CHAPTER XVIII
The road between Florence and Rome by Sienna is not very interesting, though it presents a number of reflections to those who are well acquainted with the changes that have taken place in the history and agriculture of these districts. Shortly after you leave Florence, the way becomes dreary and barren or unhealthy. Towards the close of the first day’s journey, however, we had a splendid view of the country we were to travel, which lay stretched out beneath our feet to an immense distance, as we descended into the little town of Pozzo Borgo. Deep valleys sloped on each side of us, from which the smoke of cottages occasionally curled: the branches of an overhanging birch-tree or a neighbouring ruin gave relief to the grey, misty landscape, which was streaked by dark pine-forests, and speckled by the passing clouds; and in the extreme distance rose a range of hills glittering in the evening sun, and scarcely distinguishable from the ridge of clouds that hovered near them. We did not reach these hills (on the top of one of which stands the fort of Radicofani) till the end of two days’ journey, making a distance of between fifty and sixty miles, so that their miniature size and fairy splendour, as they crowned the far-off horizon, may be easily guessed. We did not find the accommodation on the road quite so bad as we had expected. The chief want is of milk, which is to be had only in the morning; but we remedied this defect by a taking a bottle of it with us. The weather was cold enough (in the middle of March) to freeze it. The economy of life is here reduced to a very great simplicity, absolute necessaries from day to day and from hand to mouth; and nothing is allowed for the chapter of accidents, or the irregular intrusion of strangers. The mechanism of English inns is accounted for by the certainty of the arrival of customers, with full pockets and empty stomachs. There every road is a thoroughfare; here a traveller is a curiosity, and we did not meet ten carriages on our journey, a distance of a hundred and ninety-three miles, and which it took us six days to accomplish. I may add that we paid only seven louis for our two places in the Voiture (which, besides, we had entirely to ourselves) our expences on the road included. This is cheap enough.
Sienna is a fine old town, but more like a receptacle of the dead than the residence of the living. ‘It was,’ might be written over the entrance to this, as to most of the towns in Italy. The magnificence of the buildings corresponds but ill with the squalidness of the inhabitants; there seems no reason for crowding the streets so close together when there are so few people in them. There is at present no enemy without to huddle them together within the walls, whatever might have been the case in former times: for miles you do not meet a human being, or discern the traces of a human dwelling. The view through the noble arch of the gate as you leave Sienna is at once exquisitely romantic and picturesque: otherwise, the country presents a most deplorable aspect for a length of way. Nature seems to have here taken it upon her to play the part of a cinder-wench, and to have thrown up her incessant heaps of clay and ashes, without either dignity or grace. At a distance to the right and left, you see the stately remains of the ancient Etruscan cities, cresting the heights and built for defence; and here and there, perched on the top of a cliff, the ruinous haunt of some bandit chief (the scourge of later days), that might be compared in imagination to some dragon, old and blind, still watching for its long-lost prey, and sharing the desolation it has made. There are two of these near the wretched inn of La Scala, where we stopped the third morning, rising in lonely horror from the very point of two hills, facing each other and only divided by a brook, that baffle description, and require the artist’s boldest pencil. Aided by the surrounding gloom, and shrouded by the driving mist (as they were when we passed), they throw the mind back into a trance of former times, and the cry of midnight revelry, of midnight murder is heard from the crumbling walls. The romantic bridge and hamlet under them begins the ascent of Radicofani. The extensive ruin at the top meets your view and disappears repeatedly during the long, winding, toilsome ascent. Over a tremendous valley to the left, we saw the distant hills of Perugia, covered with snow and blackened with clouds, and a heavy sleet was falling around us. We started, on being told that the post-house stood directly on the other side of the fort (at a height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea), and that we were to pass the night there. It was like being lodged in a cloud: it seemed the very rocking-cradle of storms and tempests. As we wound round the road at the foot of it, we were relieved from our apprehensions. It was a fortress built by stubborn violence for itself, that might be said to scowl defiance on the world below, and to promise security and shelter to those within its reach. Huge heaps of round stones, gnarled like iron, and that looked as if they would break the feet that trusted themselves among them, were rolled into the space between the heights and the road-side. The middle or principal turret, which rose between the other two, was thrown into momentary perspective by the mist; a fragment of an outer wall stood beneath, half covered with ivy; close to it was an old chapel-spire built of red brick, and a small hamlet crouched beneath the ramparts. It reminded me, by its preternatural strength and sullen aspect, of the castle of Giant Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The dark and stern spirit of former times might be conceived to have entrenched itself here as in its last hold; to have looked out and laughed at precipices and storms, and the puny assaults of hostile bands, and resting on its red right arm, to have wasted away through inaction and disuse in its unapproachable solitude and barbarous desolation. Never did I see any thing so rugged and so stately, apparently so formidable in a former period, so forlorn in this. It was a majestic shadow of the mighty past, suspended in another region, belonging to another age. I might take leave of it in the words of old Burnet, whose Latin glows among these cold hills, Vale augusta sedes, digna rege; vale augusta rupes, semper mihi memoranda!—We drove into the inn-yard, which resembled a barrack (so do most of the inns on the road), with its bed-rooms like hospital-wards, and its large apartments for assemblages of armed men, now empty, gloomy, and unfurnished; but where we found a hospitable welcome, and by the aid of a double fee to the waiters every thing very comfortable. The first object was to procure milk for our tea (of which last article we had brought some very good from the shop of Signor Pippini, at Florence[[43]]) and the next thing was to lay in a stock for the remaining half of our journey. We were not sorry to pass a night at the height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea, and immediately under this famous fortress. The winds ‘howled through the vacant guard-rooms and deserted lobbies’ of our hostelry, and the snow descended in a heavy fall, and covered the valleys; but Radicofani looked the same, as we saw it through the coach-windows the next morning, old, grey, deserted, gloomy, as if it had survived ‘a thousand storms, a thousand winters’—the peasant still crawled along its trenches, the traveller stopped to gaze at its battlements—but neither spear nor battle-axe would glitter there again, nor banner be spread, nor the clash of arms be heard in the round of ever-rolling years—it looked back to other times as we looked back upon it, and stood towering in its decay, and nodding to an eternal repose! The road in this, as in other parts of Italy, is evidently calculated, and was originally constructed, for the march of an army. Instead of creeping along the valleys, it passes along the ridges of hills to prevent surprise, or watch the movements of an enemy, and thus generally commands an extensive view of the country, such as it is. It was long before winding slowly into the valley, we lost sight of our last night’s station.
