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But where is the <i>taste</i> of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio?
A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of a concert he had been unable to attend.
At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky- faced Palazzo Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century.
It was at Ariccia, in one of these periods of villegiatura, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that Brand, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end of September he had completed it.
At the south end of it an opening in the pavement shows a part of the Cloaca Maxima, with the sewerage passing through it underneath. The ancient street between the Basilica Julia and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, is undoubtedly the famous Vicus Tuscus, so called after the Etruscan soldiers who belonged to the army of Porsenna, and, being defeated at Ariccia, took refuge in this part of Rome.
In the same district is the lake of Nemi, very regular in its circular outline; that of Juturna lying near the foot of the Alban Hills, and that of Ariccia lying in a deep hollow eight miles in circumference; all may be supposed to have been the craters of extinct volcanoes, both by reason of their shape and of the materials of which they are formed.
A carriage full of visitors may, perhaps, be seen at long intervals, their spirits sobered by the melancholy that broods over the scene; or a lumbering cart, laden with wine-casks from Ariccia or Albano, drawn by the soft-eyed mouse-coloured oxen of the Campagna, startles the echoes, and betrays its course by the clouds of dust which it raises.
Having a relapse into the malady that had followed my breakdown in Switzerland, which was exaggerated by the heat of Rome, I was ordered by my physician to Ariccia to recruit, and I left my apartment, which was also the consulate, and took quarters at the little Ariccian inn which was the resort of the artists at that date.
The walk from the Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a double row of stunted and twisted elms.
Then one at last reached Albano, a small town less modernised and less cleansed than Frascati, a patch of the old land which has retained some of its ancient wildness; and afterwards there was Ariccia with the Palazzo Chigi, and hills covered with forests and viaducts spanning ravines which overflowed with foliage; and there was yet Genzano, and yet Nemi, growing still wilder and more remote, lost in the midst of rocks and trees.
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