es are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from
the copse-woods, where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the
thin, fine grass. The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald
green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage
tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. A
fine race of _contadini_, with large, heroically graceful forms, and
beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on
ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil.

LA MAGIONE

On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La
Magione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian
champaign to the lake of Thrasymene.

It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately
castle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio. Here took
place that famous diet of Cesare Borgia's enemies, when the son of
Alexander VI. was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair
to make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502. It was the policy of
Cesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to
submission, and by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired a
sort of tyranny in Papal cities. The Varani of Camerino and the
Manfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated. There was only too
good reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Citta di
Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bologna
would come next. Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sides
by Cesare's conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification of
Piombino, felt himself in danger. The great house of the Orsini, who
swayed a large part of the Patrimony of S. Peter's, and were closely
allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety. But such was
the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble families
lived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay of
Cesare. When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they were
plotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they had
hitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation.

The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of
Alexander VI.; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan;
Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Citta di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni,
made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin
Grifonetto's treason; Oliverotto, who had just ac