FROM ROME TO ANCONA.
In our road hither we passed through what remains of Veia, once so esteemed and liked by the Romans, that they had a good mind, after they had driven Brennus back, to change the seat of empire and remove it there; but a belief in augury prevented it, and that event was put off till Constantine, seduced by beauties of situation, made the fatal change, and broke the last thread which had so long bound tight together the fasces of Roman sway. We did not taste the Vinum Veientanum mentioned by Martial and Horace, but trotted on to Civita Castellana, where Camillus rejected the base offer of the schoolmaster of Fescennium; a good picture of his well-judged punishment is still preserved in the Capitol.
The first night of our journey was spent at Otricoli, where I heard the cuckoo sing in a shriller sharper note than he does in England. I had never listened to him before since I left my own country, and his song alone would have convinced me I was no longer in it. Porta di Fuga at Spoleta gates, commemorating poor Hannibal’s precipitate retreat after the battle of Thrasymene, may perhaps detain us a while upon this Flaminian way; it was not Titus Flaminius though, whose negotiations ruined Hannibal for ever, that gave name to the road, but Caius of the same family; they had been Flamens formerly, and were therefore called Flaminius, when drawn up by accident or merit into notice; the same custom still obtains with us: we have Dr. Priestley and Mr. Parsons.
Narni Bridge cost us some trouble in clambering, and more in disputing whether it was originally an aqueduct or a bridge—or both. It is a magnificent structure, irregularly built, the arches of majestic height, but all unequal. There was water enough under it when I was there to take off the impropriety apparent to many of turning so large an arch over so small a stream. Yet notwithstanding that the river was much swelled by long continuance of the violent rains which lately so overflowed the city of Rome, assisted by the Tyber, that people went about the streets in boats, notwithstanding the snows tumbled down from the surrounding mountains, must have much increased the quantity, and lowered the colour of the river:—We found it even now yellow with brimstone, and well deserving the epithet of sulphureous Nar.
The next day’s drive carried us forward to Terni, where a severe concussion of the earth suffered only three nights since, kept all the little town in terrible alarm; the houses were deserted, the churches crowded, supplications and processions in every street, and people singing all night to the Virgin under our window.
Well! the next morning we hired horses for our gentlemen; a little cart, not inconvenient at all, for my maid and me; and scrambled over many rocks to view the far-famed waterfall, through a sweet country, pleasingly intersected with hedges and planted with vines; the ground finely undulated, and rising by gradations of hill till the eye loses itself among the lofty Appenines; surly as they seem, and one would think impervious; but against human art and human ambition, the boundary of rocks and roaring seas lift their proud heads in vain. Man renders them subservient to his imperial will, and forces them to facilitate, not impede his dominion; while ocean’s self supports his ships, and the mountain yields marble to decorate his palace.
This is however no moment and no place to begin a panegyric upon the power of man, and of his skill to subjugate the works of nature, where the people are trembling at its past, and dreading its future effects.
The cascade we came to see is formed by the fall of a whole river, which here abruptly drops into the Nar, from a height so prodigious, and by a course so unbroken, that it is difficult to communicate, so as to receive the idea: for no eye can measure the depth of the precipice, such is the tossing up of foam from its bottom; and the terrible noise heard long before one arrives so stunned and confounded all my wits at once, that many minutes passed before I observed the horror in our conductors, who coming with us, then first perceived how the late earthquake had twisted the torrent out of its proper channel, and thrown it down another neighbouring rock, leaving the original bed black and deserted, as a dismal proof of the concussion’s force.