The mass of the wall is of polygonal stones, rude, but far less rude than the rudest at Cori. Without being actually laid in regular order, they have a certain tendency to fall into courses as it were of themselves, and it is not always easy to tell how far the roughness of the stone has been from the beginning, and how far it is due to the action of the weather on stones cut perhaps somewhat less carefully than the finer stones at Cori. But the Norban builders could, when it was worth their while, do something more than this. They could, when they had to make a corner, put together squared stones cut with a good deal of exactness, and when it was convenient that a corner should be rounded off, they could do that too with equal skill. This last was done at the greatest gateway looking towards Norma. Here there is no sign of either lintel, arch, or attempt at arch, to span the opening; it would almost seem that the gate itself was simply placed across the opening with nothing over it, much as at Tusculum the gate was hung between two pieces of native rock. That the arch was not known to the first builders of Norba, but that they had reached the stage in which men began as it were to stretch forth their hands towards that great invention, is shown by a ruined building—one of the few things within the wall of Norba which can be called even a ruined building—a little way beyond the arx. Here we have a distinct attempt at a vault for the roof; but it is not the apparent cupola of Mykênê and New Grange, nor the apparent barrel-vault of Tusculum. The building is oblong, and the attempted arches rise on both sides, from the small ones as well as from the longer. The ruined state of the building, whatever it was, most unluckily hinders us from seeing how the four vaults, so to call them, were made to meet in the middle. It must have been a strange problem in construction. Hard by is the other building at which we have already hinted as being of later date. It has real arches and masonry, like that which at Cori is attributed to Sulla's time. But it may as well come before the overthrow of Norba in his day as after it.
From primæval and forsaken Norba we go down the hill-side, learning as we go how high Norba stands, to hardly less forsaken, though only mediæval, Ninfa. Ninfa, unlike Norba, has a few inhabitants; there is a house and a mill, if not within the fortified enclosure, at least just outside it, and, if the enclosure itself contains no actual dwelling-places of man, it contains abundance of buildings which have once been so. One can hardly fancy a greater contrast than that which strikes us between the stern primæval wall of Norba, fencing in the thick-standing corn, and the wall of Ninfa, with its towers, its varied and picturesque outline, fencing in a crowd of houses, churches, and buildings of every kind, the oldest of which could not have arisen till a thousand years after Norba became desolate. All are now forsaken, roofless, shattered, forming one of the most singular gatherings of ruins to be seen anywhere, the mummy, as it has been well called, of a dead town. Ninfa was once a place of some consequence, which played its part in local history; perhaps the most notable event suggested by its name is that here Alexander III., a Pope who had so much to do with our own history, was consecrated after his famous disputed election. But its position in the deadly flat, close by a stream, led to its ruin; the malaria was too much for it, and Ninfa ceased to be reckoned among the cities of articulate-speaking men. Some freak might restore the greatness of Norba; for there is nothing to hinder men living there if the fancy took them; they cannot live at Ninfa without greater changes than a Marius or a Sulla can work. There is something specially striking in a town, whose remains are so extensive, standing so utterly desolate. There is something Irish in the look of things at Ninfa, as indeed there is in the look of a good many of the ruined mediæval sites which often meet us in this region. It is not merely the fact of their being ruined, though there is something Irish in that; the tall, slender towers, of which there are many both at Ninfa and elsewhere, have a real likeness to many buildings in Ireland. But, though the general look of Ninfa is singularly striking, there is less to be learned from the particular buildings than might have been looked for. They are spread over several centuries, some of the houses reaching even into Renaissance times. 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.