As far as Monte Rosi we followed the same road as that by which I had entered Rome, over the desolate Campagna. A church there, at the entrance of the village, is of a pleasing form; it is a little whitewashed thing, so that it wants the process of an artist’s mind in separating the good from the bad, to discover that the form is beautiful. The world in general is exceedingly unwilling to acknowledge beauty of form when the material is bad, and on the other hand, where the materials are good, it is very ready to praise the form also, if that be anything tolerable; the one is a much more obvious and indisputable merit than the other. In what the beauty of form in the present case consists, I have not been able to determine. It is an octagonal dome, with four projections below, forming a Greek cross, with a little tower on each side of the entrance, inferior in height to the dome. I call them towers and not turrets because they are continued down to the ground, and turrets might be understood as only elevations raised upon the front. Some lower buildings fill up the square, and at each angle is a paltry little obelisk, not at all well shaped, yet certainly contributing to the general beauty of the composition. [Illustration: Illustration of church] Just after leaving Monte Rosi we quitted the Siena road, and keeping to the right, passed through fine groves of oak to Nepi, a town situated on the edge of a deep ravine, and slept at Cività Castellana, which stands on a point of land between two such ravines, deeper than that at Nepi, and very wild and picturesque. The country here is intersected by several of these inaccessible valleys, and the strength of the situation gave birth to a conjecture that this must be the position of the ancient Veii, which cost the Romans a ten years siege. There is a cathedral, with a portico of small columns of granite and marble, and a mosaic frieze something in the style of San Lorenzo _fuori delle mura_, at Rome. The middle doorway is of the Lombard architecture, with two columns on each side, the outermost of which are supported on two lions: the inside has been modernized. At Cività Castellana I left two of my companions: the next morning was very foggy, but I set out on foot before the carriage, and crossed a bridge which must be at least 120 feet high, over one of the ravines. It consists of two ranges of arches, and there was to have been a third, which would have kept the road up to a level with the banks, but this has never been executed. A little beyond I entered into conversation with a labourer going to reap for some friends of his, as he told me, on land belonging to a convent just by; he had first been a monk, then a soldier, and was now going to labour for the love he bore to religion. He assured me that he possessed a very fine picture by Giotto, but it was then at Viterbo; repeated some verses of his own composition in praise of the English, and concluded with asking me for charity.