*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45899 ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal
  signs=.




Italy




  [Illustration: Edward A Freeman]




     Studies of Travel

     By
     Edward A. Freeman

     Italy


     "TOT CONGESTA MANU PRAERUPTIS OPPIDA SAXIS."--VERG. GEORG. II. 155


     G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

            NEW YORK                        LONDON
     27 & 29 West 23d Street      24 Bedford Street, Strand

     The Knickerbocker Press




     COPYRIGHT, 1893
     BY
     G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

     _Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
     BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS


     Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
     The Knickerbocker Press, New York
     G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS




Contents


                                                    PAGE
  AREZZO                                               1
  CORTONA                                             12
  PERUGIA                                             23
  THE VOLUMNIAN TOMB                                  34
  PRÆ-FRANCISCAN ASSISI                               46
  SPELLO                                              58
  VEII                                                67
  FIDENÆ                                              77
  ANTEMNÆ                                             86
  OSTIA                                               96
  THE ALBAN MOUNT                                    108
  CORI                                               123
  NORBA                                              131
  SEGNI                                              150

           ITER AD BRUNDISIUM
     I. ANAGNI                                       165
    II. FERENTINO                                    185
   III. ALATRI                                       206
    IV. FROM ALATRI TO CAPUA                         221
     V. A CHURCH BY THE CAMP OF HANNIBAL             234
    VI. A GLIMPSE OF SAMNIUM                         251
   VII. BENEVENTO                                    264
  VIII. NORMAN BUILDINGS IN APULIA                   281
    IX. BARI                                         295




Arezzo.


The city of Mæcenas, and of a whole crowd of famous men of later times,
shows no outward signs of being much frequented by travellers. There
is some difficulty there in getting so much as an Italian newspaper,
and, though excellent photographs have been taken of some of the chief
buildings, they must be sought for at Florence; they are not to be
bought at Arezzo. Yet the old Etruscan city has many attractions, among
them surely the singular cleanness of its streets, and, above all, that
clear and pure air which is thought to have had something to do with
nourishing the genius of so many of its citizens in so many different
ways. Perhaps, on the whole, Arezzo does not suffer from not having
yet put on the cosmopolitan character of some of its neighbours. And if
the city does not, either as Arretium or as Arezzo, stand forth in the
first rank of Italian cities, still it has a long history under both
forms of its name. If, again, its buildings do not rank with those of
Pisa or Lucca, still there is quite enough both in the general aspect
of the city, and in some particular objects within its walls, to claim
a day or two's sojourn from any one who is not eager to rush from
Florence to Rome as fast as the so-called express train can carry him.

Arezzo, as to its physical site, holds a middle position between cities
which sit perched on a high hill-top like Fiesole, and cities which,
like Florence, lie flat or nearly so on the banks of a great river.
It has its river, if we may give that name to the mere brook which
presently loses itself in the Chiana, as the Chiana soon loses itself
in the Arno. The river too has a bridge, but both river and bridge have
to be sought for; they form no important points in the general aspect
of the city. The bridge at Arezzo is not one of those to which we
instinctively go the first thing to take a general view of the city as
a whole. The hill is a more real thing, as any one will say who climbs
some of its steeper streets. Still it is one of those hills which seem
to borrow height and steepness from the fact of being built upon. If it
were covered with green grass, it would simply pass as one of several
small hills which break the flat of the rich plain, girded in on all
sides by higher mountains, which rise, in February at least, into vast
snowy heights in the further distance. Still Arezzo has distinctly the
character of a hill city, not of a river city; the hill counts for a
good deal, while the river counts for nothing. The best points for a
general view from below will be found on the town wall, a little way to
the left of the railway station; while to look down on Arezzo we must
climb to the castle in the eastern corner of the city, whose Medicean
fortifications look strong enough without, but which, within, has
gardens and fig trees level with the walls, and rabbits running about
at large among them. The castle therefore forms no special object in
the general view; it simply passes as a more marked part of the line
of the city walls. These last remain in their whole circuit, except
where they have been broken down to make the approach to the railway;
surely a new gate would have been a better way of compassing this
object. A town wall standing free, as those of Arezzo stand in nearly
their whole range, is always a striking object, and one whose circuit
it is pleasant and instructive to make. And it has a special interest
in some cities, of which Arezzo is one, which have, so to speak, a show
side. One side lies open to the world; the ancient roads, the modern
railway, approach it; the city dies away into the country by gradually
descending suburbs. On the other side, the wall suddenly parts the
inhabited town, sometimes from actual desolation, at all events from
open fields; the hill rises sheer above whatever lies beyond it. So it
is with the north-eastern side of Arezzo, if we go behind the cathedral
and the castle; we have not fully taken in the lie of the city without
taking this walk to its rear. Still we must not look to the walls of
Arezzo for the special interest of some other walls. They will not give
us either Roman or Etruscan blocks, nor yet the picturesque outline of
mediæval towers and gateways. The walls put on their present aspect
in Medicean times, and over one of the gates we see an inscription
which illustrates one stage of a tyrant's progress. The first avowed
sovereign Cosmo appears as "Duke of Florence and Siena." He had
inherited one enslaved commonwealth; he had himself enslaved another;
meanwhile he was waiting for the fitting reward of such exploits in the
higher rank and more sounding title of a Grand Duke of Tuscany.

In the general view of Arezzo there can be hardly said to be any one
dominant object. If the castle made any show, it and the cathedral
church, standing nearly on the same level on the highest ground in the
town, would stand well side by side. As it is, the body of the _duomo_
is the prominent feature in the view. But it is hardly a dominant
feature. It is the only building whose body shows itself, but it rises
among a crowd of towers, ecclesiastical and municipal, and one of
them, the great campanile of St. Mary _della Pieve_, though the body
of its church does not show itself far below, is a distinct rival to
the cathedral, and utterly dwarfs its small and modern, though not
ungraceful, octagon tower. These two churches form the two greatest
architectural objects in Arezzo. The municipal element does not show
itself so largely as might be looked for. The town-house is there, and
the town-tower, and that hard by the _duomo_; but they do not hold,
even comparatively, anything like the same position as their fellows
in the great Florentine piazza. Perhaps this is not wonderful in a
city which was so largely Ghibelin, and whose most noted historical
character was a fighting bishop. Guy Tarlati, bishop and lord of
Arezzo, keeps--though not on its old site--his splendid tomb in the
_duomo_, on which are graven the names and likenesses of the castles
which he won, and how King Lewis of Bavaria took the Lombard crown
at his hands. But Arezzo has little or nothing to show in the way of
houses or palaces or of street arcades. Its most striking building
besides the churches is the front of that called the _Fraternità dei
Laici_, in the open sloping space which seems to mark the forum of
Arretium. This is a work in the mixed style of the fourteenth century,
but so rich and graceful in its detail as to disarm criticism. Within,
it contains the public library and museum. This last has much to show
in many ways; most striking of all, because thoroughly local, are
the huge tusks and other remains of the fossil elephants and other
vast beasts of bygone days. The valley of the Chiana is full of them.
Naturally enough, in the early days of science, when elephants' bones
were no longer thought to be those of giants, they were set down as
relics of the Gætulian beasts of Hannibal.

Something may be picked up here and there in the other churches of
Arezzo; but it is _Santa Maria della Pieve_ which is the real object
of study. The _duomo_ is absolutely without outline; it is a single
body with nothing to break it, and nothing to finish it at either end.
But its proportions within come somewhat nearer to Northern ideas than
is common in the Italian Gothic, and its apse specially reveals the
German hand to which tradition attributes the building. The church of
_La Pieve_ is of a higher order. It has real shape within and without.
Its four arms should support a cupola, only the cupola has never been
finished; the apse is in the very best form of the Italian Romanesque;
the west front is called a copy of Pisa; but neither its merits nor
its defects seem borrowed from that model. Part of it is sham, which
nothing at Pisa is, while the small arcades stand out free, as at
Lucca, but not at Pisa. The front is a wonderful display of column
capitals of all kinds, from the Corinthian column used up again in its
lowest range to the fantastic devices of the small ranges above them.
The arch and the entablature are both used; so they are in the apse: so
they are within. For the choir has a real triforium, and that triforium
shows this strange falling back on the construction of the Greek. The
arches below are round; those which should support the cupola, as well
as those of the nave, are pointed, the latter rising from columns of
prodigious height. The internal effect is like nothing else; it is
quite un-Italian; it is as little like anything English or French;
the arches, but not the columns, suggest the memory of Aquitaine. The
south side has been rebuilt. Perhaps the work was physically needful:
but it has involved the destruction of the substructure of the ancient
building on the site of which the church stands. The columns in the
west front seem to be the only remains of Arretium as distinguished
from Arezzo. The "Tyrrhena regum progenies" have here left but small
traces behind them.




Cortona.


From Arezzo the next stage will naturally be to the hill on whose height

     ... Cortona lifts to heaven
       Her diadem of towers.

If the journey be made on a market or fair day, the space between the
walls and the station at Arezzo may be seen crowded with white oxen,
suggesting the thought of triumphs and triumphal sacrifices. Their
race, it was said, prayed to the gods that Marcus and Julian might not
win victories which would lead to their destruction. And the prayer
seems to have been answered, as the breed specially connected with
Clitumnus has clearly not died out, even by the banks of Clanis. The
journey is not a long one; yet, if we had time to see everything, we
might well wish to break it, as we pass by the hill of Castiglione
Fiorentino, with its walls and towers. That strong and stern
hill-fortress comes in well between Arezzo and Cortona. Arezzo covers
a hill, but it can hardly be said to stand on a hill-top; Castiglione
distinctly does stand on a hill-top; Cortona sits enthroned on a height
which it would hardly be straining language to speak of as a mountain.
We have now come to a site of the oldest class, the stronghold on the
height, like Akrokorinthos and the Larissa of Argos. But at Argos and
Corinth the mountain-fortress became, at a later stage, the citadel of
the younger city which grew up at the mountain's foot. But at Cortona,
as at greater Perugia, the city still abides on the height; it has
never come down into the plain. So it has remained at Laon; so it has
become at Girgenti, where the vast lower space of the later Akragas
is forsaken, and the modern town has shrunk up within the lines of
the ancient acropolis. From the ground below Cortona we look up to a
city like those of old, great and fenced up to heaven; the "diadem
of towers" is there still, though it is now made up of a group of
towers, ecclesiastical, municipal, and military, none of them of any
account in itself, but each of which joins with its fellows to make
up an effective whole. At Cortona indeed, as at Argos and Corinth,
there is an upper and a lower city, and the upper city is pretty well
forsaken. But while at Argos and Corinth the lower city stands in the
plain, and the acropolis soars far above it, at Cortona the lower city
itself stands so high up the hill that it is only when we reach it
that we fully understand that there is a higher city still. The site
itself belongs so thoroughly to the oldest days of our European world
that there is a certain kind of satisfaction in finding that the main
interest of the place belongs to those oldest days. We are well pleased
that everything of later times is of quite a secondary character, and
that the distinctive character of Cortona is to be the city of the
Etruscan walls.

In truth, a certain degree of wonder is awakened by the fact that
Cortona exists at all. It would have been by no means amazing if we had
found only its ruins, as on so many other old-world sites for which
later times have found no use. Great in its earliest days, foremost
among the Etruscan cities of the mountains, Cortona has never been
great in any later age. As a Roman city and colony it was of so little
account that, even in Italy, where bishops are so thick upon the
ground, it did not become a bishopric till the fourteenth century. Just
at that time came its short period of anything like importance among
the cities of mediæval Italy. Sold to Florence early in the fifteenth
century, it has ever since followed the fortunes of the ruling city.
Yet through all these changes Cortona has managed to live on, though
we can hardly say to flourish. It still keeps the character of a
city, though a small and mean one, inhabited by a race of whom the
younger sort seem to have nothing to do but to run after the occasional
visitor. One ragged urchin offers to accompany him to the cathedral;
another persists in following him round nearly the whole circuit of the
ancient walls. This last is too bad; a walk round the walls of Cortona
is emphatically one of those things which are best enjoyed in one's own
company.

As an Italian city which has lived, though in rather a feeble way,
through the regular stages of Roman colony and mediæval commonwealth,
Cortona has of course its monuments which record those periods of
its being. There are some small fragments of Roman work, but nothing
that can be called a Roman building. There is a crowd of churches and
monasteries, but none of any great architectural value, though some
contain works of importance in the history of painting. It perhaps
marks the position of Cortona as a comparatively modern bishopric that
its cathedral church is in no sort the crowning building of the city.
The _duomo_ stands about half-way up the height within the town, on
a corner of the walls. Its elegant _Renaissance_ interior has been
already spoken of; it seems to have supplanted a Romanesque building
the columns of which may have been used again. The point in the upper
city where we should have looked for the _duomo_ is occupied by the
Church of St. Margaret, that is, Margaret of Cortona, described over
her portal as "pœnitens Margarita," marked off thereby alike from
the virgin of Antioch and from the matron of Scotland. The municipal
buildings are not remarkable, though one wall of the Palazzo Pretorio
must be a treasure-house for students of Italian heraldry, thickly
coated as it is with the arms of successive _podestas_. Of private
palaces the steep and narrow streets contain one or two; but it is not
on its street architecture that Cortona can rest its claim to fame.
From the lower city, with its labyrinth of streets, we may climb to the
acropolis. Here, around the Church of St. Margaret, all seems desolate.
The Franciscan convent on the slope below it lies in ruins--not an
usual state for an Italian building. The castle above, fenced in by its
ditch, seems as desolate as everything around, save the new or renewed
fabric of St. Margaret's. This height is the point of view to which
the visitor to Cortona will be first taken, if he listens to local
importunity. A noble outlook it is; but the traveller can find points
of view equally noble in the course of the work which should be done
first of all--that of compassing the mighty wall which is the thing
that makes Cortona what it is.

The process of going to the back of the city, which may be done in
some measure at Arezzo, may be done in all its fulness at Cortona.
Happily, very nearly the whole wall can be compassed without, and in
by far the greater part of its course more or less of the old Etruscan
rampart remains. In many places the mighty stones still stand to no
small height, patched of course and raised with work of later times,
but still standing firmly fixed as they were laid when Cortona stood
in the first rank among the cities of the Rasena. Not that there is
reason to attribute any amazing antiquity to these walls. We must
remember that the Etruscan cities kept their local freedom till the
days of Sulla, and that some Etruscan works are later than some Roman
works. The masonry is by no means of the rough and early kind; yet the
one remaining gate, unluckily blocked, is square-headed, and might
almost have stood at Mykênê. On the highest point, the hindermost
point, the wildest and most desolate point, where, though just outside
an inhabited city, we feel as if we were in a land forsaken of men,
the Etruscan wall has largely given way to the mediæval fortress whose
present aspect dates from Medicean days. But it has given way only
to leave one of the grandest pieces of the whole wall standing as an
outpost in the rear of the city, overhanging the steepest point of
the whole hill. The Etruscan wall, the Medicean castle, one seeming
to stand as forsaken and useless as the other, form a summary of the
history of Cortona in stone and brick.

From the walls we may well turn to the Museum, to see the tombs and
the other relics of the men who reared them. Pre-eminent among them,
the glory of the Cortonese collection, as the Chimæra is the glory
of the Florentine collection, is a magnificent bronze lamp, wrought
with endless mythological figures. Near it stands the painting of a
female head, which we might at first take for the work of _Renaissance_
hands, and in which those who are skilled in such matters profess to
recognize the existing type of Cortonese beauty. The painting however
dates from the days when Cortona was still Etruscan. Perugia keeps
her ancient inhabitants themselves, in the shape at least of their
skulls and skeletons. At Cortona the remote mothers, it may be, of her
present people live more vividly in the form of the Muse whose features
were copied, it may be nineteen hundred years back, from the living
countenance of one of them.




Perugia.


The hill-city of Perugia supplies an instructive contrast with the
hill-city of Cortona. The obvious contrast in the matter of modern
prosperity and importance is an essential part of the comparative
history. Cortona has through all ages lived on, but not much more
than lived on. Perugia has, through all ages, kept, if not a place
in the first rank of Italian cities, yet at any rate a high place in
the second rank. She never had the European importance of Venice,
Genoa, Florence, Naples, and Milan, or of Pisa in her great days.
But in the purely Italian history of all ages Perugia keeps herself
before our eyes, as a city of mark, from the wars of the growing Roman
commonwealth down to the struggle which in our own days freed her from
a second Roman yoke. In the civil wars of the old Rome, in the wars
between the Goth and the New Rome, in the long tale of the troubled
greatness of mediæval Italy, Etruscan Perusia, Roman Augusta Perusia,
mediæval and modern Perugia, holds no mean place. And the last act
in the long drama is not the least notable. It sounds like a bit out
of Plutarch's "Life of Timoleôn," when we read or when we remember
how, twice within our own days, little more than twenty and thirty
years back, the fortress of the tyrants was swept away, as the great
symbolic act which crowned the winning back of freedom in its newest
form. When a city has such a tale as this to tell, we do not expect, we
do not wish, that its only or its chief interest should gather round
the monuments of an early and almost præhistoric day of greatness. At
Cortona we are glad that things Etruscan are undoubtedly uppermost.
At Perugia we are glad that things Etruscan are there to be seen in
abundance; but we also welcome the monuments of Roman days, pagan
and Christian; we welcome the streets, the churches, and palaces of
mediæval times, and even the works of recent times indeed. The Place of
Victor Emmanuel with the modern buildings which crown it, supplanting
the fortress of Pope Paul, as that supplanted the houses, churches, and
palaces of earlier times, is as much a part of the history of Perugia
as the Arch of Augustus or the Etruscan wall itself.

The difference between the abiding greatness of Perugia and the
abiding littleness of Cortona is no doubt largely due to the physical
difference of their sites. Both are hill-cities, mountain-cities, if
we will; but they sit upon hills of quite different kinds. The hill of
Perugia is better fitted for growth than the hill of Cortona. Cortona
sits on a single hill-top. Perugia sits, not indeed on seven hills, but
on a hill of complicated outline, which throws out several--possibly
seven--outlying, mostly lower, spurs, with deep valleys between them.
The Etruscan and Roman city took in only the central height, itself of
a very irregular shape and at some points very narrow. The lower and
outlying spurs were taken within the city in later times. Hence it is
only in a small part of their circuit that the original walls remain
the present external walls; it is only on part of its western side that
we can at all go behind Perugia. But the lower city is still thoroughly
a hill-city. The hill of Perugia is lower than the hill of Cortona,
while the city of Perugia is vastly greater than the city of Cortona.
But Perugia is as far removed as Cortona from coming down into the
plain. On the little hill of Arezzo such a process could happen, and it
has happened. Not so with the loftier seats of its neighbours. Cortona
is not likely to grow; Perugia very likely may. But it will take a long
period of downward growth before unbroken dwellings of men stretch all
the way from its railway station to its municipal palace.

At Perugia, as becomes its history, no one class of monuments draws
to itself exclusive, or even predominant, attention. Perhaps, on the
whole, the municipal element is the most striking. The vast pile of the
public palace, its grand portal, its bold ranges of windows, its worthy
satellites, the Exchange, and the great fountain with its marvels of
sculpture, utterly outdo, as the central points of the city, the lofty
but shapeless and unfinished cathedral which stands opposite to them.
And at this point, the Church and the commonwealth are the only rivals;
the remains of earlier times do not come into view. For them we must
seek, but at no great distance. Go down from the central height, and
stand on the bridge which spans the _Via Appia_ of Perugia, a strange
namesake for the _Via Appia_ of Rome. There the walls of the Etruscan
city, rising on the one side above the houses, on the other above one
of the deep valleys, form the main feature. And, if they lose in effect
from the modern houses built upon them, the very incongruity has a
kind of attractiveness, as binding the two ends of the story together.
From this point of view, Perugia is specially Perugian. And, if the
walls are less perfect than those of Cortona, they have something
that Cortona has not. The Arch of Augustus, the barrier between the
older and the newer city, spans the steep and narrow street fittingly
known as _Via Vecchia_. At Perugia the name of Augustus suggests the
thought whether he really made the bloody sacrifice to the _manes_ of
his uncle with which some reports charge him. The gate at least makes
no answer, save that we see that the Roman built on the foundations
of the Etruscan, save that the legend of "Augusta Perusia" is itself a
record of destruction and revival. The gateway, tall, narrow, gloomy,
the Roman arch springing from two vast Etruscan towers, is a contrast
indeed to such strictly architectural designs as the two gates of
Autun. The Roman builder was evidently cramped by the presence of the
older work. In fact the general character of the gateway has more in
common with the endless mediæval gateways and arches which span the
streets of Perugia. Of really better design, though blocked and in a
less favourable position, is the other gateway, the _Porta Martis_,
which now makes part of the substructure of the new piazza, as it once
did of that of the papal fortress. And he who looks curiously will find
out, not indeed any more Roman gateways, but the jambs from which at
least two other arches, either Roman or Etruscan, once sprang.

The walls and gateways of a city can hardly be called its skeleton,
but they are in some sort its shell. And at Perugia the body within
the shell was of no mean kind. Take away every great public building,
church, or palace, and Perugia itself, its mere streets and houses,
would have a great deal to show. With no grand street arcades like
Bologna, few or no striking private palaces like Venice and Verona,
Perugia once had streets after streets--the small and narrow streets
not the least conspicuously--of a thoroughly good and simple style of
street architecture. Arched doors and arched windows are all, and they
are quite enough. Some are round, some are pointed; some are of brick,
some of stone; and those of brick with round arches are decidedly
the best. But never were buildings more mercilessly spoiled than the
Perugian houses. As in England mediæval houses are spoiled to make
bigger windows, so at Perugia they are spoiled to make smaller windows.
Most of the doorways and windows are cut through and blocked, and an
ugly square hole is bored to do the duty of the artistic feature which
is destroyed. No land has more to show in the way of various forms of
beauty than Italy; but when an Italian does go in for ugliness he beats
all other nations in carrying out his object.

Perugia, we need hardly say, is a city of paintings, and it is as
receptacles for paintings that its churches seem mainly to be looked
on. But some of them deserve no small attention on other grounds. At
the two ends of the city are two churches which follow naturally on
the Etruscan and Roman walls and gates. At one end, the Church of St.
Angelo, circular within, sixteen-sided without, forms one of the long
series of round and polygonal churches which stretch from Jerusalem to
Ludlow. And this, clearly a building of Christian Roman times, with
its beautiful marble and granite Corinthian columns, though not one
of the greatest in size, holds no mean place among them. At the other
end, the Abbey of Saint Peter, amid many changes, still keeps two noble
ranges of Ionic columns, the spoils doubtless of some Pagan building
at its first erection in the eleventh century. Nor must the _duomo_
itself be judged of by its outside. The work of a German architect, it
shows a German character in the three bodies of the same height, and
its pillars consequently of amazing height. But at Perugia it is not
churches or palaces or earlier remains which we study, each apart from
other things. Here they all unite to form a whole greater than any one
class alone--Augusta Perusia itself.




The Volumnian Tomb.


The ancient Etruscans have some points of analogy with the modern
Freemasons. This last familiar and yet mysterious body seems to let the
outer world know everything about itself, except what it is. We have
read various books by Freemasons about Freemasonry, about its history,
its constitution, its ritual. On all these points they seem to give us
the fullest particulars: we have only to complain that the historical
part is a little vague, and its evidence a little uncertain. We should
not like rashly to decide whether Freemasonry was already ancient
in the days of Solomon or whether it cannot be traced with certainty
any further back than the eighteenth century. But we know the exact
duties of a Tyler, and we know that at the end of a Masonic prayer we
should answer, not "Amen," but "So mote it be." Still, what Freemasonry
is, how a man becomes a Freemason, or what really distinguishes a
Freemason from other people, are points about which the Masonic books
leave us wholly in the dark. So it is with the Etruscans. We seem to
know everything about them, except who they were. As far as we can
know a people from their arts and monuments, there is no people whom
we seem to know better. We have full and clear monumental evidence as
to the people themselves, as to many points in their ways, thoughts,
and belief. We know how they built, carved, and painted, and their
buildings, sculptures, and paintings, tell us in many points how they
lived, and what was their faith and worship. We have indeed no Etruscan
books; but their language still lives, at least it abides, in endless
inscriptions. But who the Etruscans were, and what their language
was, remain unsolved puzzles. The ordinary scholar is half-amused,
half-provoked, at long lines of alphabetic writing, of which, as far as
the mere letters go, he can read a great deal, but of which, save here
and there a proper name, he cannot understand a word. He knows that one
ingenious man has read it all into good German and another into good
Turkish. He curses every Lucumo whose image he sees for sticking like
a Frenchman to his own tongue. Why could they not write up everything
in three or four languages? How happy he would be if he could light
on a Latin or Greek crib which would give life to the dead letter. For
surely nothing in the world so truly answers the description of a dead
letter, as words after words, most of which it is not hard to spell,
but at the meaning of which we cannot even guess.

