Letters of a Traveller Part 24

Letter LIII.

Volterra.

[This letter was casually omitted from its proper place near the beginning of the volume.]

Rome, _April_ 15, 1835.

Towards the end of March I went from Pisa to Volterra. This you know is a very ancient city, one of the strongholds of Etruria when Rome was in its cradle; and, in more modern times, in the age of Italian republics, large enough to form an independent community of considerable importance. It is now a decayed town, containing about four thousand inhabitants, some of whom are families of the poor and proud n.o.bility common enough over all Italy, who are said to quarrel with each other more fiercely in Volterra than almost anywhere else. It is the old feud of the Montagues and the Capulets on a humbler scale, and the disputes of the Volterra n.o.bility are the more violent and implacable for being hereditary. Poor creatures! too proud to engage in business, too indolent for literature, excluded from political employments by the nature of the government, there is nothing left for them but to starve, intrigue, and quarrel. You may judge how miserably poor they are, when you are told they can not afford even to cultivate the favorite art of modern Italy; the art best suited to the genius of a soft and effeminate people. There is, I was told, but one pianoforte in the whole town, and that is owned by a Florentine lady who has recently come to reside here.

For several miles before reaching Volterra, our attention was fixed by the extraordinary aspect of the country through which we were pa.s.sing. The road gradually ascended, and we found ourselves among deep ravines and steep, high, broken banks, princ.i.p.ally of clay, barren, and in most places wholly bare of herbage, a scene of complete desolation, were it not for a cottage here and there perched upon the heights, a few sheep attended by a boy and a dog grazing on the brink of one of the precipices, or a solitary patch of bright green wheat in some spot where the rains had not yet carried away the vegetable mould.

Imagine to yourself an elevated country like the highlands of Pennsylvania or the western part of Ma.s.sachusetts; imagine vast beds of loam and clay in place of the ledges of rock, and then fancy the whole region to be torn by water-spouts and torrents into gulleys too profound to be pa.s.sed, with sharp ridges between--stripped of its trees and its gra.s.s--and you will have some idea of the country near Volterra. I could not help fancying, while I looked at it, that as the earth grew old, the ribs of rock which once upheld the mountains, had become changed into the bare heaps of earth which I saw about me, that time and the elements had destroyed the cohesion of the particles of which they were formed, and that now the rains were sweeping them down to the Mediterranean, to fill its bed and cause its waters to encroach upon the land. It was impossible for me to prevent the apprehension from pa.s.sing through my mind, that such might be the fate of other quarters of the globe in ages yet to come, that their rocks must crumble and their mountains be levelled, until the waters shall again cover the face of the earth, unless new mountains shall be thrown up by eruptions of internal fire. They told me in Volterra, that this frightful region had once been productive and under cultivation, but that after a plague which, four or five hundred years since, had depopulated the country, it was abandoned and neglected, and the rains had reduced it to its present state.

In the midst of this desolate tract, which is, however, here and there interspersed with fertile spots, rises the mountain on which Volterra is situated, where the inhabitants breathe a pure and keen atmosphere, almost perpetually cool, and only die of pleurisies and apoplexies; while below, on the banks of the Cecina, which in full sigjit winds its way to the sea, they die of fevers. One of the ravines of which I have spoken,--the _balza_ they call it at Volterra--has ploughed a deep chasm on the north side of this mountain, and is every year rapidly approaching the city on its summit. I stood on its edge and looked down a bank of soft red earth five hundred feet in height. A few rods in front of me I saw where a road had crossed the spot in which the gulf now yawned; the tracks of the last year's carriages were seen reaching to the edge on both sides. The ruins of a convent were close at hand, the inmates of which, two or three years since, had been removed by the government to the town for safety. These will soon be undermined by the advancing chasm, together with a fine piece of old Etruscan wall, once inclosing the city, built of enormous uncemented parallelograms of stone, and looking as if it might be the work of the giants who lived before the flood; a neighboring church will next fall into the gulf, which finally, if means be not taken to prevent its progress, will reach and sap the present walls of the city, swallowing up what time has so long spared.

"A few hundred crowns," said an inhabitant of Volterra to me, "would stop all this mischief. A wall at the bottom of the chasm, and a heap of branches of trees or other rubbish, to check the fall of the earth, are all that would be necessary."

I asked why these means were not used.

"Because," he replied, "those to whom the charge of these matters belongs, will not take the trouble. Somebody must devise a plan for the purpose, and somebody must take upon himself the labor of seeing it executed. They find it easier to put it off."

The antiquities of Volterra consist of an Etruscan burial-ground, in which the tombs still remain, pieces of the old and incredibly ma.s.sive Etruscan wall, including a far larger circuit than the present city, two Etruscan gates of immemorial antiquity, older doubtless than any thing at Rome, built of enormous stones, one of them serving even yet as an entrance to the town, and a mult.i.tude of cinerary vessels, mostly of alabaster, sculptured with numerous figures in _alto relievo_. These figures are sometimes allegorical representations, and sometimes embody the fables of the Greek mythology. Among them are some in the most perfect style of Grecian art, the subjects of which are taken from the poems of Homer; groups representing the besiegers of Troy and its defenders, or Ulysses with his companions and his s.h.i.+ps. I gazed with exceeding delight on these works of forgotten artists, who had the verses of Homer by heart--works just drawn from the tombs where they had been buried for thousands of years, and looking as if fresh from the chisel.

We had letters to the commandant of the fortress, an ancient-looking stronghold, built by the Medici family, over which we were conducted by his adjutant, a courteous gentleman with a red nose, who walked as if keeping time to military music. From the summit of the tower we had an extensive and most remarkable prospect. It was the 19th day of March, and below us, the sides of the mountain, scooped into irregular dells, were covered with fruit-trees just breaking into leaf and flower. Beyond stretched the region of barrenness I have already described, to the west of which lay the green pastures of the Maremma, the air of which, in summer, is deadly, and still further west were spread the waters of the Mediterranean, out of which were seen rising the mountains of Corsica. To the north and northeast were the Appenines, capped with snow, embosoming the fertile lower valley of the Arno, with the cities of Pisa and Leghorn in sight. To the south we traced the windings of the Cecina, and saw ascending into the air the smoke of a hot-water lake, agitated perpetually with the escape of gas, which we were told was visited by Dante, and from which he drew images for his description of h.e.l.l. Some Frenchman has now converted it into a borax manufactory, the natural heat of the water serving to extract the salt.

The fortress is used as a prison for persons guilty of offenses against the state. On the top of the tower we pa.s.sed four prisoners of state, well-dressed young men, who appeared to have been entertaining themselves with music, having guitars and other instruments in their hands. They saluted the adjutant as he went by them, who, in return, took off his hat.

They had been condemned for a conspiracy against the government.

The commandant gave us a hospitable reception. In showing us the fortress he congratulated us that we had no occasion for such engines of government in America. We went to his house in the evening, where we saw his wife, a handsome young lady, whom he had lately brought from Florence, the very lady of the pianoforte whom I have already mentioned, and the mother of two young children, whose ruddy cheeks and chubby figures did credit to the wholesome air of Volterra. The commandant made tea for us in tumblers, and the lady gave us music. The tea was so strong a decoction that I seemed to hear the music all night, and had no need of being waked from sleep, when our _vetturino_, at an early hour the next morning, came to take us on our journey to Sienna.

The End.