Of all the hill-cities I saw in Italy certainly Perugia was the most remarkable, the most sparkling, the most forward in all things commercial. It stands high, very high, above the plain as you come in at the depot and a wide-windowed trolley-car carries you up to the principal square, the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, stopping in front of the modern hotels which command the wide sea-like views which the valley presents below. Never was a city so beautifully located. Wonderful ridges of mountains fade into amazing lavenders, purples, scarlets, and blues, as the evening falls or the dawn brightens. If I were trying to explain where some of the painters of the Umbrian school, particularly Perugino, secured their wonderful sky touches, their dawn and evening effects, I should say that they had once lived at Perugia. Perugino did. It seemed to me as I wandered about it the two days that I was there that it was the most human and industrious little city I had ever walked into. Every living being seemed to have so much to do. You could hear, as you went up and down the streets--streets that ascend and descend in long, winding stairways, step by step, for blocks--pianos playing, anvils ringing, machinery humming, saws droning, and, near the great abattoir where cattle were evidently slaughtered all day long, the piercing squeals of pigs in their death throes. There was a busy market-place crowded from dawn until noon with the good citizens of Perugia buying everything from cabbages and dress-goods to picture post-cards and hardware. Long rows of fat Perugian old ladies, sitting with baskets of wares in front of them, all gossiped genially as they awaited purchasers. In the public square facing the great hotels, nightly between seven and ten, the whole spirited city seemed to be walking, a whole world of gay, enthusiastic life that would remind you of an American manufacturing town on a Saturday night--only this happens every night in Perugia. When I arrived there I went directly to my hotel, which faces the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It was excellent, charmingly built, beautifully located, with a wide view of the Umbrian plain which is so wonderful in its array of distant mountains and so rich in orchards, monasteries, convents and churches. I think I never saw a place with so much variety of scenery, such curious twists of streets and lanes, such heights and depths of levels and platforms on which houses, the five- and six-story tenement of the older order of life in Italy, are built. The streets are all narrow, in some places not more than ten or fifteen feet wide, arched completely over for considerable distances, and twisting and turning, ascending or descending as they go, but they give into such adorable squares and open places, such magnificent views at every turn!