In the very height of the midday we left Foligno and took the road to Spoleto. It is a fine broad road, passing along the site of the old Flaminian Way, grand, dusty, white, with a feeling that Rome is at the end of it, and Umbria but a little land to be passed quickly by. As we trundled along in our clumsy landau dragged by a pair of miserable horses, we thought of all the popes, the emperors and legions, who, going south or northwards, had passed in this direction. The dust flew up and almost choked us; it was the week of the wild roses, and the hedges were all aglow with their delicious blossoms, their petals bent wide back as though to catch the very essence of the sunlight on their golden stamens. We left the main road a little below Trevi, and driving through fields and oak woods, passed up the hills by a steep short cut which leads to the town above. This road cannot be recommended to travellers unless they go on foot; our poor little city horses struggled painfully over the sand and pebbles of the numerous streams it crosses. But what a stretch of country for the artist! Everywhere the poppies were in flower--a shimmer of pure cadmiums and carmines under the oaks and the olives. After about an hour's climb we came out suddenly on the broad bastions of the road which runs from Trevi to the convent of S. Martino. TREVI. The tiny town of Trevi is a familiar object to all who pass along the line to Rome. It stands, as one expects all Umbrian towns to stand, a crown of buildings closely packed upon a little hill-top. The city felt bare and baked when we entered it, and we left it soon to wander round its bastion-road; a thing which was fairer far than all the pictures in the churches.[119] Long we sat in the grasses, tracing out the landmarks in the heat mist far below us: Montefalco in the foreground, Perugia behind it, Assisi and Spello a little to the right, and, sunk in the broad plain of the Clitumnus, just as Raphael painted them four hundred years ago, the houses and the towers of Foligno. THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS. "Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges, et maxima taurus Victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro, Romanos ad templa Deum duxere triumphos." Georg. ii. 146. Barely three miles from Trevi, just off the dusty road, in the burning heat of a brewing storm, we came to the Temple of Clitumnus. This marvellously romantic spot needs no description of ours, for the tiny temple seems to hold the very essence of what is best in pagan art and worship, and its praises have been sung by classic poets throughout the course of centuries.[120] [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS] With the following stanzas passing through one's mind, one may linger very long and pleasantly down by the water's edge, and dragging one's hands in the cool stream, and looking towards the temple up above, dream golden dreams of river gods and hamadryads as well as of "milk white steer."