The road to Gubbio from Perugia leads over a mountain pass as wild, and as forbidding in its aspect, as that of any in the Alps. Leaving the broad and wooded valley of the Tiber it winds in long fantastic wind-swept curves across the spines of the lower Apennines, then plunges somewhat suddenly down into the smiling fields and oak woods of the valley under Gubbio. The position of the town is most remarkable. It looks out on a smiling peaceful valley, but is backed by a terrific mountain gorge which would serve as an iron breastplate in the time of siege. Gubbio is a small brown-coloured town, compact and perfect in its parts; it has never changed since the middle ages. A fine Roman theatre, a mysterious Roman mausoleum, fallen asleep on the cornfields outside the city walls, tell of her early prime, but the character of the place, as we see it now, is purely mediæval. The people themselves have the spirit of their ancestors; the worship, which is almost like a fetish worship, of their patron Saint Ubaldo is as passionate in its intensity to-day as it was seven hundred years ago, when Barbarossa threatened to destroy the town.[113] There is scarcely a single new building in Gubbio. The great weaving-looms in the piazza are a relic of the city's commerce in the Middle Ages, and the exquisite line of the palace of her rulers, Palazzo dei Consoli, with the slim bell tower soaring up against the barren outline of the gorge, lives in one's memory long after many other points of Umbrian cities are forgotten. Gubbio's bell tower and Gubbio's Madonna are points which we remember with delight. Almost every Umbrian city has its local painter. Nelli is the painter of Gubbio and the gem of all his works has been left on the actual wall for which it first was painted. It was icy wintry weather, although the month was May, when we arrived at Gubbio, but in the fields all round it the flax shone grey and blue like a lagune. Had Nelli seen such flax fields when he painted his Madonna's and his angels' gowns? The stuffs he gave them were as blue, as pure, as all these flowers put together.[114] SPELLO. Early one morning we left Perugia and passed along the plain to Spello. We found it in a halo of May sunlight. There was nothing grim or forbidding, nothing Etruscan about the smiling little town; the sunlight and the air crept into the heart of its streets and seemed to linger there. Yet these were narrow and steep and made for war and not for peace or comfort, just like the streets of Perugia. Their character indeed is so purely mediæval and untouched, that the chains which guarded them at nightfall are even left hanging in one place to the walls. Right away from the town amongst the olive trees we came to the convent of S. Girolamo. There in the back of the choir is the little fresco of the Marriage of the Virgin by Pinturicchio--faint in colour and fragile in outline, but charming in its composition.