Some Excellent Orvieto Wine Crowned Our Repast, And Helped To Restore
Us From Our Fatigues.
On leaving Bolsena the next morning, the 7th, and within a very short
distance from that town we entered a thick and venerable forest, thro'
which the road runs for several miles.
Fine old trees of immense height
covered with foliage and thickly studded together give to this forest an
aweful and romantic appearance. It is quite a lucus opaca ingens. This
forest has been held sacred since the earliest times and is even now held
in such superstitious veneration by the people that they do not allow it to
be cut. The Dryads and Hamadryads have no doubt long ago taken their
flight, but the wood, from its length and opaqueness, inspired me with some
apprehension lest it might be the abode of some modern votaries of Mercury,
people having confused ideas of meum and tuum, and the appropriative
faculty too strongly developed in their organization, and I expected every
moment to hear a shot and the terrible cry of ferma; but we met with no
accident nor did we fall in with a living soul. On issuing from this forest
we perceived on an eminence before us, at a short distance, the town of
Montefiascone. We stopped there as almost all travellers do to taste the
famous Montefiascone wine or Est wine, as it is frequently called. This
wine is fine flavored, petillant and wonderfully exhilarating. It is
renowned for having occasioned the death of a German prelate in the
sixteenth century, who was travelling in Italy and who was remarkably fond
of good wine. The story is as follows. He was accustomed to send on his
servant to the different towns thro' which he was to pass with directions,
to taste and report on the quality of the different wines to be found
there, and if they were good to mark the word Est on the casks from which
he tasted them. The servant, on arrival at Montefiascone, was highly
pleased with the flavour of the wine, of which there were three casks at
the inn where they put up. He accordingly wrote the word Est on each of
the casks. The Bishop arrived soon after and took such a liking to this
wine that he died in a few days of a fever brought on by continual
intoxication. He was buried in one of the churches at Montefiascone and the
monks of the Convent there, themselves bons-vivans, determined to give
him a suitable epitaph. They accordingly caused to be engraved on his tomb
the following Latin inscription commemorative of the event: Est, Est, Est,
propter nimium Est, Dominus Episcopus mortuus EST. From the above
circumstance this wine is called Vino d'Est, and it affords no small
revenue to the proprietor of the cabaret on the road side who sells it.
We arrived at Viterbo to breakfast and at Ronciglione in the evening.
Viterbo is a large and handsome city and contains several striking
buildings.
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