“Lifts to heaven
Her diadem of towers.”
At mention of the famous lake, he scrambled down from his seat; made a rush for the window.
“Papa! is that ‘reedy Thrasymene?’ Where is ‘dark Verbenna?’”
As a reward for remembering his lesson so well, he was lifted to the paternal knee, and while the train slowly wound along the upper end of the lake, heard the story of the battle between Hannibal and Flaminius, upon the weedy banks, B. C. 217; saw the defile in which the brave consul was entrapped; where, for hours, the slaughter of the snared and helpless troops went on, until the little river we presently crossed was foul with running blood. It is Sanguinetto to this day.
The vapors of morning were lazily curling up from the lake; dark woods crowd down to the edge on one side; hills dressed in gray olive orchards border another; a bold promontory on the west is capped by an ancient tower. A monastery occupies one of the three islands that dot the surface. A light film, like the breath upon a mirror, veiled the intense blue of the sky—darkened the waters into slaty purple.
A dense fog filled the basin between the hills on the May-day when Rome’s best consul and general marched into it and to his death.
On we swept, past Perugia, capital of old Umbria, one of the twelve chiefest Etruscan cities; overcome and subjugated by the Roman power B. C. 310. It was a battle-field while Antony and Octavius contended for the mastership of Rome; was devastated by Goth, Ghibelline and Guelph; captured successively by Savoyard, Austrian, and Piedmontese. It is better known to this age than by all these events as the home of Perugino, the master of Raphael, and father of the new departure from the ancient school of painting. The view became, each moment, more novel because more Italian. The roads were scantily shaded by pollarded trees—mostly mulberry—from whose branches depended long festoons of vines, linking them together, without a break, for miles. Farms were separated by the same graceful lines of demarcation. Other fences were rare. We did not see “a piece of bad road,” or a mud-hole, in Italy. The road and bridge-builders of the world bequeathed to their posterity one legacy that has never worn out, which bids fair to last while the globe swings through space. As far as the eye could reach along the many country highways we crossed that day, the broad, smooth sweep commanded our wondering admiration. The grade from crown to sides is so nicely calculated that rain-water neither gathers in pools in the road, nor gullies the bed in running off. Vehicles are not compelled, by barbarous “turnpiking,” to keep the middle of the track, thus cutting deep ruts other wheels must follow. It is unusual, in driving, to strike a pebble as large as an egg.
The travellers upon these millennial thoroughfares were not numerous. Peasants on foot drove herds of queer black swine, small and gaunt, in comparison with our obese porkers—vicious-looking creatures, with pointed snouts and long legs. Women, returning from or going to market, had baskets of green stuff strapped upon their backs, and often children in their arms; bare-legged men in conical hats and sheepskin coats, trudged through clouds of white dust, raised by clumsy carts, to which were attached the cream-colored oxen of the Campagna. Great, patient beasts they are, the handsomest of their race, with incredibly long horns symmetrically fashioned and curved. These horns are sold everywhere in Italy as a charm against “the evil eye”—the dread of all classes.
About the middle of the afternoon we descended into the valley of the Tiber—the cleft peak of Soracte (Horace’s Soracte!) visible from afar like a rent cloud. We crossed a bridge built by Augustus; halted for a minute at the Sabine town that gave Numa Pompilius to Rome; watched, with increasing delight, the Sabine and Alban Mountains grow into shape and distinctness; gazed oftenest and longest—as who does not?—at the Dome, faint, for a while, as a bubble blown into the haze of the horizon—more strongly and nobly defined as we neared our goal; crossed the Anio, upon which Romulus and Remus had been set adrift; made a wide détour that, apparently, took us away from, not toward the city, and showed us the long reaches of the aqueducts, black and high, “striding across the Campagna,” in the settling mists of evening. Then ensued an odd jumble of ruins and modern, unfinished buildings, an alternation, as incongruous, of strait and spacious streets, and we steamed slowly into the station. It is near the Baths of Diocletian, and looks like a very audacious interloper by daylight.