DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.847#0291
270 vulci.
and offered up the domestic sacrifice on these very
altars to Isis and to Horus. Strange that the habits,
history, and tastes of an individual with a name and
of a race unknown, should give rise to the most in-
teresting speculations two thousand five hundred or
three thousand years after his death, and that the
traces of him should have survived those of mighty
empires and powerful dynasties. We tore ourselves
unwillingly from these curious enigmas, and returned
to our carriage, passing through the Prince of Ca-
nino's court, where the processes of weighing and
winnowing were going forward under the matter-of-
fact eye of the computista, the unsatisfactory nature
of our intercourse with whom, made us more and
more regret the want of the enlightened and polite
guidance of Padre Maurizio.
It took about three hours to drive from Musig-
nano to Ponte Labadia, and our way lay through a
desolate country, resembling some of the moorland
districts in Scotland or the north of England, with
more of rugged wilderness and less of beauty than
in the deserted neighbourhood of Rome. Yet this
was in very ancient times the most favoured spot in
the midst of the highest civilization and the richest
culture, and particularly famed for its wine. No
contrast can be more striking than that between the
ancient fertility and teeming population of Etruria
and its present desolation and solitude. On the site
of the wealthiest cities scarcely a substruction re-
mains amid the barren waste, to tell of the noble for-
tunes thus extinguished. Where luxuriant vine-
and offered up the domestic sacrifice on these very
altars to Isis and to Horus. Strange that the habits,
history, and tastes of an individual with a name and
of a race unknown, should give rise to the most in-
teresting speculations two thousand five hundred or
three thousand years after his death, and that the
traces of him should have survived those of mighty
empires and powerful dynasties. We tore ourselves
unwillingly from these curious enigmas, and returned
to our carriage, passing through the Prince of Ca-
nino's court, where the processes of weighing and
winnowing were going forward under the matter-of-
fact eye of the computista, the unsatisfactory nature
of our intercourse with whom, made us more and
more regret the want of the enlightened and polite
guidance of Padre Maurizio.
It took about three hours to drive from Musig-
nano to Ponte Labadia, and our way lay through a
desolate country, resembling some of the moorland
districts in Scotland or the north of England, with
more of rugged wilderness and less of beauty than
in the deserted neighbourhood of Rome. Yet this
was in very ancient times the most favoured spot in
the midst of the highest civilization and the richest
culture, and particularly famed for its wine. No
contrast can be more striking than that between the
ancient fertility and teeming population of Etruria
and its present desolation and solitude. On the site
of the wealthiest cities scarcely a substruction re-
mains amid the barren waste, to tell of the noble for-
tunes thus extinguished. Where luxuriant vine-