Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded
in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni
and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an
isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba,
the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the
hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the
middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief
street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the
hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it,
than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space,
allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia,
and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must
confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well
their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works
of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the
difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious
forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring
us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by
ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord
Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there
would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of
earthly men," or as--
Reared by the hands of giants
For godlike kings of old.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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