Part 6

Cori and Norba are alike cities set on hills, and neither of them has any fear of being hid. But they are set on hills in different senses. Cori occupies the upper part of the sloping hill, and the houses spread down the slope. Norba occupies a large table-land on the edge of the mountains, and its outer wall is carried along the upper rim of a steep and lofty cliff. No dwellings could ever have spread themselves downwards on the side which looks toward the marshes and the sea. But we should hardly have said the outer wall; for the height was so carefully fortified that outlying defences were placed at various points on the side of the cliff wherever the primitive engineers deemed such defences needful. Within the circuit, again, the _arx_ rose on several terraces; its highest point--crowned, we may believe, as usual, by a temple--must have formed a proud object indeed from the vast extent of land and sea which it looks down upon. No other of its ancient neighbours looks down so immediately on the great Pomptine flat as Norba does, as none looks down from so great a height. Cori rather occupies a hill thrown out in front of the mountain; Norba sits on the edge of the mountain itself, though of course at a much lower elevation than the huge masses further inland. The towers and temples of the city must have had a wonderful effect from the lands below; as it is, there is nothing to mark the place but the line of wall itself, which does not always stand out in a very marked way from the cliff. It is then perhaps in some sort well that the later Norma has taken the place of Norba. On the hill of Norba we see that Norma and Norba by no means join one another; there is a gap between them which, while we are on the mountain, might pass for a valley. But as we look from below, the winding outline of the hills puts this gap out of sight, and Norma and Norba become in appearance one whole. Norma looks like a continuation of Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited part, perhaps, as at Syracuse and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold within which the city had again shrunk up. From the points where the eye can take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of the cliff, and the further town of Sermoneta crowning a hill-top far lower than the height of Norba, the whole grouping is wonderful. The view from Norba itself takes in points with which we have become familiar since we first gazed on them from the height of the Latian Jupiter. But we see them in new groupings and new proportions; the islands, prisons for dangerous or discreditable members of the Imperial house, stand out in special prominence in front of the Circæan height--a height so nearly cut off from the mainland that it seems like the greatest of the island group. Nowhere do we better understand what men looked on as a great and strong city in days when they had not yet learned that an element of truer might lurked in what, judged by the standard of Norba, would seem a mere group of molehills by the yellow Tiber.

As the whole city lay on the top of the hill, the space taken in by the walls is necessarily greater than in those towns where the hill stands distinct, the _arx_ alone crowns the top, and where the town walls are placed lower down. The nature of the construction adapts itself to the needs of the different parts of the circuit. The mass of the wall is of polygonal stones, rude, but far less rude than the rudest at Cori. Without being actually laid in regular order, they have a certain tendency to fall into courses as it were of themselves, and it is not always easy to tell how far the roughness of the stone has been from the beginning, and how far it is due to the action of the weather on stones cut perhaps somewhat less carefully than the finer stones at Cori. But the Norban builders could, when it was worth their while, do something more than this. They could, when they had to make a corner, put together squared stones cut with a good deal of exactness, and when it was convenient that a corner should be rounded off, they could do that too with equal skill. This last was done at the greatest gateway looking towards Norma. Here there is no sign of either lintel, arch, or attempt at arch, to span the opening; it would almost seem that the gate itself was simply placed across the opening with nothing over it, much as at Tusculum the gate was hung between two pieces of native rock. That the arch was not known to the first builders of Norba, but that they had reached the stage in which men began as it were to stretch forth their hands towards that great invention, is shown by a ruined building--one of the few things within the wall of Norba which can be called even a ruined building--a little way beyond the _arx_. Here we have a distinct attempt at a vault for the roof; but it is not the apparent cupola of Mykênê and New Grange, nor the apparent barrel-vault of Tusculum. The building is oblong, and the attempted arches rise on both sides, from the small ones as well as from the longer. The ruined state of the building, whatever it was, most unluckily hinders us from seeing how the four vaults, so to call them, were made to meet in the middle. It must have been a strange problem in construction. Hard by is the other building at which we have already hinted as being of later date. It has real arches and masonry, like that which at Cori is attributed to Sulla's time. But it may as well come before the overthrow of Norba in his day as after it.

