This surrounding district, known as the Roman Campagna, possesses a singular fascination, which has been often and enthusiastically described. The endless and exquisite variety of form and colour presented by the plain and its boundary of distant mountains, together with the changing effects of weather and season on such a groundwork, would of themselves furnish ample subjects for admiration. But the influence of this natural beauty is vastly enhanced by the strange and solemn loneliness of a scene which living man seems to have almost utterly forsaken, leaving behind him only memories of a storied past which are awakened at every turn by roofless walls of long-abandoned farm-buildings, mouldering ruins of medieval towers, fragments of imperial aqueducts, decayed substructures of ancient villas and the grass-grown sites of ancient cities whose names are forever linked with the early struggles of Rome. European travel offers few more instructive experiences than may be gained by wandering at will over that rolling sward, carpeted with spring-flowers, but silent save for the song of the larks overhead and the rustle of the breeze among the weeds below; when the mountainous wall of the Sabine chain from Soracte round to the Alban Hills gleams under the soft Italian sky with the iridescence of an opal, and when the imagination, attuned to the human associations of the landscape, recalls with eager interest, some of the incidents in the marvellous succession of historical events that have been transacted here. If, besides being keenly alive to all the ordinary sources of attraction, the visitor can look below the surface, he may gain a vast increase to his interest in the ground by finding there intelligible memorials of prehistoric scenes, and learning from them by what slow steps the platform was framed on which Rome rose and flourished and fell. He will thus discover that, as befitted the city which was to rule the world, its birthplace was fashioned by the co-operation of the grandest forces in Nature; that, on the one hand, subterranean upheaval and stupendous volcanic activity combined to build up the plain and hills of the Campagna, and that on the other, the universal and ceaseless working of the subaërial agencies has carved it into that varied topography which is typified in the isolation of the Seven Hills of Rome and of the many crags and ridges that served as sites for the towns of Latium and Etruria.