| PAGE |
|
| Arezzo |
1 |
| Cortona |
12 |
| Perugia |
23 |
| The Volumnian Tomb |
34 |
| Præ-Franciscan Assisi |
46 |
| Spello |
58 |
| Veii |
67 |
| Fidenæ |
77 |
| Antemnæ |
86 |
| Ostia |
96 |
| The Alban Mount |
108 |
| Cori |
123 |
| Norba |
131 |
| Segni |
150 |
| ITER AD BRUNDISIUM |
|
| I. |
Anagni |
165 |
| II. |
Ferentino |
185 |
| III. |
Alatri |
206 |
|
|
| IV. |
From Alatri to Capua |
221 |
| V. |
A Church by the Camp of Hannibal |
234 |
| VI. |
A Glimpse of Samnium |
251 |
| VII. |
Benevento |
264 |
| VIII. |
Norman Buildings in Apulia |
281 |
| IX. |
Bari |
295 |
The city of Mæcenas, and of a whole
crowd of famous men of later
times, shows no outward signs of being
much frequented by travellers. There
is some difficulty there in getting so
much as an Italian newspaper, and,
though excellent photographs have
been taken of some of the chief buildings,
they must be sought for at Florence;
they are not to be bought at
Arezzo. Yet the old Etruscan city has
many attractions, among them surely
the singular cleanness of its streets,
and, above all, that clear and pure air
which is thought to have had something
to do with nourishing the genius
of so many of its citizens in so many
different ways. Perhaps, on the whole,
Arezzo does not suffer from not having
yet put on the cosmopolitan character
of some of its neighbours. And if the
city does not, either as Arretium or as
Arezzo, stand forth in the first rank of
Italian cities, still it has a long history
under both forms of its name. If,
again, its buildings do not rank with
those of Pisa or Lucca, still there is
quite enough both in the general
aspect of the city, and in some particular
objects within its walls, to
claim a day or two's sojourn from any
one who is not eager to rush from
Florence to Rome as fast as the so-called
express train can carry him.
Arezzo, as to its physical site, holds
a middle position between cities which
sit perched on a high hill-top like
Fiesole, and cities which, like Florence,
lie flat or nearly so on the banks
of a great river. It has its river, if we
may give that name to the mere brook
which presently loses itself in the
Chiana, as the Chiana soon loses itself
in the Arno. The river too has a
bridge, but both river and bridge have
to be sought for; they form no important
points in the general aspect of the
city. The bridge at Arezzo is not one
of those to which we instinctively go
the first thing to take a general view
of the city as a whole. The hill is a
more real thing, as any one will say who
climbs some of its steeper streets. Still
it is one of those hills which seem to
borrow height and steepness from the
fact of being built upon. If it were
covered with green grass, it would
simply pass as one of several small
hills which break the flat of the rich
plain, girded in on all sides by higher
mountains, which rise, in February at
least, into vast snowy heights in the
further distance. Still Arezzo has distinctly
the character of a hill city, not
of a river city; the hill counts for a
good deal, while the river counts for
nothing. The best points for a general
view from below will be found on the
town wall, a little way to the left of the
railway station; while to look down
on Arezzo we must climb to the castle
in the eastern corner of the city, whose
Medicean fortifications look strong
enough without, but which, within,
has gardens and fig trees level with
the walls, and rabbits running about
at large among them. The castle
therefore forms no special object in
the general view; it simply passes as
a more marked part of the line of the
city walls. These last remain in their
whole circuit, except where they have
been broken down to make the approach
to the railway; surely a new
gate would have been a better way of
compassing this object. A town wall
standing free, as those of Arezzo stand
in nearly their whole range, is always
a striking object, and one whose circuit
it is pleasant and instructive to
make. And it has a special interest
in some cities, of which Arezzo is one,
which have, so to speak, a show side.
One side lies open to the world; the
ancient roads, the modern railway,
approach it; the city dies away into
the country by gradually descending
suburbs. On the other side, the wall
suddenly parts the inhabited town,
sometimes from actual desolation, at
all events from open fields; the hill
rises sheer above whatever lies beyond
it. So it is with the north-eastern side
of Arezzo, if we go behind the cathedral
and the castle; we have not fully
taken in the lie of the city without
taking this walk to its rear. Still we
must not look to the walls of Arezzo
for the special interest of some other
walls. They will not give us either
Roman or Etruscan blocks, nor yet the
picturesque outline of mediæval towers
and gateways. The walls put on their
present aspect in Medicean times, and
over one of the gates we see an inscription
which illustrates one stage of a
tyrant's progress. The first avowed
sovereign Cosmo appears as "Duke
of Florence and Siena." He had inherited
one enslaved commonwealth;
he had himself enslaved another;
meanwhile he was waiting for the fitting
reward of such exploits in the
higher rank and more sounding title
of a Grand Duke of Tuscany.
In the general view of Arezzo there
can be hardly said to be any one dominant
object. If the castle made any
show, it and the cathedral church,
standing nearly on the same level on
the highest ground in the town, would
stand well side by side. As it is, the
body of the duomo is the prominent
feature in the view. But it is hardly
a dominant feature. It is the only
building whose body shows itself, but
it rises among a crowd of towers,
ecclesiastical and municipal, and one
of them, the great campanile of St.
Mary della Pieve, though the body of
its church does not show itself far
below, is a distinct rival to the cathedral,
and utterly dwarfs its small and
modern, though not ungraceful, octagon
tower. These two churches form
the two greatest architectural objects
in Arezzo. The municipal element
does not show itself so largely as might
be looked for. The town-house is
there, and the town-tower, and that
hard by the duomo; but they do not
hold, even comparatively, anything
like the same position as their fellows
in the great Florentine piazza. Perhaps
this is not wonderful in a city which
was so largely Ghibelin, and whose
most noted historical character was a
fighting bishop. Guy Tarlati, bishop
and lord of Arezzo, keeps—though
not on its old site—his splendid tomb
in the duomo, on which are graven the
names and likenesses of the castles
which he won, and how King Lewis
of Bavaria took the Lombard crown at
his hands. But Arezzo has little or
nothing to show in the way of houses
or palaces or of street arcades. Its
most striking building besides the
churches is the front of that called the
Fraternità dei Laici, in the open sloping
space which seems to mark the
forum of Arretium. This is a work
in the mixed style of the fourteenth
century, but so rich and graceful in its
detail as to disarm criticism. Within,
it contains the public library and
museum. This last has much to show
in many ways; most striking of all,
because thoroughly local, are the huge
tusks and other remains of the fossil
elephants and other vast beasts of bygone
days. The valley of the Chiana
is full of them. Naturally enough, in
the early days of science, when elephants'
bones were no longer thought
to be those of giants, they were set
down as relics of the Gætulian beasts
of Hannibal.
Something may be picked up here
and there in the other churches of
Arezzo; but it is Santa Maria della
Pieve which is the real object of study.
The duomo is absolutely without outline;
it is a single body with nothing
to break it, and nothing to finish it at
either end. But its proportions within
come somewhat nearer to Northern
ideas than is common in the Italian
Gothic, and its apse specially reveals
the German hand to which tradition
attributes the building. The church
of La Pieve is of a higher order. It
has real shape within and without.
Its four arms should support a cupola,
only the cupola has never been finished;
the apse is in the very best
form of the Italian Romanesque; the
west front is called a copy of Pisa;
but neither its merits nor its defects
seem borrowed from that model. Part
of it is sham, which nothing at Pisa is,
while the small arcades stand out free,
as at Lucca, but not at Pisa. The
front is a wonderful display of column
capitals of all kinds, from the Corinthian
column used up again in its
lowest range to the fantastic devices
of the small ranges above them. The
arch and the entablature are both
used; so they are in the apse: so they
are within. For the choir has a real
triforium, and that triforium shows
this strange falling back on the construction
of the Greek. The arches
below are round; those which should
support the cupola, as well as those of
the nave, are pointed, the latter rising
from columns of prodigious height.
The internal effect is like nothing else;
it is quite un-Italian; it is as little like
anything English or French; the
arches, but not the columns, suggest
the memory of Aquitaine. The south
side has been rebuilt. Perhaps the
work was physically needful: but it
has involved the destruction of the substructure
of the ancient building on the
site of which the church stands. The
columns in the west front seem to be
the only remains of Arretium as distinguished
from Arezzo. The "Tyrrhena
regum progenies" have here left
but small traces behind them.
From Arezzo the next stage will
naturally be to the hill on whose
height
... Cortona lifts to heaven
Her diadem of towers.
If the journey be made on a market or
fair day, the space between the walls
and the station at Arezzo may be seen
crowded with white oxen, suggesting
the thought of triumphs and triumphal
sacrifices. Their race, it was said,
prayed to the gods that Marcus and
Julian might not win victories which
would lead to their destruction.
And the prayer seems to have been
answered, as the breed specially connected
with Clitumnus has clearly not
died out, even by the banks of Clanis.
The journey is not a long one; yet, if
we had time to see everything, we
might well wish to break it, as we pass
by the hill of Castiglione Fiorentino,
with its walls and towers. That strong
and stern hill-fortress comes in well
between Arezzo and Cortona. Arezzo
covers a hill, but it can hardly be said
to stand on a hill-top; Castiglione distinctly
does stand on a hill-top; Cortona
sits enthroned on a height which
it would hardly be straining language
to speak of as a mountain. We have
now come to a site of the oldest class,
the stronghold on the height, like Akrokorinthos
and the Larissa of Argos.
But at Argos and Corinth the mountain-fortress
became, at a later stage,
the citadel of the younger city which
grew up at the mountain's foot. But
at Cortona, as at greater Perugia, the
city still abides on the height; it has
never come down into the plain. So
it has remained at Laon; so it has become
at Girgenti, where the vast lower
space of the later Akragas is forsaken,
and the modern town has shrunk up
within the lines of the ancient acropolis.
From the ground below Cortona
we look up to a city like those of old,
great and fenced up to heaven; the
"diadem of towers" is there still,
though it is now made up of a group
of towers, ecclesiastical, municipal,
and military, none of them of any account
in itself, but each of which joins
with its fellows to make up an effective
whole. At Cortona indeed, as at
Argos and Corinth, there is an upper
and a lower city, and the upper city
is pretty well forsaken. But while at
Argos and Corinth the lower city
stands in the plain, and the acropolis
soars far above it, at Cortona the lower
city itself stands so high up the hill
that it is only when we reach it that
we fully understand that there is a
higher city still. The site itself belongs
so thoroughly to the oldest days
of our European world that there is a
certain kind of satisfaction in finding
that the main interest of the place belongs
to those oldest days. We are well
pleased that everything of later times
is of quite a secondary character, and
that the distinctive character of Cortona
is to be the city of the Etruscan walls.
In truth, a certain degree of wonder
is awakened by the fact that Cortona
exists at all. It would have been by
no means amazing if we had found
only its ruins, as on so many other old-world
sites for which later times have
found no use. Great in its earliest
days, foremost among the Etruscan
cities of the mountains, Cortona has
never been great in any later age. As
a Roman city and colony it was of
so little account that, even in Italy,
where bishops are so thick upon the
ground, it did not become a bishopric
till the fourteenth century. Just at
that time came its short period of anything
like importance among the cities
of mediæval Italy. Sold to Florence
early in the fifteenth century, it has
ever since followed the fortunes of the
ruling city. Yet through all these
changes Cortona has managed to live
on, though we can hardly say to flourish.
It still keeps the character of a
city, though a small and mean one,
inhabited by a race of whom the
younger sort seem to have nothing to
do but to run after the occasional visitor.
One ragged urchin offers to accompany
him to the cathedral; another
persists in following him round nearly
the whole circuit of the ancient walls.
This last is too bad; a walk round the
walls of Cortona is emphatically one
of those things which are best enjoyed
in one's own company.
As an Italian city which has lived,
though in rather a feeble way, through
the regular stages of Roman colony
and mediæval commonwealth, Cortona
has of course its monuments which
record those periods of its being. There
are some small fragments of Roman
work, but nothing that can be called a
Roman building. There is a crowd of
churches and monasteries, but none of
any great architectural value, though
some contain works of importance in
the history of painting. It perhaps
marks the position of Cortona as a
comparatively modern bishopric that
its cathedral church is in no sort the
crowning building of the city. The
duomo stands about half-way up the
height within the town, on a corner of
the walls. Its elegant Renaissance
interior has been already spoken of;
it seems to have supplanted a Romanesque
building the columns of which
may have been used again. The point
in the upper city where we should
have looked for the duomo is occupied
by the Church of St. Margaret, that
is, Margaret of Cortona, described over
her portal as "pœnitens Margarita,"
marked off thereby alike from the virgin
of Antioch and from the matron
of Scotland. The municipal buildings
are not remarkable, though one wall
of the Palazzo Pretorio must be a
treasure-house for students of Italian
heraldry, thickly coated as it is with
the arms of successive podestas. Of
private palaces the steep and narrow
streets contain one or two; but it is
not on its street architecture that Cortona
can rest its claim to fame. From
the lower city, with its labyrinth of
streets, we may climb to the acropolis.
Here, around the Church of St. Margaret,
all seems desolate. The Franciscan
convent on the slope below it
lies in ruins—not an usual state for
an Italian building. The castle above,
fenced in by its ditch, seems as desolate
as everything around, save the
new or renewed fabric of St. Margaret's.
This height is the point of view
to which the visitor to Cortona will be
first taken, if he listens to local importunity.
A noble outlook it is; but
the traveller can find points of view
equally noble in the course of the work
which should be done first of all—that
of compassing the mighty wall which
is the thing that makes Cortona what
it is.
The process of going to the back of
the city, which may be done in some
measure at Arezzo, may be done in all
its fulness at Cortona. Happily, very
nearly the whole wall can be compassed
without, and in by far the
greater part of its course more or less
of the old Etruscan rampart remains.
