Taking with us from Isola a guide, originally a big burly man, but now a sad victim to malaria, we set out to visit the site of the ancient city and the few relics which survive.  It takes about four hours to complete the circuit of the walls; but there are four objects of special interest, the Arx, the Columbarium, the Ponte Sodo, and the Painted Tomb, which may be visited in less than three.  The extent of the city is surprising to those who have been in the habit of thinking that all the ancient towns in the neighbourhood of Rome were mere villages.  Dionysius says that it was equal in size to Athens.  Veii was indeed fully larger, and was about the dimensions of the city of Rome, included within the walls of Servius Tullius.  It occupied the whole extent of the platform on which it was situated; and as the area was bounded on every side by deep ravines, its size was thus absolutely circumscribed.  Built for security and not for the comfort and progress of its inhabitants, its confined and inaccessible situation would have unfitted it to become the capital of a great nation, as was at one time proposed.  Passing down a richly-wooded glen by a path overhanging a stream, we came to a molino or polenta mill, most romantically situated.  Here a fine cascade, about eighty feet high, plunges over the volcanic rock into a deep gulley overshadowed by bushy ilexes.  The scenery is very picturesque, and differs widely from that of the rest of the Campagna.  In its profusion of broom and hawthorn bushes, whose golden and snowy blossoms contrasted beautifully with the dark hues of the evergreen oaks, and in the snowy gleam of its falling waters, and the hoary gray of its lichen-clad cliffs, it presented features of resemblance to Scottish scenery.  It had indeed a peculiar home look about it which produced a very pleasing impression upon our minds.  Crossing the stream above the cascade by stepping-stones, between which the water rushed with a strong current, we entered the wide down upon which Veii stood.  No one would have supposed that this was the site of one of the most important ancient cities, which held at bay for ten long years the Roman army, and yielded at last to stratagem and not to force.  Not a vestige of a ruin could be seen.  In the heart of the city the grass was growing in all the soft green transparency of spring, and a few fields of corn were marked out and showed the tender braird above the soil.  The relics of the walls that crowned the cliffs have almost entirely disappeared.  No Etruscan site has so few remains; and yet its interest is intensified by the extreme desolation.  It is more suggestive to the imagination because of the paucity of its objects to appeal to the eye.  Legend and history haunt the spot with nothing to distract the mind or dispel its musing melancholy.  All trace of human passion has disappeared, and only the eternal calm of nature broods over the spot; the calm that was before man came upon the scene, and that shall be after all his labour is over.