is not specially interesting in other than agricultural eyes, save for its numerous and storied cities. The higher Apennine range, which hedges in this district from the rest of the peninsula, is a bleak and barren region for the most part, from which its clothing of forest has, to the great injury of the country in many respects, been stripped in the course of many greedily consuming and improvidently unproducing generations. This rugged backbone of Italy is not devoid in many parts of points of interest and beauty of the wilder and sterner kind; but it cannot be compared, at least in this section of it, with the mountain scenery of either the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the Jura. But between these two regions there is a third, which teems with beauty and interest of no mean order.
The great massive flanks of the mountains are there broken by an innumerable multitude of small streams into a labyrinth of little valleys,—a world of bosky greenery, of sunny meadows on the uplands, of rich fat pastures in the watered bottoms, of woodlands on the swelling hill-sides. Less valuable as a grain-producing country than the alluvial district along the shore, it is hardly less smiling to the eye of the husbandman; it is far more varied in the nature of its products, and infinitely more beautiful. From many a snug homestead deep-niched in the hollow of some dark-green valley, a peep of the restless Adriatic, tumbling itself into white-crested breakers flashing in the southern sun, is seen across the sea side plains, through the valley’s mouth, like the section of a landscape through a telescope. Many a time the storm-wind is sweeping down from the wilderness of the upper Apennine, and teasing the Hadrian sea into meriting its Horatian epithet, “iracundus,” while the sheltered nooks among the lower hills, though they can hear the distant tempests far above them, and can see the working of it on the face of the sea far beneath them, feel nothing of it.
It is not wonderful, that the inhabitants and tillers of this favoured region should love it, and be loth to quit it; for it is in truth a lovely home,—a smiling, grateful, genial, and beautiful country.
In one of the most beautiful parts of this beautiful region, a little to the south-west of the small sea-side town of Fano, and a little to the north-west of Ancona, there is among the hills a farm and farmhouse called Bella Luce. “Beautiful light” is the translation of the name; and whether a stranger visited it when the first rays of the sun, rising out of the Adriatic, were smiling their morning greeting to it, laughingly peering round the wood-clothed shoulder of the hill, which shuts in the entrance to the valley on the southern side of it; or whether he saw it at the Ave Maria hour, when from the cool obscurity of its green nook it looked out on the last reflected beams playing with a fitful and fading smile on the darkening waters, the perfect propriety of the appellation would hardly be questioned by him.
The little stream, which in the course of ages had hollowed out for itself from the friable side of the Apennine the narrow valley, in which the house and a great part of the farm of Bella Luce are situated, runs into the river Metauro from the north. It falls into the river, that is to say, on its northern side. But as the large valley of the Metauro runs towards the Adriatic not in an easterly, but in a north-easterly direction, and as the small valley opens into the larger one not at right angles, but sloping in a direction from the west, it commanded the peep that has been described of the distant sea.
The farm-house was situated about half-way up the sloping side of the valley, the declivity of which was so shaped that the part above the dwelling was very much less steep than that below it. Immediately in front of the house, which was so placed as to look down the valley, the ground fell away in a descent as steep as it well could be without depriving the soil of its character of pasturage. Had it been steeper, the sod must have been broken by the rains, which are often very violent in this region, and the valley-side would have assumed the character of a precipice. As it was, it was a rich, deeply green, buttercup-mottled pasture. Above and behind the house, where the declivity was, as has been said, very much less rapid, there was a small quantity of arable land and a wider extent of wood. Along the sides of the valley below the farm residence—towards the opening of it, that is to say—there were several fields mainly of root-crops; but the upper part of the valley, beyond the house, was almost entirely occupied by pasture-land.
All this constituted a large farm, as the farms run in that part of the world, and a rich and valuable one. And Paolo Vanni, the farmer, was a rich and prosperous man—not so rich and prosperous as an Englishman might have imagined, if the long frontage of the farm-house had been pointed out to him from the opposite side of the valley, but richer and more prosperous than the same stranger would have supposed if he had formed his estimate from a near examination of the dwelling. In the first case, the imposing length of the frontage, and the quantity of the masses of building attached to it, would have led the Englishman to imagine that none save a man living in a house with considerable pretensions to something more than mere comfort, and carrying on his agricultural operations with a luxe of appurtenances and out-buildings of all sorts, could be in the occupation of premises making so great a show. In the second case, he would have marvelled at the quantity of brick and mortar apparently wasted, and would have concluded that only a man whose affairs were going to the bad could be the master of so unrepaired, so untidy, so ramshackle, so poorly-furnished a residence.
Neither conjecture would have hit the truth. Paolo Vanni was of the race of well-to-do peasants—a very common race in the rich and fertile province of Romagna. He was neither better instructed, nor more industrious, nor more enlightened, than any of the peasant farmers of the district, nor differing in his manners and ideas from them. But he held a very good farm—his father and grandfather had held it before him—and he was very fond of saving his money.
The strikingly long front of the building, which