Selling the famous long-horned cattle of Siena outside the walls
Italian peasants returning from market-day in the communal village
Weeks before, I had given up all hope of making clear to Italians our military system. The institution of compulsory service has been so woven into their picture of life since infancy that barely a man of them has the power of imagining an existence without this omnipresent fate hanging over his head. Whatever may be the attitude of the educated Italian towards it, military service is regarded by the laboring class as a curse from which there is no escape. We are accustomed to say that nothing is sure but death and taxes. The Italian would include conscription.
Two days after leaving Siena, I turned out in the early morning from Viterbo, just fifty miles north of Rome. Strange to say, in measure as I approached the capital the less inhabited became the countryside. For hours beyond Viterbo the highway wound over low mountains between whispering forests, in utter solitude. Where the woods ended, stretched many another weary mile with never a hut by the wayside. Only an occasional shepherd, clad in sheepskins, sat among his flocks on a hillside, and gave life to a landscape that suggested the wilds of Wyoming or the vast steppes of Siberia.
The sun was touching the western horizon as I traversed a rugged village, but with Rome so close at hand I pressed on. The hamlet, however, appeared to be the last habitation of man along the highway. The sun sank in an endless morass, amid the whispering of great fields of reeds and grasses, and the dismal croaking of frogs. Twilight faded to black night. Far off, ahead, the reflection of the Eternal City lighted up the sky; yet hours of tramping seemed to bring the glow not a yard nearer.
Forty-one miles I had covered when three hovels rose up by the wayside. One was an inn, but the keeper growled out some protest and slammed the door in my face. I took refuge and broke an all-day fast in a wine-shop patronized by traveling teamsters, one of whom offered me a bed on his load of straw in the adjoining stable.
He rose at daybreak, and for the first few miles the dawdling pace of his mules was fully fast enough for my maltreated legs. Little by little I forged ahead. The deserted highway led across a bleak moorland, rounded a slight eminence, and brought me face to face with the once center of the civilized world.
To the right and left, on low hills, stood large modern buildings, from which the mass of houses sloped down and covered the intervening plains, broken only by the Tiber winding its way through the dull, grey stretch of habitations. Here and there a dome or steeple reflected the morning sun, but towering high above the mass, dwarfing all else by comparison, stood the vast dome of St. Peter’s. Close before me began an unbroken suburb on both sides of the route; suggesting that the modern Roman builds only as far from the center of the city as his view of it remains unimpaired. Countless multitudes have caught their first glimpse of Rome from this low hilltop. Before the days of railways, pilgrims journeyed from Civita Vecchia, on the coast, by this same road—millions of them on foot, and entered the city by this massive western gateway. Through the portal poured a steady stream of peasants, on wagons, carts, donkeys, and afoot, checked by officers of the octroi, who ran long lances through bales and baskets of farm produce. I joined the surging bedlam and was swept within the walls.