Roman Neighbourhoods

I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that
I had been talking of the "picturesque" all my life, but that now
for a change I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across
the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with
its half-dozen towns shining on its purple side even as vague
sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an
agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that
during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground,
have been suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small
mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily
through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find
the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The
walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward
the neighbouring town of L'Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty
years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of
calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine
which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to
fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct--
in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there in a pensive
posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the
Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances
we make to vanished powers. An ardent nero then would have
had his own way with me and obtained a frank admission that the
Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the
charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the
Chigis into the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road
at the bottom of which, in the good old days, tourists in no
great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for
the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist might
have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look
out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into
the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of
quaintness, as to the best "bit" hereabouts, I should certainly
name the way in which the crumbling black houses of these
ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery edges of
all the steepest chasms. Before you enter one of them you
invariably find yourself lingering outside its pretentious old
gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony hillside by
this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that grow.
Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between
their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and
violet fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the
viaduct at the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the
full force