In many places the mighty stones still
stand to no small height, patched of
course and raised with work of later
times, but still standing firmly fixed
as they were laid when Cortona stood
in the first rank among the cities of
the Rasena. Not that there is reason
to attribute any amazing antiquity to
these walls. We must remember that
the Etruscan cities kept their local
freedom till the days of Sulla, and that
some Etruscan works are later than
some Roman works. The masonry is by
no means of the rough and early kind;
yet the one remaining gate, unluckily
blocked, is square-headed, and might
almost have stood at Mykênê. On the
highest point, the hindermost point,
the wildest and most desolate point,
where, though just outside an inhabited
city, we feel as if we were in a
land forsaken of men, the Etruscan
wall has largely given way to the
mediæval fortress whose present aspect
dates from Medicean days. But
it has given way only to leave one of
the grandest pieces of the whole wall
standing as an outpost in the rear of
the city, overhanging the steepest
point of the whole hill. The Etruscan
wall, the Medicean castle, one seeming
to stand as forsaken and useless as the
other, form a summary of the history
of Cortona in stone and brick.
From the walls we may well turn to
the Museum, to see the tombs and the
other relics of the men who reared
them. Pre-eminent among them, the
glory of the Cortonese collection, as
the Chimæra is the glory of the Florentine
collection, is a magnificent
bronze lamp, wrought with endless
mythological figures. Near it stands
the painting of a female head, which
we might at first take for the work of
Renaissance hands, and in which those
who are skilled in such matters profess
to recognize the existing type of Cortonese
beauty. The painting however
dates from the days when Cortona
was still Etruscan. Perugia keeps her
ancient inhabitants themselves, in the
shape at least of their skulls and
skeletons. At Cortona the remote
mothers, it may be, of her present
people live more vividly in the form
of the Muse whose features were
copied, it may be nineteen hundred
years back, from the living countenance
of one of them.
The hill-city of Perugia supplies an
instructive contrast with the hill-city
of Cortona. The obvious contrast
in the matter of modern prosperity and
importance is an essential part of the
comparative history. Cortona has
through all ages lived on, but not
much more than lived on. Perugia
has, through all ages, kept, if not a
place in the first rank of Italian cities,
yet at any rate a high place in the
second rank. She never had the European
importance of Venice, Genoa,
Florence, Naples, and Milan, or of
Pisa in her great days. But in the
purely Italian history of all ages
Perugia keeps herself before our eyes,
as a city of mark, from the wars of
the growing Roman commonwealth
down to the struggle which in our
own days freed her from a second
Roman yoke. In the civil wars of the
old Rome, in the wars between the
Goth and the New Rome, in the long
tale of the troubled greatness of mediæval
Italy, Etruscan Perusia, Roman
Augusta Perusia, mediæval and modern
Perugia, holds no mean place.
And the last act in the long drama is
not the least notable. It sounds like
a bit out of Plutarch's "Life of Timoleôn,"
when we read or when we
remember how, twice within our own
days, little more than twenty and
thirty years back, the fortress of the
tyrants was swept away, as the great
symbolic act which crowned the winning
back of freedom in its newest
form. When a city has such a tale
as this to tell, we do not expect, we
do not wish, that its only or its chief
interest should gather round the monuments
of an early and almost præhistoric
day of greatness. At Cortona
we are glad that things Etruscan are
undoubtedly uppermost. At Perugia
we are glad that things Etruscan are
there to be seen in abundance; but
we also welcome the monuments of
Roman days, pagan and Christian;
we welcome the streets, the churches,
and palaces of mediæval times, and
even the works of recent times indeed.
The Place of Victor Emmanuel with
the modern buildings which crown
it, supplanting the fortress of Pope
Paul, as that supplanted the houses,
churches, and palaces of earlier times,
is as much a part of the history of
Perugia as the Arch of Augustus or
the Etruscan wall itself.
The difference between the abiding
greatness of Perugia and the abiding
littleness of Cortona is no doubt largely
due to the physical difference of their
sites. Both are hill-cities, mountain-cities,
if we will; but they sit upon
hills of quite different kinds. The hill
of Perugia is better fitted for growth
than the hill of Cortona. Cortona sits
on a single hill-top. Perugia sits, not
indeed on seven hills, but on a hill
of complicated outline, which throws
out several—possibly seven—outlying,
mostly lower, spurs, with deep valleys
between them. The Etruscan and
Roman city took in only the central
height, itself of a very irregular shape
and at some points very narrow. The
lower and outlying spurs were taken
within the city in later times. Hence
it is only in a small part of their circuit
that the original walls remain the
present external walls; it is only on
part of its western side that we can at
all go behind Perugia. But the lower
city is still thoroughly a hill-city. The
hill of Perugia is lower than the hill
of Cortona, while the city of Perugia
is vastly greater than the city of Cortona.
But Perugia is as far removed
as Cortona from coming down into the
plain. On the little hill of Arezzo
such a process could happen, and it
has happened. Not so with the loftier
seats of its neighbours. Cortona is not
likely to grow; Perugia very likely
may. But it will take a long period
of downward growth before unbroken
dwellings of men stretch all the way
from its railway station to its municipal
palace.
At Perugia, as becomes its history,
no one class of monuments draws to
itself exclusive, or even predominant,
attention. Perhaps, on the whole, the
municipal element is the most striking.
The vast pile of the public palace, its
grand portal, its bold ranges of windows,
its worthy satellites, the Exchange,
and the great fountain with its
marvels of sculpture, utterly outdo, as
the central points of the city, the lofty
but shapeless and unfinished cathedral
which stands opposite to them. And
at this point, the Church and the commonwealth
are the only rivals; the
remains of earlier times do not come
into view. For them we must seek,
but at no great distance. Go down
from the central height, and stand on
the bridge which spans the Via Appia
of Perugia, a strange namesake for the
Via Appia of Rome. There the walls
of the Etruscan city, rising on the one
side above the houses, on the other
above one of the deep valleys, form the
main feature. And, if they lose in
effect from the modern houses built
upon them, the very incongruity has a
kind of attractiveness, as binding the
two ends of the story together. From
this point of view, Perugia is specially
Perugian. And, if the walls are less
perfect than those of Cortona, they
have something that Cortona has not.
The Arch of Augustus, the barrier
between the older and the newer city,
spans the steep and narrow street
fittingly known as Via Vecchia. At
Perugia the name of Augustus suggests
the thought whether he really
made the bloody sacrifice to the manes
of his uncle with which some reports
charge him. The gate at least makes
no answer, save that we see that the
Roman built on the foundations of
the Etruscan, save that the legend of
"Augusta Perusia" is itself a record
of destruction and revival. The gateway,
tall, narrow, gloomy, the Roman
arch springing from two vast Etruscan
towers, is a contrast indeed to such
strictly architectural designs as the
two gates of Autun. The Roman
builder was evidently cramped by the
presence of the older work. In fact the
general character of the gateway has
more in common with the endless
mediæval gateways and arches which
span the streets of Perugia. Of really
better design, though blocked and in
a less favourable position, is the other
gateway, the Porta Martis, which now
makes part of the substructure of the
new piazza, as it once did of that of
the papal fortress. And he who looks
curiously will find out, not indeed any
more Roman gateways, but the jambs
from which at least two other arches,
either Roman or Etruscan, once sprang.
The walls and gateways of a city
can hardly be called its skeleton, but
they are in some sort its shell. And
at Perugia the body within the shell
was of no mean kind. Take away
every great public building, church, or
palace, and Perugia itself, its mere
streets and houses, would have a great
deal to show. With no grand street
arcades like Bologna, few or no striking
private palaces like Venice and
Verona, Perugia once had streets after
streets—the small and narrow streets
not the least conspicuously—of a thoroughly
good and simple style of street
architecture. Arched doors and
arched windows are all, and they are
quite enough. Some are round, some
are pointed; some are of brick, some
of stone; and those of brick with
round arches are decidedly the best.
But never were buildings more mercilessly
spoiled than the Perugian
houses. As in England mediæval
houses are spoiled to make bigger
windows, so at Perugia they are
spoiled to make smaller windows.
Most of the doorways and windows
are cut through and blocked, and an
ugly square hole is bored to do the
duty of the artistic feature which is
destroyed. No land has more to show
in the way of various forms of beauty
than Italy; but when an Italian does
go in for ugliness he beats all other
nations in carrying out his object.
Perugia, we need hardly say, is a
city of paintings, and it is as receptacles
for paintings that its churches seem
mainly to be looked on. But some of
them deserve no small attention on
other grounds. At the two ends of
the city are two churches which follow
naturally on the Etruscan and
Roman walls and gates. At one end,
the Church of St. Angelo, circular
within, sixteen-sided without, forms
one of the long series of round and
polygonal churches which stretch from
Jerusalem to Ludlow. And this,
clearly a building of Christian Roman
times, with its beautiful marble and
granite Corinthian columns, though
not one of the greatest in size, holds
no mean place among them. At the
other end, the Abbey of Saint Peter,
amid many changes, still keeps two
noble ranges of Ionic columns, the
spoils doubtless of some Pagan building
at its first erection in the eleventh
century. Nor must the duomo itself
be judged of by its outside. The
work of a German architect, it shows
a German character in the three
bodies of the same height, and its pillars
consequently of amazing height.
But at Perugia it is not churches or
palaces or earlier remains which we
study, each apart from other things.
Here they all unite to form a whole
greater than any one class alone—Augusta
Perusia itself.
The ancient Etruscans have some
points of analogy with the modern
Freemasons. This last familiar and
yet mysterious body seems to let the
outer world know everything about
itself, except what it is. We have read
various books by Freemasons about
Freemasonry, about its history, its
constitution, its ritual. On all these
points they seem to give us the fullest
particulars: we have only to complain
that the historical part is a little vague,
and its evidence a little uncertain. We
should not like rashly to decide whether
Freemasonry was already ancient in
the days of Solomon or whether it cannot
be traced with certainty any further
back than the eighteenth century.
But we know the exact duties of a
Tyler, and we know that at the end
of a Masonic prayer we should answer,
not "Amen," but "So mote it be."
Still, what Freemasonry is, how a
man becomes a Freemason, or what
really distinguishes a Freemason from
other people, are points about which
the Masonic books leave us wholly in
the dark. So it is with the Etruscans.
We seem to know everything about
them, except who they were. As far as
we can know a people from their arts and
monuments, there is no people whom
we seem to know better. We have
full and clear monumental evidence as
to the people themselves, as to many
points in their ways, thoughts, and
belief. We know how they built,
carved, and painted, and their buildings,
sculptures, and paintings, tell us
in many points how they lived, and
what was their faith and worship. We
have indeed no Etruscan books; but
their language still lives, at least it
abides, in endless inscriptions. But
who the Etruscans were, and what
their language was, remain unsolved
puzzles. The ordinary scholar is half-amused,
half-provoked, at long lines
of alphabetic writing, of which, as far
as the mere letters go, he can read a
great deal, but of which, save here
and there a proper name, he cannot
understand a word. He knows that
one ingenious man has read it all into
good German and another into good
Turkish. He curses every Lucumo
whose image he sees for sticking like
a Frenchman to his own tongue. Why
could they not write up everything in
three or four languages? How happy
he would be if he could light on a
Latin or Greek crib which would give
life to the dead letter. For surely
nothing in the world so truly answers
the description of a dead letter, as
words after words, most of which it is
not hard to spell, but at the meaning
of which we cannot even guess.
It is natural that in the museums
of the Etruscan cities the monuments
of a kind whose interest is specially
local should form a chief part of the
show. At Florence, at Arezzo, at
Cortona, at Perugia, the collections
which each city has brought together
make us familiar, if we are not so
already, with much of Etruscan art
and Etruscan life. Or shall we say
that what they really make us familiar
with is more truly Etruscan death?
Our knowledge of most nations of
remote times comes largely from their
tombs and from the contents of their
tombs, and this must specially be the
case with a people who, like the Etruscans,
have left no literature behind
them. The last distinction makes it
hardly fair to attempt any comparison
between the Etruscans and nations
like the Greeks or the Romans, with
whose writings we are familiar. But
suppose we had no Greek or Roman
literature, suppose we had, as we have
in the case of the Etruscans, no means
of learning anything of Greek or
Roman life, except from Greek and
Roman monuments. The sepulchral
element would be very important;
but it would hardly be so distinctly
dominant as it is in the Etruscan
case. At all events, it would not
be so distinctly forced upon the
thoughts as it is in the Etruscan case.
Take a Roman sarcophagus: we know
it to be sepulchral, but it does not of
itself proclaim its use; there often is
no distinct reference to the deceased
person; at all events, his whole
figure is not graven on the top of
the chest which contains his bones
or his ashes. But in the Etruscan
museums it is the sepulchral figures
which draw the eye and the thoughts
towards them far more than anything
else, more than even the chimæra, the
bronze lamp, and the painted muse.
Of various sizes, of various degrees of
art, they all keep one general likeness.
The departed Lucumo leans on his
elbow, his hand holding what the uninitiated
are tempted to take for a dish
symbolizing his admittance to divine
banquets in the other world, but which
the learned tell us is designed to catch
the tears of those who mourn for him.
Sometimes the Lucumonissa—if we
may coin so mediæval a form—lies
apart, sometimes along with her husband.
On the whole, these Etruscan
sculptures seem to bring us personally
nearer to the men of a distant age and
a mysterious race than is done by anything
in either Greek or Roman art.
But if these works can teach us thus
much when set in rows in a place where
they were never meant to be set up,
how much more plainly do they speak
to us when we see them at home, untouched,
in the place and in the state
in which the first artist set them!
The Volumnian tomb near Perugia is
one of the sights which, when once
seen, is not likely to be forgotten.
