fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and
other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields
of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations;
some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof,
just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman
masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the
natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in
short, so that nobody need be at a loss when he feels the religious
sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills,
which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level space that lay between;
they continually thrust themselves across the passage, and appeared as if
determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot
right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it,
and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we
discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a
life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory
we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height
upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested
with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such
strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there
was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been
more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any
of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every
man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an
ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat
doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or
grass-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet
domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the
scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate
vicinity of an Italian home.