A Chain of Cities

One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from
Rome to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside
sacrifice to curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. There
was time to stroll far enough from the station to have a look at
the famous old bridge of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber.
While I stood admiring the measure of impression was made to
overflow by the gratuitous grace of a white-cowled monk who came
trudging up the road that wound to the gate of the town. Narni
stood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a good space
away, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, to
oblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within the
aperture. Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the view
exactly as like the bit of background by an Umbrian master as it
ideally should have been. The winter is bare and brown enough in
southern Italy and the earth reduced to more of a mere anatomy
than among ourselves, for whom the very crânerie of its
exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it much of the robust
serenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine nude statue.
In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for the eye,
during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm:
nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charity
of colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man's
heart. Her whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell on
the broken bridge, the little walled town and the trudging friar,
that I turned away with the impatient vow and the fond vision of
how I would take the journey again and pause to my heart's
content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona,
at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our vows a little when
we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my blest
springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet
with comparative meagreness, at Assisi.

[Illustration: ASSISI.]

I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks
if we always did things at the moment we want to, for it's mostly
when we can't that we're thoroughly sure we would, and we
can answer too little for moods in the future conditional. Winter
at least seemed to me to have put something into these seats of
antiquity that the May sun had more or less melted away--a
desirable strength of tone, a depth upon depth of queerness and
quaintness. Assisi had been in the January twilight, after my
mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown old missal.
But you'll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a fine
spring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn't seem
made to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker's polyglot
estimate of its