_Mercy. Detail on Façade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino_ 209 _Perugino: Madonna and Patron Saints of Perugia, painted for the Magistrates' Chapel at Perugia, now in the Vatican at Rome_ 221 _First Translation of the Body of S. Ercolano (Fresco in the Pinacoteca of Perugia)_ 243 _Gonfalone of the Annunciation attributed to Niccolò Alunno_ 249 _Adoration of the Shepherds. By Fiorenzo di Lorenzo_ 253 _Via Della Pera under the Aqueduct on the way to the University_ 269 _Etruscan Mirror in Guadabassi Collection_ 280 _Tomb of Aruns Volumnius_ 287 _The Temple of Clitumnus_ 301 _Narni (with Angelo Inn in foreground)_ 307 The Story of Perugia CHAPTER I _The earliest Origins of Perugia and growth of the City_ Sometimes in a street or in a country road we meet an unknown person who seems to us wonderfully and inexplicably attractive. Perhaps we only catch a passing vision; the face, the figure passes us, oftener than not we never meet again, and even the memory of the vision which seemed so full of life, so strong, and so enduring, passes with the years, and we forget. But had we only tried a little, it would, in almost every instance, have been possible to follow the figure up, to learn what we wanted to know about it, to understand the reason why the face was full of meaning to us, and what it was which went before and gave the mouth its passion, the eyes their pain and sweetness. In nine cases out of ten we can, in this nineteenth century, discover the birth and parentage, the loves and hates, of any human being we may wish to know. But this is not the way with cities, and although they attract us in almost precisely the same fashion as people do, we cannot always trace their earliest origins. There are certain towns we come across in travel, of which we know very well that we want to know more. Perugia is one of these. It at once catches hold of one's imagination. No one can see it and forget it. A breath of the past is in it--of a past which we dimly feel to be prehistoric. Boldly we set to work to learn its history, and at first this seems an easy matter: the later centuries are a full and an enthralling study, for as long as men knew how to write they were certain to write about themselves, and the writers of Perugia had a wide dramatic field to work upon. But then come the records which are not written--which, in fact, are merely hearsay; and further even than hearsay is the period when we know that men existed, but which has no history at all beyond a few stone arrow heads, and bits of jade and flint.