he upper end of a
wild gorge in the Samnite mountains. It is an archbishopric, and gives a
title to a cardinal, which alone would make it a town of importance. It
shares with Monte Cassino the honour of having been chosen by Saint
Benedict and Saint Scholastica, his sister, as the site of a monastery
and a convent; and in a cell in the rock a portrait of the holy man is
still well preserved, which is believed, not without reason, to have
been painted from life, although Saint Benedict died early in the fifth
century. The town itself rises abruptly to a great height upon a mass of
rock, almost conical in shape, crowned by the cardinal's palace, and
surrounded on three sides by rugged mountains. On the third, it looks
down the rapidly widening valley in the direction of Vicovaro, near
which the Licenza runs into the Anio, in the neighbourhood of Horace's
farm. It is a very ancient town, and in its general appearance it does
not differ very much from many similar ones amongst the Italian
mountains; but its position is exceptionally good, and its importance
has been stamped upon it by the hands of those who have thought it worth
holding since the days of ancient Rome. Of late it has, of course,
acquired a certain modernness of aspect; it has planted acacia trees in
its little piazza, and it has a gorgeously arrayed municipal band. But
from a little distance one neither hears the band nor sees the trees,
the grim mediaeval fortifications frown upon the valley, and the
time-stained dwellings, great and small, rise in rugged irregularity
against the lighter brown of the rocky background and the green of
scattered olive groves and chestnuts. Those features, at least, have not
changed, and show no disposition to change during generations to come.

In the year 1844, modern civilization had not yet set in, and Subiaco
was, within, what it still appears to be from without, a somewhat gloomy
stronghold of the Middle Ages, rearing its battlements and towers in a
shadowy gorge, above a mountain torrent, inhabited by primitive and
passionate people, dominated by ecclesiastical institutions, and,
though distinctly Roman, a couple of hundred years behind Rome itself in
all matters ethic and aesthetic. It was still the scene of the Santacroce
murder, which really decided Beatrice Cenci's fate; it was still the
gathering place of highwaymen and outlaws, whose activity found an
admirable field through all the region of hill and plain between