And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the
height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the
people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on
their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not
live a beautiful and jolly life.
I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is
well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts
the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside
this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious
and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient
Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain
two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site,
including, I suppose, the space occupied by the lower city, which looks
as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the
precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange
confusion of black and ugly houses, piled massively out of the ruins of
former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his
hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a
pillar, that might have adorned a palace.
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