It is natural that in the museums of the Etruscan cities the monuments
of a kind whose interest is specially local should form a chief part
of the show. At Florence, at Arezzo, at Cortona, at Perugia, the
collections which each city has brought together make us familiar, if
we are not so already, with much of Etruscan art and Etruscan life. Or
shall we say that what they really make us familiar with is more truly
Etruscan death? Our knowledge of most nations of remote times comes
largely from their tombs and from the contents of their tombs, and this
must specially be the case with a people who, like the Etruscans, have
left no literature behind them. The last distinction makes it hardly
fair to attempt any comparison between the Etruscans and nations like
the Greeks or the Romans, with whose writings we are familiar. But
suppose we had no Greek or Roman literature, suppose we had, as we have
in the case of the Etruscans, no means of learning anything of Greek
or Roman life, except from Greek and Roman monuments. The sepulchral
element would be very important; but it would hardly be so distinctly
dominant as it is in the Etruscan case. At all events, it would not be
so distinctly forced upon the thoughts as it is in the Etruscan case.
Take a Roman sarcophagus: we know it to be sepulchral, but it does
not of itself proclaim its use; there often is no distinct reference
to the deceased person; at all events, his whole figure is not graven
on the top of the chest which contains his bones or his ashes. But in
the Etruscan museums it is the sepulchral figures which draw the eye
and the thoughts towards them far more than anything else, more than
even the chimæra, the bronze lamp, and the painted muse. Of various
sizes, of various degrees of art, they all keep one general likeness.
The departed Lucumo leans on his elbow, his hand holding what the
uninitiated are tempted to take for a dish symbolizing his admittance
to divine banquets in the other world, but which the learned tell us is
designed to catch the tears of those who mourn for him. Sometimes the
_Lucumonissa_--if we may coin so mediæval a form--lies apart, sometimes
along with her husband. On the whole, these Etruscan sculptures seem to
bring us personally nearer to the men of a distant age and a mysterious
race than is done by anything in either Greek or Roman art.

But if these works can teach us thus much when set in rows in a place
where they were never meant to be set up, how much more plainly do they
speak to us when we see them at home, untouched, in the place and in
the state in which the first artist set them! The Volumnian tomb near
Perugia is one of the sights which, when once seen, is not likely to
be forgotten. The caution does not bear on Etruscan art; but it is
well to walk to it from St. Peter's Abbey; going by the railway is a
roundabout business, and the walk downwards commands a glorious and
ever-shifting view over the plain and the mountains, with the towns
of Assisi, Spello, and a third further on--can it be distant Trevi?
Foligno lies down in the plain--each seated on its hill. The tomb is
reached; a small collection from other places has been formed on each
side of the door. This is all very well; but we doubt the wisdom of
putting, as we understood had been done, some things from other places
in the tomb itself. But this is not a moment at which we are inclined
to find fault. We rejoice at finding that what ought to be there is so
happily and wisely left in its place, and are not greatly disturbed
if a few things are put inside which had better have been left
outside. The stone doorway of the lintelled entrance--moved doubtless
only when another member of the house was literally gathered to his
fathers--stands by the side; it was too cumbrous to be kept in its old
place now that the tomb stands ready to be entered by all whose tastes
lead them that way. We go in; the mind goes back to ruder sepulchres
at Uleybury and New Grange, of sepulchres at least as highly finished
in their own way at Mykênê. But those were built, piled up of stones;
here the dwelling of the dead Lucumos is hewn in the native tufa.
The top is not, as we might have looked for, domical; it imitates the
forms of a wooden roof. From it still hang the lamps; on its surface
are carved the heads of the sun-god and of the ever-recurring Medusa.
Nor is the sun-god's own presence utterly shut out from the home of
the dead. It is a strange feeling when a burst of sunshine through the
open door kindles the eyes of the Gorgon with a strange brilliancy, and
lights up the innermost recess, almost as when the sinking rays light
up the apses of Rheims and of St. Mark's. In that innermost recess,
fronting us as we enter, lies on his _kistwaen_--may we transfer
the barbarian name to so delicate a work of art?--the father of the
household gathered around him. He is doubtless very far from being the
first _Felimna_, but the first Felimna whose ashes rest here. The name
of the family can be spelled out easily by those who, without boasting
any special Etruscan lore, are used to the oldest Greek writing from
right to left. Children and grandchildren are grouped around the
patriarch; and here comes what, from a strictly historical view, is the
most speaking thing in the whole tomb. The name of Avle Felimna can be
easily read on a chest on the right hand. On the left hand opposite
to it is another chest which has forsaken the Etruscan type. Here is
no figure, no legend in mysterious characters. We have instead one of
those sepulchral chests which imitate the figure of a house with doors.
The legend, in every-day Latin, announces that the ashes within it
are those of P. Volumnius A. F. That is, the Etruscan Avle Felimna was
the father of the Roman Publius Volumnius. We are in the first century
before our æra, when the old Etruscan life ended after the Social War,
and when the Lucumos of Arretium and Perusia became Roman Clinii and
Volumnii. To an English scholar the change comes home with a special
force. He has an analogy in the change of nomenclature in his own land
under Norman influences in the twelfth century. Publius Volumnius, son
of Avle Felimna, is the exact parallel to Robert the son of Godwin, and
a crowd of others in his days, Norman-named sons of English fathers.

We are not describing at length what may be found described at length
elsewhere. But there is another point in these Etruscan sculptures
which gives them a strange and special interest. This is their
strangely Christian look. The genii are wonderfully like angels; but
so are many Roman figures also, say those in the spandrils of the arch
of Severus. But Roman art has nothing to set alongside of the Lucumo
reclining on his tomb, not exactly like a strictly mediæval recumbent
figure, but very like a tomb of the type not uncommon a little later,
say in the time of Elizabeth and James the First. And in the sculptures
on the chests, wherever, instead of familiar Greek legends, they give
us living pictures of Etruscan life, we often see the sons of the
Rasena clearly receiving a kind of baptism. There is no kind of ancient
works which need a greater effort to believe in their antiquity.
And nowhere do the sculptures look fresher--almost modern--than when
seen in contrast with the walls and roof above and beside them, the
sepulchre hewn in the rock, with the great stone rolled to its door.




Præ-Franciscan Assisi.


There is a certain satisfaction, a satisfaction which has a spice of
mischief in it, in dwelling on some feature in a place which is quite
different from that which makes the place famous with the world in
general. So to do is sometimes needful as a protest against serious
error. When so many members of Parliament showed a few years back,
and when the _Times_ showed only a very little time back, that they
believed that the University of Oxford was founded by somebody--Alfred
will do as well as anybody else--and that the city of Oxford somehow
grew up around the University, it became, and it remains, a duty to
historic truth to point out the importance of Oxford, geographical and
therefore political and military, for some ages before the University
was heard of. When the _Times_ thought that Oxford was left to the
scholars, because "thanes and barons" did not think it worth struggling
for, the _Times_ clearly did not know that schools grew up at Oxford
then, just as schools have grown up at Manchester since, because
Oxford was already, according to the standard of the time, a great,
flourishing, and central town, and therefore fittingly chosen as a seat
of councils and parliaments. Here there is real error to fight against;
in other cases there is simply a kind of pleasure in pointing out that,
while the received object of attraction in a place is often perfectly
worthy of its fame, the place contains other, and often older, objects
which are worthy of some measure of fame also. It is quite possible
that some people may think that the town of Assisi grew up round the
church and monastery of Saint Francis. If anyone does think so, the
error is of exactly the same kind as the error of thinking that the
city of Oxford grew up around the University. It is Saint Francis
and his church which have made Assisi a place of world-wide fame and
world-wide pilgrimage, and Saint Francis and his church are fully
worthy of their fame. Yet Assisi had been a city of men for ages on
ages before Saint Francis was born, and Assisi would still be a place
well worthy of a visit, though Saint Francis had never been born, and
though his church had therefore never been built. It is perhaps a light
matter that Assisi had eminent citizens besides Saint Francis and very
unlike Saint Francis, that it was the birthplace of Propertius before
him and of Metastasio after him. But before Assisi, as the birthplace
of the seraphic doctor, had earned a right to be itself called
"seraphica civitas," before one of its later churches came to rank with
the patriarchal basilicas of Rome, Assisi had, as a Roman and an early
mediæval city, covered its soil with monuments of which not a few still
exist and which are well worthy of study. And in one way they have a
kind of connexion with Saint Francis which his own church has not. The
saint never saw his own monument; it would have vexed his soul could
he have known that such a monument was to be. But in his youth he saw,
and doubtless mused, as on the bleak mountain of Subasio and the yellow
stream of Chiaschio, so also on the campanile and apse of the cathedral
church of St. Rufino and on the columns of the converted temple of the
Great Twin Brethren.

Assisi is one of the hill-cities; but the hill-cities supply endless
varieties among themselves. Assisi does not, like the others which
we have spoken of, occupy a hill which is wholly its own; the hill on
which it stands, though very distinct, is still only a spur of a huge
mountain. As at Mykênê, while the akropolis is high enough, there is
something far higher rising immediately above it. And the akropolis
of Assisi is a mere fortress; even if it was the primitive place of
shelter, it cannot have been inhabited for many ages. The _duomo_
stands, very far certainly from the top of the hill, but at the top
of the really inhabited city with its continuous streets, and that is
no small height from the lowest line of them. Above the church are the
remains of the theatre, of the amphitheatre; the distant tower beyond
it, and soaring over all, the fortress of Rocco Grande with no dwelling
of man near it, or for some way below it. To go behind Assisi is almost
more needful than in the case of any of the other hill-cities, not
only for the mediæval walls, for the slight traces which seem to mark
an outer and earlier wall; but yet more for the view over the narrow
valley, the bleak hills scattered with houses, the winding river at
their feet, soon to become yet more winding in the plain, and the
glimpse far away of Perugia on its hill. But Assisi has a spot only
less wild within the city walls, the ground namely over which we climb
from the inhabited streets to the fortress. So it is at Cortona; but
there the presence of the church and monastery of St. Margaret makes
all the difference. The general view of Assisi, as seen from below,
gives us the church of Saint Francis with the great arched substructure
to the left, the mountain to the right; between them is a hill with a
city running along it at about half its height, sending up a forest of
bell-towers, some really good in themselves, all joining in the general
effect. Above all this is the hill-top, partly grassy, partly rocky,
crowned by the towers of the fortress which looks down on all, except
the steep of the mountain itself.

Of particular objects older than the church of Saint Francis, a
restriction which of course also cuts out the church of his friend,
Saint Clara, there can be no doubt that the monument of greatest
interest is the temple in the forum--now _Piazza grande_--with its
Corinthian columns strangely hemmed in by a house on one side and on
the other by the bell-tower which was added when the temple was turned
into a church. But it is surely not, as it is locally called, a temple
of Minerva, but rather of Castor and Pollux. Not the least interesting
part of its belongings lies below ground; for the level of the forum at
Assisi has risen as though it had been at Rome or at Trier. The temple
must have risen on a bold flight of steps, of which some of the upper
ones still remain. In front of it, below the steps, was a great altar,
with the drains for the blood of the victims, just as we see them on
the Athenian akropolis. Such drains always bring to our mind those
comments of Dean Stanley on this repulsive feature of pagan and ancient
Jewish worship, which has passed away alike from the church, from the
synagogue, and from the mosque, save only at Mecca. In front again is
the dedicatory inscription with the name of the founder of the temple,
and the record of the dedication-feast which he made to the magistrates
and people. His name can doubtless be turned to in Mommsen's great
collection; we are not sure that in the underground gloom we took it
down quite correctly, and it is better not to be wrong. Anyhow the
dedication is not to Minerva but to the twin heroes. A great number
of inscriptions are built up in the wall of the church. As usual,
there are more freedmen than sons; and among the freedmen the one best
worth notice is Publius Decimius Eros Merula, physician, surgeon, and
oculist, who bought his freedom for so much, his magistracy as one of
the _Sexviri_ for so much, who spent so much on mending the roads,
and left so much behind him. Here the state of things is vividly
brought home to us in which a man could buy, not only his cook and his
coachman, but also his architect and his medical adviser. And we are
set thinking on the one hand how great must be the physical infusion of
foreign blood, Greek and barbarian, in the actual people of Italy, and
on the other hand how thoroughly and speedily all such foreign elements
were practically Romanized. The son of the slave-born magistrate of
Assisi would look on himself, and be looked on by others, as no less
good a Roman than any Fabius or Cornelius who might still linger on.

The temple above ground and its appurtenances underground are the most
memorable things in Præ-Franciscan Assisi; but there are other things
besides, both Roman and mediæval. The lower church of _Sta. Maria
Maggiore_, close by the bishop's palace, and which is said to have been
the original cathedral, is a Romanesque building of rather a German
look, with masses of wall instead of columns. The thought comes into
the mind that it is the _cella_ of a temple with arches cut through
its walls. But it hardly can be; the arrangement seems to be a local
fashion; it is found also in the later and larger church of St. Peter
hard by. Besides, at _Sta. Maria Maggiore_ there are the clear remains
of a Roman building, seemingly a house, with columns and mosaic floors,
underneath the present church of St. Rufino. The later cathedral has
been sadly disfigured within; but it keeps its apse of the twelfth
century, its west front of the thirteenth, using up older sculptures,
and it has the best bell-tower in Assisi. And below it remains the
crypt of the older church of 1028, with ancient Ionic columns used up,
and Corinthian capitals imitated as they might be in 1028. Just above
are scanty remains of the theatre; above again are still scantier
remains of the amphitheatre; but its shape is impressed on the
surrounding buildings, just as the four arms of the Roman _chester_
abide unchanged in many an English town where every actual house is
modern. A piece of Roman wall, and a wide arch in the _Via San Paolo_
leading out of the forum, complete the remains of ancient Assisi above
ground. It is doubtless altogether against rule, but among so many
memorials of earlier gods and earlier saints, it is quite possible, in
climbing the steep and narrow streets of Assisi, to forget for a while
both Saint Francis and Saint Clara.




Spello.


The Umbrian town which takes care to blazon over one of its many
gates its full description as "Ispello Colonia Giulia, Citta Flavia
Costante," is hardly of any great fame, either as ancient Hispellum
or as modern Spello. It must have some visitors, drawn thither most
likely by two or three pictures by famous masters which remain in
one of its churches. Somebody must come to see them, or their keepers
would not have learned the common, but shabby, trick of keeping them
covered, in hopes of earning a _lira_ by uncovering them. May we make
the confession that we became aware--or, to speak more delicately,
that we were reminded--of the existence of the colony at once Julian
and Flavian by the description in the generally excellent German
guide-book of Gsell-fels? And may we further add that, though we feel
thoroughly thankful to its author for sending us to Spello at all,
yet his description is not quite so orderly as is usual with him, and
that, though he is perfectly accurate in his enumeration of the Roman
monuments, yet his account led us to expect to find them in a more
perfect state than they actually are? On the whole, except for the
wonderful prospect which Spello shares with Perugia and Assisi, we
should hardly send anybody to Spello except a very zealous antiquary;
but a very zealous antiquary we certainly should send thither. There is
no one object of first-rate importance of any date in the place; but
there are the remains of a crowd of objects which have been of some
importance. There is also the site; there is the general look of the
place, which is akin to that of the other hill-towns, but which, as
Spello is the smallest and least frequented of the group, is there less
untouched and modernized in any way than even at Cortona or Assisi.
We except of course the fashion of mercilessly spoiling the mediæval
houses which has gone on as merrily at Spello as at Perugia and Assisi.
But that is no fashion of yesterday. The general old-world air, strong
in some parts of Perugia, stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all at
Spello, while at Spello there seems less eagerness than at Cortona to
seize the stranger and make a prey of him. The look-out is perhaps the
finest of all; it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked mountains
and ranges deep with snow, which barely come into the other views,
and the long series of hill-towns is pleasantly broken by the towers
and cupolas of Foligno in the plain. The mediæval walls and towers,
at all events on the south-eastern side, form a line which is not
easily surpassed; the walk outside Spello, though it lacks both the
antiquity and the wildness of the walk outside Cortona, outdoes it in
mere picturesque effect. The particular objects at Spello are perhaps
a little disappointing: Spello itself, as a whole, is certainly not
disappointing.

At Spello we have reached an Italian town which is not a bishop's see;
even in Italy it was not likely to be so, with Assisi so close on one
hand and Foligno on the other. There is therefore no _duomo_, nor is
there any other church of much architectural importance. The best are
two small forsaken Romanesque churches outside the walls, one on each
side of the town. One of them, that of St. Claudius, forms one building
of a group by which we pass on the road from Assisi to Spello, a group
lying in the plain, with Spello on its height rising above them. There
is a large modern villa which seems to be built on Roman foundations;
by its side lies the little Romanesque church; nearly opposite is the
amphitheatre of Hispellum, keeping some fragments of its walls and with
its marked shape deeply impressed on the ground. Here the amphitheatre
is down in the plain; at Assisi it stands in the higher part of the
present city; in both it lies, according to rule, outside the original
Roman enclosure. It shows the passionate love for these sports wherever
the influence of Rome spread, that two amphitheatres could be needed
with so small a distance between them as that which parts Assisi from
Spello. More nearly opposite to the villa are other Roman fragments
which are said to have been part of a theatre; but the form of the
building is certainly not so clearly stamped on the ground as that of
its bloodier neighbour. Indeed we are in a region of Roman remains;
other fragments lie by the roadside between Assisi and Spello, and when
we reach the latter town, we find that, next to its general effect, it
is its Roman remains which form its chief attraction.

As we draw near from Assisi, the Julian colony of Hispellum, the Flavia
Constans of a later day, is becomingly entered by a Roman gateway which
bears the name of Porta Consolare. But on the road from Foligno the
consular gate is reached only through a mediæval one, which bears, as
we have said, all the names of the town prominently set forth for the
stranger's benefit. The consular gate stands at the bottom of the hill:
for Spello thoroughly occupies the whole of its hill; there is plenty
of climbing to be done in its streets; but it has all to be done in
continuous streets within the town walls. The consular gate has been
patched in later times; but the Roman arch is perfect. It is a single
simple arch, plain enough, and of no great height, a marked contrast to
the lofty arch of Perugia. Another gateway on the side towards Assisi,
known as _Porta Veneris_, must have been a far more elaborate design.
But the whole is imperfect and broken down; one arch of the double
entrance is blocked, and the other is supplanted by a later arch. Yet
there is a good effect about the whole, owing to the bold polygonal
towers of later date which flank the Roman gateway. Another gateway,
higher up on the same side, is cut down to the mere stones of an arch
hanging in the air. This is locally known as the _arco di trionfo_. Of
the _arco di Augusto_ within the town, said to be a triumphal arch of
Macrinus, there is nothing left but a single jamb. In short the Roman
remains of Hispellum, though considerable in number, are slight and
fragmentary in actual extent. Yet there is a pleasure in tracing them
out. Conceive them perfect, and Hispellum would come near to rival
Verona, not as it was, but as it is. But, after all, there is a certain
perverse turn of thought which is better pleased with tracing out what
has been than with simply admiring what still is. Spello will make the
end of a mid-Italian series seen after the great snow-tide to match
the mid-French series seen before it. Everything cannot be seen in one
journey. All roads lead to Rome; but thirty-seven days are enough to
spend on any one of them. From the colony of Hispellum then we must
hurry on to _aurea Roma_ herself, even though we have to rush by many a
town and fortress on its hill-top, by Trevi and Spoleto, and, proudest
of all, by

     ... that grey crag where, girt with towers,
     The fortress of Nequinum lowers
         O'er the pale waves of Nar.

Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome is more. Rome, too, at each visit,
presents fresh objects, old and new. The oldest and the newest seem to
have come together, when one set of placards on the wall invites the
Roman people to meet on the Capitol, and when the Quæstor Bacchus--it
is taking a liberty with a living man and magistrate, but we cannot
help Latinizing the _Questore Bacco_--puts out another set of placards
to forbid the meeting. We are inclined to turn to others among
our memories, to others among our lays. We might almost look for a
secession; we might almost expect to see once more

     ... the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill.

But those who were forbidden to meet on the Capitol did not secede
even to the Aventine; the secession was done within doors, in the _Sala
Dante_.




Veii.


The student of what M. Ampère calls "L'Histoire Romaine à Rome" must
take care not to confine his studies to Rome only. The local history
of Rome--and the local history of Rome is no small part of the
œcumenical history--is not fully understood unless we fully take in
the history and position of the elder sites among which Rome arose.
With Rome we must compare and contrast the cities of her enemies and
her allies, the cities which she swept away, the cities which she made
part of herself, the cities which simply withered away before her. And
first on the list may well come the city which was before all others
the rival of Rome, and where she did indeed sweep with the besom of
destruction. A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through
a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with
the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has
utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left
within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we
are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by
a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome,
an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. There once was Veii, the
first great conquest of Rome, the Italian Troy, round whose ten years'
siege wonders have gathered almost as round the Achaian warfare by the
Hellespont. There are no monuments of the departed life of Veii such
as are left of not a few cities which have passed out of the list of
living things no less utterly. Of the greatest city of southern Etruria
nothing remains beyond a site which can never be wiped out but by some
convulsion of nature, a few scraps to show that man once dwelled there,
and tombs not a few to show that those who dwelled there belonged to a
race with whom death counted for more than life.

A sight of the spot which once was Veii makes us better understand
some points in early Italian history. We see why Veii was the rival
of Rome, and why she was the unsuccessful rival of Rome. Above all,
we understand better than anywhere else how deep must have been the
hatred with which the old-established cities of Italy must have looked
on the upstart settlement by the Tiber, which grew up to so strange
a greatness and threatened to devour them one by one. Veii, the
great border city of Etruria, was the only one among Rome's immediate
neighbours which could contend with her on equal terms. Elsewhere, in
her early history, Rome, as a single city, is of equal weight in peace
or war with whole confederations.

The happy position of certain hills by the Tiber had enabled one lucky
group of Latin settlements to coalesce into a single city as great
as all the others put together. But at Veii we see the marks of what
clearly was a great city, a city fully equal in extent to Rome. And
when the ancient writers tell us that, in riches and splendour, in the
character of its public and private buildings, Veii far surpassed Rome,
it is only what we should expect from a great and ancient Etruscan city
which had entered on the stage of decline when Rome was entering on the
stage of youthful greatness. There was little fear of Veii overthrowing
Rome; but both sides must have felt that a day would come when Rome
would be very likely to overthrow Veii. Two cities so great and so near
together could not go on together. Two cities, very great according
to the standard of those times, considerable according even to a
modern standard, cities of nations differing in blood, language, and
everything else which can keep nations asunder, stood so near that the
modern inquirer can drive from one to the other, spend several hours
on its site, and drive back again, between an ordinary breakfast and
dinner. Rivalry and bitter hatred were unavoidable. Veii must have felt
all the deadly grief of being outstripped by a younger rival, while
Rome must have felt that Veii was the great hindrance to any advance of
her dominion on the right bank of her own river. No form of alliance,
confederation, or dependence was possible; a death struggle must come
sooner or later between the old Etruscan and the newer Latin city.

The site of Veii is that of a great city, a strong city, but not a city
made, like Rome, for rule. We go far and wide, and we find nothing
like the "great group of village communities by the Tiber." Veii is
not a group, and she has no Tiber. The city stood high on the rocks,
yet it can hardly be called a hill-city. A peninsular site rises above
the steep and craggy banks of two small streams which make up the
fateful Cremera; but the peninsula itself is nearly a table-land, a
table-land surrounded by hills. The stream supplied the walls with an
admirable natural fosse, and that was all. The vast space enclosed by
the walls makes us naturally ask whether the city could have been laid
out on so great a scale from the beginning. We may believe that, as
in so many cases, the _arx_, a peninsula within a peninsula, was the
original city, and that the rest was taken in afterwards. But, if so,
it would seem as if it must have been taken in at a blow, as if Veii
took a single leap from littleness to greatness, unlike the gradual
growth of Rome or Syracuse. At all events, there is the undoubted
extent of a great city, a city clearly of an earlier type than Rome, a
city which may well have reached its present extent while Rome had not
spread beyond the Palatine. Such a site marks a great advance on the
occupation of inaccessible hill-tops; but Veii itself must have seemed
an old-world city in the eyes of those who had the highway of the Tiber
below their walls.