The caution does not bear on Etruscan
art; but it is well to walk to it from
St. Peter's Abbey; going by the railway
is a roundabout business, and the
walk downwards commands a glorious
and ever-shifting view over the plain
and the mountains, with the towns of
Assisi, Spello, and a third further on—can
it be distant Trevi? Foligno lies
down in the plain—each seated on its
hill. The tomb is reached; a small
collection from other places has been
formed on each side of the door. This
is all very well; but we doubt the
wisdom of putting, as we understood
had been done, some things from other
places in the tomb itself. But this is
not a moment at which we are inclined
to find fault. We rejoice at finding
that what ought to be there is so
happily and wisely left in its place,
and are not greatly disturbed if a few
things are put inside which had better
have been left outside. The stone
doorway of the lintelled entrance—moved
doubtless only when another
member of the house was literally
gathered to his fathers—stands by the
side; it was too cumbrous to be kept
in its old place now that the tomb
stands ready to be entered by all whose
tastes lead them that way. We go in;
the mind goes back to ruder sepulchres
at Uleybury and New Grange, of sepulchres
at least as highly finished in
their own way at Mykênê. But those
were built, piled up of stones; here
the dwelling of the dead Lucumos is
hewn in the native tufa. The top is
not, as we might have looked for,
domical; it imitates the forms of a
wooden roof. From it still hang the
lamps; on its surface are carved the
heads of the sun-god and of the ever-recurring
Medusa. Nor is the sun-god's
own presence utterly shut out
from the home of the dead. It is a
strange feeling when a burst of sunshine
through the open door kindles
the eyes of the Gorgon with a strange
brilliancy, and lights up the innermost
recess, almost as when the sinking
rays light up the apses of Rheims
and of St. Mark's. In that innermost
recess, fronting us as we enter, lies on
his kistwaen—may we transfer the barbarian
name to so delicate a work of
art?—the father of the household gathered
around him. He is doubtless very
far from being the first Felimna, but
the first Felimna whose ashes rest here.
The name of the family can be spelled
out easily by those who, without boasting
any special Etruscan lore, are used
to the oldest Greek writing from right
to left. Children and grandchildren
are grouped around the patriarch; and
here comes what, from a strictly
historical view, is the most speaking
thing in the whole tomb. The name
of Avle Felimna can be easily read on
a chest on the right hand. On the
left hand opposite to it is another chest
which has forsaken the Etruscan type.
Here is no figure, no legend in
mysterious characters. We have instead
one of those sepulchral chests
which imitate the figure of a house
with doors. The legend, in every-day
Latin, announces that the ashes within
it are those of P. Volumnius A. F.
That is, the Etruscan Avle Felimna
was the father of the Roman Publius
Volumnius. We are in the first century
before our æra, when the old
Etruscan life ended after the Social
War, and when the Lucumos of Arretium
and Perusia became Roman Clinii
and Volumnii. To an English scholar
the change comes home with a special
force. He has an analogy in the change
of nomenclature in his own land under
Norman influences in the twelfth century.
Publius Volumnius, son of Avle
Felimna, is the exact parallel to Robert
the son of Godwin, and a crowd of
others in his days, Norman-named
sons of English fathers.
We are not describing at length what
may be found described at length elsewhere.
But there is another point in
these Etruscan sculptures which gives
them a strange and special interest.
This is their strangely Christian look.
The genii are wonderfully like angels;
but so are many Roman figures also,
say those in the spandrils of the arch
of Severus. But Roman art has nothing
to set alongside of the Lucumo
reclining on his tomb, not exactly like
a strictly mediæval recumbent figure,
but very like a tomb of the type not uncommon
a little later, say in the time of
Elizabeth and James the First. And in
the sculptures on the chests, wherever,
instead of familiar Greek legends, they
give us living pictures of Etruscan life,
we often see the sons of the Rasena
clearly receiving a kind of baptism.
There is no kind of ancient works
which need a greater effort to believe
in their antiquity. And nowhere do
the sculptures look fresher—almost
modern—than when seen in contrast
with the walls and roof above and
beside them, the sepulchre hewn in
the rock, with the great stone rolled to
its door.
There is a certain satisfaction, a
satisfaction which has a spice of
mischief in it, in dwelling on some
feature in a place which is quite different
from that which makes the place
famous with the world in general. So
to do is sometimes needful as a protest
against serious error. When so many
members of Parliament showed a few
years back, and when the Times
showed only a very little time back,
that they believed that the University
of Oxford was founded by somebody—Alfred
will do as well as anybody else—and
that the city of Oxford somehow
grew up around the University,
it became, and it remains, a duty
to historic truth to point out the importance
of Oxford, geographical and
therefore political and military, for
some ages before the University was
heard of. When the Times thought
that Oxford was left to the scholars,
because "thanes and barons" did not
think it worth struggling for, the
Times clearly did not know that
schools grew up at Oxford then, just
as schools have grown up at Manchester
since, because Oxford was already,
according to the standard of the
time, a great, flourishing, and central
town, and therefore fittingly chosen as
a seat of councils and parliaments.
Here there is real error to fight
against; in other cases there is simply
a kind of pleasure in pointing out that,
while the received object of attraction
in a place is often perfectly worthy of
its fame, the place contains other, and
often older, objects which are worthy
of some measure of fame also. It is
quite possible that some people may
think that the town of Assisi grew up
round the church and monastery of
Saint Francis. If anyone does think
so, the error is of exactly the same kind
as the error of thinking that the city
of Oxford grew up around the University.
It is Saint Francis and his
church which have made Assisi a
place of world-wide fame and world-wide
pilgrimage, and Saint Francis
and his church are fully worthy of
their fame. Yet Assisi had been a
city of men for ages on ages before
Saint Francis was born, and Assisi
would still be a place well worthy
of a visit, though Saint Francis
had never been born, and though
his church had therefore never been
built. It is perhaps a light matter
that Assisi had eminent citizens
besides Saint Francis and very unlike
Saint Francis, that it was the birthplace
of Propertius before him and
of Metastasio after him. But before
Assisi, as the birthplace of the seraphic
doctor, had earned a right to
be itself called "seraphica civitas,"
before one of its later churches came to
rank with the patriarchal basilicas of
Rome, Assisi had, as a Roman and an
early mediæval city, covered its soil
with monuments of which not a few
still exist and which are well worthy
of study. And in one way they
have a kind of connexion with Saint
Francis which his own church has not.
The saint never saw his own monument;
it would have vexed his soul
could he have known that such a
monument was to be. But in his
youth he saw, and doubtless mused, as
on the bleak mountain of Subasio and
the yellow stream of Chiaschio, so also
on the campanile and apse of the
cathedral church of St. Rufino and on
the columns of the converted temple
of the Great Twin Brethren.
Assisi is one of the hill-cities; but
the hill-cities supply endless varieties
among themselves. Assisi does not,
like the others which we have spoken
of, occupy a hill which is wholly its
own; the hill on which it stands,
though very distinct, is still only a
spur of a huge mountain. As at
Mykênê, while the akropolis is high
enough, there is something far higher
rising immediately above it. And the
akropolis of Assisi is a mere fortress;
even if it was the primitive place of
shelter, it cannot have been inhabited
for many ages. The duomo stands,
very far certainly from the top of the
hill, but at the top of the really
inhabited city with its continuous
streets, and that is no small height
from the lowest line of them. Above
the church are the remains of the
theatre, of the amphitheatre; the distant
tower beyond it, and soaring over
all, the fortress of Rocco Grande with
no dwelling of man near it, or for
some way below it. To go behind
Assisi is almost more needful than in
the case of any of the other hill-cities,
not only for the mediæval walls, for the
slight traces which seem to mark an
outer and earlier wall; but yet more
for the view over the narrow valley,
the bleak hills scattered with houses,
the winding river at their feet, soon to
become yet more winding in the plain,
and the glimpse far away of Perugia
on its hill. But Assisi has a spot
only less wild within the city walls,
the ground namely over which we
climb from the inhabited streets to the
fortress. So it is at Cortona; but there
the presence of the church and monastery
of St. Margaret makes all the difference.
The general view of Assisi, as
seen from below, gives us the church of
Saint Francis with the great arched substructure
to the left, the mountain to
the right; between them is a hill with
a city running along it at about half
its height, sending up a forest of bell-towers,
some really good in themselves,
all joining in the general effect. Above
all this is the hill-top, partly grassy,
partly rocky, crowned by the towers of
the fortress which looks down on all,
except the steep of the mountain
itself.
Of particular objects older than the
church of Saint Francis, a restriction
which of course also cuts out the
church of his friend, Saint Clara,
there can be no doubt that the monument
of greatest interest is the temple
in the forum—now Piazza grande—with
its Corinthian columns strangely
hemmed in by a house on one side and
on the other by the bell-tower which
was added when the temple was turned
into a church. But it is surely not, as
it is locally called, a temple of Minerva,
but rather of Castor and Pollux. Not
the least interesting part of its belongings
lies below ground; for the level
of the forum at Assisi has risen as
though it had been at Rome or at
Trier. The temple must have risen
on a bold flight of steps, of which
some of the upper ones still remain.
In front of it, below the steps, was a
great altar, with the drains for the
blood of the victims, just as we see
them on the Athenian akropolis.
Such drains always bring to our mind
those comments of Dean Stanley on
this repulsive feature of pagan and
ancient Jewish worship, which has
passed away alike from the church,
from the synagogue, and from the
mosque, save only at Mecca. In front
again is the dedicatory inscription with
the name of the founder of the temple,
and the record of the dedication-feast
which he made to the magistrates and
people. His name can doubtless be
turned to in Mommsen's great collection;
we are not sure that in the
underground gloom we took it down
quite correctly, and it is better not to
be wrong. Anyhow the dedication is
not to Minerva but to the twin heroes.
A great number of inscriptions are
built up in the wall of the church. As
usual, there are more freedmen than
sons; and among the freedmen the one
best worth notice is Publius Decimius
Eros Merula, physician, surgeon, and
oculist, who bought his freedom for so
much, his magistracy as one of the
Sexviri for so much, who spent so
much on mending the roads, and left
so much behind him. Here the state
of things is vividly brought home to
us in which a man could buy, not only
his cook and his coachman, but also
his architect and his medical adviser.
And we are set thinking on the one
hand how great must be the physical
infusion of foreign blood, Greek and
barbarian, in the actual people of
Italy, and on the other hand how
thoroughly and speedily all such foreign
elements were practically Romanized.
The son of the slave-born magistrate
of Assisi would look on himself, and
be looked on by others, as no less good
a Roman than any Fabius or Cornelius
who might still linger on.
The temple above ground and its
appurtenances underground are the
most memorable things in Præ-Franciscan
Assisi; but there are other things
besides, both Roman and mediæval.
The lower church of Sta. Maria Maggiore,
close by the bishop's palace,
and which is said to have been the
original cathedral, is a Romanesque
building of rather a German look, with
masses of wall instead of columns.
The thought comes into the mind that
it is the cella of a temple with arches
cut through its walls. But it hardly
can be; the arrangement seems to be a
local fashion; it is found also in the
later and larger church of St. Peter
hard by. Besides, at Sta. Maria Maggiore
there are the clear remains of
a Roman building, seemingly a house,
with columns and mosaic floors, underneath
the present church of St. Rufino.
The later cathedral has been sadly disfigured
within; but it keeps its apse
of the twelfth century, its west front of
the thirteenth, using up older sculptures,
and it has the best bell-tower in
Assisi. And below it remains the
crypt of the older church of 1028, with
ancient Ionic columns used up, and
Corinthian capitals imitated as they
might be in 1028. Just above are
scanty remains of the theatre; above
again are still scantier remains of the
amphitheatre; but its shape is impressed
on the surrounding buildings,
just as the four arms of the Roman
chester abide unchanged in many an
English town where every actual house
is modern. A piece of Roman wall,
and a wide arch in the Via San
Paolo leading out of the forum, complete
the remains of ancient Assisi
above ground. It is doubtless altogether
against rule, but among so many
memorials of earlier gods and earlier
saints, it is quite possible, in climbing
the steep and narrow streets of Assisi,
to forget for a while both Saint Francis
and Saint Clara.
The Umbrian town which takes care
to blazon over one of its many
gates its full description as "Ispello
Colonia Giulia, Citta Flavia Costante,"
is hardly of any great fame, either as
ancient Hispellum or as modern Spello.
It must have some visitors, drawn
thither most likely by two or three
pictures by famous masters which remain
in one of its churches. Somebody
must come to see them, or their
keepers would not have learned the
common, but shabby, trick of keeping
them covered, in hopes of earning a
lira by uncovering them. May we
make the confession that we became
aware—or, to speak more delicately,
that we were reminded—of the existence
of the colony at once Julian and
Flavian by the description in the generally
excellent German guide-book
of Gsell-fels? And may we further add
that, though we feel thoroughly thankful
to its author for sending us to Spello
at all, yet his description is not quite
so orderly as is usual with him, and
that, though he is perfectly accurate
in his enumeration of the Roman monuments,
yet his account led us to expect
to find them in a more perfect state
than they actually are? On the whole,
except for the wonderful prospect
which Spello shares with Perugia and
Assisi, we should hardly send anybody
to Spello except a very zealous antiquary;
but a very zealous antiquary
we certainly should send thither. There
is no one object of first-rate importance
of any date in the place; but there are
the remains of a crowd of objects which
have been of some importance. There
is also the site; there is the general
look of the place, which is akin to that
of the other hill-towns, but which, as
Spello is the smallest and least frequented
of the group, is there less untouched
and modernized in any way
than even at Cortona or Assisi. We
except of course the fashion of mercilessly
spoiling the mediæval houses
which has gone on as merrily at Spello
as at Perugia and Assisi. But that is no
fashion of yesterday. The general old-world
air, strong in some parts of Perugia,
stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all
at Spello, while at Spello there seems
less eagerness than at Cortona to seize
the stranger and make a prey of him.
The look-out is perhaps the finest of all;
it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked
mountains and ranges deep
with snow, which barely come into the
other views, and the long series of hill-towns
is pleasantly broken by the
towers and cupolas of Foligno in the
plain. The mediæval walls and towers,
at all events on the south-eastern side,
form a line which is not easily surpassed;
the walk outside Spello,
though it lacks both the antiquity and
the wildness of the walk outside Cortona,
outdoes it in mere picturesque
effect. The particular objects at Spello
are perhaps a little disappointing:
Spello itself, as a whole, is certainly
not disappointing.
At Spello we have reached an Italian
town which is not a bishop's see; even
in Italy it was not likely to be so, with
Assisi so close on one hand and Foligno
on the other. There is therefore no
duomo, nor is there any other church
of much architectural importance. The
best are two small forsaken Romanesque
churches outside the walls, one
on each side of the town. One of
them, that of St. Claudius, forms one
building of a group by which we pass
on the road from Assisi to Spello, a
group lying in the plain, with Spello on
its height rising above them. There
is a large modern villa which seems to
be built on Roman foundations; by its
side lies the little Romanesque church;
nearly opposite is the amphitheatre of
Hispellum, keeping some fragments
of its walls and with its marked shape
deeply impressed on the ground. Here
the amphitheatre is down in the plain;
at Assisi it stands in the higher part
of the present city; in both it lies, according
to rule, outside the original
Roman enclosure. It shows the passionate
love for these sports wherever
the influence of Rome spread, that two
amphitheatres could be needed with so
small a distance between them as that
which parts Assisi from Spello. More
nearly opposite to the villa are other Roman
fragments which are said to have
been part of a theatre; but the form of
the building is certainly not so clearly
stamped on the ground as that of its
bloodier neighbour. Indeed we are in
a region of Roman remains; other
fragments lie by the roadside between
Assisi and Spello, and when we reach
the latter town, we find that, next to its
general effect, it is its Roman remains
which form its chief attraction.
