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Look at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it, scarcely, that hasn't been made by human hands. Look at the hill-towns; and think of the human toil that has gone to the making and maintaining of them since the world began.
Everywhere massacre and nightmare in those churches of Lucca. And the impression they made on my mind was naturally strengthened by the recollection of the similar and often more terrible carvings in other places, Milan, Pavia, Modena, Volterra, the Pistoiese and Lucchese hill-towns, in all other places rich in pre-Franciscan art.
It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology. Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns. With its back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked and rolling ridges.
What the future holds for her it is impossible to say, or what strange development may come from this sudden and overmastering Celtic element, pervading even the remotest hill-towns. But one possession remains intact: the old graveyards where the worthies of an elder day sleep quietly under stones decaying and crumbling faster than their memories.
Down the steep mountains, over bridged torrents, past the hill-towns and valley-lands, they came to the City of the Lily, fair Florence of the Arno. "As early as 1829," Cooper thought, "the unification of Italy was irresistible." In Florence a home was soon found in the Palazzo Ricasoli, Via del Cocomero.
From the hill-towns, a band of men surprised Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, taking the cannon for use around Boston.
Hints of what is to come greet you in the frittered shale of the grey country-side broken abruptly by little threatening hill-towns.
Though the castle of Falaise occupies so commanding a site, the town itself is anything but one of the hill-towns, while Domfront is one of the best of the class. Not that it is the least likely to be an ancient hill-fort, like Chartres, Le Mans, or Angers; both Falaise and Domfront are, beyond all doubt, towns which have gathered round their respective castles in comparatively modern times.
We used to drive up fist to one and then to another of those hill-towns, all white-washed houses and plane-tree atriums, and sober-eyed Basques, to hear them sing. It was beautiful. I never have had a more complete expression of beauty in all my life. It seemed to me the very soul of music; those simple people singing, not for pay, not for notoriety, out of the fullness of their hearts.
For the sake of intending travellers to this, the lordliest of Tuscan hill-towns, it will be well to state at once and without circumlocution what does not appear upon the time-tables of the line from Empoli to Rome. Montepulciano has a station; but this railway station is at the distance of at least an hour and a half's drive from the mountain upon which the city stands.
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