It is strange to step out the traces of a city whose position and
extent are so unmistakably marked, but of which nothing is left which
can be called a building, or even a ruin. The most memorable work in
the circuit of Veii is a work not of building but of boring--the Ponte
Sodo, hewn in the rock for the better passage of the guardian stream.
Besides these, some small fragments of the Etruscan wall, the signs
of a double gate, some masonry of the small Roman tower which in after
times arose within the forsaken walls, are pretty well all that remains
of the life of Veii. The remains of its death are more plentiful.
There is the Roman _columbarium_, within the Etruscan site; there
are the Etruscan tombs bored deep in all the surrounding hills. There
is, above all, the famous painted tomb, shielding no such sculptures
and inscriptions as those on which we gaze in the great Volumnian
sepulchre, but within which one lucky eye was privileged for a moment
to see the Lucumo himself, as he crumbled away at the entrance of the
unaccustomed air. A scrap or two of his harness is there still; the
arms are there; the strange-shaped beasts are there, in their primitive
form and colouring; the guardian lions keep the door; but we have no
written ænigma even to guess at. We can only feel our way to a date by
marking the imperfect attempt at an arch, an earlier and ruder stage
by far than the roof of Rome's _Tullianum_ or its fellow at Tusculum.
In the Volumnian tomb the main interest comes from the fact that it
belongs to the very latest Etruscan times, to the transition from
Etruscan to Roman life. In the Veientine tomb the main interest comes
from the fact that it cannot be later than an early stage in Roman
history, and that it may be as much earlier as we choose to think
it. It is the same with all the little that is left of Veii. We know
that, except the palpable remains of the Roman _municipium_, nothing
can be later than B.C. 396, and that anything may be vastly earlier.
In the history of Italy, the date when Rome doubled her territory by
conquering a city a dozen miles from her gates passes for an early
stage. The life of Rome is still before her. In Greece at the same
date, the greatness of Athens, the truest greatness of Sparta, is past;
the only fresh life that is to come is that of ephemeral Thebes and
half-Hellenic Macedonia.

We turn from Veii, feeling how thoroughly true in its main outline, how
utterly untrustworthy in its detail, is what passes for early Roman
history. The legend of Veii counts for less than the legend of Troy,
inasmuch as invention and combination are hardly genuine legend at all.
But that Veii was and is not, that her fall was the rising point in
Rome's destiny, that it was needful for the course of things which has
stretched from that day to this that Veii should cease to be--all this
we understand ten times the better when we turn from the living tale of
Livy to the yet more living witness of the forsaken site.




Fidenæ.


From the villa of the White Hens we looked across to the _arx_ of
Fidenæ as one of the main points in the view. The hill of Castel
Giubeleo seems planted there by the hand of nature as a border-defence
of Latium against Etruscan attacks. Yet both strong sites and other
things sometimes fail to discharge the exact functions which seem to
have been laid upon them by the hand of nature. The post which seems
designed as the Latin bulwark against the Etruscan does, as a matter
of fact, play its chief part in history in the character of an Etruscan
outpost on Latin soil. Whether Fidenæ was really such an outpost in the
strict sense, whether it was a remnant of the wider Etruscan dominion
of the days when the Tiber was not a border-stream, or whether it was
a Latin town which, from whatever cause, chose to throw itself on the
Etruscan side, it is not only as the enemy of Rome, but as the ally
of Veii, that Fidenæ made itself memorable. If we accept the received
story, the war which brought about the ruin of Fidenæ was caused
because its people slew the envoys of Rome in obedience to the hasty,
perhaps misinterpreted, words of a Veientine king. The king who thus
took so little heed of the law of nations of course paid his forfeit,
and the Royal spoils won from Lars Tolumnius by Aulus Cornelius Cossus
formed one of the most cherished relics of the early days of Rome. We
may believe the details of the story or not; but the spoils at least
were real, if the witness of Augustus Cæsar is to be believed.

Each of the roads which lead out of Rome--since the railway came,
there is practically only one way which leads into Rome--has its own
special interest, and the Salarian way is certainly not inferior to
the Cassian or the Flaminian. We leave the city by that which in
its material fabric is the most modern, which in its associations
is perhaps the most historic, of all the gates of Rome. The Salarian
gate in the wall of Aurelian may be looked at as in some sort drawing
to itself the memories of the neighbouring Colline gate in the wall
of Servius. He who fought before the Colline gate, he who entered by
the Colline gate, could hardly fail to march over the ground where in
the new system of defence the Salarian gate was to arise. The Colline
gate on the high ground of the Quirinal hill was the weakest point of
Rome; it was therefore specially strengthened in the Servian line of
defence. It was the point by which most of the early invaders of Rome
marched in or strove to march in. There the revolted troops entered to
put down the tyranny of the decemvirs; there the Gauls came in after
the slaughter of the Allia; to that gate Hannibal drew near, and those
who did not understand Hannibal said that he hurled his spear over it.
Before the Colline gate Rome had for the last time to struggle for the
dominion of Italy in the fight between Sulla and Pontius Telesinus.
And when the Colline gate had given way to the Salarian, it was at the
new entrance to Rome that the enemy came in whose coming declared that
her political dominion over the world had ceased, but that her moral
dominion was stronger than ever. "At midnight the Salarian gate was
silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous
sound of the Gothic trumpet." And if these gates were a centre of
fighting, they were also, in a strange and special way, a centre of
burying. Along this road, as along others, we mark the broken tombs
here and there, two pre-eminently just outside the present gate; but
this quarter supplies one strange contrast in the matter of burials
which is not to be found elsewhere. Outside the Colline gate was the
living tomb of unchaste vestals; not far beyond the Salarian we come
to the Christian _cœmeterium Priscillae_. We go on; we descend the
hill, the northern slope of the Quirinal, and find ourselves in the
alluvial ground of Tiber and Anio. We have now come near to the meeting
of the streams; Anio is spanned by a bridge which at first sight might
seem to be wholly a thing of yesterday, but which in truth has lived
and gone through much from the earliest times to the latest. Broken
down and rebuilt over and over again, from the wars of Narses to those
of Garibaldi, its main arch is indeed of the newest workmanship; but
if we go down to the banks we see the smaller side arches, which must
have been ancient when they were crossed by Hannibal, perhaps hardly
new when they were crossed by Cossus. A few steps further, and we come
to another record of change; an ancient tomb has grown into a mediæval
tower; the mediæval tower now proclaims itself as an "osteria"; but
we feel hardly tempted to try its powers of entertainment. We are now
fairly in the low ground; the hills of Rome lie behind us; the hills
beyond Tiber which skirt the Flaminian way rise to our left; the hills
of Fidenæ are before us. To the right lies the ground between the
Salarian and the Nomentane road where Phaon had his villa and where his
master Nero came by his end. Presently the road, and its companion the
railway, pass close under hills to the right and, at one point, with
Tiber close by them to the left. A little further on they pass between
hills on either side, a loftier and isolated height to the left, a
range of lower hills, broken by more than one stream and its valley to
the right. We are in the heart of forsaken Fidenæ, in the pass which
divides its soaring akropolis by the river from the body of the city on
the inland side.

The _arx_ of Fidenæ, now the hill of Castel Giubeleo, is not, indeed,
a height like that of Tusculum or that of Cortona; but it comes nearer
to them than anything to be found at Veii or Rome. A bend of the river
leaves a rich alluvial flat between its bank and a hill which on that
side rises steeply enough. Here the men of the faithless Latin city
could look out to their friends beyond the river, over the mouth of
the small but famous stream of Cremera, over the hills on either side,
the Fabian outpost, the future home of Livia, far away, if not to Veii
itself, yet to points further off than Veii. The view from the _arx_
of Fidenæ and the view from the hill of Livia complete one another.
Inland we see Rome on its hills; but we must again remark that when
Fidenæ was, Rome sent up no lofty towers and cupolas to mark its place
against the horizon. At our feet we see the lower hills occupied by the
rest of the town, surely a modern settlement compared with the original
_arx_. We go over its site and round its site, we mark its tombs, its
_cloaca_, the place where its gates once were. The walk in the valley
by the brook between the lower hill of Fidenæ and the hill which lies
between Fidenæ and Rome brings the features of the place well out. It
was no small gain for Veii to have such a confederate on Latin ground
as the strong post which we are compassing. We can well understand
why Rome on the first opportunity swept Fidenæ utterly away, while the
existence of Veii had to be endured for a generation longer.

As at Veii, so at Fidenæ, the traces of the living are gone--yet more
utterly at Fidenæ than at Veii. The traces of the dead are far more
plentiful, though Fidenæ has nothing to set against the painted tomb of
Veii. The city, doubtless, perished after the war in which Cossus won
the spoils of Tolumnius. Strabo speaks of Fidenæ as a deserted place,
the possession of a single man. Yet the _potestas_ of Fidenæ--perhaps
its dictator--may have lingered on, as such dignitaries have lingered
on in the boroughs once threatened by Sir Charles Dilke.




Antemnæ.


It is one of the amiable features of the study of historical topography
that its votaries are so easily pleased. Two places may have equal
charms on utterly opposite grounds. The merit of one city is that
it has lived on uninterruptedly from the earliest times till now.
The merit of another city is that it ceased to live at all many ages
back. One is precious because it contains a series of monuments of
all ages. Another is equally precious because all its monuments are
of one age. A third is as precious as either because it contains no
monuments at all. This last kind of charm may seem paradoxical; but it
will be acknowledged by every one who has given himself heartily to
this kind of research. At Veii and at Fidenæ the great merit is that
there is, speaking roughly, nothing to see there; in truth there is the
more to see because there is nothing to see. No doubt Veii and Fidenæ
untouched, as they stood under Lars Tolumnius, would be best of all;
but we set that aside among the things which it is no use hoping for.
And no doubt if we found the sites of Veii and Fidenæ full of Roman
and mediæval monuments, we should doubtless be glad to see them; but,
as they are not there, we are still more glad that they are away. But
we turn from Veii and Fidenæ to a city compared with which Veii and
Fidenæ might seem to have a wealth of monuments. It is, after all,
an exaggeration to say that nothing is left of Veii or of Fidenæ. The
sites are the main things; but there really is something to see beside
the sites. But there is a city, at least the site of a city, much
nearer to Rome than either of them, of which the great charm is that it
does not contain a single monument of any kind or date. Here we can,
even more truly than at Veii and at Fidenæ, say that the very ruins
have perished; but it is just because the very ruins have perished
yet more utterly than elsewhere that the spot has a strong and special
attraction of its own.

We took a kind of Pisgah view of Antemnæ both from the road to the
White Hens and from the road to Fidenæ. As we before said, it ought
to be examined as one of the objects on this last road; only things
are not always as they ought to be. We must therefore start afresh
from the Flaminian gate and for the third time make our way to the
Milvian bridge. This time as our course is to lead us to one of the
oldest sites in Roman history, it may be well, by way of contrast,
to let the bridge call up thoughts of warfare yet later than that
of Constantine. It was on the Roman side of the Milvian bridge, when
the bridge itself, which he had fortified, was betrayed to the Gothic
enemy, that Belisarius, with another Maxentius at his side, withstood
the host which Witigis had led from Narnia. Readers either of Procopius
or of Gibbon must remember how every dart was aimed at the bay horse,
and how the rider of the bay horse escaped without a wound. This time
we keep ourselves, with Belisarius, on the Roman side of the bridge. We
are therefore not tempted to have our thoughts carried off into quite
another part of the world by the statue of a famous Bohemian saint,
who is said by some Bohemian scholars to be a purely imaginary being.
Our present business is not with Saint John Nepomuk, not even with
Belisarius or with Constantine; we have to do with times before Rome
was, when Tiber still parted the free Etruscan from the free Latin. We
walk along his left bank, keeping within the bounds of Latium, but with
the eye tempted at every moment to look across to the opposite, the
Etruscan bank. Both banks are so quiet, both are so nearly forsaken,
both come so easily within an ordinary walk from our Roman quarters,
that it is hard to call up the days when Tiber was the boundary
stream, not merely of separate commonwealths, not merely of distinct
and hostile nations, but of nations between which there was no tie
of origin, language, or religion. To be sold beyond the Tiber was the
most frightful of all dooms which spared life and limb. If the debtor
were sold to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win his freedom and become a
denizen of a city of his own speech. To sell him beyond the Tiber was
like handing him over to bondage among Turks or Moors. But our path
keeps us on the Latin side, in a land which, when it was inhabited at
all, was inhabited by men of an intelligible speech. We peer under a
rocky cliff, the riverward slope of the hill which rises just outside
the Flaminian Gate of Rome. On that hill Witigis held his headquarters
when Belisarius and Saint Peter between them guarded the Pincian.
But, we ask, why did not some city, why did not Rome itself, arise on
a site which seems so thoroughly suited for the needs of an ancient
settlement? But we have to go further for what we seek; no record tells
of any settlement on the Monte Parioli. We pass on by a few tombs in
the hill-side, and we more distinctly make out the shape of a grassy
hill parted by a wide alluvial plain from the river on the eastern
side by which we approach. That is the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished
city whose legendary story may be summed up in a few but instructive
words. Antemnæ was older than Rome. It was one of the towns whose
daughters supplied objects for that great act of what our forefathers
called _Quenfang_, what sociologists called _exogamy_, which secured
that the Roman State should last more than one generation. War follows;
Rome prevails; Hersilia, wife of Romulus, but so strangely mother of
nobody, pleads for the conquered, and Antemnæ is merged, in Rome. We
may be sure that this is the genuine story, rather than others which
give Antemnæ a longer life. In sober history its sole record seems to
be that in Strabo's day the town had wholly passed away, and that the
site was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession of a single man.

The story in Livy is well imagined. The city whose people Romulus
spares at the prayer of his wife has a specially Roman character.
Parted as the hill is from the Tiber on three sides, its northern
point, the point of a rather long promontory, overhangs the river at
the very point of its junction with the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the
descriptive name _Antemnae_, the town before the rivers. Such a site
belongs to the same class as the hills of Rome. Less isolated than the
Palatine or the Aventine, it is as much isolated as the Capitoline was
while it still clave to the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive
name, can hardly belong to the earliest times; it marks the same degree
of progress as the settlement of Rome itself. Cut off as it was from
the oldest Rome by the whole of the high ground within and without
the Roman walls, such a settlement on the river, a settlement so like
Rome itself, might well be felt to be a special rival, a rival which
must cease to exist as a hostile post, but whose people might well be
incorporated with their more successful kinsfolk.

Of a tale placed in a time which is purely legendary, the utmost that
we can say is that the legend falls in with the appearances of the
site. Antemnæ has utterly perished; there is not a scrap of wall; some
stones which deceive the eye at a distance prove, on coming near, to
be part of the rock peeping out through the sides of the otherwise
green hill. We believe that no antiquities have been found there.
But the site speaks for itself. It is a manifest fortress; the gates
are as plain as if their openings were spanned by arches like those
of Perugia or Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and its surroundings, on
the old battlefields of kings and consuls and emperors; on the bridge
of Narses and Garibaldi, on the line of march which brought the
Gaul, the Carthaginian, the Samnite, and the Goth to the gates, and
some of them within the gates, of Rome. We can look down on nearly
the whole of Roman history from the site where once stood Virgil's
"turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are yet farther from being able to tell the
towers thereof than we were at Veii and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins
themselves have perished.




Ostia.


From the nearest neighbours and rivals of Rome, from the slight
remains which mark the sites of Veii and Fidenæ, from the almost more
instructive lack of remains which marks the site of Antemnæ, we may
well pass to a spot which lies at a greater distance from Rome than any
of them, but which never was Rome's rival or even neighbour, because
it was from the beginning simply an outlying part of Rome itself. This
is the forsaken haven of Rome at Ostia. The existence of Ostia at an
early stage of the historic being of Rome is no small sign of what
Rome already was, and it may well have had no small share in making
Rome what she afterwards was to be. For an inland town like Rome to
possess a haven of its own, existing solely as its haven, at once
marked and strengthened the difference between Rome and other inland
towns. For Ostia, it must be borne in mind, was the haven of Rome and
nothing else. It was not a separate maritime city made into the haven
of Rome by any process of conquest or confederation. Tradition makes
Ostia spring into being because it was found that Rome needed a haven.
And the tradition has nothing to contradict it and all likelihood to
support it; the name of the place by itself might almost be accepted as
proving its truth. The foundation of Ostia, too, is placed in a period
which is eminently a traditional, as distinguished from a legendary,
period. It is safer not to rule either that there was a personal
Ancus Marcius or that there was not; but we may be pretty sure that
the events assigned to his reign really happened, if we can only keep
ourselves from attempting dates where there is no chronology. Tradition
then calls Ancus the founder of Ostia. The really important point is
that whoever founded Ostia founded it purely in the interest of Rome,
and that in an age when Rome was still in the days of her early growth.

This at once marks a wide difference between Rome and other cities
of that time. Even the most famous of the early seats of maritime
enterprise had the port separate from the city, later than the city.
Corinth herself had her two havens, apart alike from her mountain
citadel and from the venerable columns at its foot. When Corinth
started in life men shrank from the close neighbourhood of the sea.
It marks a later stage when Corinthian enterprise planted colonies
absolutely in the sea--Syracuse on her island, the elder Korkyra on
her peninsula. It was not till long after Ostia had arisen that inland
Athens yoked herself to the sea. But, as the site of Rome itself on
the broad Tiber showed that men had even then learned to understand
the value of sites widely different from Tusculum on her height or
Veii with her encircling brooks, so the creation of Ostia proves yet
more. Rome, far more distant from the sea than Corinth, Megara, or
even Athens, had already learned that a hold on the sea was needful
for her power. There could have been nothing like it in Italy. There
were inland cities and there were maritime cities; but there was no
inland city which had put forth a maritime outpost at such a distance.
Indeed, no other city had put forth such an outpost at all, maritime
or otherwise. For Ostia was not a colony, not a dependency. It had
no separate being of its own. It was a limb of Rome transplanted to a
distance of fifteen Italian miles from the main body.

Ostia, then, called into being because Rome stood on the Tiber, is
eminently a child of the Tiber. But Father Tiber is unluckily one of
those fathers who do not scruple to swallow up their own children. He
has changed his course, and he has changed it in a way which is not a
little dangerous for what is still left of Ostia. The diggings which
have been carried on by the Italian Government are most praiseworthy,
and they have brought to light much that is most interesting and
instructive. But streets, storehouses, temples, theatres, will in
vain be dug out if the ravenous river god is to gulp them down as soon
as they are well dug out. At the present moment one street, with its
pavement laid bare, with its buildings still standing on each side,
leads in a perilous manner into the stream. That is to say, one end
is gone; the rest will soon follow; the pieces of wall nearest to
the stream are crumbling to their fall. Surely it would be well to
imitate in the haven of Ancus the work done for the mother-city by his
successor. Fence in the flood, as the elder Tarquin fenced it in beside
the mouth of the _cloaca maxima_; make a strong wall of defence against
the waters, and the remains which are left of Ostia may abide as long
as the _cloaca maxima_ itself.

And what is left of Ostia is indeed worth preserving. Only a small
part of the town has as yet been dug out; but, even as it is, Ostia
is becoming a fair rival to Pompeii. The interest, indeed, is of a
somewhat different kind in the two places. Pompeii will come first
with the artist and Ostia with the historian. Nothing of any moment
ever happened at Pompeii except the destruction and the discovery
of Pompeii itself. But a great deal happened at Ostia, and that at
widely distant dates. It is perhaps needless to mention that one thing
which is said to have happened at Ostia never happened either there
or anywhere else--namely, destruction by the Saracens in the _fifth_
century, which is recorded indeed in Murray's "Handbook," but which was
certainly unknown to Procopius. Ostia, destroyed by Marius, restored
by Sulla, was failing in the days of Strabo to discharge its duty as
the haven of Rome. It had yielded to the same enemy which afterwards
overcame Ravenna and Pisa; the silt of Father Tiber was too much for
it. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, notwithstanding the change
which it led to, when Claudius found it needful to transfer the harbour
of Rome to Portus on the other side of the river, Ostia contrived to
live on through all disadvantages. For it has many and great buildings
later than Strabo and Claudius, among them an Imperial house with
graceful columns, which contains the famous shrine of Mithras. There is
abundant evidence that all through the second century of our æra great
architectural works were carried on at Ostia. Besides the palace, there
is the great central temple, be it of Jupiter or of Vulcan, standing so
proudly on its steps. There is a theatre whose columns and inscriptions
supply no small materials for study, a theatre of which it might be
too much to say that it suggests those of Orange or Taormina, but which
certainly suggests that of Arles.

In the sixth century Procopius describes Ostia as lacking walls, and he
complains that the road from Ostia to Rome did not follow the course
of the river, and was therefore useless as a towing-path. This is
eminently true still. The road goes through scenery of various kinds,
some rather English-looking, though none very striking; the Tiber
makes a far less important feature than we might have looked for. But,
if Ostia had no walls in the days of Belisarius, it had no lack of
walls in earlier days. The most interesting, from one point of view,
among the ruins of Ostia are the remains, forming part of two sides
of a square, of the primitive wall, a dry wall of massive stones,
belonging no doubt to the period of the first foundation. These were
clearly ruinous when the later brick buildings were reared; the wall
was broken down, and men built against and upon it; they plastered it;
they chamfered its stones for the convenience of plastering, as best
suited their purpose. The flourishing town of the second century may
well have been wall-less. Rome herself at that date had no defence. The
wall of Servius had ceased to serve any military purpose, and the wall
of Aurelian was not yet.

The history of Ostia from the ninth century onwards, from the vain
attempt of Gregory the Fourth to turn Ostia into _Gregoriopolis_,
belongs to another, though almost adjacent, site. New Ostia, with its
castle, its cathedral, its gateway, its one or two narrow streets, but
with seemingly hardly a dozen inhabitants, is a sadder sight than old
Ostia, with no inhabitant except the stalwart _custode_, who defends
himself against Ostian air by daily doses of quinine. Yet the castle
of Cardinal Estouteville ranks high among picturesque fortresses; the
cathedral shows a mixture of classical and Gothic detail for which
nothing in Rome prepares us; fragments of ancient work lie around;
the staircase of the bishop's palace, the palace of the first among
cardinals, is rich in ancient inscriptions. But we hasten on to the
older site. There is something specially striking in its half-excavated
state. We tread the ancient pavement, between the ancient houses, of a
street dug out of a cornfield on either side. The wall of Ancus loses
itself in a bank of earth. Here a house, there a temple, is dug out,
leaving just space enough to see it among surrounding blades of corn.
At Pompeii, too, the diggings are not finished; but there one part is
dug, another is not; here we thread our way along what is dug with the
far greater mass of the undug to right and left of us. So far we are
content; the undug may soon be promoted to the state of the dug, and
Mother Earth is a safe keeper of antiquities. It is otherwise with
Father Tiber. When he is close on one side of us, there is, as our
guide truly tells us, no small danger. He once, as Horace witnesses,
set forth to destroy the monuments of Numa at Rome; he is clearly
minded to do the like by the monuments of Numa's grandson at Ostia.




The Alban Mount.


What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places
which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie
so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different
nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of
connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has
settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must
not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell
in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or
Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic
was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian,
she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that
she might have answered with a _tu quoque_ or something more; the
Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was.
But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with
the Duke of Al_v_a--for in his tongue "non aliud est _v_i_v_ere quam
_b_i_b_ere"--or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is
singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of
Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as
those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and
those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous.
It is Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without the change of jot or
tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny
the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is
thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say
that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be
unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be
Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while
her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow
and her thirty pigs.

Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly
that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in
derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount
kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There
is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely
interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road
by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still
the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre
of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the
pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of
crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes
his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she
did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as
favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood
of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there,
according to one version of his story, his body--or perhaps only his
head--found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the
Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had
so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all _Albana_,
the _Albanum_ of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long
terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The
walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian
camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still
exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still
keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old,
seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano
and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona.
In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in
the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between
them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample
ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato
stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in
her day of overthrow.

The town of Albano itself contains a good many antiquities, the most
prominent among which, that which greets the eye on the entrance from
Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so cruelly stripped of its hewn
stone, which, truly or falsely, passes for the tomb of Cnæus Pompeius
Magnus. More striking on a close examination, though spoiled in its
effect by a Papal freak of restoration, is the tomb which hovers
between the names of Aruns son of Porsena and the Horatii and Curiatii.
Which of the two would Sir George Lewis have looked on as the more
impossible? This is the tomb which so singularly forestalled the
outline of the Glastonbury kitchen--before its chimneys perished--and
thereby of the Museum laboratory at Oxford. A good deal of the wall of
the camp, a good deal of an amphitheatre on the hill-side, and several
other fragments of the earlier Imperial time, are still to be seen.
But after all Albano really exists, not for its own sake, but as a
starting-point for the Alban lake and the Alban mount, and hardly less
as a starting-point for

     ... the still glassy lake that sleeps
     Beneath Aricia's trees.