As we draw near from Assisi, the
Julian colony of Hispellum, the Flavia
Constans of a later day, is becomingly
entered by a Roman gateway which
bears the name of Porta Consolare.
But on the road from Foligno the consular
gate is reached only through
a mediæval one, which bears, as we
have said, all the names of the town
prominently set forth for the stranger's
benefit. The consular gate stands at
the bottom of the hill: for Spello
thoroughly occupies the whole of its
hill; there is plenty of climbing to be
done in its streets; but it has all to be
done in continuous streets within the
town walls. The consular gate has
been patched in later times; but the
Roman arch is perfect. It is a single
simple arch, plain enough, and of no
great height, a marked contrast to the
lofty arch of Perugia. Another gateway
on the side towards Assisi, known
as Porta Veneris, must have been a
far more elaborate design. But the
whole is imperfect and broken down;
one arch of the double entrance is
blocked, and the other is supplanted
by a later arch. Yet there is a good
effect about the whole, owing to the
bold polygonal towers of later date
which flank the Roman gateway. Another
gateway, higher up on the same
side, is cut down to the mere stones of
an arch hanging in the air. This is
locally known as the arco di trionfo.
Of the arco di Augusto within the town,
said to be a triumphal arch of Macrinus,
there is nothing left but a single
jamb. In short the Roman remains
of Hispellum, though considerable in
number, are slight and fragmentary in
actual extent. Yet there is a pleasure
in tracing them out. Conceive them
perfect, and Hispellum would come
near to rival Verona, not as it was, but
as it is. But, after all, there is a certain
perverse turn of thought which is
better pleased with tracing out what
has been than with simply admiring
what still is. Spello will make the end
of a mid-Italian series seen after the
great snow-tide to match the mid-French
series seen before it. Everything
cannot be seen in one journey.
All roads lead to Rome; but thirty-seven
days are enough to spend on any
one of them. From the colony of Hispellum
then we must hurry on to
aurea Roma herself, even though we
have to rush by many a town and
fortress on its hill-top, by Trevi and
Spoleto, and, proudest of all, by
... that grey crag where, girt with towers,
The fortress of Nequinum lowers
O'er the pale waves of Nar.
Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome
is more. Rome, too, at each visit,
presents fresh objects, old and new.
The oldest and the newest seem to
have come together, when one set of
placards on the wall invites the Roman
people to meet on the Capitol, and
when the Quæstor Bacchus—it is taking
a liberty with a living man and
magistrate, but we cannot help Latinizing
the Questore Bacco—puts out
another set of placards to forbid the
meeting. We are inclined to turn to
others among our memories, to others
among our lays. We might almost
look for a secession; we might almost
expect to see once more
... the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill.
But those who were forbidden to meet
on the Capitol did not secede even to
the Aventine; the secession was done
within doors, in the Sala Dante.
The student of what M. Ampère
calls "L'Histoire Romaine à
Rome" must take care not to confine
his studies to Rome only. The local
history of Rome—and the local history
of Rome is no small part of the œcumenical
history—is not fully understood
unless we fully take in the history
and position of the elder sites among
which Rome arose. With Rome we
must compare and contrast the cities
of her enemies and her allies, the cities
which she swept away, the cities which
she made part of herself, the cities which
simply withered away before her. And
first on the list may well come the city
which was before all others the rival
of Rome, and where she did indeed
sweep with the besom of destruction.
A short journey from the Flaminian
Gate, a journey through a country
which might almost pass for a border
shire of England, with the heights of
Wales in the distance, brings us to a
city which has utterly perished, where
no permanent human dwelling-place is
left within the ancient circuit. In a
basin, as it were, unseen until we are
close beneath or above it, hedged in
by surrounding hills as by a rampart,
stands all that is left of the first great
rival of Rome, an inland Carthage on
the soil of Etruria. There once was
Veii, the first great conquest of Rome,
the Italian Troy, round whose ten years'
siege wonders have gathered almost as
round the Achaian warfare by the
Hellespont. There are no monuments
of the departed life of Veii such as are
left of not a few cities which have
passed out of the list of living things
no less utterly. Of the greatest city
of southern Etruria nothing remains
beyond a site which can never be
wiped out but by some convulsion
of nature, a few scraps to show that
man once dwelled there, and tombs
not a few to show that those who
dwelled there belonged to a race
with whom death counted for more
than life.
A sight of the spot which once was
Veii makes us better understand some
points in early Italian history. We see
why Veii was the rival of Rome, and
why she was the unsuccessful rival of
Rome. Above all, we understand better
than anywhere else how deep must
have been the hatred with which the
old-established cities of Italy must have
looked on the upstart settlement by the
Tiber, which grew up to so strange
a greatness and threatened to devour
them one by one. Veii, the great
border city of Etruria, was the only
one among Rome's immediate neighbours
which could contend with her
on equal terms. Elsewhere, in her
early history, Rome, as a single city,
is of equal weight in peace or war with
whole confederations.
The happy position of certain hills
by the Tiber had enabled one lucky
group of Latin settlements to coalesce
into a single city as great as all the
others put together. But at Veii we
see the marks of what clearly was a
great city, a city fully equal in extent
to Rome. And when the ancient
writers tell us that, in riches and splendour,
in the character of its public and
private buildings, Veii far surpassed
Rome, it is only what we should expect
from a great and ancient Etruscan
city which had entered on the stage
of decline when Rome was entering on
the stage of youthful greatness. There
was little fear of Veii overthrowing
Rome; but both sides must have felt
that a day would come when Rome
would be very likely to overthrow
Veii. Two cities so great and so near
together could not go on together.
Two cities, very great according to the
standard of those times, considerable
according even to a modern standard,
cities of nations differing in blood, language,
and everything else which can
keep nations asunder, stood so near
that the modern inquirer can drive
from one to the other, spend several
hours on its site, and drive back again,
between an ordinary breakfast and dinner.
Rivalry and bitter hatred were
unavoidable. Veii must have felt all
the deadly grief of being outstripped
by a younger rival, while Rome must
have felt that Veii was the great
hindrance to any advance of her dominion
on the right bank of her own
river. No form of alliance, confederation,
or dependence was possible; a
death struggle must come sooner or
later between the old Etruscan and the
newer Latin city.
The site of Veii is that of a great
city, a strong city, but not a city made,
like Rome, for rule. We go far and
wide, and we find nothing like the
"great group of village communities
by the Tiber." Veii is not a group,
and she has no Tiber. The city stood
high on the rocks, yet it can hardly
be called a hill-city. A peninsular site
rises above the steep and craggy banks
of two small streams which make up
the fateful Cremera; but the peninsula
itself is nearly a table-land, a table-land
surrounded by hills. The stream supplied
the walls with an admirable
natural fosse, and that was all. The
vast space enclosed by the walls makes
us naturally ask whether the city could
have been laid out on so great a scale
from the beginning. We may believe
that, as in so many cases, the arx,
a peninsula within a peninsula, was
the original city, and that the rest was
taken in afterwards. But, if so, it
would seem as if it must have been
taken in at a blow, as if Veii took a
single leap from littleness to greatness,
unlike the gradual growth of Rome
or Syracuse. At all events, there is
the undoubted extent of a great city, a
city clearly of an earlier type than
Rome, a city which may well have
reached its present extent while Rome
had not spread beyond the Palatine.
Such a site marks a great advance on
the occupation of inaccessible hill-tops;
but Veii itself must have seemed an
old-world city in the eyes of those who
had the highway of the Tiber below
their walls.
It is strange to step out the traces of
a city whose position and extent are
so unmistakably marked, but of which
nothing is left which can be called a
building, or even a ruin. The most
memorable work in the circuit of Veii
is a work not of building but of boring—the
Ponte Sodo, hewn in the rock
for the better passage of the guardian
stream. Besides these, some small
fragments of the Etruscan wall, the
signs of a double gate, some masonry
of the small Roman tower which in
after times arose within the forsaken
walls, are pretty well all that remains
of the life of Veii. The remains of its
death are more plentiful. There is the
Roman columbarium, within the Etruscan
site; there are the Etruscan tombs
bored deep in all the surrounding hills.
There is, above all, the famous painted
tomb, shielding no such sculptures and
inscriptions as those on which we gaze
in the great Volumnian sepulchre, but
within which one lucky eye was privileged
for a moment to see the Lucumo
himself, as he crumbled away at the
entrance of the unaccustomed air. A
scrap or two of his harness is there
still; the arms are there; the strange-shaped
beasts are there, in their primitive
form and colouring; the guardian
lions keep the door; but we have no
written ænigma even to guess at. We
can only feel our way to a date by
marking the imperfect attempt at an
arch, an earlier and ruder stage by far
than the roof of Rome's Tullianum or
its fellow at Tusculum. In the Volumnian
tomb the main interest comes
from the fact that it belongs to the
very latest Etruscan times, to the transition
from Etruscan to Roman life.
In the Veientine tomb the main interest
comes from the fact that it cannot be
later than an early stage in Roman history,
and that it may be as much earlier
as we choose to think it. It is the same
with all the little that is left of Veii.
We know that, except the palpable
remains of the Roman municipium,
nothing can be later than B.C. 396, and
that anything may be vastly earlier.
In the history of Italy, the date when
Rome doubled her territory by conquering
a city a dozen miles from her
gates passes for an early stage. The
life of Rome is still before her. In
Greece at the same date, the greatness
of Athens, the truest greatness of
Sparta, is past; the only fresh life that
is to come is that of ephemeral Thebes
and half-Hellenic Macedonia.
We turn from Veii, feeling how thoroughly
true in its main outline, how
utterly untrustworthy in its detail, is
what passes for early Roman history.
The legend of Veii counts for less than
the legend of Troy, inasmuch as invention
and combination are hardly genuine
legend at all. But that Veii was
and is not, that her fall was the rising
point in Rome's destiny, that it was
needful for the course of things which
has stretched from that day to this
that Veii should cease to be—all this
we understand ten times the better
when we turn from the living tale of
Livy to the yet more living witness of
the forsaken site.
From the villa of the White Hens
we looked across to the arx of
Fidenæ as one of the main points in
the view. The hill of Castel Giubeleo
seems planted there by the hand of
nature as a border-defence of Latium
against Etruscan attacks. Yet both
strong sites and other things sometimes
fail to discharge the exact functions
which seem to have been laid
upon them by the hand of nature.
The post which seems designed as the
Latin bulwark against the Etruscan
does, as a matter of fact, play its chief
part in history in the character of
an Etruscan outpost on Latin soil.
Whether Fidenæ was really such an
outpost in the strict sense, whether it
was a remnant of the wider Etruscan
dominion of the days when the Tiber
was not a border-stream, or whether it
was a Latin town which, from whatever
cause, chose to throw itself on
the Etruscan side, it is not only as the
enemy of Rome, but as the ally of
Veii, that Fidenæ made itself memorable.
If we accept the received story,
the war which brought about the ruin
of Fidenæ was caused because its
people slew the envoys of Rome in
obedience to the hasty, perhaps misinterpreted,
words of a Veientine king.
The king who thus took so little heed
of the law of nations of course paid his
forfeit, and the Royal spoils won from
Lars Tolumnius by Aulus Cornelius
Cossus formed one of the most cherished
relics of the early days of Rome.
We may believe the details of the
story or not; but the spoils at least
were real, if the witness of Augustus
Cæsar is to be believed.
Each of the roads which lead out of
Rome—since the railway came, there
is practically only one way which
leads into Rome—has its own special
interest, and the Salarian way is certainly
not inferior to the Cassian or
the Flaminian. We leave the city by
that which in its material fabric is the
most modern, which in its associations
is perhaps the most historic, of all the
gates of Rome. The Salarian gate in
the wall of Aurelian may be looked at
as in some sort drawing to itself the
memories of the neighbouring Colline
gate in the wall of Servius. He who
fought before the Colline gate, he who
entered by the Colline gate, could
hardly fail to march over the ground
where in the new system of defence the
Salarian gate was to arise. The Colline
gate on the high ground of the
Quirinal hill was the weakest point
of Rome; it was therefore specially
strengthened in the Servian line of
defence. It was the point by which
most of the early invaders of Rome
marched in or strove to march in.
There the revolted troops entered to
put down the tyranny of the decemvirs;
there the Gauls came in after
the slaughter of the Allia; to that
gate Hannibal drew near, and those
who did not understand Hannibal said
that he hurled his spear over it. Before
the Colline gate Rome had for the
last time to struggle for the dominion
of Italy in the fight between Sulla
and Pontius Telesinus. And when
the Colline gate had given way to the
Salarian, it was at the new entrance to
Rome that the enemy came in whose
coming declared that her political
dominion over the world had ceased,
but that her moral dominion was
stronger than ever. "At midnight
the Salarian gate was silently opened,
and the inhabitants were awakened
by the tremendous sound of the Gothic
trumpet." And if these gates were a
centre of fighting, they were also, in
a strange and special way, a centre of
burying. Along this road, as along
others, we mark the broken tombs
here and there, two pre-eminently just
outside the present gate; but this
quarter supplies one strange contrast
in the matter of burials which is not
to be found elsewhere. Outside the
Colline gate was the living tomb of
unchaste vestals; not far beyond the
Salarian we come to the Christian
cœmeterium Priscillae. We go on;
we descend the hill, the northern
slope of the Quirinal, and find ourselves
in the alluvial ground of Tiber
and Anio. We have now come near
to the meeting of the streams; Anio
is spanned by a bridge which at first
sight might seem to be wholly a thing
of yesterday, but which in truth has
lived and gone through much from
the earliest times to the latest. Broken
down and rebuilt over and over again,
from the wars of Narses to those of
Garibaldi, its main arch is indeed
of the newest workmanship; but if we
go down to the banks we see the
smaller side arches, which must have
been ancient when they were crossed
by Hannibal, perhaps hardly new
when they were crossed by Cossus.
