The first stage of our rough ride was to the little hill town of Prato Vecchio on the infant Arno, and close under the lofty peaks of Falterona, in the flanks of which both the Arno and the Tiber rise.  The path, as it descends to the town, winds round the ruins of an ancient castle, beneath the walls of which is still existent that Fontebranda fountain, which Adam the forger in the Inferno longed for a drop of, and which almost all Dantescan scholars and critics mistake for a larger and nowadays better known fountain of the same name at Siena.  On pointing it out to George Eliot, I found, of course, that the name and the whole of Adam the forger’s history was familiar to her; but she had little expected to find his local habitation among these wild hills; and she was unaware of the current mistake between the Siena Fontebranda, and the little rippling streamlet before us.

The little osteria, at which we were to get some breakfast, was a somewhat lurid dwelling in an uninviting back lane.  But the ready and smiling good-humour with which the hostess prepared her coffee and bread, and eggs and bacon, availed much to make up for deficiencies, especially for guests far more interested in observing every minute specialty of the place, the persons, and the things, than they were extreme to mark what was amiss.  I remember George Eliot was especially struck by the absence of either milk or butter, and by the fact that the inhabitants of these hills, and indeed the Tuscans of the remoter parts of the country generally, never use them at all—­or did not in those days.

But it was beyond Prato Vecchio that the most characteristic part of our ride began.  The hills, into the folds and gullies of which we plunged almost immediately after leaving the walls of the little town, are of the most arid, and it is hardly too much to say, repulsive description.  It is impossible to imagine soil more evidently to the least experienced eye hopeless for any purpose useful to man, than these rolling and deeply water-scored hills.  Nor has the region any of the characters of the picturesque.  The soil is very friable, consisting of an easily disintegrated slaty limestone, of a pale whitey-brown in prevailing colour, varied here and there by stretches of similar material greenish in tint.  For the most part the hill-sides are incapable of nourishing even a blade of grass; and they are evidently in the process of rapid removal into the Mediterranean, for the further extension of the plain that has been formed between Pisa and the shore since the time, only a few hundred years ago, when Pisa was a first-class naval power.  All this, with the varied historical corollaries and speculations which it suggested, was highly interesting to my fellow-travellers.