The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the two
wanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides the
peculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had long
ago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in our
mind's eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in the
lofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,
where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the
open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the
outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of
apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted
boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic
habitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a
door, that has been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Small
windows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, so
that it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in a
strange style of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and
earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and
running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the
roughness of its decay.
Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waves
on the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike
precinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of its
ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human lives
are spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit of
the wall.
Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged only
by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Roman
fashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, or
half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along from
end to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy
sidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic village
as from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closed
with wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,
and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.
It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when
no human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possesses
vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors of
the village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the
small windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populace
are at the butcher's shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes into
a marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing
before his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at
play; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hats
of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling
from one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing.