United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then they came back again, and dragged him by the hair of his head into the mire, and shouted that so their father had been dragged through the streets of Evesham. And then they went off to the Maremma!
They have hardly passed when large flocks of sheep and goats make their appearance, attended by shepherds and their families, driven by the approach of winter from the Apenines, and seeking the pastures of the Maremma, a rich, but, in the summer, an unhealthy tract on the coast.
The Florentines, aided by the season, used the most active exertions to provide themselves troops, whose captains were Federigo, lord of Urbino, and Gismondo Malatesti da Rimino, who, though mutual foes, were kept so united by the prudence of the commissaries, Neri di Gino and Bernardetto de' Medici, that they broke up their quarters while the weather was still very severe and recovered not only the places that had been taken in the territory of Pisa, but also the Pomerancie in the neighborhood of Volterra, and so checked the king's troops, which at first had overrun the Maremma, that they could scarcely retain the places they had been left to garrison.
Their passions, tumultuous and merciless as the Tyrrhene Sea, raged indeed with the danger, but also with the uses, of naturally appointed storm; while ours, pacific in corruption, languish in vague maremma of misguided pools; and are pestilential most surely as they retire.
Gradually Eleanor made out that the song was the farewell of a maiden to her lover who is going for winter work to the Maremma. The labourers go to Maremma Oh! 'tis long till the days of June, And my heart is all in a flutter Alone here, under the moon. O moon! all this anguish and sorrow! Thou know'st why I suffer so Oh! send him me back from Maremma, Where he goes, and I must not go!
One of the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the height of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are healthy, the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at some points at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with the exception of a few localities favorably situated on the seacoast, are in a high degree pestilential.
Far away stretches the Sienese Maremma; Siena dimly visible upon her gentle hill; and still beyond, the pyramid of Volterra, huge and cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, as is almost invariable in this district, keeps to the highest line of ridges, winding much, and following the dimplings of the earthy hills.
Siena and Florence ruined Volterra once more in the Middle Ages, isolating it near the pestilential Maremma and checking its growth outward and inward. The cathedral, the pride of a mediæval commonwealth, is still a mean and unfinished building of the twelfth century.
Whereupon my Lady Featherbrain: "Gossip," said she, "'tis not for common talk, but he that I wot of is the Angel Gabriel, who loves me more dearly than himself, for that I am, so he tells me, the fairest lady in all the world, ay, and in the Maremma to boot." Whereat her gossip would fain have laughed, but held herself in, being minded to hear more from her.
She had married a patriot, a man with a beautiful eager face and a body spent with disease, and a fever that never left him since the days when he lurked in the marshes of the Maremma, crouched in a tangle of wet reeds and rushes, and watching for the flash of steel in the sunshine.
Word Of The Day