i. This
is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and still in the possession
of the Marquis of that name.

The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of
plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the
open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either
hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow
their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a
great ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are still
quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main road, we
pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay
and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may you see just
such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by
inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is neglected now; the
semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green mosses,
the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and the rose
trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have gone wandering
a-riot into country hedges. There is no demarcation between the great
man's villa and the neighbouring farms. From this point the path rises,
and the barren hill-side is a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did
the Greeks consecrate these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra
complained that her father's tomb had not received the honour of the
myrtle branch; and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in
memory of Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember
lines of Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of
myrtle wands:

+kai prospeson eklaus' eremias tychon
spondas te lysas askon on phero zenois
espeisa tymbo d' amphetheka mursinas.+

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the
prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening bay
of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of
partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in which a ruin
looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce
this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such
antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild
cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never
missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals,
where portcullises still