May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs
and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus
matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road
was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly,
till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley
sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is
an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented
fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful
ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed.
This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been
neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being
cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the
objects that interest him.
Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each
contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also,
marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of
both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the
fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a
man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men
reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to
gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked
along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and
several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either
sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little
on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we
thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last,
like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking
after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the
hedges along the road.
After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and
skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the
road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered
with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along
the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a
delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little
bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by
appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a
few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and
pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our
nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be
mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a
man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two
club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable
for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to
tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of
his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet.
Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was
exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and
inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great
respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would
consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a
sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them;
on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as
might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he
asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some
slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior
contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran
begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur,
like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed,
started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a
hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its
infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage;
and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the
beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from
inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is
attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an
honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanctity that used
to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early
Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it
meritorious to do nothing for his support.
Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this
route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle,
he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing
of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed
to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous
mountain-gorge; winding its narrow passage between high hills, the broad
sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery,
that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here
and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a
hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of
Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its
battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept
in excellent repair. A long winding street passes through Narni,
broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral
showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures
on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I
suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as
its principal street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair
edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of
which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain
and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through
Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a
broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous
gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into
the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that
cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We
passed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,--
walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing
that need be recorded.
Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and
commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in
days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites
desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the
Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to
employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after
lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to
give them up.
Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon,
and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for
I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being
artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and
determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they
wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it
into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . . We are in the Hotel delle
tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are
concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists,
who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing
really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and
the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our
contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him
for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of
vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had
coffee, eggs, and bread and butter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed
veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a
light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner,
an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, fricasseed, and a hind
quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more
decanters of the wine aforesaid.
This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and
enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court;
around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the
parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy,
probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former
magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is
ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which
appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved
beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but
rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The
windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great
cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our
ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids;
nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart
splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords
us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns
of Italy. In the album of the hotel I find the names of more English
travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think,
even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for
tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is
probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we
chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might
ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber.
After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of
Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic
might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets,
paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in
Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments
of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low,
compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal
aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as
narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it
again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we passed through
it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are
no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain
again, we at last inquired of a person in the principal piazza, and found
our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood.