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Updated: July 21, 2025
It stands on a mound of calcareous tufa, containing great numbers of fossil shells, the most recent of which resemble those found in the marly tufa close to the coast. The fort stands on the south side of the town, on a high perpendicular bank overhanging the Coanza.
In some places, too, a soft layer of tufa has been hollowed for man's abode, suggesting, like the caves, a fine old smuggling-trade. As many as eight doors may be counted side by side. In other places a rock-ledge, or even a detached boulder, has been converted into a house by masonry-walls. We shall seldom see these savageries on the eastern coast of the island.
In this ethereal fabric of azure the most real of realities, the most solid of substances, seem films upon a crystal sphere. The hermit produced some flasks of amber-coloured wine from his stores in the grotto. These we drank, lying full-length upon the tufa in the morning sunlight.
To the south of these plains violent volcanic action is everywhere apparent, not only in tufa cones, but in tracts of ashes, scoriae, and volcanic sand. Near the centre there are some very curious caves, possibly "lava bubbles," which were used by the natives as places of sepulture.
The littoral chain here is not of sand and gravel only, for a mass of volcanic tufa rises to the surface, and originally formed an islet in the sea, then, when the process began of forming a littoral belt with a lagoon behind it, the sands clung to this islet and spread out from it to left and right.
Trajan answered that he need not try to hunt them out, but that, if they were brought before him, the law must take its course. In Rome, the chief refuge of the Christians was in the Catacombs, or quarries of tufa, from which the city was chiefly built, and which were hollowed out in long galleries.
The plan of the excavation was made by M. Antoine and communicated to the "Bulletin de la Societe Archeologique de Touraine," in 1858, but I will give a description from the pen of a later visitor. "The upper rock-shelter has been dug out or enlarged with a pick. The stone is a tender tufa, containing a quantity of little cores of black silex, giving it a spotty appearance.
The layers of the more modern formation lavas and scoriae are horizontal; sheets of sub-columnar, compact basalt have been spread upon and have crushed down to paper-thickness their beds of bright red tufa, here and there white with a saline effervescence. Of such distinct superimpositions we counted in one place five; there may have been many more.
The wine press was nothing after all but a machine, and though a certain interest attached to the great vats, hollowed out in the tufa rock, into which the new-made wine trickled, Daphne soon signified her willingness to depart. Before she left they brought her a great glass of rich red grape juice fresh from the newly crushed grapes. She touched her lips to it, then looked about her.
Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds its account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea-wind, sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!
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