Aquapendente is situated on the brow of a hill, over a running stream, as its name indicates, and the ascent to it is up the side of a steep rugged ravine, with overhanging rocks and shrubs. The mixture of wildness and luxuriance answered to my idea of Italian scenery, but I had seen little of it hitherto. The town is old, dirty, and disagreeable; and we were driven to an inn in one of the bye-streets, where there was but one sitting-room, which was occupied by an English family, who were going to leave it immediately, but who, I suppose, on hearing that some one else was waiting for it, claimed the right of keeping it as long as they pleased. The assertion of an abstract right is the idea uppermost in the minds of all English people. Unfortunately, when its attainment is worth any thing, their spirit of contradiction makes them ready to relinquish it; or when it costs them any thing, their spirit of self-interest deters them from the pursuit! After waiting some time, we at last breakfasted in a sort of kitchen or outhouse upstairs, where we had very excellent but homely fare, and where we were amused with the furniture—a dove-house, a kid, half-skinned, hanging on the walls; a loose heap of macaroni and vegetables in one corner, plenty of smoke, a Madonna carved and painted, and a map of Constantinople. The pigeons on the floor were busy with their murmuring plaints, and often fluttered their wings as if to fly. So, thought I, the nations of the earth clap their wings, and strive in vain to be free! The landlady was a woman about forty, diminutive and sickly, but with one of those pale, mild, penetrating faces which one seldom sees out of Italy. She was the mother of two buxom daughters, as coarse and hard as any thing of the kind one might meet with in Herefordshire or Gloucestershire! The road from Aquapendente is of a deep heavy soil, over which the horses with difficulty dragged the carriage, The view on one side was bounded by two fine conical hills clothed to the very top with thick woods of beech and fir; and our route lay for miles over an undulating ground covered with the wild broom (growing to the size of a large shrub), among which herds of slate-coloured oxen were seen browzing luxuriously. The broom floated above them, their covering and their food, with its flexible silken branches of light green, and presented an eastern scene, extensive, soft and wild. We passed, I think, but one habitation between Aquapendente and San Lorenzo, and met but one human being, which was a Gen d’Armes! I asked our Vetturino if this dreary aspect of the country was the effect of nature or of art. He pulled a handful of earth from the hedge-side, and shewed a rich black loam, capable of every improvement. I asked in whose dominions we were, and received for answer, ‘In the Pope’s.’ San Lorenzo is a town built on the summit of a hill, in consequence of the ravages of the malaria in the old town, situated in the valley below. It looks like a large alms-house, or else like a town that has run away from the plague and itself, and stops suddenly on the brow of a hill to see if the Devil is following it. The ruins below are the most ghastly I ever saw. The scattered fragments of walls and houses are crumbling away like rotten bones, and there are holes in the walls and subterraneous passages, in which disease, like an ugly witch, seems to lurk and to forbid your entrance. Further on, and winding round the edge of the lake, you come to Bolsena. The unwholesome nature of the air from the water may be judged of from the colour of the tops of the houses, the moss on which is as yellow as the jaundice, and the grass and corn-fields on its borders are of a tawny green. The road between this and Monte-Fiascone, which you see on an eminence before you, lies through a range of gloomy defiles, and is deformed by the blackened corses of huge oak-trees, that strew the road-side, the unsightly relics of fine old woods that were cut down and half-burnt a few years ago as the haunts of bands of robbers. They plant morals in this country by rooting up trees! While the country is worth seeing, it is not safe to travel; but picturesque beauty must, of course, give place to the police. I thought, when I first saw these cadaverous trunks lying by the side of the lake, that they were the useless remains of cargoes of timber that we had purchased of the Holy See to fight its battles, and maintain the cause of social order in every part of the world! Let no English traveller stop at Monte-Fiascone (I mean at the inn outside the town), unless he would be starved and smoke-dried, but pass on to Viterbo, which is a handsome town, with the best inn on the road. You pass one night more on the road in this mode of travelling (which resembles walking a minuet, rather than striking up a country dance) at Ronciglione; and the next day from Baccano, you see rising up, in a flat, hazy plain, the dome of St. Peter’s. You proceed for some miles along a gradual descent without any object of much interest, pass the Tiber and the gate Del Popolo, and you are in Rome. When there, go any where but to Franks’s Hotel, and get a lodging, if possible, on the Via Gregoriana, which overlooks the town, and where you can feast the eye and indulge in sentiment, without being poisoned by bad air. The house of Salvator Rosa is at present let out in lodgings. I have now lived twice in houses occupied by celebrated men, once in a house that had belonged to Milton, and now in this, and find to my mortification that imagination, is entirely a thing imaginary, and has nothing to do with matter of fact, history, or the senses. To see an object of thought or fancy is just as impossible as to feel a sound or hear a smell.