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Updated: June 25, 2025
"Perhaps, buried under those old church walls, lie proofs of our early history, the stones of some old Temple, or statues of its gods; for we were once Sanitium, a Roman city in a country of six Roman roads. Perhaps all around us were great monuments of pagan wealth, a Mausoleum near these bare old rocks like that which stands in loneliness near Saint-Remy, Villas, Baths, or Triumphal Arches."
All up the hill great terraced gardens, piled-up villas: Aldobrandini, Falconieri, Lancillotti. ROME, April 13. Yesterday, Giovedi Santo evening, the washing of the high-altar of St. Peter's.
This was a wickedness in me; but if you knew how I felt, having started out from the Ritz expecting a quiet day's run through one or two of the garden counties of England, to come like this, bang into the midst of Roman villas, and under the shadow of a tenth-century castle-keep, maybe you'd excuse my morals for being upset.
Petersburg there are some few villas and farms to relieve the monotony of the gloomy pine forests; then the country opens out into immense undulating plains, marshy meadows, scrubby groves of young pine, without any apparent limit; here and there a bleak and solitary village of log huts; a herd of cattle in the meadows; a wretched, sterile-looking farm, with plowed fields, at remote intervals, and so on hour after hour, the scene offering but little variety the whole way to Tver.
When the curtain fell the Procuratessa led the company to the circular saloon which, as in most villas of the Venetian mainland, formed the central point of the house. If Odo had been charmed by the graceful decorations of the theatre, he was dazzled by the airy splendour of this apartment.
Of the beautiful country seats and villas which we now passed, I could only through the windows of our coach gain a partial and indistinct prospect, which led me to wish, as I soon most earnestly did, to be released from this movable prison. Towards evening we arrived at Richmond.
For me, I am grown so lazy, and so tired of seeing sights, that, though I have been at Florence six months, I have not seen Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, or Pistoia; nay, not so much as one of the Great Duke's villas.
Our return from Mentone to Nice was through a succession of towns and villages. Along this coast road are many white hotels, comfortable-looking villas, and trimly kept lawns. In the gardens there were century plants, orange, lemon, and palm trees, and rose bushes of great size covered with bloom. On the tops of the garden walls, plants of various kinds were growing.
Among the tall climbing roses, which hung a mantle of yellow flowers to the fretted baluster of the terrace, there stood out in the distance the illuminated fronts of the hotels and villas, and occasionally women's laughter was heard above the dull, monotonous sound of surf and the noise of the fog-horns.
Villages occurred at frequent intervals, and they passed through several large towns with temples, handsome villas, and other Roman erections similar to those that they had sacked at the capture of Camalodunum. "The people here do not seem to suffer under the Roman rule at any rate," Boduoc remarked; "they appear to have adopted the Roman dress and tongue, but for all that they are slaves."
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