The lake, with its islands and charming contours, is beautiful to look upon, but the low hills surrounding it are sterile, the climate is insalubrious, its waters harbour but few fish, and the inhabitants on its shores look impatiently forward {264} to the time when the engineers will fulfil their promise of winning for agriculture 30,000 acres of fertile land now covered by the waters of the lake. [Illustration: Fig. 93.—LAKE OF TRASIMENO. From the Austrian Staff Map. Scale 1 : 250,000.] But far more urgent, on sanitary and economical grounds, are the claims of the Roman Campagna; that is, of the region lying between the Tolfa of Cività Vecchia, Monte Soracte, the Sabine Hills, and the volcanoes of Latium. Slavery and maladministration have converted a fertile region into a desert extending to the very gates of Rome. Painters are enraptured with this Roman Campagna; they admire its melancholy aspect, its picturesque ruins hidden beneath brambles, its solitary pines, its pools reflecting the purple clouds, and visited by thirsty buffaloes. True, this region, bounded by hills of bold contours, is full of grandeur and sadness; but the air that hangs over it is deadly, the soil and climate of this _Agro Romano_ have deteriorated, and fever now reigns there supreme. Two thousand years ago the Roman Campagna, which covers an area of 600,000 acres to the north of the Tiber, and extends from the sea to the mountains, was a fertile and carefully cultivated country. Then its inhabitants were reduced to the condition of serfs, the Roman patricians appropriated the land, and {265} covered it with villas and parks. When these magnificent residences were given up to pillage and to flames, the cultivators of the soil dispersed, and the country immediately became a desert. Since that epoch most of the Agro is held in mortmain by ecclesiastical corporations or princely families, and whilst all the rest of Europe has been making progress, the Campagna has become even more sterile and insalubrious. Swamps continually invade the lowlands, and an atmosphere charged with miasmata hangs even above the hills. Malaria has already knocked at the gates of Rome, and the fevers produced by it decimate the population of its suburbs. [Illustration: Fig. 94.—THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA.]