Aricia has changed its site; the small modern town has flown up to
the level of the _arx_, to be approached by Albano by almost the only
work on which we do not grudge to see the name of Pius IX. The viaduct
of that "Pontifex Optimus Maximus"--his votaries seem never quite to
distinguish between him and Jupiter--is really a work worthy of Cæsars
or consuls. Below it new Aricia has left the elder city, its fragments
of walls and of the Appian Way, to be sought for in the valley below,
the crater, so wise men tell us, of an extinct volcano, the biggest
surely even in this region where craters meet us at every step. Scraps
of primæval wall, hardly to be distinguished from the rocks, prepare
us for what we are to see at places further out of the ordinary track;
walls of the days of Sulla join on alike to what we have seen at Rome,
and to what we are to see at Cori. But, after all, the "still glassy
lake" to which the grove of the "rex nemorensis" has given the name of
Nemi, is the true glory of Aricia. How well we remember being puzzled
years and years ago with the thrilling run of the lines--

     Those trees in whose dim shadow
       The ghastly priest doth reign,
     The priest who slew the slayer,
       And shall himself be slain.

In these days the fault would be held to lie with the poet for
venturing on an allusion which it might need a little research to take
in. In those days we thought in such cases that the fault lay with
ourselves; we admired without understanding till we lighted on the
explanation which enabled us to understand as well. As such a process
is a wholesome one, we will leave the lines without comment; not to
speak of books of reference, the story will be found, in a somewhat
grotesque form, in Dr. Merivale's chapter on the reign of Caius, better
known as Caligula.

The ghastly priest has gone from Nemi; but the lake is there still,
and the successors of the trees. Access is courteously granted by
the present owner, who, we may believe, has never slain anybody, and
who, we hope, may not be slain himself. But though we may admire Nemi
from close by, we do not fully understand Nemi and its place among
things, till we can look upon it in company with its greater fellow
of Alba. That is, we must climb the Alban mount, or a good part of
its height. But we go first to the Alban lake itself; and to do so
we go along its rim and slide down the side of its crater. There we
find the _emissarius_, so deftly cut in the rock, and which has done
its work so well for so many ages. Who made it? Camillus, or some
one long before Camillus? The men who built the great _cloaca_ of
Rome were quite capable of cutting the hole through the rock of Alba,
without any message from Delphi or any design against the walls of
Veii. Whoever the borer was, he did his work far more thoroughly than
Claudius ages afterwards did his for the Fucine lake, which work it
has been left for the Torlonia of our own day to finish. But no one,
we may suppose, wished at any time to drain the Alban lake, but only
to keep it in order. How needful such a work is we do not fully grasp
till we can look down from above. Then we take in the strict accuracy
of the name _crater_. We see the two lakes, greater and smaller, side
by side, like two basins in the strictest sense, in which, at some
time which geologists may fix, but which it is enough for history to
say that it was long before the oldest primæval wall, the powers of
water supplanted those of fire. We take in how the larger lake, with
its narrow rim, in some parts of its circuit with its low rim, liable
to be swollen, but with no natural outlet for its waters, might easily
come to overflow, if artificial means had not been, in some early time,
taken to check it.

But when we have wound our way by the rim of the lake, by the house
which the so-called Prisoner of the Vatican never chooses to visit, by
the rock which still bears his name, when we have crossed the so-called
fields of Hannibal--yet another crater, science tells us--when we have
climbed by the triumphal way to the height of Monte Cavo, we do indeed
understand the geography and history of Rome and Latium better than
we did before. The eye may range over the height of Tusculum and over
the battle-ground of Regillus as far as the height of Præneste; it
may range hither and thither over many points which have their charm
both of history and of nature. But there are two sides to which the
historical eye will be attracted before all others. Such a gazer will
better take in the position of Rome, as he sees it, with its seven
hills shrunk out of sight, a point--rather a line--in the Latin plain,
with a wall of Etruscan hills beyond it. We see how utterly different
was the position of Rome from the position of the elder cities; we see
how she lies in the midst, at the very meeting-place of nations; we
see how needful for her it was to make the barrier behind her her own;
and we understand her wars with Veii better than before. But we look
down too on the Latin plain itself: we look down, we believe, on the
vanished site of Rome's mother at our feet; we look out on the great
flat once fringed with cities, and on the great and wide sea beyond it.
Here, standing forth as an advanced post of the land, we see where

     ... the Witch's Fortress
     O'erhangs the dark-blue seas.

And beyond Circeii and its island satellites, we look on to the more
distant height, in so many ages the boundary height, best known as
a height by the name of Anxur, but known as a boundary by the name
of Terracina. When we think how early Rome became the mistress,
not only of the height on which we stand and of the kindred heights
around it, but of that long coast-line and its protecting heights, we
feel why Rome, so early in her history, had to enter on a career of
wide-spreading policy, which could never have suggested itself to a
power seated at Veii or at Præneste. Rome, on her great river, with
her haven at its mouth, with her long line of sea-faring subjects or
allies, felt from a very early time the friendship or enmity of the
great powers of the sea to be an important matter. She had to dread
Etruscan pirates and Phœnician traders; the Greek of Cumæ might
perhaps do something more against her than merely shelter her tyrants.
We may believe or not in the connexion between the Alban lake and the
fall of Veii, but, as we look one way from beside the few stones that
are left of Jove's loftiest temple, we understand how needful it was
that Juno of Veii should move to Rome. We may or we may not have the
camping-ground of Hannibal behind us; but as we look out seawards we
believe in the first treaty with Carthage; we go on to wonder how
things had turned about, when Duilius and Lutatius could break the
Carthaginian power by sea, and when Hannibal could make his way into
Italy by land.




Cori.


There was some reason in the remark made by Mr. Creighton in the
Academy a little time back, that there must be something "irritating to
the Italians of the present date in the point of view which is often
adopted by English writers towards Italian history." "Their cities,"
he said, "which are still instinct with political and social life, are
regarded as museums of curiosities, which serve to awaken picturesque
reminiscences in the mind of the passing tourist." Mr. Creighton was
speaking of Genoa, and at Genoa and in cities like Genoa, what he
says may be perfectly true. But there are other Italian cities where
the political and social life at least hides itself from the passing
tourist, and where the curiosity with which he regards the city is as
nothing compared with the curiosity with which the inhabitants of the
city seem to regard him. The curiosity is not specially irritating;
it is perhaps mixed up with a certain open craving after _soldi_
which nothing short of the very highest civilization can get rid
of; but it is quite distinct from the endless touting and wearying
which the traveller has to undergo in places which are one degree
more advanced, or which, to speak more civilly, have fallen less
far back. For it is only civil to believe of cities which were once
independent commonwealths, members of the League of the Thirty Cities,
and, therefore, doubtless instinct with political life, that they
were, at least two or three millenniums back, cleaner than they are
now, and filled with inhabitants who had something more to do than
their successors seem to have. But the interest which the novelty
of the stranger awakens in the minds of the present inhabitants--far
keener, it would seem, than the interest which the antiquity of the
city awakens in his mind--really does him no harm. The modern Latins
or Volscians come and look; they wonder; they follow. If the nature of
the country requires that the strangers be set on asses and mules, the
curiosity, as is only natural, reaches its height. The asses of the
Prisci Latini or of their Volscian neighbours are undoubtedly grave
and discreet beasts; even the obstinacy of the mule is a virtue when
he knows the way so much better than his foreign rider. But there is
something grotesque in the way of going; it is not wonderful if the
sight gathers together a crowd, if the travellers find themselves the
centre, not exactly of triumph, for they are not drawn in a chariot;
not exactly of an ovation, for they do not walk on foot; but of a not
ill-humoured procession of gazers, it may even be of admirers.

Something of this kind is likely to be the destiny, at some point at
least, of those who wish to carry out the full programme of the right
wing of the Latin host of Regillus:

     Aricia, Cora, Norba,
     Velitræ, with the might
     Of Setia and of Tusculum.

Tusculum they will, perhaps, have made the object of a separate
pilgrimage; Aricia belongs to the following of Jupiter and the Alban
mount; "Setia's purple vineyards" it may be hard to take into the line
of march; but, with a slight change of order, "Velitræ, Cora, Norba,"
with the later Ninfa thrown in as a substitute for neglected Setia,
will form an admirable group, a day's journey, which those who have
made it will perhaps, at the end of a day or two, feel sorry that
they have not cut into two. Velitræ--hardly changed in the modern
Velletri--has itself but little to show beyond one of the very noblest
bell-towers of the second Italian period, where the pointed arch creeps
in, a visitor which in Italy is better away, but which at least keeps
out the vagaries of a yet later time. The lie of the town is good;
it stands well on its hill, of no great elevation among its brighter
neighbours. Besides the bell-tower, it has little to show in the
ecclesiastical line, save only the eccentricity of having its cathedral
church placed as if we were in Wales instead of in Italy, at the bottom
of the city instead of at the top. One or two ancient houses and modern
palaces may claim some attention, but Velletri, truly barren in Roman
remains, cannot be said to be fruitful in those of mediæval times. The
chief value of the town is as a starting-point--we can hardly call it
centre--for Cora, Norba, and several other of its ancient fellows. The
view from Velletri is beyond words. We look over the fertile plain,
dying away to the right into the Pomptine marshes, and fenced in by the
mighty limestone bulwark of the Volscian mountains. To the right of all
the height of Anxur's temple looms in the distance; Circeii, with its
following of islands, rises nearer and more plainly, almost itself like
a great island, reminding the visitor from the West of England of Brean
Down and the Holms in the Severn Sea. But the mountains draw the eyes
towards them by something more than their bright masses, something more
than a light and shade upon their sides. Several of their strong points
are crowned with castles and whole towns; and one point so crowned
stands out as the centre of all. We see one spur of the mountain, far
lower than the heights beyond it, crowned by a little city coming some
way down its sides, with a tall tower rising well from the midst when
the sunlight catches it. There stands one of the chief objects for
which Velletri is the starting-point; there we have to look for--

     ... the gigantic watch-towers,
       No work of earthly men,
     Whence Cora's sentinel's o'erlook
       The never-ending fen.

Watch-towers, perhaps, in the strictest sense, we do not see, and we
shall hardly find them when we come nearer; but Cora, _Cori_, still
keeps the mightiest of walls, which it was no wonder that men looked
on as too mighty to be the work of such mortals--in Homer's phrase--as
we now are, and looked on them as reared by no hands weaker than those
of the forgers of Jove's own thunderbolts. With Cori we enter on the
examination of a long series of towns, whose main feature is their
primæval walls, and among these Cori has the merit of showing us the
walls that are the most primæval of all. None of its fellows can show
such blocks as the mysterious engineers, whose work men love to call
Cyclopean, piled together in the lower town of Cori, just outside
what is now the gate of Ninfa. Blocks indeed of equal size we may see
elsewhere, but surely none of equal rudeness. They are heaped together
as they were hewn or torn away from their place in the natural rock;
huge limestone blocks of every size and shape, with the spaces between
them filled up with similar stones of their own kind. But the whole
range of the wall of Cori is not of this primitive sort. The curious
in such matters distinguish five epochs: Cyclopean, Latin, Old Roman,
Roman of Sulla's day, and--the leap is a great one--mediæval walls
of the time of King Ladislaus; we hardly venture to give an Angevin
king of the hither Sicily the full Slavonic shape which marks him
as sprung from the other side of Hadria. The stones of the first
four--we have already spoken of the first of all--are all polygonal,
of distinguishing degrees of regularity of work and degrees of size.
The rudest wall, as far as we saw, of all is to be found quite at the
bottom; the others may be seen side by side in the great walls of the
_arx_ which soar high above all, and which shelter the chief ornament
of Cori in quite another department.

According to the nearly invariable rule, the _arx_ of Cora contained
a temple, and the temple, as so often happens, has been turned into
a church. But the change has been less destructive to Cori than in
many other places. The house of St. Peter has been built without
damaging the portico of the house of Hercules--the old Latin Herculus
was hopelessly confused with the Hêraklês of Greek legend--and still
keeps the columns of his portico, both on its front and its sides;
keeps his entablature, his pediment, the gate-way of his _cella_, the
inscription which records the work of the local _duumvirs_, Manlius
and Turpilius. But what shall we say to the columns themselves? They
profess to be Doric, even to be Greek Doric; but they have bases; they
stand as wide apart as Etruscan tradition planted the columns of the
Capitoline Jupiter; the shafts themselves, instead of being as massive
as Pæstum, are slenderer than Nemea. But sin against rule as it may,
the upper temple at Cori is still undoubtedly pretty, to say the least,
and it is really all the more interesting because of its sin against
rule. Far finer in themselves are the Corinthian columns--such as are
left--of the temple of the Greek Twin Brethren lower down the hill;
but we can see good Corinthian columns in a great many places; the
peculiarities of the Hercules temple are special to Cori. Do they not
speak of the Hellenizing mind of the great dictator who made Cora rise
again after it had suffered deeply at the hands of his Marian enemies?
Stern restorer of what he deemed Rome's ancient ways, but votary and
favourite of Hellenic gods, the taste of Sulla might well lead him to
some such forms as we see in the object, yet prominent from many points
of view, that crowns the height of the citadel of Cora.

But we have not gone through the full tale of the antiquities of
this strange little mountain-city. Outside the Ninfa gate, spanning
at a vast height the deep gorge which on that side forms the foss
of Cori, rises a bridge, of days which we call ancient, but which we
are tempted to call modern so near to the Cyclopean wall. Not a few
fragments of columns may be marked here and there in the streets. We
light too on inscriptions. Besides the _duumvirs_--one might call them
the bailiffs--of the Roman Municipium, whose names are carved on the
frieze of Hercules, another commemorates two _Praitors_; surely these,
with their archaic spelling, are the abiding magistrates of the Latin
Commonwealth--as Cicero's Milo was dictator of Lanuvium--dependent on
Rome, but not fully incorporated in her substance. Then, besides the
chief temple, other Pagan buildings and objects have been turned to
Christian uses. In the church where St. Peter has supplanted Hercules,
an altar, if altar it be, bearing rams with horns and the Gorgon's
head, has been hollowed out to make a baptismal font. The church of St.
Oliva bears a dedication dating only from the sixteenth century; but it
is a lovely cloister of that better kind of _Renaissance_ which was in
truth only a falling back on Romanesque. In the church are memorials
of earlier times, classical columns used again, fitted some of them
with capitals of the very rudest Romanesque, whose fellows may be
found in Worcester and at Hildesheim. Altogether Cori is emphatically a
place for a visit. But a word of warning must be given. Cori and Norba
cannot be combined so as to see both worthily in a single day. Let the
traveller either make two distinct outings from Velletri, or let him
take his chance of sleeping at Cori; it may not be a worse chance than
sleeping at Frosinone, where sleep may be had. Then let him rise up
early in the morning and saddle his ass, or, if able-bodied, let him
rather make his way on his own feet along the mountain-path to Norba.




Norba.


We will suppose that, the mutual curiosity of natives and strangers
having been fully gratified at Cori, the strangers have set out on
their way, on mule-back or otherwise. The mountain-track up and down,
skirting the lower heights of the Volscian range, opens noble views
of the higher mountains inland, of the wide flat below, and of the sea
beyond. But these views are perhaps, on the whole, better enjoyed when
the traveller has found a firm foothold within "Norba's ancient wall"
than while he has personal experience how

     The patient ass, up flinty paths,
       Plods with his weary load.

Still worse indeed is it when the flinty paths have to be plodded
down, and when the weary load needs all his theoretical philosophy
to persuade him how thoroughly safe he really is, while the weakness
of the flesh surrounds the descent with terrors which he knows to
be unreal. At last the ancient wall rises immediately before him;
the hill-side, a small height straight above the path, is climbed on
his own feet, and he can presently contemplate at his ease both the
wall itself and the prospect which it commands. The last part of the
ass-track has become so like a lane anywhere else that we are amazed
when we reach the other side of the immediate height of Norba, and find
how far below lies the plain from which the almost perpendicular cliffs
spring to bear up the forsaken city. For at Norba the curiosity will
be almost wholly on the side of the stranger; in cannot be returned in
kind, as at Cori; a lone shepherd or two may come to look at him; he
cannot bring together the least approach to a triumphal procession.
For within the wall all is, we cannot say desolate or forsaken, for
the crops are there, full and green--"_segetes, ubi Norba fuit_"--but
the ancient circuit is at least empty of all dwelling-places of man.
We would fain believe that the space has stood as empty as it now
does ever since the people of Norba--less wise, as the event showed,
than their neighbours of Cora--embraced the cause of Marius with such
desperate zeal that they slew themselves and burned their houses rather
than let either themselves or their goods fall into the hands of Sulla.
This inference might possibly be rash; for the ancient wall fences in
at least one ruin which may be later than the days of the fortunate
dictator. But it is clear that Norba, if it recovered from this great
single blow, gradually dwindled away, to the profit, first of Norma
by its side, which still abides, and of Ninfa, at its foot, which has
perished only less utterly than Norba itself.

Cori and Norba are alike cities set on hills, and neither of them has
any fear of being hid. But they are set on hills in different senses.
Cori occupies the upper part of the sloping hill, and the houses spread
down the slope. Norba occupies a large table-land on the edge of the
mountains, and its outer wall is carried along the upper rim of a
steep and lofty cliff. No dwellings could ever have spread themselves
downwards on the side which looks toward the marshes and the sea.
But we should hardly have said the outer wall; for the height was so
carefully fortified that outlying defences were placed at various
points on the side of the cliff wherever the primitive engineers
deemed such defences needful. Within the circuit, again, the _arx_
rose on several terraces; its highest point--crowned, we may believe,
as usual, by a temple--must have formed a proud object indeed from the
vast extent of land and sea which it looks down upon. No other of its
ancient neighbours looks down so immediately on the great Pomptine
flat as Norba does, as none looks down from so great a height. Cori
rather occupies a hill thrown out in front of the mountain; Norba sits
on the edge of the mountain itself, though of course at a much lower
elevation than the huge masses further inland. The towers and temples
of the city must have had a wonderful effect from the lands below; as
it is, there is nothing to mark the place but the line of wall itself,
which does not always stand out in a very marked way from the cliff.
It is then perhaps in some sort well that the later Norma has taken
the place of Norba. On the hill of Norba we see that Norma and Norba
by no means join one another; there is a gap between them which, while
we are on the mountain, might pass for a valley. But as we look from
below, the winding outline of the hills puts this gap out of sight,
and Norma and Norba become in appearance one whole. Norma looks like
a continuation of Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited part,
perhaps, as at Syracuse and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold within
which the city had again shrunk up. From the points where the eye can
take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of the cliff, and the further town of
Sermoneta crowning a hill-top far lower than the height of Norba, the
whole grouping is wonderful. The view from Norba itself takes in points
with which we have become familiar since we first gazed on them from
the height of the Latian Jupiter. But we see them in new groupings and
new proportions; the islands, prisons for dangerous or discreditable
members of the Imperial house, stand out in special prominence in front
of the Circæan height--a height so nearly cut off from the mainland
that it seems like the greatest of the island group. Nowhere do we
better understand what men looked on as a great and strong city in days
when they had not yet learned that an element of truer might lurked
in what, judged by the standard of Norba, would seem a mere group of
molehills by the yellow Tiber.

As the whole city lay on the top of the hill, the space taken in by
the walls is necessarily greater than in those towns where the hill
stands distinct, the _arx_ alone crowns the top, and where the town
walls are placed lower down. The nature of the construction adapts
itself to the needs of the different parts of the circuit. The mass
of the wall is of polygonal stones, rude, but far less rude than the
rudest at Cori. Without being actually laid in regular order, they
have a certain tendency to fall into courses as it were of themselves,
and it is not always easy to tell how far the roughness of the stone
has been from the beginning, and how far it is due to the action of
the weather on stones cut perhaps somewhat less carefully than the
finer stones at Cori. But the Norban builders could, when it was worth
their while, do something more than this. They could, when they had
to make a corner, put together squared stones cut with a good deal of
exactness, and when it was convenient that a corner should be rounded
off, they could do that too with equal skill. This last was done at
the greatest gateway looking towards Norma. Here there is no sign
of either lintel, arch, or attempt at arch, to span the opening; it
would almost seem that the gate itself was simply placed across the
opening with nothing over it, much as at Tusculum the gate was hung
between two pieces of native rock. That the arch was not known to the
first builders of Norba, but that they had reached the stage in which
men began as it were to stretch forth their hands towards that great
invention, is shown by a ruined building--one of the few things within
the wall of Norba which can be called even a ruined building--a little
way beyond the _arx_. Here we have a distinct attempt at a vault for
the roof; but it is not the apparent cupola of Mykênê and New Grange,
nor the apparent barrel-vault of Tusculum. The building is oblong, and
the attempted arches rise on both sides, from the small ones as well
as from the longer. The ruined state of the building, whatever it was,
most unluckily hinders us from seeing how the four vaults, so to call
them, were made to meet in the middle. It must have been a strange
problem in construction. Hard by is the other building at which we have
already hinted as being of later date. It has real arches and masonry,
like that which at Cori is attributed to Sulla's time. But it may as
well come before the overthrow of Norba in his day as after it.

From primæval and forsaken Norba we go down the hill-side, learning
as we go how high Norba stands, to hardly less forsaken, though only
mediæval, Ninfa. Ninfa, unlike Norba, has a few inhabitants; there is
a house and a mill, if not within the fortified enclosure, at least
just outside it, and, if the enclosure itself contains no actual
dwelling-places of man, it contains abundance of buildings which have
once been so. One can hardly fancy a greater contrast than that which
strikes us between the stern primæval wall of Norba, fencing in the
thick-standing corn, and the wall of Ninfa, with its towers, its varied
and picturesque outline, fencing in a crowd of houses, churches, and
buildings of every kind, the oldest of which could not have arisen till
a thousand years after Norba became desolate. All are now forsaken,
roofless, shattered, forming one of the most singular gatherings of
ruins to be seen anywhere, the mummy, as it has been well called, of
a dead town. Ninfa was once a place of some consequence, which played
its part in local history; perhaps the most notable event suggested
by its name is that here Alexander III., a Pope who had so much to
do with our own history, was consecrated after his famous disputed
election. But its position in the deadly flat, close by a stream,
led to its ruin; the malaria was too much for it, and Ninfa ceased to
be reckoned among the cities of articulate-speaking men. Some freak
might restore the greatness of Norba; for there is nothing to hinder
men living there if the fancy took them; they cannot live at Ninfa
without greater changes than a Marius or a Sulla can work. There is
something specially striking in a town, whose remains are so extensive,
standing so utterly desolate. There is something Irish in the look
of things at Ninfa, as indeed there is in the look of a good many of
the ruined mediæval sites which often meet us in this region. It is
not merely the fact of their being ruined, though there is something
Irish in that; the tall, slender towers, of which there are many both
at Ninfa and elsewhere, have a real likeness to many buildings in
Ireland. But, though the general look of Ninfa is singularly striking,
there is less to be learned from the particular buildings than might
have been looked for. They are spread over several centuries, some of
the houses reaching even into _Renaissance_ times. The church of most
pretension lies without the walls; several within them keep their apses
and the paintings on them, but little more. The whole is a wilderness
of ruins, strange, impressive, but hardly venerable. As the ruin of a
town, the wreck of many buildings crowded close together, fallen Ninfa
has little of the solemnity of our own ruined castles and abbeys. As
for the elements of wonder and mystery, they dwell in this region on
the hill-top, among the mighty masses of stone which the men of an
unrecorded age piled together to make Norba.




Segni.


