PERUSIA AUGUSTA

The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these nights of full moon.  The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona.  The hills are capped with snow, although the season is so forward.  Below our parapets the bulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and the finer group of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy ‘Pennacchio di Perugia,’ jut out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber.  As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching.  Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria.  Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements.  Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain.  The slowly moving population—­women in veils, men winter-mantled—­pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky.  Bells ring.  The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks.  Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs.  Far, far away upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamed castelli smoulder.  As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gas vies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls; Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburban world-old dwellings plastered like martins’ nests against the masonry.

Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene.  To the right of Subasio, where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy masses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain and hill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness.  First comes Assisi, with S.M. degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi; and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the village height of Montefalco—­the ‘ringhiera dell’ Umbria,’ as they call it in this country.  By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia.  The lower ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with villages and farms.  Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of red brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers.  The mills beneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and the feeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, of some Umbrian picture.  Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and honeysuckle.  The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels.  Wayside shrines