Viterbo: Via di S. Pellegrino.
Here the Middle Ages come to life again; nor are the people themselves greatly changed, for the women scrub their linen at ancient fountains, and the men work in the dark bassi at their humble trades; here we saw a white-haired dame plying her distaff in a little vine arbour at the head of her balcony staircase, and there we met a man coming from the bakery with a plank of bread, three and a half feet long on his head. As in Orvieto, there were hooded owls on stands outside the doors to give another mediaeval touch, and from the upper windows women looked down with the languid curiosity of the Latin races. In the smaller streets there were dirt and squalor unimaginable, broken fruit and flies, unspeakable smells and the noise of screaming children, but in their midst were serene-eyed mothers, with the mysterious calm in their faces which has made the Italian woman the most subtle type of Madonna, who seemed in some strange fashion to be exalted above the impure atmosphere in which they lived, like the crimson garofani, or the long sprays of Morning Glory which flowered in their mediaeval windows. Though there was poverty it was the poverty of the country rather than the destitution of a city, just as the sheets and towels which fluttered from loggia and arch and balustrade were threadbare in spite of their fine embroidery and rich insertions of hand-made lace.
It was through these streets that we saw the vintage coming in through the ancient Porta San Pietro under the shadow of the magnificent palace which was the home of Donna Olimpia Pamphili, the infamous sister-in-law of Innocent X., just as it was brought in the days when the Vetus Urbs was a sanctuary for the princes of the Church.
ONE OF VITERBO'S MANY FOUNTAINS.
Una giornata di tempo bello we drove across the swelling plains of Etruria to the ruined city of Ferentinum. It was the happiest of days, the last, though we did not know it then, of our careless pilgrimages, for the next morning came autumn with cold winds and rain, and we were forced to hurry after our luggage which had already gone to Rome. But on that day there was a special beauty in the rolling plain which once was peopled by the vanished cities of Etruria, and now is so like the Campagna with its ruined tombs and scattered trees and lonely farmsteads. Here we found the same enchantment that we remembered in the fields of Rome—the silence, the gnats hanging in the air in glinting masses as though they danced in an invisible net, the larks singing in the blue distance, the song of a ploughman hidden in a fold of the plain. From our feet stretched the dusty road losing itself in the valleys and cresting the hills beyond. Far ahead rose Montefiascone with its great dome soaring above its ilex wood, and to the right, blue and mysterious in the early morning sunlight, was the dark Ciminian Mount, misty with spreading columns of smoke as though the shepherds or the woodcutters within the precincts of its haunted forest were offering incense to the Gods.
And once we came upon a dozen yoke of oxen ploughing the heavy brown earth, with the sunlight shining on their smoking flanks and glistening on the freshly-turned clods of mould behind them. How little it has altered, this immemorial plain, since the days when Rome feared to plunge into the dark recesses of the Ciminian forest, and the Lucumos of Etruria rioted their energies away in the little cities below the mighty fane of Voltumna! For if mankind has changed, Nature is still the same; those rolling oxen are on the tombs of Thebes; the ancient poets have sung of these dark woods and scented plains, and the husbandmen at work!