I shall not soon forget my visit to this romantic spot, and the delightful day I spent there with a congenial friend.  We left Rome in an open one-horse carriage early one morning about the end of April.  Passing out at the Porta del Popolo, we quickly traversed the squalid suburb and crossed the Ponte Molle—­the famous old Milvian Bridge.  We proceeded as far as the Via Cassia on the old Flaminian Way.  At the junction of these roads the villa and gardens of Ovid were situated; but their site is now occupied by a humble osteria or wayside tavern.  The road passes over an undulating country entirely uncultivated, diversified here and there with copses and thickets of wild figs intermixed with hawthorn, rose-bushes, and broom.  A few ilexes and stone-pines arched their evergreen foliage over the road; and the succulent milky stems of the wild fig-trees were covered with the small green fruit, while the downy leaves were just beginning to peep from their sheaths.  It was one of those quiet gray days that give a mystic tone to a landscape.  The cloudy sky was in harmony with the dim Campagna, that looked under the sunless smoky light unutterably sad and forlorn.  Wreaths of mist lingered in the hollows like the shadowy forms of the past; the lark was silent in the sky; and on the desolate bluffs and headlands, where once stood populous cities, were a few hoary tombs whose very names had perished ages ago.  But inexpressibly sad as the landscape looked it was relieved by the grand background of the Sabine range capped with snow.  The village of La Storta, that flourished in the old posting days, had fallen into decay when the railway diverted the traffic from it; and its inn, with a rude model of St. Peter’s carved in wood projecting above its door, was silent and deserted.  Passing down a narrow glen, fringed with wood for three miles from this point, we came in sight of the village of Isola.  Its situation is romantic, perched on the summit of a steep cliff, with deep richly-wooded ravines around it, and long swelling downs rising beyond.  It is surrounded by two streams which unite and fall along with the Formello into the river called La Valca, which has been identified with the fatal Cremera that was dyed red with the blood of the three hundred Fabii.

The rock of Isola is most interesting to the geologist, consisting of large fragments of black pumice cemented together by volcanic ashes deposited under water.  It is literally a huge heap of cinders thrown out by the rapidly intermittent action of some neighbouring volcano, probably the crater of Baccano, or that which is now filled with the blue waters of Lake Bracciano.  The whole mass is very friable, and in every direction the soft rock is hollowed out into sepulchral caves.  By many this isolated rock is considered the arx or citadel of Veii; but the existence of so many sepulchral caves in it is, as Mr. Dennis says, conclusive of the fact that it was the Necropolis of the ancient