A few steps further, and we come to
another record of change; an ancient
tomb has grown into a mediæval
tower; the mediæval tower now proclaims
itself as an "osteria"; but we
feel hardly tempted to try its powers
of entertainment. We are now fairly
in the low ground; the hills of Rome
lie behind us; the hills beyond Tiber
which skirt the Flaminian way rise to
our left; the hills of Fidenæ are before
us. To the right lies the ground between
the Salarian and the Nomentane
road where Phaon had his villa and
where his master Nero came by his
end. Presently the road, and its companion
the railway, pass close under
hills to the right and, at one point, with
Tiber close by them to the left. A
little further on they pass between
hills on either side, a loftier and
isolated height to the left, a range of
lower hills, broken by more than one
stream and its valley to the right. We
are in the heart of forsaken Fidenæ, in
the pass which divides its soaring
akropolis by the river from the body
of the city on the inland side.
The arx of Fidenæ, now the hill of
Castel Giubeleo, is not, indeed, a
height like that of Tusculum or that
of Cortona; but it comes nearer to
them than anything to be found at
Veii or Rome. A bend of the river
leaves a rich alluvial flat between its
bank and a hill which on that side
rises steeply enough. Here the men
of the faithless Latin city could look
out to their friends beyond the river,
over the mouth of the small but
famous stream of Cremera, over the
hills on either side, the Fabian outpost,
the future home of Livia, far
away, if not to Veii itself, yet to points
further off than Veii. The view from
the arx of Fidenæ and the view from
the hill of Livia complete one another.
Inland we see Rome on its hills; but
we must again remark that when
Fidenæ was, Rome sent up no lofty
towers and cupolas to mark its place
against the horizon. At our feet we
see the lower hills occupied by the rest
of the town, surely a modern settlement
compared with the original arx.
We go over its site and round its site,
we mark its tombs, its cloaca, the place
where its gates once were. The walk
in the valley by the brook between the
lower hill of Fidenæ and the hill
which lies between Fidenæ and Rome
brings the features of the place well
out. It was no small gain for Veii to
have such a confederate on Latin
ground as the strong post which we
are compassing. We can well understand
why Rome on the first opportunity
swept Fidenæ utterly away,
while the existence of Veii had to be
endured for a generation longer.
As at Veii, so at Fidenæ, the traces
of the living are gone—yet more
utterly at Fidenæ than at Veii. The
traces of the dead are far more plentiful,
though Fidenæ has nothing to
set against the painted tomb of Veii.
The city, doubtless, perished after the
war in which Cossus won the spoils
of Tolumnius. Strabo speaks of Fidenæ
as a deserted place, the possession
of a single man. Yet the potestas
of Fidenæ—perhaps its dictator—may
have lingered on, as such dignitaries
have lingered on in the boroughs
once threatened by Sir Charles Dilke.
It is one of the amiable features of
the study of historical topography
that its votaries are so easily pleased.
Two places may have equal charms on
utterly opposite grounds. The merit
of one city is that it has lived on uninterruptedly
from the earliest times
till now. The merit of another city is
that it ceased to live at all many ages
back. One is precious because it contains
a series of monuments of all ages.
Another is equally precious because
all its monuments are of one age. A
third is as precious as either because
it contains no monuments at all. This
last kind of charm may seem paradoxical;
but it will be acknowledged by
every one who has given himself
heartily to this kind of research. At
Veii and at Fidenæ the great merit is
that there is, speaking roughly, nothing
to see there; in truth there is the
more to see because there is nothing
to see. No doubt Veii and Fidenæ
untouched, as they stood under Lars
Tolumnius, would be best of all; but
we set that aside among the things
which it is no use hoping for. And no
doubt if we found the sites of Veii
and Fidenæ full of Roman and mediæval
monuments, we should doubtless
be glad to see them; but, as they are
not there, we are still more glad that
they are away. But we turn from
Veii and Fidenæ to a city compared
with which Veii and Fidenæ might
seem to have a wealth of monuments.
It is, after all, an exaggeration to say
that nothing is left of Veii or of
Fidenæ. The sites are the main
things; but there really is something
to see beside the sites. But there is a
city, at least the site of a city, much
nearer to Rome than either of them, of
which the great charm is that it does
not contain a single monument of any
kind or date. Here we can, even
more truly than at Veii and at Fidenæ,
say that the very ruins have perished;
but it is just because the very ruins
have perished yet more utterly than
elsewhere that the spot has a strong
and special attraction of its own.
We took a kind of Pisgah view of
Antemnæ both from the road to the
White Hens and from the road to
Fidenæ. As we before said, it ought
to be examined as one of the objects
on this last road; only things are not
always as they ought to be. We must
therefore start afresh from the Flaminian
gate and for the third time make
our way to the Milvian bridge. This
time as our course is to lead us to one
of the oldest sites in Roman history,
it may be well, by way of contrast, to
let the bridge call up thoughts of warfare
yet later than that of Constantine.
It was on the Roman side of the Milvian
bridge, when the bridge itself,
which he had fortified, was betrayed
to the Gothic enemy, that Belisarius,
with another Maxentius at his side,
withstood the host which Witigis had
led from Narnia. Readers either of
Procopius or of Gibbon must remember
how every dart was aimed at the
bay horse, and how the rider of the
bay horse escaped without a wound.
This time we keep ourselves, with
Belisarius, on the Roman side of the
bridge. We are therefore not tempted
to have our thoughts carried off into
quite another part of the world by
the statue of a famous Bohemian
saint, who is said by some Bohemian
scholars to be a purely imaginary
being. Our present business is
not with Saint John Nepomuk, not
even with Belisarius or with Constantine;
we have to do with times before
Rome was, when Tiber still parted the
free Etruscan from the free Latin.
We walk along his left bank, keeping
within the bounds of Latium, but with
the eye tempted at every moment to
look across to the opposite, the Etruscan
bank. Both banks are so quiet,
both are so nearly forsaken, both come
so easily within an ordinary walk from
our Roman quarters, that it is hard to
call up the days when Tiber was the
boundary stream, not merely of separate
commonwealths, not merely of distinct
and hostile nations, but of nations
between which there was no tie of
origin, language, or religion. To be
sold beyond the Tiber was the most
frightful of all dooms which spared
life and limb. If the debtor were sold
to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win
his freedom and become a denizen of a
city of his own speech. To sell him
beyond the Tiber was like handing
him over to bondage among Turks or
Moors. But our path keeps us on the
Latin side, in a land which, when it
was inhabited at all, was inhabited by
men of an intelligible speech. We
peer under a rocky cliff, the riverward
slope of the hill which rises just outside
the Flaminian Gate of Rome. On
that hill Witigis held his headquarters
when Belisarius and Saint Peter between
them guarded the Pincian. But,
we ask, why did not some city, why
did not Rome itself, arise on a site
which seems so thoroughly suited for
the needs of an ancient settlement?
But we have to go further for what we
seek; no record tells of any settlement
on the Monte Parioli. We pass
on by a few tombs in the hill-side, and
we more distinctly make out the shape
of a grassy hill parted by a wide alluvial
plain from the river on the eastern
side by which we approach. That is
the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished city
whose legendary story may be summed
up in a few but instructive words.
Antemnæ was older than Rome. It
was one of the towns whose daughters
supplied objects for that great act of
what our forefathers called Quenfang,
what sociologists called exogamy,
which secured that the Roman State
should last more than one generation.
War follows; Rome prevails; Hersilia,
wife of Romulus, but so strangely
mother of nobody, pleads for the conquered,
and Antemnæ is merged, in
Rome. We may be sure that this is
the genuine story, rather than others
which give Antemnæ a longer life. In
sober history its sole record seems to
be that in Strabo's day the town had
wholly passed away, and that the site
was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession
of a single man.
The story in Livy is well imagined.
The city whose people Romulus spares
at the prayer of his wife has a specially
Roman character. Parted as the
hill is from the Tiber on three sides,
its northern point, the point of a rather
long promontory, overhangs the river
at the very point of its junction with
the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the
descriptive name Antemnae, the town
before the rivers. Such a site belongs
to the same class as the hills of Rome.
Less isolated than the Palatine or the
Aventine, it is as much isolated as the
Capitoline was while it still clave to
the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive
name, can hardly belong to
the earliest times; it marks the same
degree of progress as the settlement of
Rome itself. Cut off as it was from
the oldest Rome by the whole of the
high ground within and without the
Roman walls, such a settlement on the
river, a settlement so like Rome itself,
might well be felt to be a special rival,
a rival which must cease to exist as a
hostile post, but whose people might
well be incorporated with their more
successful kinsfolk.
Of a tale placed in a time which is
purely legendary, the utmost that we
can say is that the legend falls in with
the appearances of the site. Antemnæ
has utterly perished; there is not a
scrap of wall; some stones which deceive
the eye at a distance prove, on
coming near, to be part of the rock
peeping out through the sides of the
otherwise green hill. We believe that
no antiquities have been found there.
But the site speaks for itself. It is a
manifest fortress; the gates are as
plain as if their openings were spanned
by arches like those of Perugia or
Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and
its surroundings, on the old battlefields
of kings and consuls and emperors;
on the bridge of Narses and
Garibaldi, on the line of march which
brought the Gaul, the Carthaginian,
the Samnite, and the Goth to the
gates, and some of them within the
gates, of Rome. We can look down
on nearly the whole of Roman history
from the site where once stood Virgil's
"turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are
yet farther from being able to tell the
towers thereof than we were at Veii
and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins
themselves have perished.
From the nearest neighbours and
rivals of Rome, from the slight
remains which mark the sites of Veii
and Fidenæ, from the almost more instructive
lack of remains which marks
the site of Antemnæ, we may well
pass to a spot which lies at a greater
distance from Rome than any of them,
but which never was Rome's rival or
even neighbour, because it was from
the beginning simply an outlying part
of Rome itself. This is the forsaken
haven of Rome at Ostia. The existence
of Ostia at an early stage of the
historic being of Rome is no small sign
of what Rome already was, and it may
well have had no small share in making
Rome what she afterwards was to be.
For an inland town like Rome to possess
a haven of its own, existing solely
as its haven, at once marked and
strengthened the difference between
Rome and other inland towns. For
Ostia, it must be borne in mind, was
the haven of Rome and nothing else.
It was not a separate maritime city
made into the haven of Rome by any
process of conquest or confederation.
Tradition makes Ostia spring into
being because it was found that Rome
needed a haven. And the tradition
has nothing to contradict it and all
likelihood to support it; the name of
the place by itself might almost be
accepted as proving its truth. The
foundation of Ostia, too, is placed in a
period which is eminently a traditional,
as distinguished from a legendary,
period. It is safer not to rule either
that there was a personal Ancus Marcius
or that there was not; but we
may be pretty sure that the events
assigned to his reign really happened,
if we can only keep ourselves from
attempting dates where there is no
chronology. Tradition then calls
Ancus the founder of Ostia. The
really important point is that whoever
founded Ostia founded it purely in the
interest of Rome, and that in an age
when Rome was still in the days of
her early growth.
This at once marks a wide difference
between Rome and other cities of that
time. Even the most famous of the
early seats of maritime enterprise had
the port separate from the city, later
than the city. Corinth herself had
her two havens, apart alike from her
mountain citadel and from the venerable
columns at its foot. When Corinth
started in life men shrank from
the close neighbourhood of the sea.
It marks a later stage when Corinthian
enterprise planted colonies absolutely
in the sea—Syracuse on her island,
the elder Korkyra on her peninsula.
It was not till long after Ostia had
arisen that inland Athens yoked herself
to the sea. But, as the site of
Rome itself on the broad Tiber showed
that men had even then learned to
understand the value of sites widely
different from Tusculum on her height
or Veii with her encircling brooks, so
the creation of Ostia proves yet more.
Rome, far more distant from the sea
than Corinth, Megara, or even Athens,
had already learned that a hold on the
sea was needful for her power. There
could have been nothing like it in
Italy. There were inland cities and
there were maritime cities; but there
was no inland city which had put forth
a maritime outpost at such a distance.
Indeed, no other city had put forth
such an outpost at all, maritime or
otherwise. For Ostia was not a colony,
not a dependency. It had no separate
being of its own. It was a limb of
Rome transplanted to a distance of
fifteen Italian miles from the main
body.
Ostia, then, called into being because
Rome stood on the Tiber, is eminently
a child of the Tiber. But Father Tiber
is unluckily one of those fathers who
do not scruple to swallow up their own
children. He has changed his course,
and he has changed it in a way which
is not a little dangerous for what is
still left of Ostia. The diggings which
have been carried on by the Italian
Government are most praiseworthy,
and they have brought to light much
that is most interesting and instructive.
But streets, storehouses, temples,
theatres, will in vain be dug out if the
ravenous river god is to gulp them
down as soon as they are well dug out.
At the present moment one street, with
its pavement laid bare, with its buildings
still standing on each side, leads
in a perilous manner into the stream.
That is to say, one end is gone; the
rest will soon follow; the pieces of
wall nearest to the stream are crumbling
to their fall. Surely it would be
well to imitate in the haven of Ancus
the work done for the mother-city by
his successor. Fence in the flood, as
the elder Tarquin fenced it in beside
the mouth of the cloaca maxima; make
a strong wall of defence against the
waters, and the remains which are left
of Ostia may abide as long as the
cloaca maxima itself.
And what is left of Ostia is indeed
worth preserving. Only a small part
of the town has as yet been dug out;
but, even as it is, Ostia is becoming a
fair rival to Pompeii. The interest,
indeed, is of a somewhat different kind
in the two places. Pompeii will come
first with the artist and Ostia with the
historian. Nothing of any moment
ever happened at Pompeii except
the destruction and the discovery of
Pompeii itself. But a great deal happened
at Ostia, and that at widely
distant dates. It is perhaps needless to
mention that one thing which is said
to have happened at Ostia never happened
either there or anywhere else—namely,
destruction by the Saracens in
the fifth century, which is recorded
indeed in Murray's "Handbook," but
which was certainly unknown to Procopius.
