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I ought to have spoken first instead of allowing this luscious director to begin as follows: "The foreign gentleman here was at Orvinio about a month ago. He admits it himself and I can corroborate the fact, as I was there at the same time. Orvinio is a small country place in the corner of Umbria. There is a mountain in the neighbourhood, remote and very high altissima!
I desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio, bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta."
I would either have been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet an inquiry without which no Latin dossier is complete. POSTSCRIPT. Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio?
There is no eminence in the land, from Etna and the Gran Sasso downwards, whose appeal I can resist. Precipices are not so frequent at Orvinio that one can afford to pass them by, although this one, as a matter of fact, proved to be a mighty tame affair. There was yet another object to my trip.
He was a director of the Banca d'ltalia. And was I not the gentleman who had recently been to Orvinio? I remembered. "The last time I was there," I said, "was about a month ago. I fancy we had some conversation in the motor up from Mandela." "That is so. And now, however disagreeable it may be, I feel myself obliged to perform a patriotic duty. This is war-time.
What has he told us? That while at Orvinio he knew a foreigner who climbed a high mountain to make calculations with instruments. What does this admirable citizen do with regard to such a suspicious character? He does nothing. Is there not a barrack-full of carbineers at the entrance of the place ready to arrest such people?
I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites might have been explored during that period!
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