smoke-red remaining behind the towers and cupolas of the city on its
mountain-top, and the sound of church bells floated across the
precipice from Urbania, I almost expected, at every turning of the
road, that a troop of horsemen, with beaked helmets and clawed shoes,
would emerge, with armor glittering and pennons waving in the sunset.
And then, not two hours ago, entering the town at dusk, passing along
the deserted streets, with only a smoky light here and there under a
shrine or in front of a fruit-stall, or a fire reddening the blackness
of a smithy; passing beneath the battlements and turrets of the
palace.... Ah, that was Italy, it was the Past!

_August 21st.--_

And this is the Present! Four letters of introduction to deliver, and
an hour's polite conversation to endure with the Vice-Prefect, the
Syndic, the Director of the Archives, and the good man to whom my
friend Max had sent me for lodgings....

_August 22nd-27th.--_

Spent the greater part of the day in the Archives, and the greater part
of my time there in being bored to extinction by the Director thereof,
who today spouted Aeneas Sylvius' Commentaries for three-quarters of an
hour without taking breath. From this sort of martyrdom (what are the
sensations of a former racehorse being driven in a cab? If you can
conceive them, they are those of a Pole turned Prussian professor) I
take refuge in long rambles through the town. This town is a handful of
tall black houses huddled on to the top of an Alp, long narrow lanes
trickling down its sides, like the slides we made on hillocks in our
boyhood, and in the middle the superb red brick structure, turreted and