Ostia, destroyed by Marius,
restored by Sulla, was failing in the
days of Strabo to discharge its duty as
the haven of Rome. It had yielded
to the same enemy which afterwards
overcame Ravenna and Pisa; the silt
of Father Tiber was too much for it.
Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune,
notwithstanding the change which it
led to, when Claudius found it needful
to transfer the harbour of Rome to
Portus on the other side of the river,
Ostia contrived to live on through all
disadvantages. For it has many and
great buildings later than Strabo and
Claudius, among them an Imperial
house with graceful columns, which
contains the famous shrine of Mithras.
There is abundant evidence that all
through the second century of our
æra great architectural works were
carried on at Ostia. Besides the
palace, there is the great central
temple, be it of Jupiter or of Vulcan,
standing so proudly on its steps.
There is a theatre whose columns
and inscriptions supply no small materials
for study, a theatre of which
it might be too much to say that it
suggests those of Orange or Taormina,
but which certainly suggests
that of Arles.
In the sixth century Procopius describes
Ostia as lacking walls, and he
complains that the road from Ostia to
Rome did not follow the course of the
river, and was therefore useless as a
towing-path. This is eminently true
still. The road goes through scenery
of various kinds, some rather English-looking,
though none very striking;
the Tiber makes a far less important
feature than we might have looked
for. But, if Ostia had no walls in the
days of Belisarius, it had no lack of
walls in earlier days. The most interesting,
from one point of view, among
the ruins of Ostia are the remains,
forming part of two sides of a square,
of the primitive wall, a dry wall of
massive stones, belonging no doubt to
the period of the first foundation.
These were clearly ruinous when the
later brick buildings were reared;
the wall was broken down, and men
built against and upon it; they plastered
it; they chamfered its stones for
the convenience of plastering, as best
suited their purpose. The flourishing
town of the second century may well
have been wall-less. Rome herself at
that date had no defence. The wall
of Servius had ceased to serve any
military purpose, and the wall of
Aurelian was not yet.
The history of Ostia from the ninth
century onwards, from the vain attempt
of Gregory the Fourth to turn
Ostia into Gregoriopolis, belongs to
another, though almost adjacent, site.
New Ostia, with its castle, its cathedral,
its gateway, its one or two narrow
streets, but with seemingly hardly
a dozen inhabitants, is a sadder sight
than old Ostia, with no inhabitant
except the stalwart custode, who defends
himself against Ostian air by
daily doses of quinine. Yet the castle
of Cardinal Estouteville ranks high
among picturesque fortresses; the
cathedral shows a mixture of classical
and Gothic detail for which nothing
in Rome prepares us; fragments of
ancient work lie around; the staircase
of the bishop's palace, the palace of
the first among cardinals, is rich in
ancient inscriptions. But we hasten
on to the older site. There is something
specially striking in its half-excavated
state. We tread the ancient
pavement, between the ancient houses,
of a street dug out of a cornfield on
either side. The wall of Ancus loses
itself in a bank of earth. Here a house,
there a temple, is dug out, leaving just
space enough to see it among surrounding
blades of corn. At Pompeii,
too, the diggings are not finished; but
there one part is dug, another is not;
here we thread our way along what is
dug with the far greater mass of the
undug to right and left of us. So far
we are content; the undug may soon
be promoted to the state of the dug,
and Mother Earth is a safe keeper of
antiquities. It is otherwise with
Father Tiber. When he is close on
one side of us, there is, as our guide
truly tells us, no small danger. He
once, as Horace witnesses, set forth to
destroy the monuments of Numa at
Rome; he is clearly minded to do the
like by the monuments of Numa's
grandson at Ostia.
What is the common point of
connexion between all the lands
and places which bear the name of
Alba, Albania, or something like it?
They lie so far apart, they are inhabited
by people of such utterly
different nations and languages, that
it is strange if there be any point of
connexion among them, while it is at
least as strange if the name has settled
down on so many remote spots by
sheer accident only. We must not
forget that our own land has an interest
in the question: we dwell in the
Isle of Albion, and its northern part
is specially Albanach or Albany. An
English lady living on the eastern
shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented
by a Scotch lady because,
being an Albanian, she spoke such
good English. It was afterwards suggested
to her that she might have
answered with a tu quoque or something
more; the Englishwoman was
no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a
certain sense was. But have Albanians
of either of these kinds anything
to do either with the Duke of Alva—for
in his tongue "non aliud est
vivere quam bibere"—or with the
Albania beyond the Euxine? Then
again it is singular to read, say in
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local
wars of Rome and Alba Longa described
under exactly the same gentile
names as those by which Imperial
Anna describes strife between the
New Rome and those Ghegs and
Tosks who have again begun to make
themselves famous. It is Ῥωμαῖοι
and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without
the change of jot or tittle. In this
case, at least, we believe that philologers
would deny the slightest
kindred between the names; but the
casual identity is thereby only made
the more startling. A malicious critic
might say that Anna's Romans were
as unlike old Romans as her Albanians
could be unlike the men of Alba
Longa. But her Romans did at least
claim to be Romans, sharers in the
inheritance of the wolf and the eagle;
while her Albanians certainly laid no
claims to any rights in the Alban sow
and her thirty pigs.
Rome, undutiful daughter, swept
away her mother city so thoroughly
that its site has become a matter of
dispute. But the name lived on in
derivative forms. Alba perished, but
the Alban lake and the Alban mount
kept their places, to play no small part
in the history of Rome. There is the
lake, there is the great drain for its
waters, so strangely interwoven with
the tale of Veii. There is the mount,
with the road by which the chariot of
Marcellus went up in triumph; there
are still the displaced stones of the
temple which was the religious centre
of the Latin name. But for the
fanaticism of the last Stewart, the pillared
front of the Latin Jupiter might
still form the proudest of crowns for
the height on which the gazer from
the walls of Rome fixes his eye more
commonly than on any other. And,
if Alba perished, she did in a manner
rise again. The neighbourhood of dead
Alba became as favourite a quarter for
the villas of Roman nobles as the
neighbourhood of living Tusculum.
There the great Pompeius had a
dwelling; there, according to one version
of his story, his body—or perhaps
only his head—found a stately tomb,
though Hadrian could make his verse
by the Alexandrian Shore to say that
no tomb had been found for him who
had so many temples. But of all
villas on Alban ground, of all Albana,
the Albanum of the Emperors, with
its spacious gardens, its long terraces
still to be traced, of course came to be
the greatest. The walled station of
the Imperial guards, the fellow of the
Prætorian camp at Rome, became the
kernel of a new town, and Albano
still exists, an episcopal city, seat of a
cardinal-bishop, and it still keeps its
character as a summer retreat for
those who, now as of old, seek to
escape the smoke and wealth and noise
of lordly Rome. Albano and Alba
stand in somewhat the same relation as
Spalato and Salona. In both cases
the new city grew out of an Imperial
dwelling-place in the neighborhood of
the old. But there is this wide difference
between them, that Alba has
utterly perished, while Salona survives
in ample ruins. Alba had vanished
ages and ages before Albano arose.
Spalato stood ready to be a city of
refuge for those who fled from Salona
in her day of overthrow.
The town of Albano itself contains
a good many antiquities, the most
prominent among which, that which
greets the eye on the entrance from
Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so
cruelly stripped of its hewn stone,
which, truly or falsely, passes for the
tomb of Cnæus Pompeius Magnus.
More striking on a close examination,
though spoiled in its effect by a Papal
freak of restoration, is the tomb which
hovers between the names of Aruns
son of Porsena and the Horatii and
Curiatii. Which of the two would
Sir George Lewis have looked on as
the more impossible? This is the
tomb which so singularly forestalled
the outline of the Glastonbury
kitchen—before its chimneys perished—and
thereby of the Museum laboratory
at Oxford. A good deal of the
wall of the camp, a good deal of an
amphitheatre on the hill-side, and
several other fragments of the earlier
Imperial time, are still to be seen.
But after all Albano really exists, not
for its own sake, but as a starting-point
for the Alban lake and the Alban
mount, and hardly less as a starting-point
for
... the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia's trees.
Aricia has changed its site; the small
modern town has flown up to the
level of the arx, to be approached by
Albano by almost the only work on
which we do not grudge to see the
name of Pius IX. The viaduct of
that "Pontifex Optimus Maximus"—his
votaries seem never quite to distinguish
between him and Jupiter—is
really a work worthy of Cæsars or
consuls. Below it new Aricia has left
the elder city, its fragments of walls
and of the Appian Way, to be sought
for in the valley below, the crater, so
wise men tell us, of an extinct volcano,
the biggest surely even in this
region where craters meet us at every
step. Scraps of primæval wall, hardly
to be distinguished from the rocks,
prepare us for what we are to see at
places further out of the ordinary
track; walls of the days of Sulla join
on alike to what we have seen at
Rome, and to what we are to see at
Cori. But, after all, the "still glassy
lake" to which the grove of the "rex
nemorensis" has given the name of
Nemi, is the true glory of Aricia.
How well we remember being puzzled
years and years ago with the
thrilling run of the lines—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
In these days the fault would be
held to lie with the poet for venturing
on an allusion which it might need a
little research to take in. In those
days we thought in such cases that
the fault lay with ourselves; we
admired without understanding till
we lighted on the explanation which
enabled us to understand as well. As
such a process is a wholesome one, we
will leave the lines without comment;
not to speak of books of reference, the
story will be found, in a somewhat
grotesque form, in Dr. Merivale's
chapter on the reign of Caius, better
known as Caligula.
The ghastly priest has gone from
Nemi; but the lake is there still, and
the successors of the trees. Access is
courteously granted by the present
owner, who, we may believe, has never
slain anybody, and who, we hope,
may not be slain himself. But though
we may admire Nemi from close by,
we do not fully understand Nemi and
its place among things, till we can look
upon it in company with its greater
fellow of Alba. That is, we must
climb the Alban mount, or a good part
of its height. But we go first to the
Alban lake itself; and to do so we go
along its rim and slide down the side
of its crater. There we find the
emissarius, so deftly cut in the rock,
and which has done its work so well
for so many ages. Who made it?
Camillus, or some one long before
Camillus? The men who built the
great cloaca of Rome were quite
capable of cutting the hole through
the rock of Alba, without any message
from Delphi or any design
against the walls of Veii. Whoever
the borer was, he did his work far
more thoroughly than Claudius ages
afterwards did his for the Fucine lake,
which work it has been left for the
Torlonia of our own day to finish.
But no one, we may suppose, wished
at any time to drain the Alban lake,
but only to keep it in order. How
needful such a work is we do not fully
grasp till we can look down from
above. Then we take in the strict
accuracy of the name crater. We see
the two lakes, greater and smaller,
side by side, like two basins in the
strictest sense, in which, at some time
which geologists may fix, but which it
is enough for history to say that it was
long before the oldest primæval wall,
the powers of water supplanted those
of fire. We take in how the larger
lake, with its narrow rim, in some
parts of its circuit with its low rim,
liable to be swollen, but with no
natural outlet for its waters, might
easily come to overflow, if artificial
means had not been, in some early
time, taken to check it.
But when we have wound our way
by the rim of the lake, by the house
which the so-called Prisoner of the
Vatican never chooses to visit, by the
rock which still bears his name, when
we have crossed the so-called fields of
Hannibal—yet another crater, science
tells us—when we have climbed by the
triumphal way to the height of Monte
Cavo, we do indeed understand the
geography and history of Rome and
Latium better than we did before. The
eye may range over the height of
Tusculum and over the battle-ground
of Regillus as far as the height of
Præneste; it may range hither and
thither over many points which have
their charm both of history and of
nature. But there are two sides to
which the historical eye will be
attracted before all others. Such a
gazer will better take in the position
of Rome, as he sees it, with its seven
hills shrunk out of sight, a point—rather
a line—in the Latin plain, with
a wall of Etruscan hills beyond it.
We see how utterly different was the
position of Rome from the position of
the elder cities; we see how she lies in
the midst, at the very meeting-place of
nations; we see how needful for her it
was to make the barrier behind her
her own; and we understand her wars
with Veii better than before. But we
look down too on the Latin plain
itself: we look down, we believe, on
the vanished site of Rome's mother at
our feet; we look out on the great flat
once fringed with cities, and on the
great and wide sea beyond it. Here,
standing forth as an advanced post of
the land, we see where
... the Witch's Fortress
O'erhangs the dark-blue seas.
And beyond Circeii and its island
satellites, we look on to the more
distant height, in so many ages the
boundary height, best known as a
height by the name of Anxur, but
known as a boundary by the name of
Terracina. When we think how early
Rome became the mistress, not only of
the height on which we stand and of
the kindred heights around it, but of
that long coast-line and its protecting
heights, we feel why Rome, so early
in her history, had to enter on a career
of wide-spreading policy, which could
never have suggested itself to a power
seated at Veii or at Præneste. Rome,
on her great river, with her haven at
its mouth, with her long line of sea-faring
subjects or allies, felt from a
very early time the friendship or
enmity of the great powers of the
sea to be an important matter. She
had to dread Etruscan pirates and
Phœnician traders; the Greek of
Cumæ might perhaps do something
more against her than merely shelter
her tyrants. We may believe or not
in the connexion between the Alban
lake and the fall of Veii, but, as we
look one way from beside the few
stones that are left of Jove's loftiest
temple, we understand how needful it
was that Juno of Veii should move to
Rome. We may or we may not have
the camping-ground of Hannibal behind
us; but as we look out seawards
we believe in the first treaty with
Carthage; we go on to wonder how
things had turned about, when Duilius
and Lutatius could break the Carthaginian
power by sea, and when Hannibal
could make his way into Italy
by land.
There was some reason in the
remark made by Mr. Creighton
in the Academy a little time back, that
there must be something "irritating
to the Italians of the present date
in the point of view which is often
adopted by English writers towards
Italian history." "Their cities," he
said, "which are still instinct with
political and social life, are regarded
as museums of curiosities, which serve
to awaken picturesque reminiscences
in the mind of the passing tourist."
Mr. Creighton was speaking of Genoa,
and at Genoa and in cities like Genoa,
what he says may be perfectly true.