From primæval and forsaken Norba we go down the hill-side, learning as we go how high Norba stands, to hardly less forsaken, though only mediæval, Ninfa. Ninfa, unlike Norba, has a few inhabitants; there is a house and a mill, if not within the fortified enclosure, at least just outside it, and, if the enclosure itself contains no actual dwelling-places of man, it contains abundance of buildings which have once been so. One can hardly fancy a greater contrast than that which strikes us between the stern primæval wall of Norba, fencing in the thick-standing corn, and the wall of Ninfa, with its towers, its varied and picturesque outline, fencing in a crowd of houses, churches, and buildings of every kind, the oldest of which could not have arisen till a thousand years after Norba became desolate. All are now forsaken, roofless, shattered, forming one of the most singular gatherings of ruins to be seen anywhere, the mummy, as it has been well called, of a dead town. Ninfa was once a place of some consequence, which played its part in local history; perhaps the most notable event suggested by its name is that here Alexander III., a Pope who had so much to do with our own history, was consecrated after his famous disputed election. But its position in the deadly flat, close by a stream, led to its ruin; the malaria was too much for it, and Ninfa ceased to be reckoned among the cities of articulate-speaking men. Some freak might restore the greatness of Norba; for there is nothing to hinder men living there if the fancy took them; they cannot live at Ninfa without greater changes than a Marius or a Sulla can work. There is something specially striking in a town, whose remains are so extensive, standing so utterly desolate. There is something Irish in the look of things at Ninfa, as indeed there is in the look of a good many of the ruined mediæval sites which often meet us in this region. It is not merely the fact of their being ruined, though there is something Irish in that; the tall, slender towers, of which there are many both at Ninfa and elsewhere, have a real likeness to many buildings in Ireland. But, though the general look of Ninfa is singularly striking, there is less to be learned from the particular buildings than might have been looked for. They are spread over several centuries, some of the houses reaching even into _Renaissance_ times. The church of most pretension lies without the walls; several within them keep their apses and the paintings on them, but little more. The whole is a wilderness of ruins, strange, impressive, but hardly venerable. As the ruin of a town, the wreck of many buildings crowded close together, fallen Ninfa has little of the solemnity of our own ruined castles and abbeys. As for the elements of wonder and mystery, they dwell in this region on the hill-top, among the mighty masses of stone which the men of an unrecorded age piled together to make Norba.

Segni.

The visitor to Segni will find difficulties in studying the history on the spot second only to those which he finds at Norba. It is quite certain that he will find no books at Norba, save such as he may take with him, which are not likely to be many. It is possible that there may be books at Segni; there may lurk in some odd corner either a hidden scholar with his treasured library, or a bookseller of that class, sometimes to be found in old-fashioned places, who dislikes nothing so much as parting with his books. But, if such there be, they do not force themselves on the eye on one's entrance into Segni. A natural and important question is sure to present itself, and--without wings to fly at once to the libraries of Rome--there is no immediate means of answering it. Is the name of Signia--now by a very slight change _Segni_--to be found in any of the lists of the Thirty Cities of Latium? The lists are many, and the traveller is not likely to carry them all in his head. He may perhaps be able to repeat the lines in which Macaulay draws the picture of many of them; and, if so, every step that he takes among the Latin cities will make him more fully admire the fitness and force of the points and epithets picked out in each case. But at Segni the Lay of Regillus fails him; he has his quotations for Cora and Norba; he has no quotations for Signia. Still Macaulay's verses are not a full or formal list of the cities; while, if he argues that Signia lies too much in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican land to have belonged to the Latin name, he is met by the fact that "Ferentinum of the rock," yet further on, has its place in them alongside of "Gabia of the pool." He turns to his guide-book--and the guide-book of Gsell-fels, though it sometimes leaves things out, is almost always to be trusted for what it puts in; he there finds only the entry of the alleged Roman colony of the days of the Tarquins, with the remark that the existing walls seem to point to an earlier origin. And again a thought may occur to him, if not at Segni itself, yet in the later course of the journey of which Segni forms a part--Were the people of ancient Signia specially skilful in the making of mosaic pavements? There is a kind of work called _opus Signinum_, a pattern of black spots on a white ground, of which there is a good deal at Pompeii, and of which the visitor to Segni will most likely see an example a few days later at Anagni. The question is hardly so exciting as the question as to the position of Signia in the days of the Latin League. But it is one which may suggest itself, and it is one which it will be hard to answer with only the resources which are to be had at Segni itself. The visitor to Segni is thus likely to find himself a little uncomfortable as to more than one point in the history of the place where he stands. And he will feel most uncomfortable of all as to the great point of all with regard to its earliest history. Still, he may for the moment comfort himself by thinking that there are those who might be unkind enough to hint that he would still be equally uncertain if he had a hundred quotations on the tip of his tongue, or if he were in a library with thousands of volumes to turn to.

