SORACTE.
But it is in riding that one grows to feel most familiar with the Tiber and all his Roman children, whether it be strolling somewhat sulkily in a line with his banks by the Via Flaminia or the Via Cassia, impatient to get away from their stones and dust to the soft, springing turf; or hailing him from afar as a guide after losing one's self in the endless undulations of the open country; or cantering over daffodil-sheeted meadows beside the Anio at the foot of the grassy heights on which Antemnæ stood; or threading one's way doubtfully among the ravines which intersect the course of the little Cremera as one goes to Veii.
VEII, FROM THE CAMPAGNA.
The last is a most beautiful and interesting expedition, for, what with the distance—more than twelve miles—and the difficulty of finding the way, it is quite an enterprise. As one turns his horse's head away from the river, off the high-road, to the high grassy flats, the whole Campagna seems to lie before one like a vast table-land, with nothing between one's self and Soracte as he lifts his heavy shoulder from the plain—not half hidden by intervening mountains, as from some points of view, but majestic and isolated, thirty miles away to the north. But here, as in every other part of the Campagna, one cannot go far without finding hillocks and hollows, long steep slopes and sudden little dells, and, stranger still, unsuspected tracts of woodland, for the general effect of the Roman landscape is quite treeless. So there is a few miles' gallop across the trackless turf, sometimes asking the way of a solitary shepherd, who looms up against the sky like a tower, sometimes following it by faint landmarks, few and far between, of which we have been told, and hard to find in that waste, until we pass a curious little patriarchal abode shaped like a wigwam, where, in the midst of these wide pastures dwells a herdsman surrounded by his family, his cattle, his dogs, his goats and his fowls—the beautiful animals of the Campagna, long-haired, soft-eyed, rich-colored, like the human children of the soil. Then we strike the Cremera, and exploring begins among its rocky gullies, up and down which the spirited, sure-footed horses scramble like chamois. Thick woods of cork-oak clothe their sides, and copses of a deciduous tree which I never saw in its summer dress of green, but which keeps its dead leaves all through the winter, a full suit of soft, pale brown contrasting with the dark evergreens. Among these woods grow all the wild-flowers of the long Roman spring from January to May—flowers that I never saw in bloom at the same time anywhere else. On banks overcanopied by faded boughs nodded myriads of snowdrops; farther on we held our horses' heads well up as they slipped, almost sitting, down the damp rocky clefts of a gorge whose sides were purple with violets, mingling their delicious odor, the sweetest and most sentimental of perfumes, with the fresh, geranium-like scent of the cyclamen, which here and there flung back its delicate pinkish petals like one amazed: then came acres of anemones—not our pale wind-shaken flower, but brave asters of half a dozen superb kinds. Up and down these passes we forced our way through interlacing branches, which drooped too low, until we had crossed the ridges on either side the Cremera, and gained the valley at the head of which is Isola Farnese, the rock-fortress supposed to occupy the site of the citadel of Etruscan Veii. It is not really an island, in spite of its name; only a bold peninsula, round whose base two rivulets flow and nearly meet. It is called a village, and so it is, with quite a population, but the great courtyard of the fifteenth-century castle contains them all, and the huts, pig-pens, kennels and coops which they seem to inhabit indiscriminately. Except where the bluff overlooks the valley, everything is closed and shut in by rocks and gorges, through one of which a lovely waterfall drips from a covert of boughs and shrubbery and wreathing ferns and creepers into a little stream, which with musical clamor rushes at a picturesque old mill: through another the road from the castle passes through a narrow issue to the outer world. And this stranded and shipwrecked fortress in the midst of so wild a scene is all that exists to mark where Veii stood, the powerful city which kept Rome at bay for ten years, and fell at length by stratagem! Its site was forgotten for nearly two thousand years, but in this century the discovery of some tombs revealed the secret.
