III.—­FOSDINOVO

The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni.  This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still in the possession of the Marquis of that name.

The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves.  It then takes to the open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines.  The country-folk allow their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a great ornament to the grey branches.  The berries on the trees are still quite green, and it is a good olive season.  Leaving the main road, we pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan.  Here may you see just such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by inch, in his Peter Martyr picture.  The place is neglected now; the semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green mosses, the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and the rose trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have gone wandering a-riot into country hedges.  There is no demarcation between the great man’s villa and the neighbouring farms.  From this point the path rises, and the barren hillside is a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles.  Why did the Greeks consecrate these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love?  Electra complained that her father’s tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch; and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory of Harmodius.  Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines of Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtle wands: 

(Greek:)

  kai prospeson eklaus’ eremias tuchon
  spondas te lusas askon hon phero xenois
  espeisa tumbo d’amphetheka mursinas.

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the prospect over plain and sea—­the fields where Luna was, the widening bay of Spezzia—­grows ever grander.  The castle is a ruin, still capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair—­the state in which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn.  How strange it is, too, that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such antique masonry!  Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild cucumber.  At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them.  And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves.  Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina—­a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic irony.