Zagorolo near Rome, where the inhabitants are noted at the same time
for the strength and excellence of their wines and for the
quarrelsomeness of their dispositions. Palestrina, a little way off on
the hillside, with a flowing skirt of vines all about it, breathes
laughter in its very air. One may sit in Bernardini's--known to all
visitors to the city of Fortune--and hear the travellers who come there
laugh over mishaps which they would have growled over anywhere else.
The comparison might be made of many other towns.

Asisi is set in a world of olives. They swing like smoke from a censer
all through the corn and grain of the plain; they roll up the hills and
mountains, climbing the almost perpendicular heights like goats; they
crawl through the ravines; they cover the tiny plateaus set between the
crowded hills; and plantations of slim young trees are set through the
city, bending like long feathers and turning a soft silver as the wind
passes over them. It is delightful to walk under the olive trees in
early summer, when they hang full of strings of tiny cream-colored
blossoms. In winter these blossoms will have changed to a small black
fruit. The trees are as rugged as the roughest old apple trees, and
many of them are supported only on a hollow half-circle of trunk or on
two or three mere sticks. One wonders how these slender fragments of
trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and
tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient
sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; but the olive
is tough, and the oil that runs in its veins for blood keeps it ever
vigorous.

True to my fancy--which, indeed, it helped to nourish--Asisi is a
serious town. It has even an air of gentle melancholy, which is not,
however, depressing, but which inclines to thoughtfulness and study.