The sky above is covered with
colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine
hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by
what gate or from what quarter we enter. On every side the scene is much
the same. The Campagna surrounds the city. A wide, waste, broken,
hillock-covered plain, half common, half pasture land, and altogether
desolate; a few stunted trees, a deserted house or two, here and there a
crumbling mass of shapeless brickwork: such is the foreground through
which you travel for many a weary mile. As you approach the city there
is no change in the desolation, no sign of life. Every now and then a
string of some half-dozen peasant-carts, laden with wine-barrels or wood
faggots, comes jingling by. The carts so-called, rather by courtesy than
right, consist of three rough planks and two high ricketty wheels. The
broken-kneed horses sway to and fro beneath their unwieldy load, and the
drivers, clad in their heavy sheepskin jackets, crouch sleepily beneath
the clumsy, hide-bound framework, placed so as to shelter them from the
chill Tramontana blasts. A solitary cart is rare, for the neighbourhood
of Rome is not the safest of places, and those small piles of stone, with
the wooden cross surmounting them, bear witness to the fact that a murder
took place not long ago on the very spot you are passing now.
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