and
Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity and isolation.
Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks; and the brown
mediaeval walls with square towers which protected them upon the mountain
side, following the inequalities of the ground, are still a marked
feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets and staircases,
with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn
across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial
notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as
they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to
the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising
ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the
blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds. All
this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight
and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct with
age, but beautiful.

Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages. But poor people
are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants. These new
inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals
of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without
materially changing the architectural masses. In that witching hour when
the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the glowing
tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming by
oneself alone, to picture the old noble life--the ladies moving along
those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair with
one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules
and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts
within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene
has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters
which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these
disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by
Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city
was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of
the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the
Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is
here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman
in