Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843 by Various
page 24 of 336 (07%)
page 24 of 336 (07%)
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proper, we find the complexity of its geography quite in
accordance with its manifold political division. It is not one simple central ridge of mountains, leaving a broad belt of level country on either side between it and the sea, nor yet is it a chain rising immediately from the sea on one side, like the Andes in South America, and leaving room, therefore, on the other side for wide plains of table-land, and rivers with a sufficient length of course to become at last great and navigable. It is a back-bone thickly set with spines of unequal length, some of them running out at regular distances parallel to each other, but others twisted so strangely that they often run for a long way parallel to the back-bone, or main ridge, and interlace with one another in a maze almost inextricable. And, as if to complete the disorder, in those spots where the spines of the Apennines, being twisted round, run parallel to the sea and to their own central chain, and thus leave an interval of plain between their bases and the Mediterranean, volcanic agency has broken up the space thus left with other and distinct groups of hills of its own creation, as in the case of Vesuvius, and of the Alban hills near Rome. Speaking generally then, Italy is made up of an infinite multitude of valleys pent in between high and steep hills, each forming a country to itself, and cut off by natural barriers from the others. Its several parts are isolated by nature, and no art of man can thoroughly unite them. Even the various provinces of the same kingdom are strangers to each other; the Abruzzi are like an unknown world to the inhabitants of Naples, insomuch, that when two Neapolitan naturalists, not ten years since, made an excursion to visit the Majella, one of the highest of the central Apennines, they found there many medicinal plants |
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