But whether Signia was ever a Thirty-city or not--we may be allowed to follow the local usage of Canterbury, which speaks of "a Six-preacher"--there is no doubt as to its geographical position; there is no doubt as to the grandeur of its remains. In starting from Velletri, with Algidus and its holm-oaks and its memories of Æquian encampments on our left hand, on the right we turn the corner of the Volscian mountains, and the railway carries us along the valley between them and their Hernican rivals. We reach the station of Segni; we mark more than one town perched on the opposite heights; we have close by us, in the low ground--reminding us of Ninfa on a smaller scale--the walls of a forsaken fortress, with a shattered tower of wonderful height and slenderness; but the walls of Signia still keep themselves hidden among the mountains. It is not from the side of Velletri, but, as we afterwards learn, from the side of Anagni, that Segni on its mountain height, and its satellite of Gavignano, perched on a smaller detached hill in front, form striking features in the landscape.

Segni belongs to the same class of hill-fortress as Norba, not the same class as Cori. It occupies, not the top of a conical hill, but a table-land, if we may apply that name to so narrow a space, on the mountain itself. The distinction is well marked by comparing it with Gavignano just below, which is one of the chief objects in the immediate view from the height of Segni. The difference is just the same as the difference between Norba and Sermoneta, though Gavignano has more the air of being an outpost of Segni than Sermoneta has of being an outpost of Norba. The hill-top which Segni crowns is long and narrow, at some points very narrow indeed, so as to give to the space within the walls nearly the shape of a figure of eight. The space within is neither wholly forsaken, as at Norba, nor all crowded with dwellings, as at Cori. The modern town has withdrawn into one quarter of the old enclosure; but it has not, as in so many other cases, withdrawn into the ancient citadel. The site of the _arx_ of Signia, rising but little above the general level of the hill-top, but placed well so as to command what we may call the isthmus between the two parts of the town, forms no part of the dwelling-place of the modern Signians; but under the name of _Passegiata_ it does form part of their pleasure-ground. The modern town has retreated into the other loop of the figure of eight, that which lies furthest from the traveller as he draws near from Velletri, but to which the course of the road will necessarily take him first. He may enter by a gateway of Roman date, and if he so does his eye will soon be struck by the great number of graceful fragments of mediæval work to be found within the narrow streets of Segni. The town has most likely been for ages too poor to follow the example of its richer neighbours in replacing beauty by ugliness. But he will do better to keep for a while from entering the inhabited part of the town. Let him first make the circuit of the ancient walls. And he can hardly doubt whether to turn to the right hand or to the left. The claims of the left are in this case overwhelming. Long before he has reached the town, he must have seen far away on the hill the most precious of the remains of Signia, the gateway which stands, forsaken but still untouched, beckoning him, as it were, to make his way first of all to the most instructive thing which the primæval city has to show him.

