Onward along the coasts from Rio, we come to the ancient town of Portolongone, built along the curve of a fine, natural harbour. Sheer above the town, where the Portolongone women flaunt it along their sea front after mass, in the brightest of dresses, and the most artistic of black or white lace head-veils, rises one of the strongest fortresses of the island. It was built in 1603, to the infinite dismay and disturbance of such small fry as the Florentines, Genoese, and the Pope, by Philip III. of Spain. The approach to it is broad, but very steep; the outer ring of fortifications are a city in themselves; and within, across the inner moat and drawbridge, there are spacious squares, clusters of houses, an interesting church, and the large prisons in which are kept criminals condemned to solitary confinement. The prisons we cannot enter, but let us sit for a while in the chaplain’s cool, brick-paved room, sipping the country wine and breaking the long, curled strips of pastry which his hospitable womenfolk have heaped on the table, and listen to what he has to tell us of his charges. “No,” he says, “they none of them live long, once they come in here; they go mad or fall into consumption, and so die if they have not succeeded in committing suicide first. We have to look out sharply to prevent that. A man managed to do it, though, about a month ago. He tore his shirt into strips and made a slip-knot for his neck, climbed, no one knows how, to the grate in the middle of the deep window-hole, and tied the end of the noose there, bound his own hands together somehow or other, and then kicked away the stool he had been standing on. When he felt himself strangling, he struggled to get free, but his hands were fast, and he only succeeded in pulling the noose tighter and tighter. He was quite dead when they took him down. Outside the prison are a number of cells open to the air, closed by iron gates. You can see them down there.” We were walking about outside by this time, where the convicts not in solitary confinement are building the new prisons. “Every prisoner has an hour’s turn in one of those open-air cells once a day, guards pacing outside the gates the whole time. “Their food? Well, yes, as you say, it is clean, savoury, and well-cooked”—we had been peeping into the kitchens as we came along—“but they have a very small allowance; a plate of soup given half at midday and half in the evening (vegetable soup, with _pasta_ in it) and two loaves, not much bigger than rolls, of white bread. It is piteous to see how a stout well-built man dwindles away on this _régime_. The men who are at work buy extras with their wages. Those who wear chains from ankle to wrist were sentenced under the old penal code. When they go to bed they are chained to the wall. Chains are abolished by the new code.