the old man paused, and resting upon his staff, raised his age-dimmed eyes, and pointing to the gushing water, said, ’E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma!’ (’And this is called the Tiber at Rome!’) ...  We followed the stream from the spot where it issued out of the beech-forest, over barren spurs of the mountains crested with fringes of dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate valley, shut in by dim and misty blue peaks.  Then we entered the portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds.  To this succeeded a blank district of barren shale cleft into great gullies by many a wintry torrent.  Presently we found ourselves at an enormous height above the river, on the ledge of a precipice which shot down almost perpendicularly on one side to the bed of the stream....  A little past this place we came upon a very singular and picturesque spot.  It was an elevated rock shut within a deep dim gorge, about which the river twisted, almost running round it.  Upon this rock were built a few gloomy-looking houses and a quaint, old-world mill.  It was reached from the hither side by a widely-spanning one-arched bridge.  It was called Val Savignone."[1] Beyond this, at a small village called Balsciano, the hills begin to subside into gentler slopes, which gradually merge in the plain at the little town of Pieve San Stefano.

[Illustration:  CAPRESE.]

Thus far the infant stream has no history:  its legends and chronicles do not begin so early.  But a few miles farther, on a tiny branch called the Singerna, are the vestiges of what was once a place of some importance—­Caprese, where Michael Angelo was born exactly four hundred years ago.  His father was for a twelvemonth governor of this place and Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsenna’s Clusium, which is to the south, but Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to inhabit the palazzo communale.  During his regency the painter of the “Last Judgment,” the sculptor of “Night and Morning,” the architect of St. Peter’s cupola, first saw the light.  Here the history of the Tiber begins—­here men first mingled blood with its unsullied waves.  On another little tributary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terrible battle was fought between the Milanese troops, under command of the gallant free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren-tines, led by Giovanni Paolo (commonly called Giampaolo) Orsini; and a little farther, on the main stream, Citta di Castello recalls the story of a long siege which it valiantly sustained against Braccio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio (Strongarm), another renowned soldier of fortune of the fifteenth century.

[Footnote 1:  The Pilgrimage of the Tiber, by Wm. Davies.]

[Illustration:  LAKE THRASIMENE.]