amed and nameless,
restless with light, about to break in the sun. While to the west
Florence lay sleeping yet in the cusp of her hills, her towers, her
domes, perfect and fresh in the purity of dawn that had renewed her
beauty.

It was an altogether different impression, an impression of sadness, of
some tragic thing, that I received when at evening I stood above the
Castle of Porciano on a hill a little way off, and looked down the
valley. It was not any joyful thing that I saw, splendid though it was,
but the ruined castles, blind and broken, of the Counts Guidi: Porciano
itself, line a jagged menace, rises across Arno, which is heard but not
seen; farther, on the crest of a blue hill, round which evening gathers
out of the woods, rises the great ruin of Romena like a broken oath;
while farther still, far away on its hill in a fold of the valley, Poppi
thrusts its fierce tower into the sky, a cruel boast that came to
nothing. They are but the ghosts of a forgotten barbarism these gaunt
towers of war; they are nothing now, less than nothing, unreconciled
though they be with the hills; they have been crumbling for hundreds of
years: one day the last stone will fall. For around them is life; the
children of Stia, laughing about the fountain, will never know that
their ancestors went in fear of some barbarian who held Porciano by
murder and took toll of the weak. These shepherd girls, these
_contadini_ and their wives and children, they have outlived the Conti
Guidi, they have outlasted the greatest of the lords; like the flowers,
they run among the stones without a thought of that brutal greatness
that would have enslaved them if it could. Not by violence have they
conquered, but by love; not by death, but by life. It is just this which
I see round every ruin in the Casentino. Force, brute force, is the only
futile thing in the world. Why has La Verna remained when Romena is
swept away, that strong place, when Porciano is a ruin, when the castle
of Poppi is brought low, but that life which is love has beaten hate,
and that a kiss is more terrible than a thousand blows.

Yes, as one wanders about these hills where life itself is so hard a
master, it is just that which one understands in almost every village.
You go to S. Maria delle Grazie--Vallombrosella, they call it, since it
was a daughter of the monastery of Vallombrosa--and there in that
beautiful fifteenth-century church you still find the simple things of
life,