r, or winter with sad
tints of russet woods and faintly rosy snows, or spring attired in
tenderest green of new-fledged trees and budding flowers, the air is
always pure and light and finely tempered here. City gates, sombre
as their own antiquity, frame vistas of the laughing fields.
Terraces, flanked on either side by jutting masonry, cut clear
vignettes of olive-hoary slopes, with cypress-shadowed farms in
hollows of the hills. Each coign or point of vantage carries a
bastion or tower of Etruscan, Roman, mediaeval architecture, tracing
the limits of the town upon its mountain plateau. Everywhere art and
nature lie side by side in amity beneath a sky so pure and delicate,
that from its limpid depth the spirit seems to drink new life. What
air-tints of lilac, orange, and pale amethyst are shed upon those
vast ethereal hills and undulating plains! What wandering
cloud-shadows sail across this sea of olives and of vines, with here
and there a fleece of vapour or a column of blue smoke from charcoal
burners on the mountain flank! To southward, far away beyond those
hills, is felt the presence of eternal Rome, not seen, but clearly
indicated by the hurrying of a hundred streams that swell the Tiber.

In the neighbourhood of the town itself there is plenty to attract
the student of antiquities, or art, or history. He may trace the
walls of the Etruscan city, and explore the vaults where the dust of
the Volumnii lies coffered in sarcophagi and urns. Mild faces of
grave deities lean from the living tufa above those narrow alcoves,
where the chisel-marks are still fresh, and where the vigilant lamps
still hang suspended from the roof by leaden chains. Or, in the
Museum, he may read on basreliefs and vases how gloomy and morose
were the superstitions of those obscure forerunners of majestic
Rome. The piazza offers one of the most perfect Gothic facades, in
its Palazzo Pubblico, to be found in Italy. The flight of marble
steps is guarded from above by the bronze griffin of Perugia and the
Baglioni, with the bronze lion of the Guelf faction, to which the
town was ever faithful. Upon their marble brackets they ramp in all
the lean ferocity of feudal heraldry, and from their claws hang down
the chains wrested in old warfare from some barricaded gateway of
Siena. Below is the fountain, on the many-sided curves of which
Giovanni Pisano sculptured, in quaint statuettes and basreliefs, all
the learning of the middle ages, from the Bib