nossa's
rocky hill, contrasted with the red gleam of Rossena, and outlined
against the prevailing dulness of these earthy Apennines, secures a
picturesque individuality concordant with its unique history and
unrivalled strength.

There is still a journey of two hours before the castle can be
reached: and this may be performed on foot or horseback. The path
winds upward over broken ground; following the _arete_ of curiously
jumbled and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements of
Rossena, whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order to
escape the savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting those
horrid earthen _balze_ which are so common and so unattractive a
feature of Apennine scenery. The most hideous _balze_ to be found in
the length and breadth of Italy are probably those of Volterra, from
which the citizens themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and which
lure melancholy men by intolerable fascination on to suicide. For ever
crumbling, altering with frost and rain, discharging gloomy glaciers
of slow-crawling mud, and scarring the hillside with tracts of
barrenness, these earth-precipices are among the most ruinous and
discomfortable failures of nature. They have not even so much of
wildness or grandeur as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wasteful
things in the world, and can only be classed with the desolate
_ghiare_ of Italian river-beds.

Such as they are, these _balze_ form an appropriate preface to the
gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a
narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its
base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which
the greatest length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet.
Scarcely a vestige of any building can be traced either upon the
platform or the summit, with the exception of a broken wall and
windows supposed to belong to the end of the sixteenth century. The
ancient castle, with its triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracks
for the garrison, lodgings for the lord and his retainers, a stately
church, a sumptuous monastery, storehouses, stables, workshops, and
all the various buildings of a fortified stronghold, have utterly
disappeared. The very passage of approach cannot be ascertained; for
it is doubtful whether the present irregular path that scales the
western face of the rock be really the remains of some old staircase,
corresponding to that by which Mont