what reason
could not do, and I entered by a gate.

The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all shaded by the great
houses, and still full of the cold of the night. The noise of
fountains echoed in them, and the high voices of women and the cries
of sellers. Every house had in it something fantastic and peculiar;
humanity had twined into this place like a natural growth, and the
separate thoughts of men, both those that were alive there and those
dead before them, had decorated it all. There were courtyards with
blinding whites of sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow; and there
were many carvings and paintings over doors. I had come into a great
living place after the loneliness of the road.

There, in the first wide street I could find, I bought sausage and
bread and a great bottle of wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it
by the same gate and took the road.

For a long while yet I continued under the walls, noting in one place
a thing peculiar to the Middle Ages, I mean the apse of a church built
right into the wall as the old Cathedral of St Stephen's was in Paris.
These, I suppose, enemies respected if they could; for I have noticed
also that in castles the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the
wall. So be it. Your fathers and mine were there in the fighting, but
we do not know their names, and I trust and hope yours spared the
altars as carefully as mine did.

The road began to climb the hill, and though the heat increased--for
in Italy long before nine it is glaring noon to us northerners (and
that reminds me: your fathers and mine, to whom allusion has been made
above {as they say in the dull history books--[LECTOR. How many more
interior brackets are we to have? Is this algebra? AUCTOR. You
yourself, Lector, are responsible for the worst.]} your fathers and
mine coming down into this country to fight, as was their annual
custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when you think that they
could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack
and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff,
and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt
and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No
wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do
not even know their names.)--Where was I?

LECTOR. You were at the uninteresting remark that the heat was
increasing.

AUCTOR. Precisely. I remember. Well