FASCINATION OF THE CAMPAGNA 309 



booths and shops, varied here and there, perhaps, by 

 a villa and its grounds. But these fringes of habitation 

 are too narrow and short, and cling too closely to their 

 respective arteries of traffic, seriously to affect the 

 solitariness which broods over the intervening landscape 

 up to the very foot of the walls. 



This surrounding district, known as the Roman 

 Campagna, possesses a singular fascination, which has 

 been often and enthusiastically described. The endless 

 and exquisite variety of form and colour presented by 

 the plain and its boundary of distant mountains, to- 

 gether with the changing effects of weather and season 

 on such a groundwork, would of themselves furnish 

 ample subjects for admiration. But the influence of 

 this natural beauty is vastly enhanced by the strange 

 and solemn loneliness of a scene which living man 

 seems to have almost utterly forsaken, leaving behind 

 him only memories of a storied past which are 

 awakened at every turn by roofless walls of long- 

 abandoned farm-buildings, mouldering ruins of medie- 

 val towers, fragments of imperial aqueducts, decayed 

 substructures of ancient villas and the grass-grown 

 sites of ancient cities whose names are forever linked 

 with the early struggles of Rome. European travel 

 offers few more instructive experiences than may be 

 gained by wandering at will over that rolling sward, 

 carpeted with spring-flowers, but silent save for the 

 song of the larks overhead and the rustle of the breeze 

 among the weeds below ; when the mountainous wall 

 of the Sabine chain from Soracte round to the Alban 

 Hills gleams under the soft Italian sky with the irides- 

 cence of an opal, and when the imagination, attuned 



