ins of a
roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and
gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in
them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the
fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features of interest.
It is very unlike any other church in Italy, and reminds one of the
country churches of England. What led the Gaetanis to adopt this
foreign style of ecclesiastical architecture is a circumstance
unexplained. Altogether it is a most incongruous group of objects that
are here clustered together--a tomb, a fortress, and a church--and
affords a curious illustration of the bizarre condition of society at
the time. An extraordinary echo repeats here every sound entrusted to
it with the utmost distinctness. It doubtless multiplied the wailings
of the mourners who brought to this spot two thousand years ago the
ashes of the dead; it sent back the rude sounds of warfare which
disturbed the peace of the tomb in the middle ages; and now it haunts
the spot like the voice of the past, "informing the solitude," and
giving a response to each new-comer according to his mood.

Beyond the tomb of Caecilia Metella the Appian Way becomes more
interesting and beautiful. The high walls which previously shut in the
road on either side now disappear, and nothing separates it from the
Campagna but a low dyke of loose stones. The traveller obtains an
uninterrupted view of the immense melancholy plain, which stretches
away to the horizon with hardly a single tree to relieve the
desolation. Here and there on the waste surface are fragments of ruins
which speak to the heart, by their very muteness, more suggestively
than if their historical associations were fully known. The mystic
light from a sky which over this place seems ever to brood with a sad
smile more touching than tears, falls upon the endless arches of the
Claudian Aqueduct that remind one, as Ruskin has finely said, of a
funeral procession departing from a nation's grave. The afternoon sun
paints them with ruby splendours, and gleams vividly upon the
picturesque vegetation which a thousand springs have sown upon their
crumbling sides. They lead the eye on to the Alban Hills, which form
on the horizon a fitting frame to the great picture, tender-toned,
with delicate pearly and purple shadows clothing every cliff and
hollow, like "harmonies of music turned to shape."

I shall never forget my first walk over