ulted and painted
in Gothic style, with shrine lamps here and there, were quite open and
empty. We walked into them, or rather into a crooked vestibule
frescoed by some Umbrian, with no sudden transition from the splendid
grove of ilexes, immense branches like beams overhead, from the great
hillside of bluish-grey tufo, with only a few bitter herbs on it. The
convent of the Sacro Speco is a half-fortified little place into which
we could not penetrate. Only a surly monk, found with difficulty
(another entered the chapels with a great bundle of wall-flowers and
irises), took us into the microscopic garden under the convent
battlements hedged with flowering rosemary, where the roses in which
St. Benedict rolled are grown (May roses, only bright leaves as yet)
literally in the shape of a bed or gridiron, row along row.

Though it is not remote-looking, 'tis a splendid place for a hermit's
thoughts: the blue-grey hillside running down into the green rushing
Anio, the great bare bluish mountains all round, far enough to be
visible, a great sense of air and space, for a valley. No vegetation,
save a few olives and scrub oaks and the bitter herbs and euphorbus.
No scented happy Tuscan things. And deep below, the arches of Nero's
Villa--with demons no doubt galore. Those giottesque chapels hold in
them, all hung with lamps, a small tufo grotto, the one down which, as
in Sodoma's fresco, the angels sent baskets of provisions and the
devils made horns at St. Benedict.

ROME, _March_ 30.

VII.

THE VALLEY OF THE ANIO.

There is a nice Cosmati cloister at S. Scolastica, lower on the hill,
an enormous also fortified-looking monastery, but to which also there
is only a mule path. These places are splendidly _meditative_, but
they do not give me the idea of hermitages in the wilderness like that
ruined Abbey of Sassovivo above Foligno. But the Sacro Speco's little
up and down chapels, a miniature Assisi, empty, yet not abandoned on
this sunburnt rock, are very impressive.

I take great pleasure following the Anio, which we first met coming
out of the narrow gorge round the S. Scolastica hill (the other side
behind Nero's ruins is a hill covered with pale green scrub, beech, or
more likely alder), down below Subiaco. In the ever-widening valley it
is an impetuous stream, but not at all a torrent; pale green filling
up a narrow bed between pale green willows, here and there slackening
into pools with delicate green wavin