the well-pruned maples which support the vines.

If I have found my expectations of Italian scenery, in some respects,
below the reality; in other respects, they have been disappointed. The
forms of the mountains are wonderfully picturesque, and their effect is
heightened by the rich atmosphere through which they are seen, and by
the buildings, imposing from their architecture or venerable from time,
which crown the eminences. But if the hand of man has done something to
embellish this region, it has done more to deform it. Not a tree is
suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural
channel. An exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage
of the soil. The country is without woods and green fields; and to him
who views the vale of the Arno "from the top of Fiesole," or any of the
neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains
to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it
appears, at any time after mid-summer, a huge valley of dust, planted
with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish
maple on which vines are trained.

The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is
no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground,
no ancient and towering trees clustered about the villas, no rows of
natural shrubbery following the course of the brooks and rivers. The
streams, which are often but the beds of torrents dry during the summer,
are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the
slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept
down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the
Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the
summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil. The grander
features of the landscape, however, are fortunately beyond the power of
man to injure; the lofty mountain-summits, bare precipices cleft with
chasms, and pinnacles of rock piercing the sky, betokening, far more
than any thing I have seen elsewhere, a breaking up of the crust of the
globe in some early period of its existence. I am told that in May and
June the country is much more beautiful than at present, and that owing
to a drought it now appears under disadvantage....

Florence, from being the residence of the Court,[41] and from the vast
number of foreigners who throng to it, presents