The visitor to Segni will find difficulties in studying the history
on the spot second only to those which he finds at Norba. It is quite
certain that he will find no books at Norba, save such as he may take
with him, which are not likely to be many. It is possible that there
may be books at Segni; there may lurk in some odd corner either a
hidden scholar with his treasured library, or a bookseller of that
class, sometimes to be found in old-fashioned places, who dislikes
nothing so much as parting with his books. But, if such there be, they
do not force themselves on the eye on one's entrance into Segni. A
natural and important question is sure to present itself, and--without
wings to fly at once to the libraries of Rome--there is no immediate
means of answering it. Is the name of Signia--now by a very slight
change _Segni_--to be found in any of the lists of the Thirty Cities of
Latium? The lists are many, and the traveller is not likely to carry
them all in his head. He may perhaps be able to repeat the lines in
which Macaulay draws the picture of many of them; and, if so, every
step that he takes among the Latin cities will make him more fully
admire the fitness and force of the points and epithets picked out
in each case. But at Segni the Lay of Regillus fails him; he has his
quotations for Cora and Norba; he has no quotations for Signia. Still
Macaulay's verses are not a full or formal list of the cities; while,
if he argues that Signia lies too much in the heart of the Volscian
and Hernican land to have belonged to the Latin name, he is met by the
fact that "Ferentinum of the rock," yet further on, has its place in
them alongside of "Gabia of the pool." He turns to his guide-book--and
the guide-book of Gsell-fels, though it sometimes leaves things out,
is almost always to be trusted for what it puts in; he there finds only
the entry of the alleged Roman colony of the days of the Tarquins, with
the remark that the existing walls seem to point to an earlier origin.
And again a thought may occur to him, if not at Segni itself, yet in
the later course of the journey of which Segni forms a part--Were the
people of ancient Signia specially skilful in the making of mosaic
pavements? There is a kind of work called _opus Signinum_, a pattern
of black spots on a white ground, of which there is a good deal at
Pompeii, and of which the visitor to Segni will most likely see an
example a few days later at Anagni. The question is hardly so exciting
as the question as to the position of Signia in the days of the Latin
League. But it is one which may suggest itself, and it is one which
it will be hard to answer with only the resources which are to be had
at Segni itself. The visitor to Segni is thus likely to find himself
a little uncomfortable as to more than one point in the history of the
place where he stands. And he will feel most uncomfortable of all as to
the great point of all with regard to its earliest history. Still, he
may for the moment comfort himself by thinking that there are those who
might be unkind enough to hint that he would still be equally uncertain
if he had a hundred quotations on the tip of his tongue, or if he were
in a library with thousands of volumes to turn to.

But whether Signia was ever a Thirty-city or not--we may be
allowed to follow the local usage of Canterbury, which speaks of "a
Six-preacher"--there is no doubt as to its geographical position;
there is no doubt as to the grandeur of its remains. In starting from
Velletri, with Algidus and its holm-oaks and its memories of Æquian
encampments on our left hand, on the right we turn the corner of the
Volscian mountains, and the railway carries us along the valley between
them and their Hernican rivals. We reach the station of Segni; we mark
more than one town perched on the opposite heights; we have close by
us, in the low ground--reminding us of Ninfa on a smaller scale--the
walls of a forsaken fortress, with a shattered tower of wonderful
height and slenderness; but the walls of Signia still keep themselves
hidden among the mountains. It is not from the side of Velletri, but,
as we afterwards learn, from the side of Anagni, that Segni on its
mountain height, and its satellite of Gavignano, perched on a smaller
detached hill in front, form striking features in the landscape.

Segni belongs to the same class of hill-fortress as Norba, not the
same class as Cori. It occupies, not the top of a conical hill, but
a table-land, if we may apply that name to so narrow a space, on
the mountain itself. The distinction is well marked by comparing it
with Gavignano just below, which is one of the chief objects in the
immediate view from the height of Segni. The difference is just the
same as the difference between Norba and Sermoneta, though Gavignano
has more the air of being an outpost of Segni than Sermoneta has of
being an outpost of Norba. The hill-top which Segni crowns is long
and narrow, at some points very narrow indeed, so as to give to the
space within the walls nearly the shape of a figure of eight. The
space within is neither wholly forsaken, as at Norba, nor all crowded
with dwellings, as at Cori. The modern town has withdrawn into one
quarter of the old enclosure; but it has not, as in so many other
cases, withdrawn into the ancient citadel. The site of the _arx_ of
Signia, rising but little above the general level of the hill-top,
but placed well so as to command what we may call the isthmus between
the two parts of the town, forms no part of the dwelling-place of
the modern Signians; but under the name of _Passegiata_ it does form
part of their pleasure-ground. The modern town has retreated into the
other loop of the figure of eight, that which lies furthest from the
traveller as he draws near from Velletri, but to which the course of
the road will necessarily take him first. He may enter by a gateway
of Roman date, and if he so does his eye will soon be struck by the
great number of graceful fragments of mediæval work to be found within
the narrow streets of Segni. The town has most likely been for ages
too poor to follow the example of its richer neighbours in replacing
beauty by ugliness. But he will do better to keep for a while from
entering the inhabited part of the town. Let him first make the circuit
of the ancient walls. And he can hardly doubt whether to turn to the
right hand or to the left. The claims of the left are in this case
overwhelming. Long before he has reached the town, he must have seen
far away on the hill the most precious of the remains of Signia, the
gateway which stands, forsaken but still untouched, beckoning him, as
it were, to make his way first of all to the most instructive thing
which the primæval city has to show him.

But before he can reach either the Roman or the primæval gate he will
have begun to notice the character of the wall. The construction is
hardly so rude as the rudest parts of the wall at Cori, but a great
deal of it belongs to the same general stage of engineering progress.
The huge polygonal stones are heaped together; but one might note
perhaps two stages, yet often intermingled--one, where the sides _only_
of the stones are cut so as to fit their neighbours; another, where
the outer faces are also smoothed of what is called "rustication" in
late _Renaissance_ work. In the first they are not left so utterly in a
state of nature as they are at Cori. Their sides have been cut to the
shape which was thought best for the work of piling them together. In
a later stage, also seen at Cori, the outer sides, those which stand
free from the scarped wall, are also cut; but it is not always easy
to say how much of the change of the surface is due to art and how
much to weather. At Segni the peculiar shape of the enclosure makes it
somewhat hard to follow the line of the walls without a ground-plan,
and a ground-plan is not to be had at Segni merely by asking for it.
But it is plain that, in many parts at least, on the whole side of
the hill which lies exposed to the open valley, and on the head of the
whole promontory, there was, whenever the ground allowed and required
it, a double wall, one on the edge of the hill, the other at some
distance down its side. The most famous of the gates of Segni, locally
known as _Porta Saracenesca_, leads from the outside world into the
outer enclosure, at a point well chosen for military purposes, close
to the edge, and commanding the path by which the traveller will most
likely make his way to it. And a mighty gate it is, and one that holds
no small place in the history of the art of construction. It is one of
those instances which show that their builders were still ignorant of
the principle of the arch, but that they were, so to speak, in search
of it. They had not yet learned how to make the top of an opening out
of stones really so arranged as to stand by mutual support; but they
were striving after something beyond the mere horizontal lintel resting
on two vertical supports. The builders of Segni had not got so far as
those of Veii or Tusculum; as they had no idea of the true principle
of the arch, so they had no idea of its form; all they could do was
to place two horizontal stones with sides sloping inwards immediately
under the lintel. In truth, the construction is still purely that of
the lintel, and nothing else; but the form chosen shows a certain
vain striving after something different. As such, it is no small
lesson which it teaches; and the effect of the great stones thus piled
together to form the entrance is striking and solemn. It carries us
back from days which on our side of the Alps we deem ancient, but when
the arts of construction were as well known as they are now, to days
when men were making the first rude attempts towards the greatest of
constructive inventions. Attempts of this kind, simply because they are
mere attempts, failures and not successes, have a more ancient look
than those examples where the builders were fully satisfied with the
lintel construction and attempted no other. In point of fact, whatever
their relative date, they are later in idea, as showing a desire to
innovate on the received form, some instances of which were at last
crowned with success.

It is not easy to see how this gate came by its local name. One can
understand the process of thought by which the roofing at Tusculum,
which has the outward shape of the pointed arch, came to be called
_arco Gotico_; it is harder to guess why the great primæval gate of
Segni should be attributed to Saracens. It is far from being the only
primæval gateway in the whole circuit. No less than five have been
counted between the outer and inner walls, and two more in the part of
the enclosure occupied by the modern town, where the two lines of wall
coincide. Hard by _Porta Saracenesca_ itself is a small sally-port;
of the others, the larger ones, like _Porta Saracenesca_ itself,
stand at right angles to the wall. Some of them at least show the same
strivings after the arch as their greater neighbour. The nature of the
ground forbids the _arx_ from reaching any great height above the rest
of the city; but its place is easily marked. It contains a singular
large cistern of Roman work, and close by is one of those junctions
of different ages which always preach to us a living historic lesson.
Here is the terrace of a temple wrought with stones of the primitive
construction. On this primitive work rise the remains of the _cella_ in
Roman masonry, and the Roman wall of the _cella_ is now carried up to
form a church. Now, at least the church is of no architectural value,
but it is none the less a witness to the greatest of all the changes
which the hoary walls of Signia have looked upon.

Landed, then, in Christian Segni, we may, perhaps, remember that one of
the greatest of the Popes was born either in the town itself or in its
satellite of Gavignano. But which was the actual spot? Our one guide
available at the moment seems to doubt between the two. In either case
we see, if we do not tread, the place which gave birth to the third
and greatest of the Innocents. We find, too, that a Papal palace of
Segni was swept away by the Duke of Alva in that strange war which the
Catholic King Philip waged, not, of course, against the Vicar of St.
Peter, but against the temporal Sovereign of the Roman States.

We are thus, even at Segni, plunged among Papal memories; we look over
the valley of the Trerus across to Anagni, and they press upon us with
double force. We hasten to the spot where a lesser Pope than Innocent,
but still a mighty one, died like a dog after his fox-like entrance and
his lion-like reign.




Iter ad Brundisium.

I. Anagni.


He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his
way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener
on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is
the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he
can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will
of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from
Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia.
But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and
its lesser fellow--the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and
dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child
Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the
temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left--all
these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So
may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre,--the
hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with
neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it--Ninfa's more modern
wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations,
ruined churches, in abundance--all these may be connected with an
_iter ad Brundisium_, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let
our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway--we were
going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could
well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his
time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni
and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni.
Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the
gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It
would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels,
prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the _locanda_ there as "reinlich
und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller
will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more
inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is
no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni,
Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is
the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is
not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make
Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest
for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome
but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points
in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he
will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII.,
almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is
as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met
his end, the prisoner--not the last Pope who was fated so to be--of
a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the
mind. In mediæval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to
this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress
meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome.
Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore
did not suffer at the hands of _Renaissance_ Popes as Rome lived to
suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well
go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos,
then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome
which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and
Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in
which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation
of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is
harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading
Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few
personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or
Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical
or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position,
and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us
a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom
Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great
Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having
neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium,
they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades.
But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust
in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could
be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most
exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself
was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle
must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must
have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants
of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have
endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening
neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to
another, we better understand the political relations of the endless
little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The
ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need
to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack
or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them
therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare
and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but
they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's
sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at
Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either
at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If
in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less
clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as
its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one
another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies.
They must be always doing something to one another in the way either
of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when
Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the
first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land
and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed
put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.

We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded
in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni
and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an
isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba,
the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the
hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the
middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief
street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the
hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it,
than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space,
allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia,
and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must
confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well
their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works
of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the
difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious
forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring
us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by
ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord
Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there
would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of
earthly men," or as--

     Reared by the hands of giants
       For godlike kings of old.

The walls of Anagni are wonderful only as the great works of Rome
are wonderful. They are built by men to whom it was more natural to
put together rectangular stones with some kind of regularity than it
was to pile together huge polygons anyhow. They were built by men who
thoroughly understood the principle of the arch, and knew how to use
it with all boldness. They remain, in various degrees of preservation,
round the greater part of the circuit of the town. In some parts they
are broken down altogether; in some they are supplanted, in others
merely patched, by walls of later date; in short, they have gone
through all the casualties which a wall is likely to go through in the
course of two millenniums or so; but the wall of modern Anagni, as a
whole, is still the old wall of Anagnia. The construction differs a
good deal in different parts as to the size of the stones and as to
their nature, and as to the degree of rudeness or finish in the work.
In some parts the wall stands single; in others it is strengthened by
further defences, buttresses rather than towers--defences, by-the-way,
which must be carefully distinguished from the additions of later
times. But one general character reigns throughout. The stones,
greater and smaller, smoother and rougher, are always rectangular, and
always laid with some measure of regularity. In some cases ranges of
larger and smaller stones alternate; in one part of the wall stones
of two natures and colours almost alternate. The chief material is a
light-coloured stone exactly like the _puff-stone_ of Gloucestershire,
the material of Berkeley Castle and of not a few other buildings
in that neighbourhood. This is eked out here and there by the dark
volcanic _peperino_, which, towards the south-eastern part of the wall,
is used much more freely. The general effect, wherever the wall is at
all perfect, is stately and striking in the extreme, both in form and
colour.

Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a
certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back
to our library; we take down the _Dictionary of Geography_; we turn to
the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to
the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings
are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman
date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture
to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great
an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an
object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the
latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date."
But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of
the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us
to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic
Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call
the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For
Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "_Flamen sume
samentum_." He did not know what "_samentum_" meant, and we cannot find
the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its
meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which
the _flamen_ put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want
to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans
at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they
had no fellowship with the primæval works at Cori and at Segni; they
did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at
Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the
walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from
a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were
burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may
carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read
between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that,
we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the
days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have
looked.

One thing is plain, that the builders of the walls of Anagnia, like the
builders of the _cloaca_ at Rome, but most unlike the elder builders
of Cora and Signia, knew as well as any men how to turn arches. On
the highest point of the town, by the modern gate which looks out
towards Ferentino, within the circuit of the ancient _arx_, we may
still see, blocked, partly hidden by the modern gate, disguised
by the arrangements of the mediæval castle, the double gate of the
ancient wall. It is perfectly plain, but with arches thoroughly well
turned, with a double range of voussoirs. A smaller arch of the same
workmanship beside them looks almost as if it had been blocked from the
beginning. The _arx_ itself, it should be remembered, had its separate
wall within that of the city, a noble fragment of which, of exactly the
same character as the town wall, is still to be seen in a narrow street
a little lower down.

When we actually reach Anagni, there can be no doubt that the character
in which it chiefly strikes us is that of the city of the Hernican
walls, if Hernican walls we may call them. But historically Anagni is
so far more famous as the city of mediæval Popes that it is fitting
that it should have something to show in that character also. The
town is rich in mediæval fragments. The main street, in its winding
courses, displays long ranges of blocked arcades, round and pointed,
which, when open, must have given it, narrow and often dim as it is,
no small measure of stateliness. Not a few buildings stand out with
arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one
papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent
Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for
their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal
palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which,
on its northern side, shows a range of windows which savour of France
or England rather than of Italy. The houses with their staircases
often present highly picturesque shapes, which in one house in the
main street, where the outside staircase is sheltered by two arches
resting on a graceful column, grow into a form of genuine beauty. And
an elegant form of double window, two round arches divided by a slender
shaft, is characteristic of the architecture of Anagni. It is needless
to add that at Anagni, as everywhere else in Italy, most of these
relics of the skill of former times have been mercilessly disfigured
and mutilated.

In the ecclesiastical line the other churches supply a few good
fragments of the same character as those in the domestic building; but
the cathedral church within the _arx_ is the only one which has the
least claim to be looked on as a striking whole. It stands boldly on
the edge of the hill with its east end--that is, what would be east
according to northern rules, for it is in truth nearly west--rising
up nobly with its three apses in good Romanesque style, while a
stately bell-tower of the more massive sort, though sadly marred on
two sides, stands near the east end which should be west. The crypt is
in a somewhat ruder form of the same style. The whole outside of the
church is worth study; the inside is of an early and massive type of
the Italian Gothic, always, unless in the case of some unusual merit,
less satisfactory than Italian Romanesque. The sacristy contains
the vestments of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and a good many
other curious objects. The church is just now suffering restoration;
let us hope that nothing very dreadful will happen to it. There, at
least, seems no disposition to pull down the apse, after the pattern
of the church which Popes and Emperors alike have decreed to be the
mother-church of Rome and of the world.




II. Ferentino.


Italy contains two places bearing the name of Ferentinum or Ferentino,
as England contains two places--perhaps more--bearing the several
names of Leeds, Stafford, Birmingham, Hereford, Cambridge, Washington,
Rochester, and others more obvious. And as the Northumbrian Rochester
is also very conveniently written _Rutchester_, so the Etruscan
Ferentinum is also conveniently written _Ferentia_. On an _iter ad
Brundisium_ we cannot possibly have anything to do with Etruscan
Ferentia; our business lies with that Ferentinum which, according to
the Itineraries, was to be found on the _Via Latina_ between Anagnia
and Frusino, and which is to be found there still. But if the name
of the southern Ferentinum is more certain than that of its fellow,
its ancient nationality is less certain. Its historical position is
Hernican; it lies between Hernican Anagnia and Hernican Frusino; yet
it is also spoken of as Volscian, as it may well have become in the
endless warfare of those ever-shifting nations. Yet it is in other
company that we should be best pleased to find it. Our earliest
remembrance of the name places "Ferentinum of the rock" among the
Thirty Cities, and gives it no mean place among them. We go to the spot
with the lines ringing in our ears which place its warriors under the
rule of proud Tarquin himself, on the spot where--

     ... in the centre thickest
       Were ranged the shields of foes,
     And from the centre loudest
       The cry of battle rose.

Yet, even without book, we may have been a little surprised both to
find a Thirty-city so far in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican
hills, and to find its warriors marshalled along with such distant
comrades as Tibur and Pedum and "Gabii of the pool." And, when we
come back to our books, a horrible thought presses itself upon us more
and more, a thought that Ferentinum may have no right to any place in
that list at all. The name seems to be Lord Macaulay's guess--among a
hundred other guesses--at the manifestly corrupt name which comes next
before Gabii in Dionysios' list of the Latin cities. Some read as near
to our mark as _Fortinei_; so we may hope for the best; but remembering
where Ferentinum stands, very far from Gabii, we confess that our hopes
are small.

In obedience to the Itinerary, it is from Anagni that we make our way
to Ferentino. And as we go from Anagni to Ferentino, we better take
in the special position of Anagni on the top of its isolated hill.
Till we have gone some little distance, we are hardly conscious that
Anagni is there at all; gradually the bell-tower rises into view, and
the rest of the city follows. A few miles only lead us from the hill
of Anagni to the hill of Ferentino. At the first glance it may be that
the spot which we have reached does not specially strike as "Ferentinum
of the rock." It does not seem to stand on such steep cliffs as many
other hill-fortresses, Norba pre-eminently among them. But, when we
begin to follow the line of the walls, we find out that, whether Lord
Macaulay is right or wrong in speaking of Ferentinum at all, he has
at least chosen his epithet wisely. Ferentinum is Ferentinum of the
rock. Large parts of the wall stand directly on vast masses of rock,
and sometimes rock and wall almost lose themselves in one another.
And the walls of Ferentino certainly yield in interest to none of
our series. They are still standing through the greater part of their
ancient circuit, and for the most part they are of two manifest dates,
differing in material and construction. There is an original lower
part of the wall, built of huge blocks of lias which we may describe as
rude, but less rude than the rudest work at Cori. The height to which
this earliest construction of all reaches differs in different parts,
but it has in most parts been patched and raised, not only by later
repairs of all manner of dates, but long before then by a construction
of very respectable antiquity, which would seem venerable if it were
not for the elder and more massive stones beneath it. The later work
has a general likeness to the walls of Anagnia both in construction
and material, and it is distinguished from the more primitive work
by the same mark. The pilers of the elder stones had no notion of the
arch; the builders of the later wall were perfectly familiar with it.
The only complete opening of the earlier work is a small postern with
merely inclined sides; but in one of the ancient gates, not far from
the modern gate by which the visitor is most likely to enter, stones
of the earlier date support an arch of the second date. This ancient
entrance is, as usual, warily placed; the giants, or whoever they
were, from the days of Tiryns onwards, knew perfectly well how to take
a military advantage of any enemy who might attack their strongholds.
Another gate, now known as _Porta Maggiore_, is a much more elaborate
work, with its inner and outer arch still remaining. Here the gate is
placed with great skill, advanced in front at a point where the wall
turns at an angle. The wall may be followed, and followed to great
advantage, through the more part of its circuit. One hardly knows
whether to count it gain or loss that the path becomes most difficult
just at the point where, through large later repairs, the wall becomes
least interesting. When we have to scramble--all at least save Alpine
climbers--with constant thoughts for the safety of our legs and feet,
we are less able to take in the differences in the various forms of
construction, or to consider the dates to which we may be inclined to
refer each. In the more instructive parts of the walls of Ferentino no
such necessity is laid upon us; they may be studied with perfect ease,
and the outlook from the various points of their circuit may be enjoyed
at the same time. And at one point, not far from the _Porta Maggiore_,
it will be well to go down the hill a little way to study the long
inscription cut in the rock in honour of a local worthy and magistrate,
Aulus Quinctilius by name, who seems to have played much the same part
at Ferentinum in pagan days which Sir William Harpur played ages later
at Bedford. He founded everything that, according to the notions of
his day, could be founded. Among other things he ordained that thirty
bushels of nuts should be yearly given to be scrambled for by the
boys of Ferentinum, without distinction of bond or free. Now is the
will of this pious founder carried out? Are there any Italian Charity
Commissioners to look into these matters, and to see that the boys get
their nuts? Or, if the scrambling for nuts be deemed a nuisance--yet
many well-remembered scraps of Latin plead on its behalf--will they
devise a scheme for the better employment of the funds? Or has the
benefaction of the benevolent Quinctilius, like some benefactions
nearer home, been lost altogether? Two or three years ago the _Times_
was filled with letters complaining how a charitable foundation in
Somerset had vanished altogether, and how the founder's monument, once
standing in the church, had been buried under a neighbouring barn. In
one point at least the benevolent Aulus of Ferentinum has been more
lucky. When Ferentinum had _quatuorviri_, they did not bury people in
their temples, still less did they set up monuments in their temples to
people who were not buried in them. So the monument which commemorates
the bounty of Aulus Quinctilius stands in the open air clear enough to
be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret,
as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his
benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated
by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we
trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world,
Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull
down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and
villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which
should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum.

We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we
wish--we must confess the weakness--to see independent Hernicans
wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come
back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum
spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up
again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word
certainly means something quite different from what it commonly
means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light
on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us
to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far
back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think
that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old
Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great
piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more
important--though about the comparative importance some might raise a
doubt--than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them
by the proper road; we must get into what once was the _arx_, what
is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino,
ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly
thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or
houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that
Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance,
and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed
at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept
asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the
small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The
most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the
mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the
bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the _arx_, as a
mighty sub-structure. The walls of the _arx_ show the same two dates
as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude
stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper
range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to
Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the
"Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of
the censors Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius--censors, that is, not
of Rome but of Ferentinum. The inscription may be seen in the first
volume of the great _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, p. 238, and
its closer likeness is given at fol. lxvii., lxviii. of the _Priscae
Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica_. Now Aulus Hirtius and Marcus
Lollius are names of a frightfully modern sound, suggesting well-known
persons of the days of Divus Julius and Divus Augustus. But no one
asks us to think of them here, though we may likely enough have got
hold of the Hernican forefathers of those better-known Romans. They
had no such need to change their names and the alphabet in which they
are written, as when the son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne became the
Roman Publius Volumnius. Now our Hirtius and Lollius claim to have
built what they built from the foundation; but they must at the outside
only mean that they built the later work on the top of the primæval
wall. And to a zealous eye even the work of Hirtius and Lollius has an
archaic look about it. There are no columns against the wall, as in
the _Tabularium_ of Catulus at Rome; the work is finished with a row
of triglyphs, not unlike those on the tomb of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio
Gnaivod patre prognatus." But we need not go back quite so far as his
day. The further back we can go the better, but any time before Sulla
will do. The history of Ferentinum allows us to carry our Hernicans
of Ferentinum, like our Etruscans of Perusia, down to the Social War.
Ferentinum, it must be remembered, was one of those Hernican towns
which were true to Rome when Anagnia fought against her. What follows
is most instructive. The men of Ferentinum, steady allies of Rome,
refused the proffered reward of Roman citizenship, and chose rather
to remain a distinct, even if a dependent, community. That is to say,
the old Hernican city went on, as long doubtless as to the days of
the Social War, a self-ordering commonwealth, with its own laws and
magistrates--Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius among them--subject
only to the demands of military service which were needed in the wars
of Rome, and sometimes perhaps to the unlawful excesses of powerful
Romans.

