Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
The town of Albano itself contains a good many antiquities, the most
prominent among which, that which greets the eye on the entrance from
Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so cruelly stripped of its hewn
stone, which, truly or falsely, passes for the tomb of Cnæus Pompeius
Magnus. More striking on a close examination, though spoiled in its
effect by a Papal freak of restoration, is the tomb which hovers
between the names of Aruns son of Porsena and the Horatii and Curiatii.
Which of the two would Sir George Lewis have looked on as the more
impossible? This is the tomb which so singularly forestalled the
outline of the Glastonbury kitchen--before its chimneys perished--and
thereby of the Museum laboratory at Oxford. A good deal of the wall of
the camp, a good deal of an amphitheatre on the hill-side, and several
other fragments of the earlier Imperial time, are still to be seen.
But after all Albano really exists, not for its own sake, but as a
starting-point for the Alban lake and the Alban mount, and hardly less
as a starting-point for
... the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia's trees.
Aricia has changed its site; the small modern town has flown up to
the level of the _arx_, to be approached by Albano by almost the only
work on which we do not grudge to see the name of Pius IX. The viaduct
of that "Pontifex Optimus Maximus"--his votaries seem never quite to
distinguish between him and Jupiter--is really a work worthy of Cæsars
or consuls. Below it new Aricia has left the elder city, its fragments
of walls and of the Appian Way, to be sought for in the valley below,
the crater, so wise men tell us, of an extinct volcano, the biggest
surely even in this region where craters meet us at every step. Scraps
of primæval wall, hardly to be distinguished from the rocks, prepare
us for what we are to see at places further out of the ordinary track;
walls of the days of Sulla join on alike to what we have seen at Rome,
and to what we are to see at Cori. But, after all, the "still glassy
lake" to which the grove of the "rex nemorensis" has given the name of
Nemi, is the true glory of Aricia. How well we remember being puzzled
years and years ago with the thrilling run of the lines--
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
In these days the fault would be held to lie with the poet for
venturing on an allusion which it might need a little research to take
in. In those days we thought in such cases that the fault lay with
ourselves; we admired without understanding till we lighted on the
explanation which enabled us to understand as well. As such a process
is a wholesome one, we will leave the lines without comment; not to
speak of books of reference, the story will be found, in a somewhat
grotesque form, in Dr. Merivale's chapter on the reign of Caius, better
known as Caligula.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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