like the ark on Ararat on its hillside of brushwood
and market-garden, seems to sum up, in a shape only a little more
splendid than usual, the story told on all sides. For on all sides
there are great mouldering unfinished villas, barrocco casinos, even
fifteenth-century small palaces, deserted among the fields; and
everywhere monumental gateways leading to nothing. Their story is that
of the unceasing enterprise of pope after pope, and cardinal after
cardinal against the inexorable climate of Rome. Each shortlived
generation of old men, come to Rome too late to learn, already
accustomed to order about and to swagger, refusing to see the ruins
left by its predecessors; insisting on having its way with those
malarious hillocks and riversides; only to die like the rest, leaving
another gaunt enclosure behind.

One of the fascinations of Rome is undoubtedly not its murderous
quality as such, but the character of which that seems a part, the
quality of being a living creature, with unbreakable habits and
unanswerable reasons, making it massacre quite quietly, whatever came
in its way.

Rome, as perhaps only Venice, is an organic city, almost a living
being; its _genius loci_ no allegory, but its own real self.

_March._

III.

FROM VALMONTONE TO OLEVANO.

Valmontone, on the railway line to Naples, to which we bicycled back
from Segni--a savage village on a hill, pigs burrowing and fighting at
its foot--and on its skirt a great stained Palazzo Farnese-like
palace.

Crossing the low hills of the wide valley between the Alban and Sabine
chains, magnificent bare mountains appear seated opposite,
crystalline, almost gemlike; and splendid, almost crepuscular, colours
in the valley even at noon: deep greens and purples, the pointed straw
stacks replacing, as black accents, our Tuscan cypresses. Quantities
of blue and white wind-flowers on the banks, and wine-coloured
anemones under the thick ilex-like olives; and all round the splendid
pale-blue chains of jagged and conical mountains. A population of
tattered people and galled horses; much misery; a sort of more savage
Umbrian landscape, and without Umbrian serenity; deserted, deserted
roads. I am writing from the olive yard above the inn; the rugged
little Olevano hanging, almost sliding, down the hillside opposite,
black houses and yellow-lichened roofs.

OLEVANO, _March_ 28.

IV.

FROM OLEVANO TO SUBIACO.

Yesterday afternoon bicycled and walked