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Updated: June 17, 2025
From the warm olive-groves sounded the blithesome note of the Attic grasshopper. The wind sweeping over the dark cypresses by the house set their dark leaves to talking. The afternoon passed in pleasure, friends going and coming; there was laughter, music, and good stories.
There is a charm to me which no other spot can supply, in the porticoes hallowed still by holy and venerable shades. In the olive-groves of Ilyssus I still hear the voice of poetry on the heights of Phyle, the clouds of twilight seem yet the shrouds of departed freedom the heralds the heralds of the morrow that shall come!
Far away on either side was a broad plain, dotted with towns and villages, and filled with olive-groves and vineyards, where cattle, and sheep, and goats grazed peacefully, and shepherds, goatherds, and vine-dressers stared lazily up as the train rolled by.
Here, amid rich natural scenery, in this large, imposing castle, which, built on the summit of a hill, mantled with olive-groves and vineyards, afforded on all sides a view of the surrounding, smiling plains of Lombardy here Bonaparte wished to rest from the hardships and dangers of his last campaign; here, he wished to organize the great Italian republic which was then the object of his exertions, and whose iron crown he afterward coveted to place on his head.
Beyond rise the steep green slopes of Monte Mario, with vineyards and olive-groves nestling in its warm folds, crowned with the Villa Mellini beside the "Turner pine," a familiar object in many of the great artist's pictures.
The view reached from Jaffa and the sea to the mountains near Jerusalem, and southward to the plain of Ascalon a great expanse of grain and grazing land, all blossoming as the rose, and dotted, especially near the mountains, with dark, luxuriant olive-groves. The landscape had something of the green, pastoral beauty of England, except the mountains, which were wholly of Palestine.
The neighbourhood is rich in palm-groves and olive-groves, and the Cinyps region, regarded by Herodotus as the most fertile in North Africa, lies at no great distance to the east. Ten miles east, and a little south of Leptis Minor, was Thapsus, a small town, but one of great strength, famous as the scene of Julius Caesar's great victory over Cato.
And all these good things acquire a second relish from the voluntary labours of fowling and the chase. What need to dwell upon the charm of the green fields, the well-ordered plantations, the beauty of the vineyards and olive-groves?
In her dreams she seemed to be wandering far away among the purple passes of the Apennines, where she had come years ago when she was a little girl; with her grandmother she pushed through old olive-groves, weird and twisted with many a quaint gnarl, and rustling their pale silvery leaves in noonday twilight.
In the vineyards, where the vines commonly trailed upon low elms and other trees, various vegetables grew between the rows, as they still do about Vesuvius; on the hills were olive-groves, which cost almost nothing to keep in order, and which supplied the "butter" and the lamp-oil of the Mediterranean world. We need not waste much compassion upon the life of the Roman working class.
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