“Tivoli, March 22.—I have been greatly enjoying a little mountain tour with Lady Castletown and Mrs. Lewis Wingfield. On Wednesday we spent the day in the villas Aldobrandini and Mondragone at Frascati, and the next morning had the most charming drive by Monte Porzio and Monte Compatri, chiefly through the desolate chestnut forests, to Palestrina. It was the fair of Genazzano, and the whole road was most animated, such crowds of peasants in their gayest costumes and prettiest ornaments. At beautiful Olevano we had just time to go to the little inn and visit my friend of last year, Peppina Baldi. It was a tiring journey thence to Subiaco after such a long day, and we only passed the worst precipices by daylight, so it was quite dark when we reached Subiaco, where we found rooms with difficulty, as, quite unwittingly, we had arrived on the eve of the great festa of S. Benedetto. Most delighted we were, however, of course, and most picturesque and beautiful was the early pilgrimage, with bands of music and singing, up the stony mountain paths. Lady Castletown travels with a second carriage for her maids, so prices naturally rise at first sight of so grand a princess.... On the way here we diverged to the farm of Horace in the Licenza valley, all marvellously unaltered—the brook, the meadows, the vines, the surrounding hills and villages, still just as he described them eighteen hundred years ago. It is a wonderful country, one lives so entirely in the past.”
I have seldom enjoyed Tivoli more than in this spring of 1874. It was then that, sitting in the scene I describe, I wrote the paragraph of “Days near Rome” which I insert here.
“Nothing can exceed the loveliness of the views from the road which leads from Tivoli by the chapel of S. Antonio to the Madonna di Quintiliolo. On the opposite height rises the town with its temples, its old houses and churches clinging to the edge of the cliffs, which are overhung with such a wealth of luxuriant vegetation as is almost indescribable; and beyond, beneath the huge pile of building known as the Villa of Maecenas, the thousand noisy cataracts of the Cascatelle leap forth beneath the old masonry, and sparkle and dance and foam through the green—and all this is only the foreground to vast distances of dreamy campagna, seen through the gnarled hoary stems of grand old olive-trees—rainbow-hued with every delicate tint of emerald and amethyst, and melting into sapphire, where the solitary dome of St. Peter’s rises, invincible by distance, over the level line of the horizon.