in dry
leaves, then paved with hard volcanic flags; chestnut woods, but no
longer cut for charcoal (the smoke of its burning rises from below),
but in clumps, straight slender boles rising from immense roots.
Chestnuts so unlike those of our Apennines that, when, higher up, they
are exchanged for beeches, it is only by picking up the fallen dry
leaves that we could tell the difference. And beyond, descending
towards Nemi, the woods reveal themselves for alder only by their
catkins.

Immediately above the town of Rocca di Papa, before you begin that
ascent through the woods of Monte Cavo, are the Campi d'Annibale, the
former crater of the volcano of Mons Latialis, grass fields whose
legend Pascarella tells us: that when Hannibal encamped there the
Romans raised the necessary money by selling the ground of the enemy's
camp! A strange, unexpected place; a great green basin, bleak and
bare, marked only by fences like some northern hill-top; on such fell
sides shall the Romans camp above the Tyne and Tweed.

We climbed up through the woods, Antonia and I, following the keeper
in his riding boots, silent, or at most exchanging a word about the
flowers, all blue, borage, squill, and dog violets, among the fallen
leaves. And little by little there unrolled, deep below us, the dim
green plain with a whiteness which is St. Peter's; and then there
unfolded, gradually, unexpected, the pale blue of one lake and of a
second. Till, near the top, they had both turned into steely mirrors,
tarnished, as by breath, by the rapidly passing clouds. And the pink
of the leafless woods stretches away, soft and feathery, to distant
towns and villages. And we ascend, with the wind arising to meet us,
always through softly winding paths, to the summit of the Latin
mountain. To a long, gaunt, white, empty house, a circle of ancient
moss-grown walls, a circle of old, wind-bent, leafless beeches, with
the whole world of earliest Rome misty below, and thin clouds passing
rapidly overhead. This is that sort of natural altar, visible as such
even from the streets of Rome, of the Latin Jove, which, when we saw
it again later from the ridge near Castel Gandolfo, above the deep
circular chasm (fringed with asphodel) of the lake, seemed to smoke
with a superhuman sacrifice.

How Renan, in the _Pretre di Nemi_, has rendered, without
descriptions, the charm of that outlook towards Rome from this lower
portion of the Latin hills! They cover a very small a