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Updated: June 25, 2025
Ah! that charming Frascati, on its greeny knoll at the foot of the wooded Tusculan heights, with its famous terrace whence one enjoys the finest view in the world, its old patrician villas with proud and elegant Renascence facades and magnificent parks, which, planted with cypress, pine, and ilex, are for ever green!
The thickets of ilex that shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo.
Nets are set across open paths between the trees, generally Ilex, through which the Woodcocks take their flight when going out "roading," as it is called that is, when on their evening excursion for food; into these nets the Woodcocks fly and become easy victims. Professor Ansted includes the Woodcock in his list, but only marks it as occurring in Guernsey and Sark.
But though the waters may be occasionally sipped of a morning and wry faces made, it is in reality the warm sea-bathing on the shore, where people spend hours pickling in tepid salt water, and also the cool rides or walks amongst the shady alleys of sweet chestnut and ilex woods of Quisisana and Monte Coppola, which draw hither in summer the elegant world of Naples, and even of Athens, to visit Castellamare.
In the middle distance, a few ilex and cypress trees were effectively and naturally distributed. The background was mountain scenery; and from a lofty cliff a river was precipitated, in a bold and picturesque fall. The waters rebounded from the gulf below in silver spray, and flowed through a verdant level into a tranquil and beautiful lake.
At the far end of this flat-patterned place a group of tall cypress and ilex, black against the sky, struck a note of Italy and the South; while, through the yew hedges which closed in the little garden, broad archways pierced at intervals revealed far breadths of silvery English lawn and the distant gleam of the river.
"Besides," added Bertuccio, "there is proof of this. My father's father saw the olive tree, and it was quite closed." Over the shallow tufa basin of the great fountain on the hill Daphne stood gazing into the water. She had sought the deep shadow of the ilex trees, for the afternoon was warm, an almost angry summer heat having followed yesterday's coolness.
Its radiant marble porticoes, the white walls of the villas, a dome of burning copper, the flash and scintillation of tiled roofs, the quiet red of brickwork, dark groves of ilex, and cypress, and laurel, glowing rose-gardens, and here and there the silver of a fountain, seemed arranged and contrasted with a wonderful art, and the town appeared a delicious ornament, every cube of color owing its place to the thought and inspiration of the artificer.
Her dainty grace, her Tanagra beauty, seemed to harmonise with that of the ilex, for there is an antique beauty in this tree that we find in none other. Theocritus must have composed many a poem beneath it. It is the only tree that the ancient world could have cared to notice; and if it were possible to carve statues of trees, I am sure that the ilex is the tree sculptors would choose.
From him she would not only receive the consolations of religion, but might learn what awaited her. Very slowly passed the hours until the reappearance of the black monk. He came when day was declining, and joyfully she learnt that Sisinnius permitted her to visit him; it must be on the morrow at the second hour, the place a spot in the ilex wood, not far away, whither the monk would guide her.
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