It Is
Now A Decayed Town, Containing About Four Thousand Inhabitants, Some Of
Whom Are Families Of The Poor And Proud Nobility Common Enough Over All
Italy, Who Are Said To Quarrel With Each Other More Fiercely In Volterra
Than Almost Anywhere Else.
It is the old feud of the Montagues and the
Capulets on a humbler scale, and the disputes of the Volterra nobility are
the more violent and implacable for being hereditary.
Poor creatures! too
proud to engage in business, too indolent for literature, excluded from
political employments by the nature of the government, there is nothing
left for them but to starve, intrigue, and quarrel. You may judge how
miserably poor they are, when you are told they can not afford even to
cultivate the favorite art of modern Italy; the art best suited to the
genius of a soft and effeminate people. There is, I was told, but one
pianoforte in the whole town, and that is owned by a Florentine lady who
has recently come to reside here.
For several miles before reaching Volterra, our attention was fixed by the
extraordinary aspect of the country through which we were passing. The
road gradually ascended, and we found ourselves among deep ravines and
steep, high, broken banks, principally of clay, barren, and in most places
wholly bare of herbage, a scene of complete desolation, were it not for a
cottage here and there perched upon the heights, a few sheep attended by a
boy and a dog grazing on the brink of one of the precipices, or a solitary
patch of bright green wheat in some spot where the rains had not yet
carried away the vegetable mould.
Imagine to yourself an elevated country like the highlands of Pennsylvania
or the western part of Massachusetts; imagine vast beds of loam and clay
in place of the ledges of rock, and then fancy the whole region to be torn
by water-spouts and torrents into gulleys too profound to be passed, with
sharp ridges between - stripped of its trees and its grass - and you will
have some idea of the country near Volterra. I could not help fancying,
while I looked at it, that as the earth grew old, the ribs of rock which
once upheld the mountains, had become changed into the bare heaps of
earth which I saw about me, that time and the elements had destroyed the
cohesion of the particles of which they were formed, and that now the
rains were sweeping them down to the Mediterranean, to fill its bed and
cause its waters to encroach upon the land. It was impossible for me to
prevent the apprehension from passing through my mind, that such might be
the fate of other quarters of the globe in ages yet to come, that their
rocks must crumble and their mountains be levelled, until the waters shall
again cover the face of the earth, unless new mountains shall be thrown up
by eruptions of internal fire. They told me in Volterra, that this
frightful region had once been productive and under cultivation, but that
after a plague which, four or five hundred years since, had depopulated
the country, it was abandoned and neglected, and the rains had reduced it
to its present state.
In the midst of this desolate tract, which is, however, here and there
interspersed with fertile spots, rises the mountain on which Volterra is
situated, where the inhabitants breathe a pure and keen atmosphere, almost
perpetually cool, and only die of pleurisies and apoplexies; while below,
on the banks of the Cecina, which in full sigjit winds its way to the sea,
they die of fevers. One of the ravines of which I have spoken, - the
_balza_ they call it at Volterra - has ploughed a deep chasm on the north
side of this mountain, and is every year rapidly approaching the city on
its summit. I stood on its edge and looked down a bank of soft red earth
five hundred feet in height. A few rods in front of me I saw where a road
had crossed the spot in which the gulf now yawned; the tracks of the last
year's carriages were seen reaching to the edge on both sides. The ruins
of a convent were close at hand, the inmates of which, two or three years
since, had been removed by the government to the town for safety. These
will soon be undermined by the advancing chasm, together with a fine piece
of old Etruscan wall, once inclosing the city, built of enormous
uncemented parallelograms of stone, and looking as if it might be the work
of the giants who lived before the flood; a neighboring church will next
fall into the gulf, which finally, if means be not taken to prevent its
progress, will reach and sap the present walls of the city, swallowing up
what time has so long spared.
"A few hundred crowns," said an inhabitant of Volterra to me, "would stop
all this mischief. A wall at the bottom of the chasm, and a heap of
branches of trees or other rubbish, to check the fall of the earth, are
all that would be necessary."
I asked why these means were not used.
"Because," he replied, "those to whom the charge of these matters belongs,
will not take the trouble. Somebody must devise a plan for the purpose,
and somebody must take upon himself the labor of seeing it executed. They
find it easier to put it off."
The antiquities of Volterra consist of an Etruscan burial-ground, in
which the tombs still remain, pieces of the old and incredibly massive
Etruscan wall, including a far larger circuit than the present city, two
Etruscan gates of immemorial antiquity, older doubtless than any thing at
Rome, built of enormous stones, one of them serving even yet as an
entrance to the town, and a multitude of cinerary vessels, mostly of
alabaster, sculptured with numerous figures in _alto relievo_. These
figures are sometimes allegorical representations, and sometimes embody
the fables of the Greek mythology.
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