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The Garfagnana, again, cannot be bettered if you avoid such touristry as Bagni di Lucca; but then Castelnuovo is bare, and though Barga is fine enough, Piazza al Serchio is a mere huddle of houses, and it is not till you reach Fivizzano on the other side of the pass that you find what you want. In Casentino alone there is everything mountains, rivers, woods, and footways, convents and castles.
A few lines, too, might be quoted from his own poem, the "Boat on the Serchio," to prove that he did not entertain a merely disagreeable memory of his school life.
From mountain-sides bordering the broad road along the Serchio mountains dotted with bright homesteads, each gleaming out of its own cypress-grove, olive-patch, canebrake, and vine-arbor, under which the children play they come from solitary hovels, hung up, as it were, in mid-air, over gloomy ravines, scored and furrowed with red earth, down which dark torrents dash and spray.
Pisa sank before Genoa at Meloria, the Italian AEgos- Potamos; Genoa before Venice in the war of Chiozza, the Italian siege of Syracuse. Florence sent her Brunelleschi to divert the waves of Serchio against the walls of Lucca; Lucca her Castruccio, to hold mock tournaments before the gates of vanquished Florence.
The Serchio overflowed its banks, and, breaking its bounds, this canal also overflowed; all this part of the country is below the level of its rivers, and the consequence was that it was speedily flooded. The rising waters filled the Square of the Baths, in the lower part of which our house was situated.
That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as right as any other the impression of the drive through the huge general tangled and fruited <i>podere</i> of the countryside; that of the pair of jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of the valley of the Serchio opens.
For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio the hot, droughty, and baking Garfagnana lead down pointing straight to Rome; and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up directly towards Rome?
Antonio del Rosso, as we remarked above, was Siennese ambassador at Lucca, and with the authority of the count he contrived the ruin of Pagolo Guinigi. The heads of the conspiracy were Pierro Cennami and Giovanni da Chivizzano. The count resided upon the Serchio, at a short distance from the city, and with him was Lanzilao, the son of Pagolo.
Alas! alas! what a pasticcio! made by herself made by herself and her lawsuits about the defunct Guinigi damn them!" It was seldom that the cavaliere used bad words excuse him. The road from Lucca to Corellia lies at the foot of lofty mountains, over-mantled by chestnut-forests, and cleft asunder by the river Serchio the broad, willful Serchio, sprung from the flanks of virgin fastnesses.
"As God hears me, cavalier, they are his twin children, born in the convent of Santa Maria di Fosciandora, in the valley of the Serchio, some leagues to the north of Florence; and on the feast-day of Saint Mark these sixteen years ago." "Then King Theodore either knew nothing of it, or he was a liar." "He was a liar, cavalier." "Stay a moment.
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