This last fact comes out in a strange story told by Aulus Gellius (x.
3). It is an extract from a speech of Gaius Gracchus, setting forth
the wrongs of the Italian allies. The wife of a Roman prætor suddenly
wished the public baths of Ferentinum to be cleared and made ready for
herself. The thing was not done so fast as the great lady wished; so
her husband bade the two quæstors of the town to be seized; one was
scourged, the other threw himself over the wall. This tale, told in the
words of Gracchus, proves a good deal as to the arbitrary way in which
Roman magistrates are not ashamed to deal with the dependent cities
even of Italy, whatever might be their formal relation to Rome.

It is of less importance that Gellius casually speaks of the town as
a _municipium_, while Livy also casually implies its possession of the
Latin franchise. Such _obiter dicta_ do not go for very much. Scholars
sometimes get astray in these times from forgetting that, not only
casual sayings, but even formal documents, may sometimes err. Thus
not long ago we saw a solemn paper in which a public officer, bound to
accuracy, a clerk of the peace, had to describe several towns in the
West of England. We here read of "the county of the city of Bristol,"
the "borough of Gloucester," the "borough of Bath," and the "borough of
Taunton." An inquirer some ages hence might be misled into forgetting
that Bath is a "city" and Gloucester even a "county of a city." May
we not sometimes get wrong about _municipia_ and Latin colonies from
the same kind of cause? Ferentinum was not, in the strict sense, a
_municipium_, but an allied Hernican commonwealth. In the like sort,
we once saw an official document from a high sheriff calling on the
electors of a county to elect, not a "knight of the shire," as they
had done for six hundred years, but a hitherto unheard-of being called
a "member of Parliament." Is it not possible then that Livy, and
even Cicero, may sometimes use a wrong phrase in talking of tribes,
_curiae_, and centuries, in ages long before their own day?

The walls then, though called "Roman" in a vague sense--that is, it
would seem, simply not primæval, like those of Cori and Segni--are
doubtless Hernican in the sense of being built while Ferentinum was
still a separate Hernican community. The walls that we see are most
likely the walls over which the unlucky quæstor threw himself. The
walls of the _arx_, where we read the legend of Hirtius and Lollius,
connect the Hernican town with later times. Just at the point where the
inscription is they are carried up to form the Bishop's palace, and
from the middle of one side rises the bell-tower of the cathedral--a
very good example of the usual Romanesque type of such buildings.
The church of Ferentino is small and unpretending, and a good deal
damaged within, but it still keeps its main features, not only its
bell-tower, but its west front, its apses, its ranges of windows. A
little restoration, in the true sense of the word, would soon make
it into as good a specimen of its own class as could be needed. But,
unless we altogether misunderstood the words of one of its own clergy,
antiquity and simplicity are not esteemed at Ferentino. The little
minster is convicted of the crime of being old, a charge which, except
by comparison with the walls beneath it, cannot be denied. Only, if
the church be an offender on this score, how fearful must be the crime
of the walls? Unless we misunderstood in the most amazing way what
we heard with our own ears, the church of Ferentino, convicted of the
crime of old age, is sentenced to destruction. A new church is actually
begun; when it is finished the old one is to go. Happily the new one as
yet stands still for want of funds; let us hope that funds may refuse
to drop in till a wiser Bishop and Chapter shall rule at Ferentino.

The church at Ferentino is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, who may be seen
there in the worldly garb of the unbaptized prefect, before the infant
voice greeted him as Bishop of Milan. And in the inner buildings of the
_arx_--buildings most worthy of a visit on their own account--strange
tales lurk of the sufferings of the saint, which seem to find no place
either in history or in received legend. Among other things he was
thrown into a boiling caldron. Down below is another church _Santa
Maria Maggiore_, some centuries younger than the cathedral, and a
very pretty example of its style; which, as far as we know, no one
designs to destroy. Singularly graceful, but singularly un-Italian,
it strikes by the power of contrast, as it rises above the walls, or
as we go up to it from the gate which shares its surname. A few other
ecclesiastical and domestic scraps may also be picked up in the city
of the rock. The primitive remains are the great object in all these
places; but it is always a gain when the walls shelter something which
has an interest of another kind. The walls of the stout-hearted people
who chose rather to be citizens of Ferentinum than citizens of Rome
lose nothing by having been turned to an unlooked-for use as the holy
places of their successors, perhaps descendants, of another age and
another creed.




III. Alatri.


The tale of those Hernican cities, fenced in with primæval walls, among
which we have been lately sojourning, is worthily brought to an end at
Alatri. Among its immediate Hernican fellows that town must certainly
claim the highest place; it might on some grounds claim the highest
place, even if we throw in Old-Latin and Volscian rivals. Yet it is
the one which has the least history. There is very little to say about
it, except that Alatrium, like Ferentinum, was faithful to Rome, but
preferred to keep its separate Hernican being rather than accept the
proffered reward of Roman citizenship. It therefore doubtless remained
a distinct commonwealth down to the Social War. And here at least
there can be no question about dates. Alatri is not especially rich
in mediæval antiquities; it has still less claim to be called rich
in Roman antiquities. Nor does it supply us with the work of more or
less Romanized Hernicans, like the censors of Ferentinum. At Alatri
nearly everything that we care about is strictly primæval. We cannot
reasonably doubt that both the circuits of wall at which we now look
were there in the days of Spurius Cassius, and were by no means new
then.

Alatri seems to have been somewhat of an out-of-the-way place in
all ages. Not lying on any of the great roads of Italy, it has no
place in the Itineraries, and now it lies much further than Anagni
or Ferentino--nay, even than Cori and Norba, from common tracks of
going and from the common haunts of men. Yet it cannot be looked
on as seriously inaccessible; it may at least be reached without
calling in the help of asses and mules. The party whose track we are
now following--a party, be it noticed, numbering two ladies among
them--reached Alatri in a carriage from Frosinone, having slept there
after seeing Ferentino. The old Hernican town of Frusino had scant
justice done to it by our wayfarers; as no man or book had pointed
it out as a seat of primitive walls, it was treated merely as a
resting-place between the wonders of Ferentino and the wonders of
Alatri. Frosinone was slept in, but was not examined; yet a glance from
its railway station, the point which connects Alatri with the modern
world, shows that it at least possesses a by no means contemptible
bell-tower. From Frosinone then our travellers made their way to
Alatri, and, as Alatri gradually rose before them, they were for
a while puzzled, perhaps for a while even disappointed, with what
they saw. But it was not for lack of a striking object to crown the
Alatrian hill-top. Of all the walls of our series, the inner range of
the walls of Alatri, the walls which fence in the _arx_, are the most
prominent in a distant view. Even the circuit of empty Norba, beyond
our immediate range, hardly outdoes these defences of a still inhabited
town. At Alatri indeed the primæval walls are so prominent that in the
distant view no one would suspect them of being primæval walls at all.
They are still so nearly perfect that they can and do discharge what
may be looked on as a survival of their original function. They still
fence in the innermost and loftiest quarter of the town, where, as
in so many other cases, the ancient citadel has become the episcopal
precinct. But at Alatri the episcopal precinct puts on a distinct and
central character which is rarely found in Italian cities. The _arx_
is not in a corner, but in the middle; the lower town, fenced in by the
wall of its own outer circuit, lies around it on every side. The _arx_
forms an open, lofty, and airy platform, looking forth from every point
of the compass on the mountains which keep watch around--on the little
towns, Veroli among them, perched here and there on their heights--on
the houses and churches of Alatri, covering the slope of the hill
which the _arx_ crowns. It is seldom that we find in an Italian town a
church or any other building standing in this way free on a commanding
site, not hemmed in on any side by parasitical buildings. These
hill-towns are perhaps better off in this respect than most others;
at Anagni, at Ferentino, the cathedral churches stand grandly on their
heights, comparatively free from all buildings except their own proper
companions. But there is not the wide, open space around them which
surrounds the church of Alatri. One cannot help wishing that some more
worthy building, either the primæval temple itself or some more fitting
successor, occupied so noble a site, a site in truth which needs--let
us say either the Parthenôn of Athens or the Parthenôn of Lincoln to
do it justice. But the only thing that can be said for the cathedral
church of Alatri is that the lower part of its wall is part of the
_cella_ of the primæval temple. Here we have something even more than
can be seen at Segni. We know not what may have been added in the way
of a pillared front; but it is plain that, as far as the main walls are
concerned, the building which was transformed into a Christian church
was actually the house of pagan worship itself. And it was a house
going back, not to dated Emperors or consuls, but to the unrecorded
age which reared these cities great and fenced up to heaven. There
is the terrace, there is the wall of the _cella_, wrought of the same
wonderful masonry as the walls of the surrounding _arx_, as the walls
of the yet again surrounding city. It is strange indeed to see the
ordinary rites of Christian worship, the ordinary accompaniments of a
Christian church, dwelling, as at Rome and Syracuse, within the temples
of a creed, fallen indeed but perfectly familiar. But here we see them
within walls reared in honour of we know not what--gods of unchronicled
days, gods alongside of whom Jupiter of the Capitol may have seemed
as strange and foreign as Mithras and Serapis now seem alongside of
Jupiter of the Capitol.

Where the præhistoric temple has thus become the cathedral church, it
is not out of keeping that the wall of the præhistoric _arx_ should
become the wall of the cathedral close. This is the wall which we see
from afar, a wall which seems so straight and regular, so clearly
furnished with a modern finish at top, that it is not till we can
distinguish the mighty blocks of which it is formed that it has the air
of a wall even of Roman, even of mediæval, antiquity. Shall we say it?
As we looked up at no very amazing distance, the wall of the _arx_ of
Alatri had a good deal of the air of the wall of a modern prison. We
could not yet see the construction, and the outline seemed more regular
and rectangular than it proves to be. Nowhere do we better see than
at Alatri the nature of these primitive walls. They are seldom walls
in the same sense as the later walls of Rome or of other places, walls
built on the ground and standing up clear on both sides. Their business
commonly is, as is perhaps more clear at Alatri than anywhere else,
to strengthen by masonry the scarped side of a hill. Hence they have
little or no height within, and the gateways are necessarily reached
from within by a steep descent. The open space at Alatri allows this
arrangement to be studied with unusual ease. The wall is eminently a
wall against a hill, and its arrangements are made with no small art.
The weak corner has its double defence; the way up from the town at
this point is carefully sheltered. And what stones they are with which
the hill of Alatri is strengthened; above all, what stones they are
which are piled together to form its main gateway. Nowhere indeed in
the walls of Alatri, whether of temple, _arx_, or city, do we find
anything quite so rude as the rudest part of the wall of Cori. All the
stones, of whatever shape--and they are of many shapes--have clearly
been cut; they are all laid according to some kind of system, though
the system according to which they are laid is not the same in every
part of the wall. In some parts they seem almost to take the shape of
constructive arches, at least of attempts at arches, such as may be
seen in gateways and roofs at Segni and elsewhere. The true arch, it
is hardly needful to say, is nowhere found in the original work; nor
do we find even any of the attempts at the arch in that position where
we should have most naturally looked for them, in the gateways. The
great gateway of the _arx_ at Alatri is indeed a wonderful work. Its
builders either knew the arch and despised it, or else the thought of
the arch had not come into their heads. It is as pure an example of
the lintel-construction as any gateway at Athens or Mykênê. We suppose
that the lintel-stone of the great treasury is yet vaster than the huge
lintel-stone at Alatri; but the Anakim of Alatri were at least rivals
whom those of Mykênê could not have despised. But, except in vastness
of construction, we must not compare the gateway at Alatri, perfectly
plain, a mere piling, though a very skilful piling, of huge blocks with
the really artistic work of the Mykênaian treasuries. It goes rather
with the lion-gate; only there are no lions. The builders of Alatri
could carve, as is shown over one of the smaller gateways of the _arx_.
But they chose to carve quite other subjects than lions. On the great
gate however they carved nothing; that is left in the stern majesty of
the vast blocks which form it. And here we may distinguish between the
cut blocks of the gateway itself and the far ruder blocks just within
it, which merely formed part of the foundation, and which, when the
steep path went down to the gate, would not have stood above ground.
Even the builders of primæval walls clearly drew a line between what
was meant to meet the public eye and what was not.

But we must remember that the walls of which we have been speaking,
the walls which first catch the eye, are not the whole of the walls of
Alatri. They fence in only its inner and higher circuit. Their effect
in the distant view is so imposing that the visitor will most likely be
tempted to go to them first, instead of doing things in a more regular
order by first tracking out the walls of the town itself. But these
last, except that they do not supply anything like the primæval gate,
are just as well worthy of study as the walls of the _arx_ itself. They
remain perfectly round the greater part of the circuit of the city, and
they are of the same general construction as the walls of the _arx_.
At some points a singular contrast is made by mediæval additions to
the defences; good thirteenth century work, with the characteristic
windows of the time, stands out as projections from the primæval wall.
And, as in some of the other places, we have something thrown in in
the way of what the walls contain, besides the attractions of the
walls themselves. From the _arx_ of Alatri we look down on several
bell-towers and rose-windows, and one church at least, that of _Santa
Maria Maggiore_, though hardly equal to its namesake at Ferentino, is
quite worthy of examination. But, next to its walls, the strong point
of Alatri lies in its domestic buildings. Very seldom, in Italy or
out of it, do we see graceful windows, chiefly couplets with a divided
shaft, more thickly gathered together, than in its crooked and narrow
streets. Alatri, in short, is, to the antiquarian eye, satisfactory
in every point save one. There should have been some decent building,
pagan or Christian, crowning the noble site of its _arx_, the noblest
in our whole range.

With Alatri we end one main stage of our _iter_, that of the
hill-cities. We shall henceforth pass by places which lie more in
the world, some of them in the thick of modern communication. But if
we had turned back at Alatri, we should have done a good stroke of
work. A journey to the walls of the Hernicans is in every way pleasant
and profitable. And in truth, even if we throw in the Old-Latins and
the Volscians, it is not a journey of hardships. The little inns
are very humble, very simple, but they may be fed in and slept in
without anything very frightful to endure. It may perhaps be well to
mention that the _Locanda d'Italia_, at Anagni, recommended in various
guide-books, has ceased to exist for some years. Still a day and a
night at Anagni are no hardship, and a guide may be found, shirtless
and letterless, who knows what is really worth going to much better
than many in England who boast at once more clothes and more learning.
Indeed, the men of the walls seem altogether a kindly and well-disposed
race. Some say that is because they are said to be reclaimed brigands,
perhaps on the principle that a reformed rake used to be said to make
the best husband. There are indeed more beggars among them than need
be; but on this head a wise rule was laid down by a young Volscian, or
he might be a Hernican--we cannot always be exact among these obsolete
nationalities--"Give to the halt and the blind; but not to anybody
else."




IV. From Alatri to Capua.


We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not
be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling
in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to
existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the
special necessities of an _iter ad Brundisium_ carry us to quite other
parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest
are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they
are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their
lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our
work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant
companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their
substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond
it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can
carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway
system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea
and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy,
beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters
to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a
chance likeness between the names--a name that ranges from the Euxine
to the Hudson--without seeking in any sort to identify the Ἀλβανοί of
Dionysios and the Ἀλβανοί of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious
feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were
looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder
mountains of Albania.

Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of
those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new
feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look
out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the
western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped
themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the
Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to
being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to
the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the
boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on
the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch
glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on
the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of
cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which
decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must
go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time
we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive
range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass
from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of
south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series
of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but
their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages,
not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days
when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of
Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those
eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.

Greek influence indeed begins--some say that it historically began--on
the western, not the eastern, shore of Italy, in lands which, in the
present journey, we leave to the west of us and see only in glimpses.
We hurry on, passing by much that we might well stop and study, from
Frosinone to Caserta. And we are luxurious enough to rejoice at finding
ourselves there. We have proved that a few days and nights may be
passed among Volscians and Hernicans without damage or even serious
discomfort; but we trust that it is not an avowal to be ashamed of that
it is a pleasing exchange to find ourselves in thoroughly civilized
quarters in the plains of Campania. We have found our Capua; not,
however, at Capua itself, but under the shadow of the royal palace a
few miles off. But we desert Capua only because Capuan comforts--we
will not talk of luxuries--have fled from Capua and have found their
new home at Caserta. Those who have tried a night at Capua itself,
_Santa Maria di vetere Capua_, not the newer Capua on the site of
Casilinum, report that, if Hannibal's army could be quartered there
again, they would certainly not be corrupted by anything excessive in
the way of creature comforts. Anagni and Frosinone are said to be far
in advance of the city which long was to Rome what Paris long was to
London. The excuse doubtless would be that Capua is Capua no longer.
The name of Capua, and with it the stirring history of early mediæval
Capua, has wandered from the true Capua to Casilinum. It is not at the
town now called Capua, but at the village--it is hardly more--of Santa
Maria, that we must look for what is left of Etruscan Vulturnum, of
Samnite, Campanian, and Roman Capua, the special city of pleasure, the
city where, before all others, pleasure was sought for in scenes of
blood.

On our present course we have no special call to either Capua, old or
new. We have in times past seen both the amphitheatre of the elder
Capua and the cathedral portico of the newer. But, when Caserta has
been chosen as a convenient halting-place, it would be a shame for the
historic traveller to pass by two such famous spots without a glance at
either, while in their neighbourhood lies a third object, of no small
value in its own line, which will have the further charm of novelty.
It is well, while still fresh from the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome,
to look again on the amphitheatre of Capua--Capua, the mistress of
Rome in the sports of slaughter. There is a certain special lore of
amphitheatres, the mastery of which does not fall to the lot of all,
even of those who look on the monuments either of Rome or Capua with
a general historical eye. But it is easy to see that in the Capuan
amphitheatre the underground arrangements can be studied as they
hardly can be studied anywhere else. The walls, the seats, are far
less perfect than at Rome; much more then are they less perfect than
at Verona. But the substructure seems wholly untouched. In the Roman
Coliseum the underground work is only partially brought to light,
while of what has been brought to light it is not always clear how
much is the work of the Flavian Emperors, and how much of the mediæval
barons who turned the amphitheatre into a fortress. Here, better than
at Rome, we may study what really happened when the lions came up
from underground to be slaughtered by the imperial hands of Commodus.
If any question is raised as to the date of the building, one who is
not a special Capuan topographer may be satisfied with the fact, that
the inscription of Hadrian claims for that prince only a renovation
and enrichment of the building with columns and statues. This seems
to imply that the shell is older; it may be far older. In idea at
least, the amphitheatre of Capua is far older than that of Rome. It
illustrates a strange but well-known law of human nature, that the
taste for luxury and the taste for blood should find a common home.

Besides the modernized basilica, besides the tombs of various sizes
and designs which line the road--one of which is indeed singularly
like a model of an amphitheatre--the true Capua has little to show
besides the amphitheatre itself. It is strange to see so great a city,
one which for some ages must have been far greater, far more splendid
than Rome, so utterly gone--or rather to see the little that is left of
it translated to another site. But great as Capua undoubtedly was, we
begin to doubt its extreme antiquity. Capua, once Etruscan Vulturnum,
remained Etruscan Vulturnum till the fourth century of Rome. It was the
last remnant of the great Etruscan dominion in that region of Italy.
As such, it represents a state of things far older than Rome. But the
city itself may well be of later date than Rome. At all events, we may
be sure that it is of far later date than Cori and Alatri. The city
by the Vulturnus, down in the plain, taking its name from its guardian
river, marks an advance not only on the mountain strongholds of Segni
and Norba, but on Veii, on Rome itself. It must be far older than
Florence; but it is the fellow of Florence; it marks an equal forsaking
of the oldest type of a city. It is hard to see where the _arx_ of
Capua could have stood, if we are to understand by an _arx_ something
set upon a hill. But what a position that of Capua was, according to
later ideas, is shown by its revival after the Hannibalian war. The
Samnite settlement, parted away from their kinsfolk of the mountains,
had become Campanians, and, to seek shelter against their kinsfolk of
the mountains, they had been fain in some sort to become Romans.

     "Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani,"

says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved
constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as
simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us
a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without
a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was
doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons,
who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment
to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was
largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the
large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any
measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua
for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the
Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who
filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once
more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came
not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum,
and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the
keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those
remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the _arx_ of Capua, are not
to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his
first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan
_arx_, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their
lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the
Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we
come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way
to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan
amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of
Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his
camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the
holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain
which rises above its massy tower.




V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal.


We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching
of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of
beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout
fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his
last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the
danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in
some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks
which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no
lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend
on Tifata as grew round--

     Those trees in whose dim shadow
       The ghastly priest doth reign,
     The priest who slew the slayer,
       And shall himself be slain.

Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent
forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest
forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed
might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever
disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the
man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for
he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for
he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner
life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his
own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And
it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal
and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would
have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and
mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phœnician
by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other
Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the
fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at
Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him.
With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city
of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and Cannæ? Is
it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same
form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?

But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence
of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata;
Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable
church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents
the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is
curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in
the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches.
Thus, at Athens, the Parthenôn remained the Parthenôn, while the temple
of the warrior Thêseus or Hêraklês became the church of the warrior
George. We should look for a _Santa Maria_ or a _Santa Lucia_ at
the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a _San
Pietro_, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince
of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But
at _Sant' Angelo in Formis_ we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael
suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that
the name is no older than his day.

But St. Michael on the slope of Tifata did carry us back in thought to
a church of St. Peter seen some months before under a widely different
state of outward things. We then made a somewhat difficult journey to a
great and solitary Tuscan basilica in time of snow. The outward aspect
of nature had certainly changed a good deal between the bleak day in
January when it was found a hard task to follow the way from Pisa to
the basilica of the prince of the Apostles _in Grado_ and the sunny day
in May when the same travellers found their way without difficulties of
any kind to the basilica of the prince of the archangels _in Formis_.
And there certainly can be no likeness of position, even if both were
seen in January or both in May, between the basilica standing low in
the flats by the mouth of Arno and the basilica which nestles against
the mountains which form a wall to the rich plain of Vulturnus. But
in seeing any one of these great churches, left, not ruined, like
our Cistercian abbeys, but still living on a kind of life in places
forsaken or nearly so, something always brings up the memory of some
other of its fellows. Aquileia is perhaps the greatest case of all; but
Aquileia, with its special position in the history of the world, stands
by itself. If Aquileia itself is dead, it has lived on a wonderful
after-life in the shape of its Venetian colony. We go to see Aquileia,
because it is Aquileia; but even a well-informed traveller may know
nothing of _San Pietro in Grado_ and _Sant' Angelo in Formis_, till
either his guide-book or some earlier visitor points them out to him
as places which he ought not to pass by. Aquileia again has other
things to show besides the great basilica and its surroundings. St.
Apollinaris _in Classe_ is as nearly forsaken as a church that is still
kept up can be; but the basilica of Classis does not stand by itself;
it forms part of the wonders of Ravenna, as St. Paul without-the-Walls
forms part of the wonders of Rome. St. Peter _in Grado_ might be looked
on as standing in the same relation to Pisa; but it hardly enters
into our general conception of Pisa, as the church of Classis--papal
havoc hinders us from adding the church of Cæsarea--certainly enters
into our general conception of Ravenna. S. Angelo _in Formis_ at all
events does not enter into our general conception of old Capua, because
there is not enough of old Capua left to form any general conception
of it at all. The church and the small surrounding village do form
a kind of distant _arx_ to the greater collection of houses which
surrounds the amphitheatre; but among the nearer objects which catch
the eye from the height, the most prominent is not old Capua with its
amphitheatre, but new Capua, Casilinum that once was, with its towers
and cupolas, mediæval and modern. We look on many things from the
terrace in front of the portico of the archangel, but that which among
artificial objects chiefly draws the eye towards it, is not the elder
Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa
as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in
Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than
as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes
to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk
to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we
have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua,
on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman
dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In
another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member
of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after
more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than
any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of
united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress.

We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of
old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of
the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its
present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the
second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when
the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs
of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of
the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in
Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman
in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature
of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at
once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian
grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns
bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as
some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily,
just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic;
the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque
too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing
the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen
models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but
not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike
Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower,
or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as
to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height.
Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of
brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been
finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class,
utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so
far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights
above it. As in some other cases, the thought suggests itself, were not
those who left off building the tower wiser than those who began it?
The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard
plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of
the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if
it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up
to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when
set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small
man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. But the
technical eye is thankful for the fragment that has been built, though
mainly on a very technical ground. Professor Willis is gone, but his
happy phrase of _mid-wall_ shafts has not died with him. The custom
of the elder Romanesque towers, the abiding fashion of Germany and
Northern Italy, was to set the little columns which divided the coupled
windows in the very middle of the wall; the latter Norman fashion,
whether in Normandy, in England, or in Apulia, was to set them nearly
flush with the outer wall. In this tower, Italian by geography, Norman
by allegiance, two sides conform to the Italian and two to the Norman
fashion. Nothing can show more clearly that even such small matters
of detail as the use of a mid-wall shaft were made matters of serious
thought, and that it was sometimes thought well to come to a compromise
between two rival forms of taste.

