There they lie, bare and grim before us. Poor bones, insulted by a Pope, buried and then unburied, and now laid out for any man to look at! There is a note of pathos in the sight, which the inscription does not lessen.
Hospes lege et luge.
Perusiæ natum Montonium me exulem excepit.
Mars patriam Umbriam et Capuam mihi subegit.
Roma paruit Italia theatrum spectator orbis fuit.
At Aquila cadentem risit quem patria lugens brevi hac urna tegit.
Eheu! Mars extulit, Mors substulit.
Abi.
A portrait of Braccio hangs above his coffin—a strong pugnacious countenance, differing quite from his other portrait in the Confraternità di San Francesco. On the opposite wall is a picture of Niccolò Piccinino.
To close these notes on the museum we would mention another private museum in Perugia full of extraordinary interest; that of Professore Giuseppe Bellucci, in the Via Cavour.
Prof. Bellucci has made a special study of the people who preceded the Etruscans in Umbria, and, after years of careful search and indefatigable energy, has accumulated a grand collection of objects belonging to the stone age, and to the earliest settlers on the hills. Arrow heads, battleaxes from Trasimene, pottery and ornaments of infinite variety, are carefully stored and arranged in the top rooms of one of the most charming of the old Perugian palaces; also a surprising collection of amulets against witches and the evil eye, of which Prof. Bellucci has made a special study. This museum can be visited by anyone who is interested in the subject, and its owner is always willing to show it.[107]
The Tomb of the Volumnii.
About three miles from Perugia, down at the foot of one of the last hills which fall into the valley of the Tiber, a mysterious necropolis of Perusia Etrusca was discovered many years ago on the property of Count Baglioni. It was a big necropolis full of innumerable urns of more or less artistic interest, and the land about the hill seemed honeycombed with small vaults holding their respective sarcophagi and ashes.
Some time later—so tradition tells us—whilst a peasant was driving his oxen over a field in this same place one of the oxen fell forward. When the man came up to see what had happened, he found that the creature had stumbled through the stones of a great arch which covered a hitherto unsuspected subterranean passage.[108]