The path we pursued was different from that which I had travelled before, and the intense solitude around it was almost oppressive. We were marching through a dense forest, where not a sound broke its stillness, save the cry of a solitary lynx or the flap of an eagle’s wing, as he soared to his eyrie in the sandstone cliffs which reared their rugged front above the woodlands. White wreaths of distant smoke shot up in vapoury columns through the green foliage, announcing that the wild contained other human beings than ourselves; but whether these were poor charcoal-burners, or robbers roasting a fat buck on the green sward, we knew not. We passed one or two lonely cottages, where the labouring hinds were separating grain from its husks, by the ancient modes—trampling the corn under the hoofs of cattle, or rolling over it a large stone drawn by a team of stout buffaloes. Calabria was then (and perhaps is yet) widely different from every other part of Italy: its peculiar situation, its lofty mountains, its dense forests spreading from sea to sea and intersected by few roads, and its hordes of banditti, made it dangerous and difficult of access to the artist and tourist; consequently, until the close of Manhes’ campaign of blood, it was an unknown territory to the rest of Europe. These circumstances rendered the natives rude in character and revengeful in spirit; and thus a mighty barrier rose between the lower orders and the noblesse: who (in the words of a recent writer on Italy) "live wholly apart from the people—they compose two entirely distinct worlds." After halting in forests during the sultry noon, cantoning in villages, and marching in the cool morning and evening for two days, we arrived near Amato, a little town within a few leagues of the Villa D’Alfieri. We were traversing a deep pass of the Apennines, when the evening, which had been serene and fine, became clouded: the lowering sky portended a coming tempest. We pushed on, at an increased pace, to reach a castellated villa, the residence of a Calabrian of rank, which we saw perched on an isolated mass of rock, about a league up the mountains. Striking and picturesque appeared the Vale of Amato, as the setting sun poured its last blaze of radiance down the deep gorge between the dark wooded hills, gilding the crenellated battlements, Saracenic galleries and Norman keep of the distant castle; and reflected in the river, which glowed like a stream of molten gold between thickets of sombre cypress and fragrant orange-trees. Gradually, the hue of the setting orb changed from bright saffron to deep red; and a flood of crimson lustre fell over everything, tinging the lofty hills, the thick woods, the glassy river with a blood-red tint, which rapidly became more sombre as the sun disappeared behind the pine-clad hills. Then thunder rumbled through the darkening sky; gloomy banks of cloud came scudding across it, and volumes of vapour rolled away from the bed of the Amato.