A short walk down a steep narrow street beneath an archway led us out of the low-browed passage of the Etruscan Porta Susanna on to the wall itself. This rises up directly from La Cupa, as the indentation which the valley here makes is called. The wall follows the curves of the hills, always keeping close to the edge of the descent, and, as I have already said, where an angle is sharply turned a bold round tower stands out sentinel-wise against the blue sky.
PORTA SUSANNA
Below the wall the fertile dell was literally covered with vines, olives, fig and mulberry trees; plots of blue-green cabbage and shining lettuce covered bare spaces of brown earth. In winter a torrent flows through the Cupa.
To-day the long range of hill on the left looked red-brown, variegated with green and grey; behind its shoulder a more distant mountain showed opal; tall regular houses of the ancient city rose one behind another on the right, and the last brick tower, that of the Scalzi, rose above them all.
The wall makes here an inward angle before it goes out far away westward to another point of the star-shaped hill, and here the view becomes more beautiful. The outlines of the mountains cross, and reveal through the openings yet another ridge behind, and this farther ridge looks a delicate opal, while the sunbeams become less powerful. On the right the hills stretched in two purple undulating lines, between them a rosy vapour moved slowly, deepening in tint as it rose towards the orange-coloured clouds. Masses of grey now sent up warnings from below, and partly obscured the rosy vapour; southward the grey took a lurid tinge, and across it floated pale phantom-like cloudlets. The far-off hill, as we looked southward, had become a purple-blue, while the town in the space between climbed upwards in terraces, the houses bowered in vines and garden blossoms.
This is not so extended a prospect as some others that are to be had from the walls of Perugia, but I am inclined to consider it one of the most interesting, from the double view it offers of the town and of the quaint formation of the steep-sided, triangular valley, with its mysterious depth of vegetation below.
We kept along the wall for some distance, then our road led us away from it between old stone garden walls, supports for vines and figs, and brilliant orange begonia blossoms which peep above them. Quaint side-streets looked tempting on our left. Going up one of these, we found a portion of Etruscan wall with an opening in it of the same period of stone-work.
The street beyond mounted steeply to where a brick arch spanned it: on one side a flight of broken steps led up to a tall house above the wall; a loggia, corbelled out from between the house and the grey pointed arch, was filled with charming foliage and flowers; an iron crane projected from the balcony over a brick water-tank beside the broken steps. The variety of form and colour was most vivid against the shadow within the arch; its two projecting imposts were massive slabs of travertine, and beside one of these, gleaming out of the shadow, was a little shrine with a nosegay of freshly-gathered flowers.