But there are other Italian cities where
the political and social life at least
hides itself from the passing tourist,
and where the curiosity with which
he regards the city is as nothing compared
with the curiosity with which
the inhabitants of the city seem to
regard him. The curiosity is not
specially irritating; it is perhaps
mixed up with a certain open craving
after soldi which nothing short of the
very highest civilization can get rid
of; but it is quite distinct from the
endless touting and wearying which
the traveller has to undergo in places
which are one degree more advanced,
or which, to speak more civilly, have
fallen less far back. For it is only
civil to believe of cities which were
once independent commonwealths,
members of the League of the Thirty
Cities, and, therefore, doubtless instinct
with political life, that they
were, at least two or three millenniums
back, cleaner than they are now, and
filled with inhabitants who had something
more to do than their successors
seem to have. But the interest which
the novelty of the stranger awakens
in the minds of the present inhabitants—far
keener, it would seem, than the
interest which the antiquity of the city
awakens in his mind—really does him
no harm. The modern Latins or
Volscians come and look; they wonder;
they follow. If the nature of
the country requires that the strangers
be set on asses and mules, the curiosity,
as is only natural, reaches its
height. The asses of the Prisci Latini
or of their Volscian neighbours are
undoubtedly grave and discreet beasts;
even the obstinacy of the mule is a
virtue when he knows the way so much
better than his foreign rider. But
there is something grotesque in the
way of going; it is not wonderful if
the sight gathers together a crowd,
if the travellers find themselves the
centre, not exactly of triumph, for they
are not drawn in a chariot; not exactly
of an ovation, for they do not walk
on foot; but of a not ill-humoured
procession of gazers, it may even be
of admirers.
Something of this kind is likely to
be the destiny, at some point at least,
of those who wish to carry out the full
programme of the right wing of the
Latin host of Regillus:
Aricia, Cora, Norba,
Velitræ, with the might
Of Setia and of Tusculum.
Tusculum they will, perhaps, have
made the object of a separate pilgrimage;
Aricia belongs to the following
of Jupiter and the Alban mount;
"Setia's purple vineyards" it may be
hard to take into the line of march;
but, with a slight change of order,
"Velitræ, Cora, Norba," with the
later Ninfa thrown in as a substitute
for neglected Setia, will form an
admirable group, a day's journey,
which those who have made it will
perhaps, at the end of a day or two,
feel sorry that they have not cut into
two. Velitræ—hardly changed in the
modern Velletri—has itself but little
to show beyond one of the very noblest
bell-towers of the second Italian period,
where the pointed arch creeps in, a
visitor which in Italy is better away,
but which at least keeps out the
vagaries of a yet later time. The lie
of the town is good; it stands well on
its hill, of no great elevation among
its brighter neighbours. Besides the
bell-tower, it has little to show in the
ecclesiastical line, save only the eccentricity
of having its cathedral church
placed as if we were in Wales instead
of in Italy, at the bottom of the city instead
of at the top. One or two ancient
houses and modern palaces may claim
some attention, but Velletri, truly
barren in Roman remains, cannot be
said to be fruitful in those of mediæval
times. The chief value of the town is
as a starting-point—we can hardly call
it centre—for Cora, Norba, and several
other of its ancient fellows. The view
from Velletri is beyond words. We
look over the fertile plain, dying away
to the right into the Pomptine marshes,
and fenced in by the mighty limestone
bulwark of the Volscian mountains.
To the right of all the height
of Anxur's temple looms in the distance;
Circeii, with its following of
islands, rises nearer and more plainly,
almost itself like a great island, reminding
the visitor from the West of
England of Brean Down and the Holms
in the Severn Sea. But the mountains
draw the eyes towards them by something
more than their bright masses,
something more than a light and shade
upon their sides. Several of their
strong points are crowned with castles
and whole towns; and one point so
crowned stands out as the centre of all.
We see one spur of the mountain, far
lower than the heights beyond it,
crowned by a little city coming some
way down its sides, with a tall tower
rising well from the midst when the
sunlight catches it. There stands one
of the chief objects for which Velletri
is the starting-point; there we have to
look for—
... the gigantic watch-towers,
No work of earthly men,
Whence Cora's sentinel's o'erlook
The never-ending fen.
Watch-towers, perhaps, in the strictest
sense, we do not see, and we shall
hardly find them when we come
nearer; but Cora, Cori, still keeps the
mightiest of walls, which it was no
wonder that men looked on as too
mighty to be the work of such mortals—in
Homer's phrase—as we now are,
and looked on them as reared by no
hands weaker than those of the forgers
of Jove's own thunderbolts. With
Cori we enter on the examination of a
long series of towns, whose main feature
is their primæval walls, and
among these Cori has the merit of
showing us the walls that are the
most primæval of all. None of its
fellows can show such blocks as the
mysterious engineers, whose work men
love to call Cyclopean, piled together
in the lower town of Cori, just outside
what is now the gate of Ninfa. Blocks
indeed of equal size we may see elsewhere,
but surely none of equal rudeness.
They are heaped together as
they were hewn or torn away from their
place in the natural rock; huge limestone
blocks of every size and shape,
with the spaces between them filled up
with similar stones of their own kind.
But the whole range of the wall of
Cori is not of this primitive sort. The
curious in such matters distinguish
five epochs: Cyclopean, Latin, Old
Roman, Roman of Sulla's day, and—the
leap is a great one—mediæval
walls of the time of King Ladislaus;
we hardly venture to give an Angevin
king of the hither Sicily the full
Slavonic shape which marks him as
sprung from the other side of Hadria.
The stones of the first four—we have
already spoken of the first of all—are
all polygonal, of distinguishing degrees
of regularity of work and degrees of
size. The rudest wall, as far as we
saw, of all is to be found quite at the
bottom; the others may be seen side
by side in the great walls of the arx
which soar high above all, and which
shelter the chief ornament of Cori in
quite another department.
According to the nearly invariable
rule, the arx of Cora contained a
temple, and the temple, as so often
happens, has been turned into a
church. But the change has been less
destructive to Cori than in many other
places. The house of St. Peter has
been built without damaging the portico
of the house of Hercules—the old
Latin Herculus was hopelessly confused
with the Hêraklês of Greek
legend—and still keeps the columns
of his portico, both on its front and its
sides; keeps his entablature, his pediment,
the gate-way of his cella, the
inscription which records the work of
the local duumvirs, Manlius and Turpilius.
But what shall we say to the
columns themselves? They profess to
be Doric, even to be Greek Doric;
but they have bases; they stand as
wide apart as Etruscan tradition
planted the columns of the Capitoline
Jupiter; the shafts themselves, instead
of being as massive as Pæstum,
are slenderer than Nemea. But sin
against rule as it may, the upper temple
at Cori is still undoubtedly pretty,
to say the least, and it is really all the
more interesting because of its sin
against rule. Far finer in themselves
are the Corinthian columns—such as
are left—of the temple of the Greek
Twin Brethren lower down the hill;
but we can see good Corinthian
columns in a great many places; the
peculiarities of the Hercules temple
are special to Cori. Do they not speak
of the Hellenizing mind of the great
dictator who made Cora rise again
after it had suffered deeply at the
hands of his Marian enemies? Stern
restorer of what he deemed Rome's
ancient ways, but votary and favourite
of Hellenic gods, the taste of Sulla
might well lead him to some such
forms as we see in the object, yet prominent
from many points of view, that
crowns the height of the citadel of Cora.
But we have not gone through the
full tale of the antiquities of this
strange little mountain-city. Outside
the Ninfa gate, spanning at a vast
height the deep gorge which on that
side forms the foss of Cori, rises a
bridge, of days which we call ancient,
but which we are tempted to call
modern so near to the Cyclopean wall.
Not a few fragments of columns may
be marked here and there in the
streets. We light too on inscriptions.
Besides the duumvirs—one might call
them the bailiffs—of the Roman Municipium,
whose names are carved on
the frieze of Hercules, another commemorates
two Praitors; surely these,
with their archaic spelling, are the
abiding magistrates of the Latin Commonwealth—as
Cicero's Milo was
dictator of Lanuvium—dependent on
Rome, but not fully incorporated in
her substance. Then, besides the
chief temple, other Pagan buildings
and objects have been turned to Christian
uses. In the church where St.
Peter has supplanted Hercules, an
altar, if altar it be, bearing rams with
horns and the Gorgon's head, has been
hollowed out to make a baptismal font.
The church of St. Oliva bears a dedication
dating only from the sixteenth
century; but it is a lovely cloister of
that better kind of Renaissance which
was in truth only a falling back on
Romanesque. In the church are
memorials of earlier times, classical
columns used again, fitted some of
them with capitals of the very rudest
Romanesque, whose fellows may be
found in Worcester and at Hildesheim.
Altogether Cori is emphatically a
place for a visit. But a word of warning
must be given. Cori and Norba
cannot be combined so as to see both
worthily in a single day. Let the
traveller either make two distinct outings
from Velletri, or let him take his
chance of sleeping at Cori; it may not
be a worse chance than sleeping at
Frosinone, where sleep may be had.
Then let him rise up early in the
morning and saddle his ass, or, if
able-bodied, let him rather make his
way on his own feet along the mountain-path
to Norba.
We will suppose that, the mutual
curiosity of natives and strangers
having been fully gratified at Cori,
the strangers have set out on their
way, on mule-back or otherwise. The
mountain-track up and down, skirting
the lower heights of the Volscian
range, opens noble views of the higher
mountains inland, of the wide flat
below, and of the sea beyond. But
these views are perhaps, on the whole,
better enjoyed when the traveller has
found a firm foothold within "Norba's
ancient wall" than while he has personal
experience how
The patient ass, up flinty paths,
Plods with his weary load.
Still worse indeed is it when the flinty
paths have to be plodded down, and
when the weary load needs all his
theoretical philosophy to persuade him
how thoroughly safe he really is, while
the weakness of the flesh surrounds
the descent with terrors which he
knows to be unreal. At last the ancient
wall rises immediately before him;
the hill-side, a small height straight
above the path, is climbed on his own
feet, and he can presently contemplate
at his ease both the wall itself and
the prospect which it commands. The
last part of the ass-track has become so
like a lane anywhere else that we are
amazed when we reach the other side
of the immediate height of Norba, and
find how far below lies the plain from
which the almost perpendicular cliffs
spring to bear up the forsaken city.
For at Norba the curiosity will be almost
wholly on the side of the stranger;
in cannot be returned in kind, as at
Cori; a lone shepherd or two may
come to look at him; he cannot bring
together the least approach to a triumphal
procession. For within the wall
all is, we cannot say desolate or forsaken,
for the crops are there, full and
green—"segetes, ubi Norba fuit"—but
the ancient circuit is at least empty
of all dwelling-places of man. We
would fain believe that the space has
stood as empty as it now does ever
since the people of Norba—less wise,
as the event showed, than their neighbours
of Cora—embraced the cause of
Marius with such desperate zeal that
they slew themselves and burned their
houses rather than let either themselves
or their goods fall into the hands of
Sulla. This inference might possibly
be rash; for the ancient wall fences in
at least one ruin which may be later
than the days of the fortunate dictator.
But it is clear that Norba, if it recovered
from this great single blow,
gradually dwindled away, to the profit,
first of Norma by its side, which still
abides, and of Ninfa, at its foot, which
has perished only less utterly than
Norba itself.
Cori and Norba are alike cities set
on hills, and neither of them has any
fear of being hid. But they are set on
hills in different senses. Cori occupies
the upper part of the sloping hill, and
the houses spread down the slope.
Norba occupies a large table-land on
the edge of the mountains, and its
outer wall is carried along the upper
rim of a steep and lofty cliff. No
dwellings could ever have spread themselves
downwards on the side which
looks toward the marshes and the sea.
But we should hardly have said the
outer wall; for the height was so carefully
fortified that outlying defences
were placed at various points on the
side of the cliff wherever the primitive
engineers deemed such defences needful.
Within the circuit, again, the
arx rose on several terraces; its highest
point—crowned, we may believe,
as usual, by a temple—must have
formed a proud object indeed from the
vast extent of land and sea which it
looks down upon. No other of its
ancient neighbours looks down so immediately
on the great Pomptine flat
as Norba does, as none looks down
from so great a height. Cori rather
occupies a hill thrown out in front of
the mountain; Norba sits on the edge
of the mountain itself, though of course
at a much lower elevation than the
huge masses further inland. The
towers and temples of the city must
have had a wonderful effect from the
lands below; as it is, there is nothing
to mark the place but the line of wall
itself, which does not always stand out
in a very marked way from the cliff.
It is then perhaps in some sort well
that the later Norma has taken the
place of Norba. On the hill of Norba
we see that Norma and Norba by no
means join one another; there is a gap
between them which, while we are on
the mountain, might pass for a valley.
But as we look from below, the winding
outline of the hills puts this gap
out of sight, and Norma and Norba
become in appearance one whole.
Norma looks like a continuation of
Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited
part, perhaps, as at Syracuse
and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold
within which the city had again shrunk
up. From the points where the eye
can take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of
the cliff, and the further town of Sermoneta
crowning a hill-top far lower
than the height of Norba, the whole
grouping is wonderful. The view from
Norba itself takes in points with which
we have become familiar since we first
gazed on them from the height of the
Latian Jupiter. But we see them in
new groupings and new proportions;
the islands, prisons for dangerous or
discreditable members of the Imperial
house, stand out in special prominence
in front of the Circæan height—a
height so nearly cut off from the mainland
that it seems like the greatest of
the island group. Nowhere do we
better understand what men looked on
as a great and strong city in days
when they had not yet learned that
an element of truer might lurked in
what, judged by the standard of Norba,
would seem a mere group of molehills
by the yellow Tiber.
As the whole city lay on the top of
the hill, the space taken in by the walls
is necessarily greater than in those
towns where the hill stands distinct,
the arx alone crowns the top, and where
the town walls are placed lower down.
The nature of the construction adapts
itself to the needs of the different parts
of the circuit. The mass of the wall
is of polygonal stones, rude, but far
less rude than the rudest at Cori.
Without being actually laid in regular
order, they have a certain tendency to
fall into courses as it were of themselves,
and it is not always easy to tell
how far the roughness of the stone has
been from the beginning, and how far
it is due to the action of the weather
on stones cut perhaps somewhat less
carefully than the finer stones at Cori.
