, with rococo shepherds and
shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the
verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift
descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and
tobacco.

We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous
cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the
hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached
by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through
a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling
current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like
roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and
fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic
designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the
endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern
is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the
pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts
into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even
unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an
auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of
sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on
the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that
this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.

The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the
hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed
to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many
unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino
family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this
as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of
Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino
il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot,
let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of
the best society in Ital