re AEneas Sylvius built palaces and
called his birthplace after his own Papal name. Still closer to the
town itself of Montepulciano, stretching along the irregular ridge
which gave it building ground, and trending out on spurs above deep
orchards, come the lovely details of oak-copses, blending with grey
tilth and fields rich with olive and vine. The gaze, exhausted with
immensity, pierces those deeply cloven valleys, sheltered from wind
and open to the sun--undulating folds of brown earth, where Bacchus,
when he visited Tuscany, found the grape-juice that pleased him
best, and crowned the wine of Montepulciano king. Here from our
eyrie we can trace white oxen on the furrows, guided by
brown-limbed, white-shirted contadini.

The morning glory of this view from Montepulciano, though
irrecoverable by words, abides in the memory, and draws one back by
its unique attractiveness. On a subsequent visit to the town in
springtime, my wife and I took a twilight walk, just after our
arrival, through its gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza,
where the impendent houses lowered like bastions, and all the masses
of their mighty architecture stood revealed in shadow and dim
lamplight. Far and wide, the country round us gleamed with bonfires;
for it was the eve of the Ascension, when every contadino lights a
beacon of chestnut logs and straw and piled-up leaves. Each castello
on the plain, each village on the hills, each lonely farmhouse at
the skirt of forest or the edge of lake, smouldered like a red
Cyclopean eye beneath the vault of stars. The flames waxed and
waned, leapt into tongues, or disappeared. As they passed from gloom
to brilliancy and died away again, they seemed almost to move. The
twilight scene was like that of a vast city, filling the plain and
climbing the heights in terraces. Is this custom, I thought, a relic
of old Pales-worship?

III

The early history of Montepulciano is buried in impenetrable mists
of fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of these
high-hill cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to the
volcanic system of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed a
portion of the crater which threw that mighty mass aloft. But sons
have passed since the _gran sasso di Maremma_ was a fire-vomiting
monster, glaring like Etna in eruption on the Tyrrhene sea; and
through those centuries how many races may have camped upon the
summit we call Montepulciano! Tradition assigns the