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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Tiber between low, interrupted slopes, some covered with longest most compact green grass, others of brown, unreal tufo, like crumbled masonry, or hollowed into Signorelli-looking grottoes, with deep growths of Judas-tree, broom, and scant asphodels; all green and brown, of such shapes that one wonders whether they also, like so many seeming boulders scattered in their neighbourhood, are not in reality masonry, long destroyed towns.
But between the moors and Ponteglos the valley wound for fourteen miles or so between secular woods, so steeply converging that for the most part no more room was left at the bottom of the V than the river itself filled. The fisherman beside it trampled on pimpernels, sundew, watermint, and asphodels, or pushed between clumps of Osmunda regalis that overtopped him by a couple of feet.
These two shining eyes, which almost seem to gaze at one, and the cone-shaped head of the egg, give it the look of a tiny fish without fins a fish for whom half a nut-shell would make a capacious aquarium. About the same time I notice frequently, on the asphodels in the paddock and on those of the neighbouring hills, certain indications that the eggs have recently hatched out.
In spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver. Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender, and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath and sweet-scented yellow coronilla.
The wonderful loveliness of the double colonnade of polished granite pillars on the polished pale grey marble floor; fantastic, like transfigured pools and streams of purest water. May 9. Asphodels on the banks. As we come up, the peasants drive into the stable, one by one, a lot of mares with their foals. Along the road a drove of great long-horned grey oxen; a bull-calf canters among them.
The hillside was just turning purple with heather bloom, and along the winding, stony road the yellow asphodels were dancing in the wind.
To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the "world," dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about "Middlemarch" to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.
The sea, which is tame and messy in the artificial bay formed by the pier of Anzio, was fresh and rushing; the wind swept the brown dark sand like smoke along the ground. Monte Circeo was quite distinct, blue and white its summit an overhanging rock, no castle. Inland stretched the fields of asphodels and the deep woods.
Then the Drosidæ are divided into five great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes.
It would seem as if Nature had wished to console the desert by giving to it her loveliest and most enticing blossoms. I came upon colonies of the poet's narcissus, breathing over the rocks so sweet a fragrance that it was as if a miracle had been wrought to draw it out of the earth. I walked knee-deep through blooming asphodels, beautiful and strange, but only noticed here by the wild bee.
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