But the Norban builders could, when
it was worth their while, do something
more than this. They could, when
they had to make a corner, put
together squared stones cut with a
good deal of exactness, and when it
was convenient that a corner should be
rounded off, they could do that too with
equal skill. This last was done at
the greatest gateway looking towards
Norma. Here there is no sign of
either lintel, arch, or attempt at arch,
to span the opening; it would almost
seem that the gate itself was simply
placed across the opening with nothing
over it, much as at Tusculum the gate
was hung between two pieces of native
rock. That the arch was not known
to the first builders of Norba, but that
they had reached the stage in which
men began as it were to stretch forth
their hands towards that great invention,
is shown by a ruined building—one
of the few things within the wall
of Norba which can be called even a
ruined building—a little way beyond
the arx. Here we have a distinct
attempt at a vault for the roof; but it
is not the apparent cupola of Mykênê
and New Grange, nor the apparent
barrel-vault of Tusculum. The building
is oblong, and the attempted arches
rise on both sides, from the small ones
as well as from the longer. The ruined
state of the building, whatever it was,
most unluckily hinders us from seeing
how the four vaults, so to call them,
were made to meet in the middle. It
must have been a strange problem in
construction. Hard by is the other
building at which we have already
hinted as being of later date. It has
real arches and masonry, like that
which at Cori is attributed to Sulla's
time. But it may as well come before
the overthrow of Norba in his day as
after it.
From primæval and forsaken Norba
we go down the hill-side, learning as
we go how high Norba stands, to
hardly less forsaken, though only
mediæval, Ninfa. Ninfa, unlike Norba,
has a few inhabitants; there is a house
and a mill, if not within the fortified
enclosure, at least just outside it, and,
if the enclosure itself contains no actual
dwelling-places of man, it contains
abundance of buildings which have
once been so. One can hardly fancy
a greater contrast than that which
strikes us between the stern primæval
wall of Norba, fencing in the thick-standing
corn, and the wall of Ninfa,
with its towers, its varied and picturesque
outline, fencing in a crowd of
houses, churches, and buildings of
every kind, the oldest of which could
not have arisen till a thousand years
after Norba became desolate. All are
now forsaken, roofless, shattered, forming
one of the most singular gatherings
of ruins to be seen anywhere, the
mummy, as it has been well called, of
a dead town. Ninfa was once a place
of some consequence, which played its
part in local history; perhaps the most
notable event suggested by its name is
that here Alexander III., a Pope who
had so much to do with our own history,
was consecrated after his famous
disputed election. But its position in
the deadly flat, close by a stream, led
to its ruin; the malaria was too much
for it, and Ninfa ceased to be reckoned
among the cities of articulate-speaking
men. Some freak might restore the
greatness of Norba; for there is nothing
to hinder men living there
if the fancy took them; they cannot
live at Ninfa without greater changes
than a Marius or a Sulla can work.
There is something specially striking
in a town, whose remains are so extensive,
standing so utterly desolate. There
is something Irish in the look of things
at Ninfa, as indeed there is in the look
of a good many of the ruined mediæval
sites which often meet us in this
region. It is not merely the fact of
their being ruined, though there is
something Irish in that; the tall,
slender towers, of which there are
many both at Ninfa and elsewhere,
have a real likeness to many buildings
in Ireland. But, though the general
look of Ninfa is singularly striking,
there is less to be learned from the
particular buildings than might have
been looked for. They are spread over
several centuries, some of the houses
reaching even into Renaissance times.
The church of most pretension lies
without the walls; several within them
keep their apses and the paintings on
them, but little more. The whole
is a wilderness of ruins, strange, impressive,
but hardly venerable. As the
ruin of a town, the wreck of many
buildings crowded close together, fallen
Ninfa has little of the solemnity of our
own ruined castles and abbeys. As
for the elements of wonder and mystery,
they dwell in this region on the
hill-top, among the mighty masses of
stone which the men of an unrecorded
age piled together to make Norba.
The visitor to Segni will find difficulties
in studying the history on
the spot second only to those which he
finds at Norba. It is quite certain that
he will find no books at Norba, save
such as he may take with him, which
are not likely to be many. It is possible
that there may be books at Segni;
there may lurk in some odd corner
either a hidden scholar with his treasured
library, or a bookseller of that
class, sometimes to be found in old-fashioned
places, who dislikes nothing
so much as parting with his books.
But, if such there be, they do not force
themselves on the eye on one's entrance
into Segni. A natural and important
question is sure to present
itself, and—without wings to fly at once
to the libraries of Rome—there is no immediate
means of answering it. Is the
name of Signia—now by a very slight
change Segni—to be found in any of
the lists of the Thirty Cities of Latium?
The lists are many, and the traveller
is not likely to carry them all in his
head. He may perhaps be able to repeat
the lines in which Macaulay draws
the picture of many of them; and, if
so, every step that he takes among
the Latin cities will make him more
fully admire the fitness and force of
the points and epithets picked out in
each case. But at Segni the Lay of
Regillus fails him; he has his quotations
for Cora and Norba; he has no
quotations for Signia. Still Macaulay's
verses are not a full or formal list of
the cities; while, if he argues that
Signia lies too much in the heart of the
Volscian and Hernican land to have
belonged to the Latin name, he is met
by the fact that "Ferentinum of the
rock," yet further on, has its place in
them alongside of "Gabia of the pool."
He turns to his guide-book—and the
guide-book of Gsell-fels, though it
sometimes leaves things out, is almost
always to be trusted for what it puts
in; he there finds only the entry of
the alleged Roman colony of the days
of the Tarquins, with the remark that
the existing walls seem to point to an
earlier origin. And again a thought
may occur to him, if not at Segni
itself, yet in the later course of the
journey of which Segni forms a part—Were
the people of ancient Signia
specially skilful in the making of
mosaic pavements? There is a kind
of work called opus Signinum, a pattern
of black spots on a white ground,
of which there is a good deal at
Pompeii, and of which the visitor to
Segni will most likely see an example
a few days later at Anagni. The question
is hardly so exciting as the question
as to the position of Signia in the
days of the Latin League. But it is
one which may suggest itself, and it is
one which it will be hard to answer
with only the resources which are to
be had at Segni itself. The visitor to
Segni is thus likely to find himself a
little uncomfortable as to more than
one point in the history of the place
where he stands. And he will feel
most uncomfortable of all as to the
great point of all with regard to its
earliest history. Still, he may for the
moment comfort himself by thinking
that there are those who might be
unkind enough to hint that he would
still be equally uncertain if he had a
hundred quotations on the tip of his
tongue, or if he were in a library with
thousands of volumes to turn to.
But whether Signia was ever a
Thirty-city or not—we may be allowed
to follow the local usage of Canterbury,
which speaks of "a Six-preacher"—there
is no doubt as to its geographical
position; there is no doubt as to the
grandeur of its remains. In starting
from Velletri, with Algidus and its
holm-oaks and its memories of Æquian
encampments on our left hand, on the
right we turn the corner of the Volscian
mountains, and the railway
carries us along the valley between
them and their Hernican rivals. We
reach the station of Segni; we mark
more than one town perched on the
opposite heights; we have close by us,
in the low ground—reminding us of
Ninfa on a smaller scale—the walls of
a forsaken fortress, with a shattered
tower of wonderful height and slenderness;
but the walls of Signia still keep
themselves hidden among the mountains.
It is not from the side of Velletri,
but, as we afterwards learn, from
the side of Anagni, that Segni on its
mountain height, and its satellite of
Gavignano, perched on a smaller detached
hill in front, form striking features
in the landscape.
Segni belongs to the same class of
hill-fortress as Norba, not the same
class as Cori. It occupies, not the top
of a conical hill, but a table-land, if
we may apply that name to so narrow
a space, on the mountain itself. The
distinction is well marked by comparing
it with Gavignano just below,
which is one of the chief objects in the
immediate view from the height of
Segni. The difference is just the same
as the difference between Norba and
Sermoneta, though Gavignano has
more the air of being an outpost of
Segni than Sermoneta has of being an
outpost of Norba. The hill-top which
Segni crowns is long and narrow, at
some points very narrow indeed, so as
to give to the space within the walls
nearly the shape of a figure of eight.
The space within is neither wholly
forsaken, as at Norba, nor all crowded
with dwellings, as at Cori. The
modern town has withdrawn into one
quarter of the old enclosure; but it has
not, as in so many other cases, withdrawn
into the ancient citadel. The
site of the arx of Signia, rising but
little above the general level of the
hill-top, but placed well so as to command
what we may call the isthmus
between the two parts of the town,
forms no part of the dwelling-place of
the modern Signians; but under the
name of Passegiata it does form part
of their pleasure-ground. The modern
town has retreated into the other loop
of the figure of eight, that which lies
furthest from the traveller as he
draws near from Velletri, but to
which the course of the road will necessarily
take him first. He may enter
by a gateway of Roman date, and if he
so does his eye will soon be struck by
the great number of graceful fragments
of mediæval work to be found within
the narrow streets of Segni. The town
has most likely been for ages too poor
to follow the example of its richer
neighbours in replacing beauty by ugliness.
But he will do better to keep
for a while from entering the inhabited
part of the town. Let him first make
the circuit of the ancient walls. And
he can hardly doubt whether to turn
to the right hand or to the left. The
claims of the left are in this case overwhelming.
Long before he has reached
the town, he must have seen far away
on the hill the most precious of the
remains of Signia, the gateway which
stands, forsaken but still untouched,
beckoning him, as it were, to make his
way first of all to the most instructive
thing which the primæval city has to
show him.
But before he can reach either the
Roman or the primæval gate he will
have begun to notice the character of
the wall. The construction is hardly
so rude as the rudest parts of the wall
at Cori, but a great deal of it belongs
to the same general stage of engineering
progress. The huge polygonal
stones are heaped together; but one
might note perhaps two stages, yet
often intermingled—one, where the
sides only of the stones are cut so as to
fit their neighbours; another, where the
outer faces are also smoothed of what
is called "rustication" in late Renaissance
work. In the first they are not
left so utterly in a state of nature as
they are at Cori. Their sides have been
cut to the shape which was thought
best for the work of piling them together.
In a later stage, also seen at
Cori, the outer sides, those which stand
free from the scarped wall, are also cut;
but it is not always easy to say how
much of the change of the surface is
due to art and how much to weather.
At Segni the peculiar shape of the
enclosure makes it somewhat hard to
follow the line of the walls without a
ground-plan, and a ground-plan is not
to be had at Segni merely by asking for
it. But it is plain that, in many parts
at least, on the whole side of the hill
which lies exposed to the open valley,
and on the head of the whole promontory,
there was, whenever the ground
allowed and required it, a double wall,
one on the edge of the hill, the other
at some distance down its side. The
most famous of the gates of Segni,
locally known as Porta Saracenesca,
leads from the outside world into the
outer enclosure, at a point well
chosen for military purposes, close to
the edge, and commanding the path
by which the traveller will most likely
make his way to it. And a mighty
gate it is, and one that holds no small
place in the history of the art of construction.
It is one of those instances
which show that their builders were
still ignorant of the principle of the
arch, but that they were, so to speak,
in search of it. They had not yet
learned how to make the top of an
opening out of stones really so arranged
as to stand by mutual support; but
they were striving after something
beyond the mere horizontal lintel resting
on two vertical supports. The
builders of Segni had not got so far as
those of Veii or Tusculum; as they
had no idea of the true principle of the
arch, so they had no idea of its form;
all they could do was to place two
horizontal stones with sides sloping
inwards immediately under the lintel.
In truth, the construction is still purely
that of the lintel, and nothing else; but
the form chosen shows a certain vain
striving after something different. As
such, it is no small lesson which it
teaches; and the effect of the great
stones thus piled together to form the
entrance is striking and solemn. It
carries us back from days which on
our side of the Alps we deem ancient,
but when the arts of construction were
as well known as they are now, to
days when men were making the first
rude attempts towards the greatest of
constructive inventions. Attempts of
this kind, simply because they are mere
attempts, failures and not successes,
have a more ancient look than those
examples where the builders were
fully satisfied with the lintel construction
and attempted no other. In point
of fact, whatever their relative date,
they are later in idea, as showing a
desire to innovate on the received form,
some instances of which were at last
crowned with success.
It is not easy to see how this gate
came by its local name. One can
understand the process of thought by
which the roofing at Tusculum, which
has the outward shape of the pointed
arch, came to be called arco Gotico;
it is harder to guess why the great
primæval gate of Segni should be
attributed to Saracens. It is far from
being the only primæval gateway in
the whole circuit. No less than five
have been counted between the outer
and inner walls, and two more in the
part of the enclosure occupied by the
modern town, where the two lines of
wall coincide. Hard by Porta Saracenesca
itself is a small sally-port; of the
others, the larger ones, like Porta
Saracenesca itself, stand at right angles
to the wall. Some of them at least
show the same strivings after the arch
as their greater neighbour. The nature
of the ground forbids the arx from
reaching any great height above the
rest of the city; but its place is easily
marked. It contains a singular large
cistern of Roman work, and close by
is one of those junctions of different
ages which always preach to us a living
historic lesson. Here is the terrace
of a temple wrought with stones of
the primitive construction. On this
primitive work rise the remains of the
cella in Roman masonry, and the
Roman wall of the cella is now carried
up to form a church. Now, at least
the church is of no architectural value,
but it is none the less a witness to the
greatest of all the changes which the
hoary walls of Signia have looked
upon.
Landed, then, in Christian Segni,
we may, perhaps, remember that one
of the greatest of the Popes was born
either in the town itself or in its satellite
of Gavignano. But which was
the actual spot? Our one guide available
at the moment seems to doubt
between the two. In either case we
see, if we do not tread, the place which
gave birth to the third and greatest of
the Innocents. We find, too, that a
Papal palace of Segni was swept away
by the Duke of Alva in that strange
war which the Catholic King Philip
waged, not, of course, against the
Vicar of St. Peter, but against the temporal
Sovereign of the Roman States.
We are thus, even at Segni, plunged
among Papal memories; we look over
the valley of the Trerus across to
Anagni, and they press upon us with
double force. We hasten to the spot
where a lesser Pope than Innocent, but
still a mighty one, died like a dog after
his fox-like entrance and his lion-like
reign.
