III

The Valdedera is situated on the south of the Marches, on the
confines of what is now the territorial division of the
Abruzzo-Molese, and so lies between the Apennines and the Adriatic,
fanned by cool winds in summer from the eternal snow of the mountain
peaks, and invigorated in all seasons by breezes from the Adrian Sea.

Ruscino, placed midway in the valley, is only a village to which no
traveller has for many years come, and of which no geographer ever
speaks; it is marked on the maps of military topographers, and is, of
course, inscribed on the fiscal rolls, but is now no more than a
village; though once, when the world was young, it was the Etruscan
Rusciae, and then the Latin Ruscinonis; and then, when the Papacy was
mighty, it was the militant principality of the fortified town of
Ruscino. But it was, when the parish of Don Silverio, an almost
uninhabited village; a pale, diminutive, shrunken relic of its heroic
self; and of it scarcely any man knows anything except the few men
who make their dwelling there; sons of the soil, who spring from its
marble dust and return to it.

It had shrunk to a mere hamlet as far as its population was counted;
it shrank more and more with every census. There was but a handful of
poor people who, when gathered together in the great church, looked
no more than a few flies on a slab of marble.

The oldest men and women of the place could recall the time when it
had been still of some importance as a posting place on the mountain
route between the markets of the coast and the western towns, when