city, which is handsome and very solidly built, but has rather a sombre appearance.  The Piazza Grande lies in a bottom to which you descend from the environing streets.  It is in the shape of a mussel shell and of very large size.  The Cathedral is Gothic and is a very majestic and venerable building.  Inside it is of black and yellow marble.  The pavement of this church contains Scripture histories in mosaic.  A library is annexed to the church.  The librarian pointed out to me 80 folio volumes of church music with illuminated plates; likewise an ancient piece of sculpture much mutilated, viz., a group of the three Graces.  In one of the chapels of this Cathedral are eight columns of verd-antique.  I observed a monument of the Piccolomini family who belong to this city; one of which family figured a good deal in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany.  I saw several women in the Cathedral and at the windows of the houses.  The greater part of them were handsome.  The Italian language is spoken here in its greatest purity; it is the pure Tuscan dialect without the Tuscan aspiration.  The Siennese language is in fact the identical lingua Toscana in bocca Romana.

We arrived the same evening at Buon Convento, an old dismal dirty-looking town formerly fortified; but the country in the environs is pleasing enough.  The inn here is very bad.  On the road between Sienna and this place I observed a number of mulberry trees.

The next morning, the 5th Sept., we arrived at Radicofani or rather at an inn or post house facing Radicofani.  This is a very ancient city, and from its being on an eminence it has an imposing appearance.  Above it towers an immense conical shaped mountain, evidently a volcano in former times.  In fact, the whole country hereabouts is volcanic, which is plainly seen from the immense masses of calcined stones, the exhalations of sulphur and the dreary wild appearance of the country, where scarce a tree is to be seen.  I never in my life saw so many calcined rocks and stones of great magnitude heaped together as at Radicofani.  It gave the idea as if it were the identical field of battle between Jupiter and the Titans, and as if the masses of rock that everywhere meet the eye had been hurled at the Empyreum by the Titans and had fallen back on the spot from whence they were torn up.  It is indeed very probable that this volcano which vomited forth rocks and stones in a very remote age, gave rise to the Fable of the war between Jupiter and the Giants; just as the volcanos in Sicily and Stromboli gave rise to the story of the Cyclops with one eye (the crater) in their forehead.  But the mountain of Radicofani must have been a volcano anterior even to Aetna; it presents the image of an ancient world destroyed by fire.

At Ponte Centino the next morning we took our leave of

        La patria bella
  Di vaghe Donne e di dolce favella;