The Hill of Venus

The morning dawned gray with heat. The air was lifeless. The sun, rolling lazily up the eastern sky, scarcely deigned to permit his beams to penetrate the humid atmosphere. In t...

It was early on the following day when Francesco took the direction of the palace. The city appeared gay and bright; the beautiful isles of Ischia and Capri, like twin outposts...

With the first pulse of dawn in the East, Francesco was up and astir with the zest of the hour. The woods were full of golden vapor, of dew and the chanting of birds. A stream s...

Evening was falling on the Basilicata, the shadowy, hazy twilight of the fading midsummer day. The pale green leaves of the olive-branches hung limply from their boughs, but the...

Beneath the dark cornices of a thicket of wind-stunted pines stood a small company of men, looking out into the hastening night. The half-light of evening lay over the scene, ro...

Francesco arrived at Avellino at dusk. It was the hour when the castle courtyard was comparatively deserted. Only two bow-men guarded the lowered drawbridge, and they paid littl...

Francesco, having spent the night at a wayside inn, was astir with the breaking of the dawn. He saddled and bridled his horse for the day's journey, and having paid his reckonin...

On the summit of a wood-crowned hill, rising like a pyramid above moor and forest, stood two men silent under the shadows of an oak. In the distance glimmered the sea, and by a...

It had been a day of driving wind and rain. The sound of the sea beat weirdly through the streets of Naples. The great street of the Provencals leading from Castel del Ovo to Ca...

When Francesco waked on the following morning, the June sun touched the tree-tops which bounded the western horizon with their delicate feathery twigs. Throughout the castle of...

When darkness had fallen on the Capitoline Hill, the old palace of the Caesars seemed to waken to a semblance of new life. In the gorgeous reception hall a splendid spectacle aw...

Over the Campagna hung white mists, that hovered longest where the Tiber rolled; but over the green mountains of Rocca Romana the woods were alight with sunbeams and the glancin...

In the young sunshine its many towers were no longer phantom intruders on the sky, but a dominant fact. The machicolated heights, the encircling ramparts, the stern outlines of...

In the antechamber of the elder Villani's sick-room, during the talk between father and son, the monks had quietly waited the termination of the interview. The Prior sat alone o...

Some by land, and some by sea, the revellers took their morning way along the coast towards the ruins of ancient Baiae. Francesco was on horseback, a friend having furnished him...

Dazed, in a state of mind bordering on utter bewilderment, such as he had not experienced since the Masque of the Gods in the park of Avellino, Francesco wandered by the shore,...

The Piazza of St. John Lateran was alive with the rush and roar of a vast multitude, which congested the spacious square from the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme to the dis...

Out into the open caverns of the night Francesco and Ilaria rode. Their eyes still roved from the fading city to the great ships stealing over the water. Their tall masts rose a...

On the summit of a conical hill, rising above the great amphitheatre of forests that skirt the sunny Apulian plains, upon the ruins of a temple to Apollo and in a grove sacred t...

Spring triumphed with a vaunting pageant in the park of Avellino, where the gravelled walks were snowy beneath the light of the higher risen moon, and were in shadows transmuted...

It was early on the following morning when Francesco saddled his steed and departed from the Red Tower. He did not trust himself to remain longer under the same roof with the wo...

Ilaria had gone from him. Nothing mattered any longer. He had no longer the sense that there could be duty for him. Even in his wish for freedom there was cowardice; his soul cr...

Before a low, massive stone table, resembling a druidical altar, surrounded by giant casks filled with the choicest wines of Italy, Greece and Spain, there sat the Duke of Spole...

Francesco was astir early with the coming of the dawn. The grass was drenched with dew, the woods towered heavenwards with a thousand golden peaks. In the valleys the stream ech...

It was a windless morning. Stillness and sunlight lay upon the world, when on the back of his own good steed, which had seen heavy service since last he rode it, Francesco bade...

The following weeks dragged along in hopeless monotony. The last night of Francesco's novitiate had come. There would not be a loophole of escape for him now. On the morrow, the...

Days and weeks in the cloisters of Monte Cassino sufficed to convince Francesco that he was not destined to find any friendships there. The elder Villani had not seen fit, in an...

Meantime, the atmosphere of this secular court was not distasteful to Francesco. The love of poetry and the arts which had made Naples in the twelfth century the literary centre...

The chimes of the Angelus were borne to him on the soft breeze of evening, when, on the third day of his journey, Francesco caught sight of the walls and towers of Rome. As he d...

As the world grew gray with waking light, Francesco came from the woods and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in the dawn. The storm had passed over the sea a...

Six days had passed. Once more the sun had tossed night from the sky and kindled hope in the hymning east. The bleak wilderness barriered by sea and crag had mellowed into the g...

How the birds sang that evening when the saffron afterglow had fainted over the forest spires, and when all was still with the hush of night, how the cry of a nightingale thrill...

Francesco rode out into the scented night and the round yellow moon rode with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in the crucible of destiny a new life was for...

During the months that followed, it had become Francesco's habit to spend most of his leisure time in loneliness on the spot whence he had beheld the passing of Conradino's iron...