The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been
appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows
have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built
upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings
with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of
massive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are
trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the
windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the
line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town
is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous
bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the
highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers
rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we
had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable
outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity,
presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and
modes to shame.
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