From Ostia I walked down to the shore, among brushwood of a hundred flowering shrubs. The sand hills nearest the sea are chiefly covered with junipers. The sand itself is dark, and has a dirty look, arising from its colour; its material is chiefly volcanic. Herds of buffaloes graze in these woods, the ugliest of the ox tribe. They are said to be sometimes mischievous, and are therefore not very pleasant companions in a solitary walk; but though they frequently approached to stare at me, they always dispersed before I came very near them. ---------------------------- 1826. There are two or three other very interesting excursions which may be made in the neighbourhood of Rome. One of these is to Veii, where I have just been in company with my friends Scott and Pardini. The situation of this city has been, as you know, long a subject of dispute, but it is now determined with so much certainty, that one wonders how it could ever have been doubted. It is only very lately that the Roman antiquaries have suspected that a careful examination of the localities might help to determine questions of this sort. We leave the road to Florence just beyond the tenth mile-stone, and a practicable carriage-way conducts us to Isola Farnese, a small village with a baronial palace, and various excavations in the precipitous and almost insulated rock of tufo on which it stands. At the foot of this rock runs a little stream, and an extensive platform at the top of the opposite steep ascent is the site of the ancient Veii. The bank is steep all round, and the boundary of the city followed the sinuosities of the hill. Parts of the ancient walls remain. They are of squared masonry, about eight or nine feet thick, and the blocks not very large. There are a few fragments of Roman times scattered about; and in a rock above the Cremera, (another little brook which afterwards unites with that below Isola Farnese) there are remains of sepulchres, which perhaps belonged to the ancient city. Yet we find here the usual sepulchral niche, with the cinerary urn at bottom, and some remains of the stucco, and of the red paint which adorned it. One of them has a recess within the niche to receive a tablet with the inscription, and part of the iron nails by which this tablet was attached to the rock may still be distinguished. At a little distance are other rocks cut in a similar manner. All of them are on the steep irregular bank between the city and the stream. Ascending by the banks of this little brook, we come to the Ponte Sodo, where the rivulet has been turned from its natural bed, and passes through a subterranean channel under a spur of the hill of Veii. I suspect this to be a Roman, not an Etruscan work, but I cannot explain why it was done. Just where the water enters, this perforation divides another channel obliquely, the two parts of which are seen at an