What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent
Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in the
inn of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is
setting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded hills
of Citta della Pieve to the left. The deep green dimpled valley goes
stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain mass,
distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte! The near
country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine olives and
oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its crowning villages,
is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture. The breadth and depth
and quiet which those painters loved, the space of lucid sky, the
suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all are here. The
evening is beautiful--golden light streaming softly from behind us on
this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue with stars
above.
At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and black
scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault of
stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped out of the
living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in
walking and driving through the country. Chiusi means for me the
mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy
lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens and
cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the
bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo and
Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways winding
among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so full of
flowers. It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories about
Lars Porsena and Etruscan ethnology.