i, with Monte Amiata
full in front--its double crest and long volcanic slope recalling Etna;
the belt of embrowned forest on its flank, made luminous by sunlight.
Far away stretches the Sienese Maremma; Siena dimly visible upon her
gentle hill; and still beyond, the pyramid of Volterra, huge and
cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, as is almost invariable in
this district, keeps to the highest line of ridges, winding much, and
following the dimplings of the earthy hills. Here and there a solitary
castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts into
picturesqueness from some point of vantage on a mound surrounded with
green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable _creta_, ash-grey
earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately
breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to
believe that this _creta_ of Southern Tuscany, which has all the
appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape,
can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only
needs assiduous labour to render it enormously productive.

When we reached Pienza we were already in the middle of a country
without cultivation, abandoned to the marl. It is a little place,
perched upon the ledge of a long sliding hill, which commands the vale
of Orcia; Monte Amiata soaring in aerial majesty beyond. Its old name
was Cosignano. But it had the honour of giving birth to AEneas Sylvius
Piccolomini, who, when he was elected to the Papacy and had assumed the
title of Pius II., determined to transform and dignify his native
village, and to call it after his own name. From that time forward
Cosignano has been known as Pienza.

Pius II. succeeded effectually in leaving his mark upon the town. And
this forms its main interest at the present time. We see in Pienza how
the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the
representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century,
commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, worked out his whim
of city-building. The experiment had to be made upon a small scale; for
Pienza was then and was destined to remain a village. Yet here, upon
this miniature piazza--in modern as in ancient Italy the meeting-point
of civic life, the forum--we find a cathedral, a palace of the bishop,
a palace of the feudal lord, and a palace of the commune, arranged upon
a well-considered plan, and executed after one desig