There Is Squalid
Tivoli, With The River Anio, Diverted From Its Course, And Plunging
Down, Headlong, Some Eighty Feet In Search Of It.
With its
picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor
waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern
yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots
on, low down under beetling rocks.
There, too, is the Villa
d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and
cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state. Then, there is
Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where
Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his favourite house (some
fragments of it may yet be seen there), and where Cato was born.
We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a grey, dull day, when a shrill
March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old
city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as
the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen
miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the
ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at
half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out
upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over
an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.
Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of
columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble;
mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a
spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes, loose walls,
built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our
path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves,
rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to
advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the
old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy
covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In
the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course
along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us,
stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on
miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the
awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen,
clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their
sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate
Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of
an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men
have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have
left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished;
where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their
Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust!
Returning, by the road, at sunset!
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