If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take the trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village of Fornovo—­a score of bare grey hovels on the margin of a pebbly river-bed beneath the Apennines.  The fields on either side, as far as eye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with flax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there with clover red as blood.  Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like flamelets of bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn is bending all one way beneath a western breeze.  But not less beautiful than this is the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here than in the acacia trees around Pavia.  As we drive, the fields become less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a tranquil sea.  When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to narrow on either hand, and the road rises.  Soon they open out again with gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheatre filled up from flank to flank with the ghiara or pebbly bottom of the Taro.  The Taro is not less wasteful than any other of the brotherhood of streams that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell the Po.  It wanders, an impatient rivulet, through a wilderness of boulders, uncertain of its aim, shifting its course with the season of the year, unless the jaws of some deep-cloven gully hold it tight and show how insignificant it is.  As we advance, the hills approach again; between their skirts there is nothing but the river-bed; and now on rising ground above the stream, at the point of juncture between the Ceno and the Taro, we find Fornovo.  Beyond the village the valley broadens out once more, disclosing Apennines capped with winter snow.  To the right descends the Ceno.  To the left foams the Taro, following whose rocky channel we should come at last to Pontremoli and the Tyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana.  On a May-day of sunshine like the present, the Taro is a gentle stream.  A waggon drawn by two white oxen has just entered its channel, guided by a contadino with goat-skin leggings, wielding a long goad.  The patient creatures stem the water, which rises to the peasant’s thighs and ripples round the creaking wheels.  Swaying to and fro, as the shingles shift upon the river-bed, they make their way across; and now they have emerged upon the stones; and now we lose them in a flood of sunlight.

It was by this pass that Charles VIII. in 1495 returned from Tuscany, when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept and crush him in the mousetrap of Fornovo.  No road remained for Charles and his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running, as I have described it, between the spurs of steep hills.  It is true that the valley of the Baganza leads, from a little higher up among the mountains, into Lombardy.  But this pass runs straight to