But before he can reach either the Roman or the primæval gate he will have begun to notice the character of the wall. The construction is hardly so rude as the rudest parts of the wall at Cori, but a great deal of it belongs to the same general stage of engineering progress. The huge polygonal stones are heaped together; but one might note perhaps two stages, yet often intermingled--one, where the sides _only_ of the stones are cut so as to fit their neighbours; another, where the outer faces are also smoothed of what is called "rustication" in late _Renaissance_ work. In the first they are not left so utterly in a state of nature as they are at Cori. Their sides have been cut to the shape which was thought best for the work of piling them together. In a later stage, also seen at Cori, the outer sides, those which stand free from the scarped wall, are also cut; but it is not always easy to say how much of the change of the surface is due to art and how much to weather. At Segni the peculiar shape of the enclosure makes it somewhat hard to follow the line of the walls without a ground-plan, and a ground-plan is not to be had at Segni merely by asking for it. But it is plain that, in many parts at least, on the whole side of the hill which lies exposed to the open valley, and on the head of the whole promontory, there was, whenever the ground allowed and required it, a double wall, one on the edge of the hill, the other at some distance down its side. The most famous of the gates of Segni, locally known as _Porta Saracenesca_, leads from the outside world into the outer enclosure, at a point well chosen for military purposes, close to the edge, and commanding the path by which the traveller will most likely make his way to it. And a mighty gate it is, and one that holds no small place in the history of the art of construction. It is one of those instances which show that their builders were still ignorant of the principle of the arch, but that they were, so to speak, in search of it. They had not yet learned how to make the top of an opening out of stones really so arranged as to stand by mutual support; but they were striving after something beyond the mere horizontal lintel resting on two vertical supports. The builders of Segni had not got so far as those of Veii or Tusculum; as they had no idea of the true principle of the arch, so they had no idea of its form; all they could do was to place two horizontal stones with sides sloping inwards immediately under the lintel. In truth, the construction is still purely that of the lintel, and nothing else; but the form chosen shows a certain vain striving after something different. As such, it is no small lesson which it teaches; and the effect of the great stones thus piled together to form the entrance is striking and solemn. It carries us back from days which on our side of the Alps we deem ancient, but when the arts of construction were as well known as they are now, to days when men were making the first rude attempts towards the greatest of constructive inventions. Attempts of this kind, simply because they are mere attempts, failures and not successes, have a more ancient look than those examples where the builders were fully satisfied with the lintel construction and attempted no other. In point of fact, whatever their relative date, they are later in idea, as showing a desire to innovate on the received form, some instances of which were at last crowned with success.

It is not easy to see how this gate came by its local name. One can understand the process of thought by which the roofing at Tusculum, which has the outward shape of the pointed arch, came to be called _arco Gotico_; it is harder to guess why the great primæval gate of Segni should be attributed to Saracens. It is far from being the only primæval gateway in the whole circuit. No less than five have been counted between the outer and inner walls, and two more in the part of the enclosure occupied by the modern town, where the two lines of wall coincide. Hard by _Porta Saracenesca_ itself is a small sally-port; of the others, the larger ones, like _Porta Saracenesca_ itself, stand at right angles to the wall. Some of them at least show the same strivings after the arch as their greater neighbour. The nature of the ground forbids the _arx_ from reaching any great height above the rest of the city; but its place is easily marked. It contains a singular large cistern of Roman work, and close by is one of those junctions of different ages which always preach to us a living historic lesson. Here is the terrace of a temple wrought with stones of the primitive construction. On this primitive work rise the remains of the _cella_ in Roman masonry, and the Roman wall of the _cella_ is now carried up to form a church. Now, at least the church is of no architectural value, but it is none the less a witness to the greatest of all the changes which the hoary walls of Signia have looked upon.

Landed, then, in Christian Segni, we may, perhaps, remember that one of the greatest of the Popes was born either in the town itself or in its satellite of Gavignano. But which was the actual spot? Our one guide available at the moment seems to doubt between the two. In either case we see, if we do not tread, the place which gave birth to the third and greatest of the Innocents. We find, too, that a Papal palace of Segni was swept away by the Duke of Alva in that strange war which the Catholic King Philip waged, not, of course, against the Vicar of St. Peter, but against the temporal Sovereign of the Roman States.

We are thus, even at Segni, plunged among Papal memories; we look over the valley of the Trerus across to Anagni, and they press upon us with double force. We hasten to the spot where a lesser Pope than Innocent, but still a mighty one, died like a dog after his fox-like entrance and his lion-like reign.

Iter ad Brundisium.

I. Anagni.