he past has been suffered to go to decay; it was
only eighty years ago that the walls of the last remaining salon fell
in. The only room left is an upper chamber, reached by climbing a
ladder. The place where the hearth was is still discernible, as is also
the paneled ceiling found in so many of the buildings of the early
Renaissance. The ends of the rafters are supported by beautifully
carved consoles. All the woodwork is stained dark brown, and here and
there on the ceiling are wooden shields, on which are painted the Borgia
arms in colors.

In various places in the interior, and also without, on the towers of
the stronghold, the same arms may be seen carved in stone. There are
also two stones, with the arms very carefully chiseled, set in the walls
of the entrance hall of the town house of Nepi, which were originally in
the castle where they had been placed by Lucretia's orders. The Borgia
arms and those of the house of Aragon, which Lucretia, as Duchess of
Biselli, had adopted, are united under a ducal crown.

Lonely Nepi, which now has only 2,500 inhabitants, had but few more in
the year 1500. It was a little town in Campagna, whose streets were
bordered by Gothic buildings, with a few old palaces and towers
belonging to the nobles, among the most important of whom were the
Celsi. There is a small public square, formerly the forum, on which the
town hall faces, and also an old church, originally built upon the ruins
of the temple of Jupiter. There were a few other ancient churches and
cloisters, such as S. Vito and S. Eleuterio, and other remains of
antiquity, which have now disappeared. There are only two ancient
statues left--the figures of two of Nepi's citizens whose names are now
unknown--they are on the facade of the palace, a beautiful building
dating from the late Renaissance. Owing to the topography of the region
and the general decadence peculiar to all Etruria, the country about
Nepi is forbidding and melancholy. The dark and rugged chasms, with
their huge blocks of stone and steep walls of black and dark red tuff,
with rushing torrents in their depths, cause an impression of grandeur,
but also of sadness, with which the broad and peaceful highlands and the
idyllic pastures, where one constantly hears the melancholy bleating of
the sheep, and the sad notes of the shepherds' flutes are in perfect
accord.

Here and there dark oak forests may still be seen, but four hundred
years ago, in the neighborhood