f colour, the clear
freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we
pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:--

What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin, by the mountain road;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco basking glowed.

Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It
is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.

Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
uniformity of its existence. The town from which Caesar sailed to Genoa
and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Ge