n our own time, seen on a sunny autumn day, when the light glints
clearly on each white villa and church and hamlet, from this specular
mount of antique Fiesole. But to understand why Fiesole itself stands
there at all you must neglect all this, neglect all the wealth of art
that makes each inch of that valley classic ground, and look only, if
you can for a brief moment, at the bare facts of primitive nature.

And what then do you see? Spread far below you, and basking in the
sunshine, a comparatively flat and wide, open valley; olive and stone
pine and mulberry on its slopes; pasture land and flowery vale in its
midst. North and south, in two long ridges, the Apennines stretch their
hard, blue outlines from Carrara to Siena against the afternoon
sky--outlines of a sort that one never gets in northern lands, but
which remind one so exactly of the painted background to a
fifteenth-century Italian picture that nature seems here, to our
topsy-turvy fancy, to be whimsically imitating an effect from art. But
in between those two tossed and tumbled guardian ridges, the valley of
the Arno, as it flows towards Pisa, with the minor basins of its
tributary streams, expands for a while about Florence itself into a
broad and comparatively level plain. In a mountain country so broken
and heaved about as Peninsular Italy, every spare inch of cultivable
plain like that has incalculable value. True, on the terraced slopes of
the hillsides generation after generation of ingenious men have managed
to build up, tier by tier, a wonderful expanse of artificial tilth. But
while oil and wine can be produced upon the terraces, it is on the
river valleys alone that the early inhabitants had to depend for their
corn, their cheese, and their flesh-meat. Hence, in primitive Italy and
in primitive England alike, every such open alluvial plain, fit for
tilth or grazing, had overhanging it a stockaded hill-fort, which grew
with time into a mediaeval town or a walled city. It is just so that
Caer Badon at Bath overhangs, with its prehistoric earthworks, the
plain of Avon on which Beau Nash's city now spreads its streets, and it
is just so that Old Sarum in turn overhangs, with its regular Roman
fosses and gigantic glacis, the dale of the namesake river in Wilts,
near its point of confluence with the stream of the Wily.

We find it hard, no doubt, to imagine nowadays that once upon a time
England was almost as thickly covered with hill-top villages (th