to their own central chain, and thus leave an
interval of plain between their bases and the Mediterranean,
volcanic agency has broken up the space thus left with other
and distinct groups of hills of its own creation, as in the
case of Vesuvius, and of the Alban hills near Rome. Speaking
generally then, Italy is made up of an infinite multitude of
valleys pent in between high and steep hills, each forming a
country to itself, and cut off by natural barriers from the
others. Its several parts are isolated by nature, and no art of
man can thoroughly unite them. Even the various provinces of
the same kingdom are strangers to each other; the Abruzzi are
like an unknown world to the inhabitants of Naples, insomuch,
that when two Neapolitan naturalists, not ten years since, made
an excursion to visit the Majella, one of the highest of the
central Apennines, they found there many medicinal plants
growing in the greatest profusion, which the Neapolitans were
regularly in the habit of importing from other countries, as no
one suspected their existence within their own kingdom. Hence
arises the romantic character of Italian scenery: the constant
combination of a mountain outline and all the wild features of
a mountain country, with the rich vegetation of a southern
climate in the valleys. Hence too the rudeness, the pastoral
simplicity, and the occasional robber habits, to be found in
the population; so that to this day you may travel in many
places for miles together in the plains and valleys without
passing through a single town or village; for the towns still
cluster on the mountain sides, the houses nestling together on
some scanty ledge, with cliffs rising above them and sinking
down abruptly below them, the very 'congesta manu praeruptis
oppida saxis' of Virgil's description, which he even then
called 'antique walls,' because they had been the strongholds
of the primaeval inhabitants of the country, and which are still
inhabited after a lapse of so many centuries, nothing of the
stir and movement of other parts of Europe having penetrated
into these lonely valleys, and tempted the people to quit their
mountain fastnesses for a more accessible dwelling in the
plain.

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