eeming to indicate their belonging, or having
been intended to belong, to some of the unfinished houses which are
springing up amidst their weeds. But it is difficult to say, in any part
of the town, what is garden-ground or what is waste; still more, what is
new building and what old. The houses have been for the most part built
roughly of the coarse limestone of the neighboring hills, then coated
with plaster, and painted, in imitation of Palladian palaces, with grey
architraves and pilasters, having draperies from capital to capital.
With this false decoration is curiously contrasted a great deal of
graceful, honest, and original ironwork, in bulging balconies, and
floreted gratings of huge windows, and branching sprays, for any and
every purpose of support or guard. The plaster, with its fresco, has in
most instances dropped away, leaving the houses peeled and scarred;
daubed into uncertain restoration with new mortar, and in the best cases
thus left; but commonly fallen also, more or less, into ruin, and either
roofed over at the first story when the second has fallen, or hopelessly
abandoned;--not pulled down, but left in white and ghastly shells to
crumble into heaps of limestone and dust, a pauper or two still
inhabiting where inhabitation is possible. The lanes wind among these
ruins; the blue sky and mountain grass are seen through the windows of
their rooms and over their partitions, on which old gaudy papers flaunt
in rags: the weeds gather, and the dogs scratch about their
foundations; yet there are no luxuriant weeds, for their ragged leaves
are blanched with lime, crushed under perpetually falling fragments, and
worn away by listless standing of idle feet. There is always mason's
work doing, always some fresh patching and whitening; a dull smell of
mortar, mixed with that of stale foulness of every kind, rises with the
dust, and defiles every current of air; the corners are filled with
accumulations of stones, partly broken, with crusts of cement sticking
to them, and blotches of nitre oozing out of their pores. The lichenous
rocks and sunburnt slopes of grass stretch themselves hither and thither
among the wreck, curiously traversed by stairs and walls and half-cut
paths, that disappear below starkly black arches, and cannot be
followed, or rise in windings round the angles, and in unfenced slopes
along the fronts, of the two masses of rock which bear, one the dark
castle, the other the old church and conv