izon, stooped from the box to
call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on the plain of
Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From the village of
Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaiting Charles VIII. upon
that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikes suddenly aside, gains
a spur of the descending Apennines, and keeps this vantage till the
pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings are occasioned by thus adhering
to aretes, but the total result is a gradual ascent with free prospect
over plain and mountain. The Apennines, built up upon a smaller scale
than the Alps, perplexed in detail and entangled with cross sections and
convergent systems, lend themselves to this plan of carrying highroads
along their ridges instead of following the valley.

What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern water-shed is the
subtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines.
There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vast
expanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. And
over the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like an ethereal
raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimonious green--in
the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry and monotonous; for
these so finely moulded hills are made up of washed earth, the immemorial
wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brown villages, not unlike those of
Midland England, low houses built of stone and tiled with stone, and
square-towered churches, occur at rare intervals in cultivated hollows,
where there are fields and fruit trees. Water is nowhere visible except
in the wasteful river-beds. As we rise, we break into a wilder country,
forested with oak, where oxen and goats are browsing. The turf is starred
with lilac gentian and crocus bells, but sparely. Then comes the highest
village, Berceto, with keen Alpine air. After that, broad rolling downs
of yellowing grass and russet beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa.
The sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this
ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of
Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the
geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect of majesty
proportionately greater.

From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpment of
the Apennines, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steep