With no more level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched passages and by steps of stone.

The aspect of everything was awfully old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself, because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and tell us all about their origin.

Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these structures.

They are built of such huge, square stones, that their appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than now for human habitation.

Many of them may once have been palaces, and still retain a squalid grandeur.