Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly
that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in
derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount
kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There
is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely
interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road
by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still
the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre
of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the
pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of
crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes
his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she
did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as
favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood
of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there,
according to one version of his story, his body--or perhaps only his
head--found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the
Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had
so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all _Albana_,
the _Albanum_ of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long
terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The
walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian
camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still
exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still
keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old,
seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano
and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona.
In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in
the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between
them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample
ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato
stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in
her day of overthrow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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