ists in Rome wander out here to take shelter from the
burning heat of the flat Campagna land, and to sketch the wild Salvator
Rosa scenery which hems in the town on every side. I cannot say,
however, that it was love of antiquities or divinity, or even scenery,
which led my steps Subiaco-wards. The motive of my journey was of a less
elevated and more matter-of-fact character. Some few days beforehand a
yellow play-bill-looking placard caught my eye as I strolled down the
Corso. A perusal of its contents informed me, that on the approaching
feast-day of St Benedict there was to be held at Subiaco the great annual
_Festa e fiera_. Many and various were the attractions offered. There
was to be a horse-race, a _tombola_, or open lottery, an illumination,
display of fire-works, high mass, and, more than all, a public
procession, in which the sacred image of San Benedetto was to be carried
from the convent to the town. Such a bill of fare was irresistible, even
had there not been added to it the desire to escape from the close muggy
climate of Rome into the fresh mountain-air,--a desire whose intensity
nothing but a long residence here can enable one to appreciate.

Subiaco is some forty odd miles from Rome, and amongst the petty towns of
the Papal States is a place of some small importance. The means,
however, of communication with the metropolis are of the scantiest. Two
or three times a week a sort of Italian _eil-wagen_, a funereal and
tumble-down, flea-ridden coach, with windows boarded up so high that,
when seated, you cannot see out of them, and closed hermetically, after
Italian fashion, shambles along at jog-trot pace between the two towns,
and takes a livelong day, from early morning to late at night, to perform
the journey. Other public mode of transit there is none; and therefore,
not having patience for the diligence, I had to travel in a private
conveyance, and if there had been any one else going from the fair to
Rome, which there was not, they must perforce have done the same. As to
the details of the journey, and the scenery through which you pass, are
they not written in the book of Murray, wherein whoso likes may read
them? It is enough for me to note one or two facts which tell their own
story. Throughout the forty and odd miles of the road I traversed, I
never passed through a single village or town, with the exception of
Tivoli; and between that town and Rome, a distance of some twenty miles,