The outside of this church, except so far as it forms an object in
the general landscape, is perhaps chiefly attractive to the technical
observer; the inside will surely appeal to every visitor, though the
visitor who is technically informed in matters of painting may possibly
look upon it with more of curiosity than of positive admiration. But
the eye of the more general inquirer will give something like positive
admiration to a basilica of eight arches, resting on ancient columns
of various marbles, with its original design far less damaged than is
common in Italian churches, and with every inch of available space
covered with elaborate paintings of the date of the building. Like
St. Peter by Pisa, the archangel by Capua trusted to painting for his
enrichment and not to mosaics; and though the Campanian pictures are by
far the better preserved of the two, though nearly all the subjects can
be made out with the greatest ease, yet Ravenna and Venice rise to the
mind to make us think that at least if endurance be the object, there
is a more excellent way.

The walls of this church form almost a pictorial Bible, with a few
legendary and local subjects thrown in. The Abbot Desiderius, holding,
after the usual symbolical fashion, the church in his hand, is to be
seen at the east end along with the archangels and evangelists. At
the west end is what connoisseurs tell us is one of the very earliest
pictures of the Last Judgment. On the two sides a crowd of scenes and
figures from the Old and New Testament cover the whole space. The style
of the painting is said to show Greek workmanship; we look toward the
west end and mark, hardly above the ground, a single small shaft with
a capital of strictly Byzantine character. The ruling Norman seems on
this spot to have pressed into his service the artistic powers of all
the inhabitants of the peninsula. Italian, Greek, Saracen, all give
their help to adorn the house of the archangel. The Norman himself
contributes nothing but the position of two small columns in the tower
windows. We cannot even attribute to him the position of the house of
the archangel, set Norman-fashion in a high place; for the first church
was built before the Norman came. It is not so further east, where a
distinctively Norman element is to be seen in the great churches of
Apulia. But the gathering together of the best skill of the time from
all quarters is a thoroughly Norman function, whether in Italy or in
England.

The basilica should be compassed, so far at least as to climb the
hill a little way to look at its east end. Its surrounding buildings
supply an arch or two to catch the eye on the way up or down. But the
essential features of Sant' Angelo are the grand display of painting
and the union of elements of so many kinds. It is the first of a great
series of churches at which our course will bid us to stop here and
there. But before we reach them we shall pass by one point where our
musings will again be mainly secular and largely pagan. A short journey
will lead us from Campania into Samnium, and the valiant men of the
Samnite land will claim a tribute on a spot which is Samnite beyond all
others.




VI. A Glimpse of Samnium.


From Caserta and what is to be seen from Caserta, our next journey lies
by the line of railway which runs right across Italy, connecting the
two great lines of the east and west of the peninsula. It leads us from
the Campanian plain, with at least its sheltering wall of mountains,
with Tifata to guard the great city that once was from the ruder land
beyond, to the great plain of Apulia from which every feature of a
mountain-land has passed away. But, in so crossing from one side of
Italy to the other, we pass through a striking and an historic region.
We are in the land of the mightiest Italian rivals of Rome, the land
of those with whom Rome had to fight, before Pyrrhos and Hannibal came,
and ages after Pyrrhos and Hannibal were gone.

Our course leads us into the heart of the Samnite land, a land which
may well call up endless musings on the hard fate of those "hearts of
steel" who bore up so long against Rome, in the days when Rome was
really at her greatest. And the memories of the same land in after
days are not wholly alien to those of earlier times. Our course brings
us, at not a few points, across the memories, if not of nations, yet
of men, who had to bear up against the power of Rome, when the power
of Rome had taken a far other form than that of the senate and the
armies against which the Samnite had to strive. For the old Samnite
land holds its place in later story, as the land of princes who felt
what the spiritual Rome could do when the powers of the spiritual
Rome were at their highest. We pass through regions which were the
scene of no small part of the history of the Norman and Swabian lords
of Sicily and Southern Italy. We are deep in the land of the counts,
dukes, kings, and emperors of the house of Hauteville and the house
of Hohenstaufen; and we are often called on to stop and track out
their deeds. At not a few points do we light on some building, some
inscription, which brings up the memory of Frederick, the Wonder of
the World, and of Manfred, whose field of overthrow we shall presently
pass by. In both periods the history of these lands has a character
altogether different from that of Northern and Central Italy. In the
later period this needs no proof: we are dealing with the history of
a kingdom, not with the history of a system of separate cities. But
something of the same difference extends to the earlier period also. If
we wish to know more of Volscians and Hernicans, yet more keenly do we
wish to know more of Samnites. The part which they played is greater,
at all events in scale, and their dealings with Rome belong to a stage
of Roman history when we feel that we have a kind of right to know
more than we could hope to know in the earlier time. But while we know
something of the character of the Samnite people as a whole, while we
know something--though much less than in some other Italian lands--of
the geography of the Samnite country, we have no clear notion of the
political position or the political action of any particular Samnite
city or canton, such as we ever and anon do get of particular cities
of Etruria and Latium. And again, it is seldom that we can call up
any distinct personal conception of any Samnite leader as a living and
breathing man. This is indeed a grievance which affects Samnites along
with the other Italian enemies of Rome. The personal conceptions which
we do get of Etruscans and Latins largely belong to legendary times. Of
historical Volscians we know very few. And we have already complained
on Hernican ground that we cannot picture to ourselves the personal
likeness of any single Hernican of independent Hernican days.

Still, on this particular journey we have small right to complain;
for we pass by the spot which calls up the memories of the most
memorable Samnites of whom we have any personal knowledge. They are
men of one name, most likely therefore of one house, and men of whom
we emphatically wish to know more than we do know. Leaving Caserta
behind, glancing at the Campanian plain and the Campanian mountains,
marking Naples only by the smoke of the distant city, we pass along
through what, in our simplicity, we take to be the vale of Vulturnus,
till we light on a more classical friend, armed with a more classical
map, who explains that the stream which we are tracing is in strictness
not Vulturnus himself, but only his tributary Calor. Anyhow we go
along its course into the heart of the Samnite land, and we pass by
one spot--a spot which we ought to have treated better than merely to
pass it by, a spot round which the greatest memories of Samnite history
gather, and where they strangely interweave themselves with wholly
different memories of the history of our own land. We reach Telesia,
the home of the Pontii, and we remember that Telesia was also for a
moment the home of Anselm. Our guide-book provokingly fails us; but
the large building on the hill-side must surely be the monastery where
he sojourned. There are Roman antiquities in the place; for Samnite
antiquities we do not look. But did Samnites build no walls, or do the
mighty bulwarks of Cori and Segni mark an earlier state of things than
the Sabellian occupation of Southern Italy? Anyhow, we are here at the
place which has attached itself as a surname to the two most memorable
men in the scanty personal history of Samnium. Here, on his own
ground, we remember that Gaius Pontius who spared Rome's army at the
Caudine Forks, and who lived to be led, twenty-seven years later, as a
spectacle in a Roman triumph, to end his days, one might almost say as
a martyr, by the axe of the headsman in a Roman dungeon. So we used to
read the tale in our youth; so moralized the historians of our youth
over the special baseness which handed over such a man to such an end.
Or are we to adopt the new reading of the tale which at least saves
Quintus Fabius Maximus from that special stain of blood-guiltiness
which cleaves to the canonized memory of Divus Julius? It may be
well if we can believe that one of the worthiest heroes of the old
commonwealth, if he could not forestall the magnanimity of Pompeius and
Aurelian, at least did not sink to the special and petty spite of the
murderer of Vercingetorix. We are now taught that the Gaius Pontius
who appears twenty-seven years after the first mention of that name,
is most likely not the same man as the merciful victor of the Caudine
Forks. If this be so, then Quintus Fabius, in consigning his Pontius
to the axe, merely conformed to the cruel custom of his nation, without
the further aggravation of slaying in cold blood one who had dealt with
Rome so nobly. And after all some might hint that the oldest Pontius
of all was the wisest. It may be that the sage old father of Gaius
knew human nature best, when he bade his son either to massacre the
whole Roman army or else to let them go free without terms. It may be
that the son chose a more dangerous path than either, when he took to
diplomacy and middle courses.

But if the earlier Pontius of Telesia should prove--though the guess
is a simple guess--to be in truth two Pontii, perhaps a father and a
son, no doubt seems to have fixed itself on the identity of the last
Pontius at the Colline gate of Rome. The rising again of Samnite life
at the last moment of all, when the war with the allies seemed to have
lost itself in the deeper whirlpool of the war of Marius and Sulla,
is really the most striking thing in the whole history, such as we
have it, of the Samnite people. We are taken by surprise when, in
days when Rome already seems the fully established head, not only of
Italy, but of all the Mediterranean world, her power, her very being,
is threatened by the leader of a nation which seemed to have been dead
and buried for some centuries. But, just like the Volumnian tomb in
one way, so the Samnite resurrection in another way is a witness to
the real life which the other states of Italy kept on under a form
of Roman dominion which made them externally dependent, which threw
its influence into the scale of oligarchy in their external affairs,
which ever and anon subjected them to some irregular demand, but which
left the general course of their lives to be whatever they themselves
chose it to be. In the days of Marius and Sulla, Etruscans and Samnites
were still Etruscans and Samnites; they had not become Romans, nor had
they merged their being in any common name of Italians. The Social War
itself was the first attempt at forming a general Italian nationality.
But the last campaign of the last Pontius shows how deep, in Samnite
hearts at least, was the earlier feeling, the feeling which knew
no greater whole than the federal union of Etruria or Samnium. It
shows too how specially deep was the feeling of hatred for the single
city which had brought down so many cities and leagues to become its
helpless dependents. Against Pontius at the Colline gate Rome fought
for life, as she had never fought since the old days when she had to
guard herself against enemies who lived within sight of her capitol.
Foreign invaders, Pyrrhos, Hannibal himself, did not come with the
same fixed purpose of rooting up the wood which sheltered the wolves of
Italy. We can hardly doubt that it is the hand of Sulla which from that
day to this has hindered the south of Italy from being like the north.
But the blow which crushed the Samnite people as the other nations of
Italy were not crushed, was vengeance taken for a moment when it once
more became a question whether Rome should rule over Italy, whether
Rome should exist at all.

At Telesia we look out, and muse on what might have been, if one
Pontius had done otherwise than he did by the forks of Caudium, if
another Pontius had fared otherwise than he fared at the gates of
Rome herself. At our next halting-place we are called on, not to muse
on what might have been, but on what was. At Beneventum we tread the
battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest
victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day.
There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the
older and the later Pontius, known by one action of their lives. The
Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the
history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will
show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter
ruin for one.




VII. Benevento.


We follow the stream of Calore till we reach a city which, without
ever having been one of the great cities of the world, without having
been even one of the greatest cities of Italy, has always kept up an
important historic being. Beneventum is a familiar name in all ages;
yet Beneventum has never been either a mighty commonwealth like Venice
or Genoa, or the head of a mighty kingdom like Naples and Palermo.
It has had its princes; if we never heard of them before, we should
learn a good deal of them by studying the monuments of their city.
That is to say, the monuments will tell us a great deal about princes
nine hundred or a thousand years back; no monument that we remember in
Benevento tells us anything about the last prince who bore their title.
Let us suppose a wanderer who began his travels at Autun and who finds
himself, in the course of the same wandering, at Benevento. He will
feel it as a grotesque coincidence that, not so very long ago, a man
was living who had once been Prince of Benevento and who before that
had been Bishop of Autun. Benevento, among many other things that it
is, is also the later city of Talleyrand, as Autun is the earlier. But
there is this difference that one thinks of Talleyrand at Autun and one
does not think of him at Benevento. At Autun he has his place, though
a very strange place, in the long succession of Bishops of Autun; at
Benevento, though he bore the style of its prince, he stands all alone;
we cannot find a niche for him in the succession of the Beneventan
princes. Yet a prince of Benevento whose existence marks the ending
for a season of the long papal dominion in Benevento reminds us that
Benevento had its princes before that papal dominion began. It reminds
us of the two distinctive features in the later history of the city.
Benevento was first the seat of Lombard princes who, placed on the
borders of both empires, contrived to escape all practical submission
to either; it was then the seat of an outlying scrap of papal dominion
surrounded on all sides by the Sicilian realm. In both these characters
Benevento was a kind of curiosity on the historical map of Europe. But
the city had its ups and downs before those days, and amongst other
things it had gone through a somewhat grotesque change of name. It is
hard to believe that a city placed so far inland can really have been
of Greek origin; but legend attributed it to a Greek founder, and its
oldest name had a Greek sound. Greek _Maloeis_, Samnite _Maluentum_,
had, when it was read into Latin _Maloventum_, an ill sound; so, when
the Samnite stronghold was changed into the Roman colony, it took the
name of Beneventum, city of welcome.

Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place,
stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared
with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that
amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a
river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not
as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primæval walls of the hill-cities;
but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediæval art such as
in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from
Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from
it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona,
the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan
arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs
essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and
the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own
tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in
general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position
of a town-gate, since it bears the name of _Porta aurea_, to match the
golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch
of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal
arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures
is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a
house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary
economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate
something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs,
public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue
or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very
much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little
deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought
of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that
the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set
up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little
unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even
be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the
immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits
of the "fortissimus princeps" whom it commemorates was the repair of
the Appian Way. But it does not become us to find fault with any built
and graven monument, specially with one of a time of which we have so
few written monuments as the memorable reign of Trajan. We are so much
the slaves of accidental associations, so apt to draw lines at some
altogether unreasonable point, that we may doubt whether the reign of
Trajan holds the place which it should hold in popular imagination.
Suetonius wrote the lives of Twelve Cæsars, and this mere accident has
caused the notion of a break which has no real existence between the
Suetonian Twelve and those who next followed them. The reign of Trajan
marks the Empire at its highest pitch of extent and power, at that
highest pitch which, in its own nature, comes just before the beginning
of decay. His days saw, too, the highest pitch of architectural
magnificence; and with Tacitus and Juvenal to adorn it, one might be
inclined to say that, as an age of Latin literature, the age of Trajan
might hold its own against any earlier period of the Imperial rule. For
we must remember that the great writers of the early days of Augustus
are in truth writers of the republican period living on into the
Empire. The Flavian period, continued under Trajan, is quite as rich as
the earlier days of the Empire itself. And we may notice that the arch
of Beneventum marks the reign of Trajan, and with it the Roman Empire,
at what was really its highest point. It was raised at a time when it
could commemorate conquered Dacia and tributary Armenia. That Dacia and
Armenia could be brought within the range of that Roman world which is
continued in the system of modern Europe is proved by daily witnesses.
But the arch of Beneventum was built too early to commemorate its
hero's later victories in the further East, momentary victories in
lands which neither Alexander nor Trajan could bring within the abiding
range of Western influences.

The arch of Trajan is so distinctly the most famous thing in Benevento
that it has carried us out of all chronological order. But the
historical interest of Beneventum lies earlier and later than Trajan's
day. In truth the _Pax Romana_ forbade that the main interest of any
Italian city should lie in Trajan's day. We may believe or not as
we please in the presence of Diomêdês and Æneas; but Pyrrhos, Hanno,
Totilas, and Manfred are visitors who cannot be forgotten. The city
has looked out on many battles, from the overthrow of the Molossian
to the overthrow of the Swabian. A pleasing tale in its history is
when that Tiberius Gracchus who is the first of a name to appear in
Roman history led back his victorious slave-soldiers to receive the
reward of freedom, and to be welcomed by the rejoicing people of the
faithful colony. For among the Thirty Cities of those days, the Latin
colony of Beneventum was not one of the laggard twelve, but one of
the faithful eighteen that were ready to endure all hardships. In
later warfare the city seems to have been less steadfast. It welcomed
Belisarius, and in after days Totilas took it without any trouble, and
if he destroyed the walls it was not out of revenge for any resistance
on the part of its inhabitants, but for fear they should supply a post
of defence for an imperial army. But the greatest day of Beneventum as
an historical city comes later than Totilas and earlier than Manfred.
The memory of that day may be studied in the chief remaining buildings
in the city, the two greatest churches and the castle. The west front
of the metropolitan church, a grand example of Italian Romanesque, is
furthermore a perfect chronicle of local history. There we may read,
built up into the wall, a crowd of monumental records of the Lombard
princes of Beneventum, with their deeds, especially their dealings
with the dangerous power of the Franks, set forth at length. The
bronze doors are famous, with their long array of Scriptural subjects
ending in a lesson in the ecclesiastical geography of the province,
the figures of the Archbishop of Beneventum and his suffragans. The
harmony of the front is a little marred by the single low and massive
corner-tower; but the inscription sums up the history of Beneventum,
political and physical, for some ages. The city was laid waste by the
Emperor Frederick in 1229 and by an earthquake in 1688. The tower was
built after the first overthrow in 1279; it was restored after the
second in 1690. Destruction wrought by the elements would thus seem
to be more easily repaired than destruction wrought by the hand of
Cæsar. But it is somewhat strange to find Frederick, in his own belief
a successor of Trajan, a follower of Trajan in Eastern conquests,
branded as a destroyer in the city where Trajan's memory is cherished.
But Frederick had to deal with a kind of power which Trajan knew not.
The wrath of the later Emperor fell on a city which was too faithful
to the Roman Bishop. The course of Trajan's rule was not likely to be
interfered with either by the obscure chief of the persecuted Christian
sect, or by any minister of the creed of which Trajan was himself chief
Pontiff.

Within the church the repairs done after the earthquake have wrought a
good deal of mischief. But we can still see the four ranges of columns
of a mighty basilica which must once have taken its place among the
noblest of its class. Their capitals are a little nondescript; but
they do not offend the eye; if they were certified to be of Trajan's
day, it would doubtless be the right thing to admire them. The ambones
and the Easter-light are lovely work of the early fourteenth century,
the days of a real _Renaissance_, truer than that which followed. The
treasury is rich in vestments and other precious things; but the reader
of Anselm's _Life_ looks in vain for that specially gorgeous vestment
which a Beneventan Archbishop of the eleventh century bore away from
Canterbury in exchange for the arm of St. Bartholomew, and which made
its wearer the most splendid object among the assembled fathers at
Bari. If this missing garment carries our thoughts to England, the
round church of St. Sophia--hexagonal in its inner range--carries us
to the Eastern world, and reminds us that there was more than one line
of successors of Trajan, and that Beneventum came under the influences
of both. The cloister, with its amazing series of capitals, its birds,
its elephants, its hunting scenes, may rank with those of Aosta and of
Arles, of which that of Aosta can supply camels to match the Beneventan
elephants. The castle dates only from Pope John the Twenty-second, far
away at Avignon; we look perhaps more carefully at the older fragments
built up in its walls and on the lion in front of it. With the lion
in our thoughts we may look out for other beasts, graven or molten
or abiding in their own relics. Procopius saw there the tusks of the
Kalydonian boar, as in later times he might, either at Warwick or at
Bristol, have seen the ribs of the dun cow. It is for palæontologists
to say what it was that the Beneventan antiquaries really showed
him. Failing this natural wonder we go to pay our respects to another
beast whose shape is due to man's device, in quite another part of the
city. A rudely carved bovine animal, in which local patriotism sees
the Samnite bull--the bull which, on the coins of revived Samnium, so
proudly trampled down the Roman wolf--is now cruelly to be ruled as
nothing better than a monument of intruding Apis-worship. We have less
time to spend at Benevento than at some other cities; but the Roman
arches and vaults of the strange building called _Quaranta Santi_,
the grand Roman bridge below, must not be forgotten, and we must still
give one more thought to the two mighty men whose hopes were shattered
at Beneventum. Manfred fell with his faithful Saracens around him;
Pyrrhos lived to fall by a meaner end at Argos; but Beneventum ended
the real career of both. It is strange how the two were in some sort
the converse of each other. Pyrrhos carried the Epeirot arms into
Sicily and southern Italy; Manfred, lord of Sicily and southern Italy,
established a Sicilian dominion on the coast of Epeiros. Korkyra,
Corfu, the island which has seen every master except the Turk, formed
part of the dominions of both alike. We leave Benevento for another
city in which the East and the West of Europe, and a crowd of other
elements besides, meet yet more closely than they do at Benevento.
At Beneventum the eye of Horace began to be caught by the well-known
mountains of Apulia; Procopius somewhat boldly speaks of inland
Beneventum as being opposite to Dalmatia. The city which we take as
our next chief goal, if not strictly opposite to Dalmatia, is so marked
as being opposite to one Illyrian port as to have sent its name, so to
speak, across the Hadriatic. We will not trouble ourselves to look out
for Equotuticum, or to regale ourselves with either the bread or the
water of Canusium. It is to the walls of Bari, fishy Bari, that we have
to make our way; at Bari, Greek, Latin, Saracen, even Englishman, are
all at home, and Bari is opposite to Antivari.




VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia.


At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula
from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most
part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the _iter
ad Brundisium_ is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass
of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome
too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the
same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have
undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire,
or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer
look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the
hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the
amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian
plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of
which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia
itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction.
Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we
can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of
Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi,
has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some
other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder,
while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a
later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an
inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial
seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose
passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent.
Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go
beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives
a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was
before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar
it. It was--indeed, with all mutilations, it still is--a fine front
of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows
which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is
the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They
surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as
they do a kind of earlier and more healthy _Renaissance_, which, taking
classical form as its general models, took them only as general models,
and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf
or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are
akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of
anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.

Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller--at least
the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and
Benevento--by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as
being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of
which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and
prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems
to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which
stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar
of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its
dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But
most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a
different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only
a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture
to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it
represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place,
if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when
Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do
not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the
later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves
multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions
of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the
waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew
nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan
church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that
singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms--not without
a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen--which is the characteristic
style of this region, the natural result of its political history.
Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end
of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable
is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen
have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades,
and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would
make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of
this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the
under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports.
The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a
portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic
architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its
dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed
by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to
pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for
itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of
later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the
Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of
its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We
long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at
Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again
we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can
qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of
the whole region at Bari.

Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away
from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns
along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church,
which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First
of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the
treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers.
A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind
in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why
any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part
of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower
than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside
to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been
done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern
times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they
had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall
to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two
great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would
almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and
something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the
church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with
details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round
window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is
actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has
been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a
thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of
a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy
unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental
wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of
the three curved projections which form the main features of so many
Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is
flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is
carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall
between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani.
At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing
external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still
real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the
outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of
arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an
English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a
single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was
possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed
opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to
bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall
come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange
in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in
one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get
something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can
hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.

The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless
columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of
the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the
Imperial eagle--better suited for the purpose than anything else--all
do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another
rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms.
But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is
strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below.
Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from
columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste
set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the
Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in
the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of
pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively
Oriental, and which look as if they had come--as they possibly may have
come--from a mosque.

Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of
styles--more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style,
for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great
artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the
Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build
for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where
Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen
was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his
own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in
Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no
doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly,
by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian
models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply
influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the
same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.




IX. Bari.


We are now at Barium, Bari, the original Bari of the West, as
distinguished from the Bari, _Bar_, _Antibaris_, _Antivari_, which
repeats its name on the opposite coast. There we can now again, as we
could have done seventy years back at Cattaro, land at a Montenegrin
haven. The distinction between the two bearers of the name of Bari
implies an association which is not out of place. The historic interest
of Bari gathers wholly round its connexion with the lands on the
other side of Hadria. In earlier days the place has really no history
whatever. Its most memorable day was when the powers of the Eastern
and Western Empires--powers which perhaps never again worked in such
harmony--were needed to dislodge a Saracen Sultan from its walls.
"Emir," some one will say, not "Sultan," and certainly we are more
used in Europe to Sultans of much later date than the days of Lewis
the Second and Basil the First, Sultans coming from quite other lands
than any that can have sent forth the Mussulman prince of Bari. But
he is called Sultan as well as Emir by his one biographer, the Emperor
Constantine, and we cannot appeal from those august pages which still
form the best guide-book to the eastern shores of the Hadriatic.
Anyhow, the Sultan of Bari was a philosopher; he never laughed, except
once when he saw a wheel go round; for that reminded him of the ups and
downs of his own fortunes. Then Bari passes to the rule of the Eastern
Empire; instead of a Sultan it has a Katapan, representative of the
Eastern Augustus in that Italian dominion which had become so small
at the beginning of the ninth century, and which was so great again at
its end. Threatened again at the beginning of the eleventh century by
new Saracen invaders, it is guarded by the fleets of Venice, still the
faithful vassal of Constantinople against a common enemy. Seventy years
later the arms of Robert Wiscard added the capital of Byzantine Italy
to his Norman dominion, and before the century was out, Pope Urban, the
great stirrer of the West against the Mussulman East, chose Bari as the
scene of the Council called to denounce at once the practical abuses of
the Christian West and the dogmatic errors of the Christian East. Once
more, in the next age, we find Bari looking across the sea to its old
lord, and chastised by the Sicilian king for its disloyalty. Add that
Bari, before all saints, still honours St. Nicolas of the Lykian Myra,
and keeps his relics sacred, we are told, from Turkish desecration
by the craft of merchants of her own city. Altogether Bari seems, at
least in its history, as much Greek as Italian or Norman. It would seem
neither unnatural nor unpleasant if Greek were still the tongue of the
seafaring folk of Bari, much as a Norman in his own land often carries
an air about him which would make Danish seem a much more natural
speech for him than French.

