. Livorno la cara, they call her, and no doubt of old she endeared
herself to her outcasts. To-day, however, it is to the Italian summer
visitor that she is dear. There he comes for sea-bathing, and it is
difficult to imagine a more delightful seaside. For you may live on the
hills and yet have the sea. Beyond Livorno rises the first high ground
of the Maremma, Montenero, holy long ago with its marvellous picture of
the Madonna, which, as I know, still works wonders. Here Byron lived,
and not far away Shelley wrote the principal part of _The Cenci_.

Passing out by tramway by the Porta Maremmana, you come to Byron's
villa, almost at the foot of the hills, on a sloping ground on your
right. Entering by the great iron gates of what looks like a neglected
park, you climb by a stony road up to the great villa itself, among the
broken statues and the stone pines, where is one of the most beautiful
views of the Pisan country and seashore, with the islands of Gorgona,
Capraja, Elba, and Corsica in the distance. Villa Dupoy, as it was
called in Byron's day, is now in the summer months used as a girls'
school: and, indeed, it would be easy to house a regiment in its vast
rooms, where here and there a seventeenth century fresco is still
gorgeous on the walls, and the mirrors are dim with age. From here the
walk up to Our Lady of Montenero is delightful; and once there, on the
hills above the church, the rolling downs towards Maremma lie before you
without a single habitation, almost without a road, a country of heath
and fierce rock, desolate and silent, splendid with the wind and the
sun.

The Church of Madonna lies just under the crest of the hill, and is even
to-day a place of many pilgrimages: for the whole place is strewn and
hung with thank-offerings, silver hearts, shoes, crutches, and I know
not what else, among the pathetic pictures of her kindly works. The
picture itself, loaded now with jewellery, is apparently a work of the
thirteenth century; but it is said to have been miraculously brought
hither from Negroponte. It was found at Ardenza close by, by a shepherd,
who carried it to Montenero, where, as I suppose, he lived; but just
before he won the top of the hill it grew so heavy he had to set it
down. So the peasants built a shrine for it; and the affair getting
known, the Church inquired into it, with the result that certainly by
the fifteenth century the shrine was in charge of a Religious Order;
to-day the monks