lonely and desolate valley, shut in by dim and misty blue peaks. Then
we entered the portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees
everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the
deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds. To this succeeded
a blank district of barren shale cleft into great gullies by many a
wintry torrent. Presently we found ourselves at an enormous height
above the river, on the ledge of a precipice which shot down almost
perpendicularly on one side to the bed of the stream.... A little past
this place we came upon a very singular and picturesque spot. It was
an elevated rock shut within a deep dim gorge, about which the river
twisted, almost running round it. Upon this rock were built a few
gloomy-looking houses and a quaint, old-world mill. It was reached
from the hither side by a widely-spanning one-arched bridge. It was
called Val Savignone."[1] Beyond this, at a small village called
Balsciano, the hills begin to subside into gentler slopes, which
gradually merge in the plain at the little town of Pieve San Stefano.

[Illustration: CAPRESE.]

Thus far the infant stream has no history: its legends and chronicles
do not begin so early. But a few miles farther, on a tiny branch
called the Singerna, are the vestiges of what was once a place of
some importance--Caprese, where Michael Angelo was born exactly four
hundred years ago. His father was for a twelvemonth governor of this
place and Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsenna's Clusium, which
is to the south, but Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to
inhabit the _palazzo communale_. During his regency the painter of the
"Last Judgment," the sculptor of "Night and Morning," the architect of
St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. Here the history of the Tiber
begins--here men first mingled blood with its unsullied waves. On