Modern Rome is unlike all other European cities in this respect, that
a short distance beyond its gates you plunge at once into a desert.
There is no gradual subsidence of the busy life of the gay metropolis,
through suburban houses, villages, and farms, into the quiet seclusion
of the country. You pass abruptly from the seat of the most refined
arts into the most primitive solitude, where the pulse of life hardly
beats. The desolation of the Campagna, that green motionless sea of
silence, comes up to and almost washes the walls of the city. You know
that you are in the immediate neighbourhood of a teeming population;
but you might as well be a hundred miles away in the heart of the
Apennines, for any signs of human culture or habitation that you
perceive within the horizon. There is no traffic on the road; and only
at rare intervals do you meet with a solitary peasant, looking like a
satyr in shaggy goat-skin breeches, and glaring wildly at you from his
great black eyes as he crosses the waste. Far as the eye can see there
is nothing but a melancholy plain, studded here and there with a ruin,
and populous only with the visionary forms of the past; and its
tragic beauty prepares your mind for passing into the solemn shadow of
the great Niobe of cities. But it was not thus in the brilliant days
of the Empire. For fifteen miles beyond the walls the Appian Way
stretched to the beautiful blue Alban hills, through a continuous
suburb of the city, adorned with all the charms of nature and art,
palatial villas and pleasure-gardens, groves and vineyards, temples
and far-extending aqueducts. These homes and fashionable haunts of the
living were interspersed in strange association with the tombs of the
dead. Through the gate a constant stream of human life passed in and
out; and crowds of chariots and horsemen and wayfarers thronged the
road from morning to night.