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.
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