But the great buildings of Bari belong to that mixed Norman and
Italian style of which we have already seen something at Bitonto. The
architectural attractions of the city are chiefly to be found in two
great churches and one smaller one. The castle, standing by the sea,
should have its landward side walked round, and the walk will reveal
much of picturesque outline and a little of good detail. But it is
the churches, above all the great abbey of St. Nicolas, which are the
glory of Bari. They all lie in the old town by the sea, the old town
of narrow and crooked streets, in which it does not much matter which
way you go; you are sure to come either to the castle or to one of the
churches before very long. Very different are things in the new town,
which we may rejoice in as we look at it as a sign of Bari's abiding
or renewed prosperity, but which can raise no feelings of pleasure on
any other ground. Its streets, crossing each other at right angles, are
indeed carefully dedicated to the worthies of Bari; but, unless we can
always remember which of several perhaps not very familiar worthies
watches over each of several angles which are exactly alike, it is
easy to take a wrong turn and to put oneself under the care of Andrew
of Bari when we ought rather to be commending ourselves to Robert.
And under either protection we yearn in the wide straight streets
for some physical shelter from the Apulian sun, and wonder why modern
Rome, modern Athens, and modern Bari should have so much less common
sense than Bologna, Padua, and Corfu had in days long past. Still,
amid this rectangular labyrinth the sea is a help on one side, while
on another the tall tower of the metropolitan church of St. Sabinus
beckons us into the older streets, whose narrowness and crookedness
at least supply shade. That tower, one of the tallest and stateliest
of Italy, we naturally assume to be a detached campanile, without a
fellow and standing apart from its confederate buildings, church and
baptistery. So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but
here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The
two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers
wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the _duomo_ the
great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church
and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends
of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the
place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid
Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been
carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the
northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its
conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas
has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing
at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them
as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think
would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the
metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola
over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern
towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen,
must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German
outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally
stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern
tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we
should perhaps have to go as far as Angoulême for a single tower of
equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the
external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much
in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades,
are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the
fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that
function--in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see
something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of
the _pachydermata_ are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter
_carnivora_. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches,
and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both
of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some
the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front
of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones
from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?

When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate
in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much
as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden
in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the
columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been
left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone
must have taken place not very long after the original building. The
original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto--three arches from
columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this
arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning
arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly
regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are
insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet
they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all
approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the
patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of
St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still
be drunk. In the _duomo_ the under-church has been restored out of all
ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture.

As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed
the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the
fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here
that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction
of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he
interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the
king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English
Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the
splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little
touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together
in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing
answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and
at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner
of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke
it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro
between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between
distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari,
one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long
time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends
of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place
of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of
Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic
figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her
epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not
only the mighty King of Poland, but Grand-Duke of Lithuania, Russia,
Prussia, Mazovia, and Samogitia. Yet we might have lighted on Slavonic
associations earlier on the road. There is a strange record of a
Bulgarian settlement in the parts of Beneventum; but that would take us
yet further afield: it was before Bulgarians became Slavonic. But what
are we to say to the Samnite _Schiavia_ which sheltered Anselm?

The journey is done--

"Brundisium longæ finis cartæque viæque."

Otranto lies yet further; but Otranto, yet more notably than Bari,
comes within the Venetian _Notitia_. So does Brundisium, city of the
stag's horn, of the haven so aptly called, if we only knew in what
tongue it is that _Brentesium_ has that meaning. But we are tempted
to regret that Brindisi and not Otranto is the point for which Hadria
has to be crossed. Brindisi has no moral claim. We cannot look thence,
as we can from Otranto, upon the mountains of still enslaved Epeiros;
no one is tempted even to dream that he looks on free Corfu or on the
lesser satellite that stands in front as its outpost.




INDEX.


     A

     _Alatri_, its alliance with Rome, 206; its special interest
     to be found in its primæval remains, 207; not named in the
     Itineraries, _ib._; its walls, 209, 212 _et seq._; position
     of the _arx_, 210, 213; its cathedral church on the site of
     the primæval temple, 211, 212, 219; gateway of the _arx_,
     215; contrasted with Mykênê, 216; mediæval remains at,
     298; church of Sta. Maria Maggiore at, _ib._; its domestic
     architecture, _ib._

     _Alba_, its destruction, 110, 112, 120; use of the name,
     _ib._; Roman villas at, 111, 112; analogy of its relation to
     Albano with that of Spalato and Salona, 112. See _Albano_.

     _Alban Lake_, the, 110, 114, 119, 165

     _Alban Mount_, the, 110, 119, 165; remains of temple of
     Jupiter Latiaris on, 111, 122, 142

     _Albania_, use of the name, 108, 109

     _Albano_ (Alba), imperial dwelling-place, 112; its relation
     to Alba contrasted with that of Spalato and Salona, _ib._;
     tomb of Pompeius at, 113; so-called tomb of Aruns at, _ib._

     _Ἀλβανοί_, use of the name, 109, 110, 222

     _Albanum_. See _Albano_.

     _Alexander III._, Pope, consecrated at Ninfa, 147

     _Anagni_ (Anagnia), its position beyond Rome, 167; the city
     of Boniface VIII., 168; the halting-place of Pyrrhos and
     Hannibal, 169; head of the Hernican confederation, _ib._,
     172; joins the Triple League, 172; physical position of, 173;
     its ancient walls, _ib._; how they differ from those at Cori
     and Segni, 174, 175, 179; Hernican Anagnia not in Macaulay's
     catalogues, 174; variety of construction in its walls,
     175-177; question as to their earliest date, 177-180; decline
     of its power, 179; separate wall of the _arx_, 180; special
     character of derived from its walls, _ib._, 181; historically
     famous for its mediæval Popes, 181; rich mediæval remains in,
     _ib._, 182; compared with Avignon, 181; cathedral church at,
     183; the _Locanda d'Italia_ no longer exists at, 219

     _Ancona_, triumphal arch of Trajan at, 268

     _Anselm_, at Telesia, 256; defends the _Filioque_ at the
     Council of Bari, 305; sheltered at _Schiavia_, 307

     _Antemnæ_, lack of remains at, 88, 94-96; its legendary
     story, 92; derivation of its name, 93

     _Antivari_, Eastern Bari, 280, 295

     _Anxur_ (Terracina), 120, 121, 128

     _Appian Way_, the, its namesake at Perugia, 28; remains of,
     115; arch of Trajan at Beneventum commemorates the repair of,
     269

     _Apulia_, plain of, 251, 282; mixture of architectural styles
     in, 293, 294

     _Aquileia_, its special position in history, 239, 240

     _Arch_, the, early striving after, at Norba, 145; at Signia,
     160-162; its principle known at Anagni, 175, 179, 180; the
     true form not found at Alatri, 215; the pointed arch in
     Southern Italy, Sicily, and Aquitaine Romanesque, not Gothic,
     243

     _Arches_, triumphal, their purely monumental character, 268,
     269

     _Arco Gotico_, at Tusculum, origin of the name, 161, 162

     _Arezzo_, its historical and physical position, 1-7, 13; its
     Medicean walls, 4, 5; lack of domestic architecture in, 8;
     the _Duomo_ and church of Sta. Maria della Pieve, 6, 7, 9-11

     _Aricia_, old and new, 114, 115, 126, 165

     _Arles_, Roman theatre at, compared with that at Ostia, 103

     _Assisi_, præ-Franciscan, its analogy with præ-academic
     Oxford, 48; the birth-place of Propertius and Metastasio, 48,
     49; Roman and mediæval remains in, 49, 52-57; its physical
     position, 50-52; so-called temple of Minerva at, 52-54; its
     dedication to Castor and Pollux, _ib._; Roman inscriptions,
     54

     _Athens_, her sea-port of later origin than Ostia, 99

     _Aurelius_, Marcus, Emperor, at Anagnia, 178

     _Aversa_, Norman county of, 241

     _Avignon_, its papal buildings compared with those of Anagni,
     181


     B

     _Bari_, Western, as opposed to Antivari, 279, 280, 295; under
     Mussulman rule, 296; won back by both Empires in 871, _ib._;
     under the Eastern Empire, _ib._; protected by Venice, 297;
     Norman conquest of, _ib._; council at, held by Pope Urban,
     _ib._, 305; Greek character of, 298; mixed Norman and Italian
     style of architecture in, _ib._; Abbey of St. Nicolas and
     cathedral church of St. Sabinus at, 299-305; its cosmopolitan
     character, 306; tomb of Bona, Queen of Poland, in church of
     St. Nicolas, 306, 307

     _Barletta_, 285, 287

     _Basilicas_, 238-241

     _Belisarius_, at Beneventum, 273

     _Beneventum_ (Benevento), the battle-ground of Pyrrhos and
     Manfred, 262, 272, 278; its position in history, 264 _et.
     seq._; principality of, _ib._; Lombardy duchy of, 266;
     papal possession of, _ib._; its change of name, _ib._, 267;
     described by Procopius, _ib._, 279; arch of Trajan at, 268,
     271, 272; among the Thirty Cities, 273; Belisarius at, _ib._;
     taken by Totilas, _ib._; monumental records preserved in its
     metropolitan church, _ib._, 274; overthrown by Frederick the
     Second, 274, 275; Canterbury cope worn by archbishop of, 276,
     305; the castle, 277; _Quaranta Santi_, 278

     _Bitonto_, mixture of Norman and Italian elements in its
     cathedral church, 288-294

     _Bona_, wife of Sigismund, King of Poland, her tomb at Bari,
     306, 307

     _Boniface VIII._, Pope, his end at Anagni, 164, 168; his
     vestments kept at Anagni, 183

     _Brundisium_ (Brindisi), 285; final point in the journey of
     Horace and Mæcenas, 307; whence the meaning of _Brentesium_?
     _ib._, 308

     _Bunbury_, Sir E. H., on Anagnia, 177


     C

     _Calor_ (Calore), tributary stream of Vulturnus, 256, 264

     _Campo di Annibale_, 119, 122

     _Capua_ (Vulturnum), old and new, 226, 227, 240;
     amphitheatre, 227-229; contrasted with the Roman coliseum,
     228, 229; date of the ancient city, 230; its Roman
     citizenship, 231; its revolt, 232; Roman conquest of, _ib._,
     242; taken by the Saracens, _ib._

     _Caserta_, 226, 227

     _Casilinum_, new Capua, ancient Capua moved to, 226, 232,
     241; Norman principality of, 241, 242

     _Cassius_, Spurius, wins over Anagnia to the Triple League,
     170, 172

     _Castel Gandolfo_, 118, 119

     _Castel Giubeleo_, 77, 83. See _Fidenæ_.

     _Castiglione Fiorentino_, 13

     _Chiana_, tributary of the Arno, 3; valley of the, local
     tradition assigned to its fossil elephants, 8, 9

     _Circeii_ (Monte Circello), 120, 128, 143

     _Colline Gate_, the, its historical associations, 79-81, 259,
     261

     _Constantine Porphyrogenêtos_, his description of the Sultan
     of Bari, 296

     _Cora_ (Cori), its primæval walls, 129, 132, 166, 174; later
     walls, 131; temple of Hercules, 132, 133, 166; supplanted by
     church of St. Peter, 132, 134, 135; church of St. Oliva at,
     135; its physical position contrasted with Norba, 140, 141

     _Corinth_, later stage of her havens, 98; her colonies,
     _ib._, 99

     _Cortona_, its physical position compared with that of
     Argos and Corinth, 13, 14; compared with Perugia, Laon, and
     Girgenti, _ib._; owes its distinctive character to its walls,
     15, 16, 19-21; its early greatness, 15; its decline, 16;
     ecclesiastical and municipal buildings in, 17-19; Mykênaian
     character of its Etruscan gate, 20; the Etruscan Muse, 21,
     22; contrasted with Perugia, 23-28

     _Cosmo de' Medici_, Duke of Florence and Siena, his
     inscription at Arezzo, 6; his later title, _ib._

     _Creighton_, M. (present Bishop of Peterborough), quoted, 123


     D

     _Documents_, official, errors in, 200, 201


     E

     _Eadmer_, at Bari, 305

     _Emissarius_, the, of the Alban Lake, 117; contrasted with
     that of the Fucine Lake, _ib._

     _Etruscans_, their cities remain free until the days of
     Sulla, 20; their analogy with Freemasons, 34, 35; their
     tongue remains a riddle, 36; their sculpture derives more
     force from the absence of literature, 37-40; analogy of
     Etruscan and Roman change of nomenclature with English and
     Norman, 43, 44; Christian and modern character of their
     sculpture, 44, 45


     F

     _Felimna_, Avle, Etruscan tomb of, 42, 43, 197

     _Ferentinum_ (Ferentino), whether a Thirty-city, 186, 187,
     188; its position, 188; its walls and gateways, 189-192, 202;
     monument of Aulus Quinctilius at, 193; question as to the
     date of its walls, 194 _et seq._; inscriptions on the _arx_,
     195, 197; alliance of with Rome, 198, 199, 205, 206; wrongly
     called a _municipium_ by Aulus Gellius, 200, 201; cathedral
     church at, 202, 205; inner buildings of the _arx_, 204;
     church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, _ib._

     _Fidenæ_, the ally of Veii, 78; destroyed by Rome, _ib._, 85;
     position of its _arx_, 83, 84; desolation of, 85, 87

     _Foggia_, the capital of Apulia, 282; palace of Frederick
     _II._ at, 283; death of Empress Isabel at, _ib._; church at,
     _ib._

     _Frederick II._, Emperor, destroys Benevento, 274, 275;
     remains of his palace at Foggia, 283

     _Freemasons_, modern, their analogy with ancient Etruscans,
     34, 35

     _Frosinone_ (Frusino), 208


     G

     _Gavignano_, 155, 163, 172

     _Gellius_, Aulus, his story about Ferentinum, 199

     _Girgenti_, compared with Cortona, 14

     _Gracchus_, Gaius, his speech quoted by Aulus Gellius, 199

     _Gracchus_, Tiberius, his reception at Beneventum, 272, 273

     _Gregoriopolis_, 105

     _Gsell-fels_, guidebook of, referred to, 59, 152, 167, 283


     H

     _Hannibal_, son of Hamilkar Barak, at Anagnia, 169, 179; at
     Capua, 226, 236; revolt of the city to, from Rome, 232, 234;
     his camp at Tifata, 233, 234; scanty records concerning, 235

     _Harpur_, Sir William, Aulus Quinctilius compared to, 192

     _Hernicans_, the, scanty records concerning, 170, 255;
     importance of their geographical position, 170, 171, 172

     _Hirtius_, Aulus, censor of Ferentinum, 197, 199, 202


     I

     _Innocent III._, Pope, his birthplace, whether at Segni or
     Gavignano, 163; his vestments kept at Anagni, 183

     _Isabel_, wife of Frederick II., dies at Foggia, 283

     _Italy_, Southern, a part of Hellas, 224, 225; use of the
     pointed arch in, 243; interest maintained in its cities, 284


     K

     _Korkyra_ (Corfu), held by Pyrrhos and Manfred, 279; never
     under the Turk, _ib._, 308


     L

     _Laon_, compared with Cortona, 14

     _Lollius_, Marcus, censor of Ferentinum, 197, 199, 202


     M

     _Macaulay_, Lord, his verses on the Thirty Cities, 151, 152;
     Signia not named by, _ib._; Anagnia not in his catalogues,
     174; whether Ferentinum is rightly placed by, 187;
     fittingness of his epithet for Ferentinum, 188

     _Manfred_, King of Sicily, 253, 262, 272, 278, 279

     _Marcellus_, Marcus Claudius, his triumph by the Alban Mount,
     111, 166

     _Marcius_, Ancus, traditional founder of Ostia, 97, 98

     _Maxim_, Volscian or Hernican, on beggars, 220

     _Member of Parliament_, misuse of the name, 201

     _Milvian Bridge_, the, its historical associations, 89

     _Monte Cavo_, see _Alban Mount_.

     _Monte Parioli_, 91

     _Muse_, the, of Cortona, 21, 22


     N

     _Nemi_, Lake of, 114-116, 234, 235

     _Ninfa_, 126, 140, 142, 146; its striking desolation,
     146-150, 166; its mediæval wall, 147

     _Norba_, its ancient wall, 137 _et seq._, 147, 149, 166;
     its position contrasted with Cora, 140, 141; early strivings
     after the arch at, 145

     _Norma_, 140-142


     O

     _Opus Signinum_, theory suggested as to its origin, 152

     _Ostia_, the haven of Rome, 96, 97, 99, 121; its traditional
     foundation, 98; an integral part of Rome, 99, 100; its
     remains endangered by the Tiber, 100, 101, 106, 107;
     contrasted with Pompeii, 101, 102; _not_ destroyed by the
     Saracens in the fifth century, 102; Roman remains in, 103;
     how described by Procopius, _ib._; its early walls, 104; new
     Ostia, 105

     _Otranto_, the entrance-place of the Turk into Western
     Europe, 223; view of enslaved Epeiros from, 307

     _Oxford_, præ-academic, its importance, 47; its analogy with
     præ-Franciscan Assisi, 48


     P

     _Parthenôn_, the, its continuance as such, 237

     _Perugia_, contrasted with Cortona, 23-28; its historical
     position, 23-25; physical position, 26; walls of, _ib._, 28;
     Roman gateways at, 28-31; barbarous treatment of mediæval
     houses in, 31; the interest of its churches not only due to
     their paintings, 31-33

     _Pius IX._, Pope, his viaduct between Albano and Aricia, 114

     _Pompeii_, contrasted with Ostia, 101, 102

     _Pompeius Magnus_, Cnæus, his villa and tomb at Alba, 111,
     113

     _Pomptine Marshes_, the, 128

     _Ponte Sodo_, the, at Veii, 74

     _Pontius_, Gaius, spares the Roman army in the second Samnite
     War, 257, 262; whether the Pontius of the triumph of Quintus
     Fabius, 258, 259

     _Porta Saracenesca_, at Segni, 157, 159; shows the arch in
     its constructive form, 160-161; origin of its name uncertain,
     161, 162

     _Portus_, harbour of Rome transferred to, from Ostia, 102

     _Procopius_, his description of Ostia, 103; of Beneventum,
     267, 279

     _Puff-stone_ of Gloucestershire, its likeness to the stone of
     Anagnia's walls, 176

     _Pyrrhos_, King of Epeiros, 169, 179, 262, 272, 278, 279


     Q

     _Quinctilius_, Aulus, his foundation of nuts to Ferentinum,
     192; his monument, 193


     R

     _Robert_, son of Godwin, his analogy to Publius Volumnius,
     son of Felimna, 44

     _Robert Wiscard_, takes Bari, 297

     _Rocca di Papa_, 119

     _Roman_, use of the word, 194, 197, 202

     _Roman Empire_, the, important era marked by Trajan's reign,
     270, 271

     _Rome_, how her local history should be studied, 67; rivalry
     of Veii with, 69-72; her conquest of Veii, 68, 75, 76; her
     origin, 70, 72, 143; Fidenæ destroyed by, 78, 85; taken by
     Alaric, 80; her incorporation of Antemnæ with, 92; her haven
     of Ostia, 96, 97, 99; contrasted with Corinth and Athens, 98,
     99; her harbour removed from Ostia to Portus, 102; Alba Longa
     destroyed by, 110, 120; her physical and historical position,
     119-122; alliance of Ferentinum with, 198, 199, 205; her
     arbitrary dealing with her Italian allies, 199, 200; her
     wars with the Samnites, 251, 252; her army spared by Gaius
     Pontius, 257; final struggle of the Samnites against, 259-261

     _Ῥωμαῖοι_, use of the name, 109, 110


     S

     _Saint Ambrose_, cathedral church of Ferentino dedicated to,
     204

     _Saint Angelo in Formis_, basilica of, near Capua, 238, 240
     _et seq._; frescoes at, 247-249

     _Saint Apollinaris in Classe_, basilica of, 240

     _Saint Francis of Assisi_, 48, 49

     _Saint Nicolas_ of Myra in Lykia, patron saint of Bari, 297,
     298

     _Saint Peter in Grado_, basilica of, near Pisa, 238, 239,
     240; contrasted with Saint Angelo in Formis, 239; frescoes
     at, 247

     _Salarian Gate_, the, its historical associations, 79-81

     _Salona_, its relation to Spalato contrasted with that of
     Alba to Albano, 112

     _Samentum_, meaning of the word, 178

     _Samnites_, the, 248, 251, 254, 259-262

     _Schiavia_, Samnite, Anselm at, 307

     _Segni_ (Signia), whether a Thirty-city? 151-154; its
     physical position analogous with that of Norba, 155; the
     _arx_ of Signia forms the modern _Passegiata_, 156; fragments
     of mediæval work in, 157; ancient walls and gateways of,
     _ib._, _et seq._, 172, 174; Roman remains on the arx, 162,
     163; whether the birthplace of Innocent III., 163; _locandæ_
     at, recommended by Gsell-fels, 167

     _Sicily_, use of the pointed arch in, 243; the architectural
     characteristics of Norman rule in Apulia not found in, 293

     _Signia_. See _Segni_.

     _Social War_, the, its significance, 261

     _Spalato_, its relation to Salona contrasted with that of
     Albano to Alba, 112

     _Spello_ (Hispellum), its local description, 58; its walls
     and towers, 60; Romanesque churches and Roman remains at,
     61-63; Roman gateways, 63, 64

     _Stewart_, Henry, Cardinal of York, temple of Jupiter
     Latiaris destroyed by, 111, 166

     _Strabo_, his description of Fidenæ, 85; on Ostia, 102

     _Sulla_, restores Cora, 133; Norba destroyed by, 139


     T

     _Talleyrand_, Bishop of Autun and Prince of Benevento, 265

     _Tarlati_, Guy, Bishop and Lord of Arezzo, his tomb, 7, 8

     _Telesia_ (Telese), the home of Gaius Pontius, 256, 257, 262;
     Anselm at, _ib._

     _Terracina_. See _Anxur_.

     _Thêseion_, re-dedicated to Saint George, 237

     _Tiber_, the, its early importance as a boundary stream, 90;
     its destructiveness, 100-103, 106, 107

     _Tifata_, Hannibal at, 233, 234; meaning of the name, 234;
     whether the scene of Semitic worship, 236; worship of Diana
     and Jupiter at, 237; church of Sant' Angelo in Formis at,
     233, 238, 240 _et seq._

     _Topography_, historical, variety of interest offered by, 86

     _Totilas_, Beneventum taken by, 273

     _Trajan_, his arch at Rome survives in the arch of
     Constantine, 267, 268; his arch at Benevento, 268-273;
     important era of the Roman Empire marked by his reign, 270,
     271

     _Trani_, special interest of its metropolitan church, 286,
     287, 290, 291; church of All Saints at, 287


     U

     _Urban II._, Pope, council at Bari held by, 297, 305


     V

     _Veii_, its site and desolation, 68, 69, 72-75, 87; conquered
     by Rome, _ib._, 75; rivalry of with Rome, 69-72; Etruscan
     tombs at, 74, 75

     _Velletri_ (Velitræ), 126-129, 166, 167

     _Venice_, vassal of the Eastern Empire, protects Bari against
     the Saracen, 297

     _Veroli_, 210

     _Volumnian Tomb_, the, 40 _et seq._

     _Volumnius Avle Felimna_, Publius, his analogy to Robert, son
     of Godwin, 44, 197


     W

     _Willis_, Professor, his use of the phrase _mid-wall_ shaft,
     245





End of Project Gutenberg's Studies of Travel: Italy, by Edward A. Freeman

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45899 ***