Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloisa: about its walls there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell. The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its brakes counting by millions--sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river--built of stone, fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a living man that is blind. This was and is Sant' Aloisa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and noisy with the clash and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of the Tiber--the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes, and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I have always felt afraid. Sant' Aloisa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls, though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb. The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth. They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields: flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the broad and open country--our women, who only breathe at their ease in the obscurity of their _palco_ or under the shelter of a domino?