Nothing can be wilder than all the local surroundings of
the scene; nothing less town-like than the living things, human and
other, which are to enact their parts in it; nothing less rural,
nothing more completely of the town townish, than the assembled
company of spectators. Evidently, the individuals belonging to either
category look upon those of the other very little in the light of
fellow-creatures. In no country in the world is the division between
the town population and that of the country so wide as it is in Italy.
No one of either class seems to be struck by, or even to see, the
extreme beauty of the prospect from the spot on which we are standing.
It is a spot in the Campagna somewhat to the south-west of a line
drawn from the city to the base of the Alban Hills; and though the
place chosen for the operation of the merca is, as I have said, a
hollow, the generality of the immediate neighborhood is somewhat
higher than the level of the surrounding plain, and the eye is thus
enabled to wander far and wide over the Campagna--to the Alban Hills
southward; to the peak of Monte Cavo, where the early rays of the sun
are just touching with light the old gray walls of the convent on its
summit; to the large village of Rocca di Papa on its hillside a little
farther to the left; to the town of Grotto Ferrata on the lowest
instep of the hill, and more still to the left; and then Frascati,
with the heights of Tusculum above it; and thence to that wonderfully
beautiful opening in the range of hills where Preneste lies; and
beyond that, as we turn the delighted eye slowly round to the
eastward, the olive-rich hill of Tivoli, the woods that mark the
position of Hadrian's Villa, and the whole range of the Sabine Hills.
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