among the inhuman rocks, and Serchio for ever whispers her name.  Here too, doubtless, came Ariosto, most serene of poets, when in 1522 he was sent to suppress an insurrection in the Garfagnana.  But even Ariosto will not keep you long in Castelnuovo, since she whom he would certainly have sung, and whose name you will find in his poem, cannot hold you there.  So you follow the country road up stream, a laughing, leaping torrent in September, full of stones longing for rain, towards Camporgiano.

It is very early in the morning maybe, as you climb out of the shadow and receive suddenly the kiss of the morning sun over a shoulder of the great mountains, a kiss like the kiss of the beloved.  From the village of Piazza al Serchio, where the inn is rough truly but pulito, it is a climb of some six chilometri into the pass, where you leave the river, then the road, always winding about the hills, runs level for four miles, and at last drops for five miles into Fivizzano.  All the way the mountains stand over you frighteningly motionless and threatening, till the woods of Fivizzano, that magical town, hide you in their shadow, and evening comes as you climb the last hill that ends in the Piazza before the door of the inn.

Here are hospitality, kindness, and a welcome; you will get a great room for your rest, and the salone of the palace, for palace it is, for your sojourn, and an old-fashioned host whose pleasure is your comfort, who is, as it were, a daily miracle.  He it will be who will make your bed in the chamber where Grand Duke Leopold slept, he will wait upon you at dinner as though you were the Duke’s Grace herself, and if your sojourn be long he will make you happy, and if your stay be short you will go with regret.  For his pride is your delight, and he, unlike too many more famous Tuscans, has not forgotten the past.  Certainly he thinks it not altogether without glory, for he has carved in marble over your bed one of those things which befell in his father’s time.  Here it is—­

    “Qui stette per tre giorni
    Nel Settembre del MDCCCXXXII
    Leopoldo Il Granduca di Toscana
    E i fratelli Cojari da Fivizzano
    L’imagine dell’ Ottimo Principi vi possero
    Perche rimanesse ai posteri memoria
    Che la loro casa fu nobilitata
    Dalle presenza dell’ ospite augusto.”

But nature had ennobled the House of Cojari already.  There all day long in the pleasant heat the fountain of Cosimo in plays in the Piazza outside your window, cooling your room with its song.  And, indeed, in all Tuscany it would be hard to find a place more delightful or more lovely in which to spend the long summer that is so loath to go here in the south.  Too soon, too soon the road called me from those meadows and shadowy ways, the never-ending whisper of the woods, the sound of streams, the song of the mountain shepherd girls, the quiet ways of the hills.