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The highway that leads from the bridge to the city, is part of the Via Flaminia, which extended as far as Rimini; and is well paved, like a modern street. Nothing of the antient bridge remains but the piles; nor is there any thing in the structure of this, or of the other five Roman bridges over the Tyber, that deserves attention.
In Flaminia Rimini, which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved.
The western part of that province, cut off from its capital, attached itself by force of circumstances to what remained of Aemilia and of Flaminia, whose neighbour she was, and these fragments of the ancient provinces all together grouped themselves about, or found their centre in, Ravenna, the capital of Flaminia and the residence of the prefect of Italy.
She was known, under her theatrical name of Flaminia, in the literary world by several translations, but I had a great wish to make her acquaintance less on that account than in consequence of the story, known throughout Italy, of the stay that three literary men of great fame had made in Paris.
The second place occupied was Spoleto at the head, and the third was Perugia at the foot, of the great valley of Spoleto, from which the Via Flaminia rose to cross the central Apennines. The three places were occupied without much trouble, and it was thus attempted to make the great road from the north impassable.
Nor at that of the Italian buried on the Via Flaminia at Rome, who in his epitaph complains that the bite of a she-puss on his little finger was the cause of his death. Nor of that of Q. Lecanius Bassus, who died suddenly of so small a prick with a needle on his left thumb that it could hardly be discerned.
Nor did our traveller fail to estimate the beauty of the bridges, which one might fancy to be admiring each other, or the streets, which, by their very names alone, claim authority and pre-eminence over those of all other cities in the world: the Via Flaminia, for example, the Via Julia, the Appia, and others of the same character.
All the places occupied were fortresses and all were with one exception upon the Via Flaminia which they commanded. The first of these strong places was Narni, which held the great bridge over the Nera at the southern exit of the passes between the valley of Spoleto and the lower Tiber valley, where the two roads over the mountains, one by Todi, the other by Spoleto, met.
"Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina." Thus Juvenal immortalised the obsequious senators who met to decide the fate of the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently reminds us of the great political poem of Dryden; but it was not written till Domitian had fallen: and it wants something of the peculiar flavour which belongs to contemporary invective alone.
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