Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/587

 VOL. XXIV.—NOVEMBER 1877.—No. 5.

 

 FIVE DAYS IN THE TUSCAN MAREMMA.

first line of Goldsmith's "Traveller" almost exactly sums up the ideas which would have been excited in an Italian mind some years ago by the word Maremma: "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow"—very slow! Still slow, although a fine touch can feel more healthy life in its pulse than beat there thirty years back. "Remote" from centres of civilization it must continue to be for generations to come; and a certain amount of "melancholy" is perhaps inherent in the peculiar nature of its scenery. But it is no longer "unfriended." The late Grand Duke of Tuscany was its well wisher, and, to a great extent, its benefactor. But it possesses a yet more powerful benefactor in the railway engine, which now traverses a great part of its extent, on the way from Leghorn toward Rome.

Maremma is nothing more than a contraction of Marittima; maritime, a country on the seacoast. The Tuscan Maremma stretches along the border of the Mediterranean, running southward until it touches the Roman territory. Its northern limit may be said to be at or about the town of Pitigliano. But the Maremma is not a province, a district, or a county; it is merely the expression of certain remarkable peculiarities of climate and scenery throughout a considerable tract of land; and therefore it is impossible to fix its boundaries with precision. It remains to this day a wild and little explored country. Within its hidden recesses it contains extinct cities; some of them (as the old Etruscan towns) absolutely fossilized. You look at them curiously, as one examines a petrified shell. And the life of their former inhabitants may be guessed at, and speculated on, much as a naturalist reads and deciphers the traces of organic life, stereotyped, stony, and changeless, in some geological formation. Other cities there be which retain a little flesh on their bones; a fragment or two of hide and hair, like the ice-bound mammoth discovered in Siberia.

But besides these, which I have termed extinct, there are other cities still very well alive: populous, noisy, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage—cities which present some extraordinary anomalies to the eyes of an "heir of all the ages," inasmuch as they appear to have come into their final inheritance precociously, some three or four centuries ago, and to be still enjoying it, and ignoring nearly all the bequests of Time subsequent to Anno Domini 1550, or thereabouts! In a word, there are in the Tuscan Maremma places wherein the mediæval barons who ruled over them would see very little change could they be permitted a glimpse of their old haunts in this year of grace