We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an _iter ad Brundisium_ carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a chance likeness between the names--a name that ranges from the Euxine to the Hudson--without seeking in any sort to identify the [Greek: Albanoi] of Dionysios and the [Greek: Albanoi] of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder mountains of Albania.
Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages, not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.