The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner, and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have floated, in his time. They look like the tops of green hills rising from the water.
It is a beautiful country again as you approach Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is famous, drinking it to the memory of the "German prelate," who, as Madame Stark relates, "stopped here on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to excess." It has degenerated, probably, since his time, or we chanced upon a bad bottle.
The walls of _Viterbo_ are flanked with towers, and have a noble appearance from the hill-side on which the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything of the place. As we were taking coffee at the _café_ the next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard music in the street, and looking out at the door, we saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal, and half dancing as she went along. Three or four at the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told it was a procession _to the vintage_. They were going out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the otherwise perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The measure was quick, and the step very fast. They were gone in an instant. The whole thing was poetical, and in keeping, for Italy. I have never seen it elsewhere.
We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning; and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful climate more thrillingly. The road was wild, and with the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy perceptible in the air. Half way up the mountain, I overtook a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up on his mule. I was passing him with a "_buon giorno_," when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his, to keep him company. "It was the worst road for thieves," he said, "in all Italy," and he pointed at every short distance to little crosses erected at the road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered men on the spot. After he had told me several stories of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hesitating whether to trust me with his opinions on the subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his caution, and pointing off to the right, showed me a lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It was _Lake Vico_. From the midst of it rose a round mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts--the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the hill on which we stood rising directly from the other edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves. The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strongly of the country about the Seneca lake of America. I was on the Cayuga at about the same season three summers ago, and I could have believed myself back again, it was so like my recollection.