Clearly I Must Make The Advances; And So When, One Morning Of
Mid-March, A Friend Sent To Ask If We Would Not Motor Out To Tivoli With
Him And His Family, I Closed Eagerly With The Chance Of A Compromise
Which Would Save Feeling All Round.
My friend has never yet known how he
was bringing Tivoli and me together after a mutual diffidence, but, as
he was a poet, I am sure he will be glad to know now.
Our road across the Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside
the tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched rough,
if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between the wide,
lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat. The Campagna is
said to be ploughed only once in five years by the peasants for the
proprietors, who have philosophized its fertility as something that can
be better restored by the activities of nature in that time than by
phosphates in less. As they are mostly Roman patricians, they have
always felt able to wait; but now it is said that northern Italian
capital and enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be
cropped every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the
two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we had the
company of the different aqueducts, but their broken stretches presently
ceased altogether, and then for other human association we had, besides
the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered among
the grassy humps and hollows.
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