if he could be sure to witness such a game of Pallone as we chanced upon in the Via dell’ Arco di Augusto—­lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving the great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation of projecting house-eaves.  I do not understand the game; but it was clearly played something after the manner of our football, that is to say; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to cover the greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall.

Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune.  On the fountain in the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering her veil to catch the wind.  May she long shower health and prosperity upon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!

* * * * *

THE PALACE OF URBINO

I

At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make our way across San Marino to Urbino.  In the Piazza, called apocryphally after Julius Caesar, I found a proper vetturino, with a good carriage and two indefatigable horses.  He was a splendid fellow, and bore a great historic name, as I discovered when our bargain was completed.  ‘What are you called?’ I asked him. ’Filippo Visconti, per servirla!’ was the prompt reply.  Brimming over with the darkest memories of the Italian Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard this answer.  The associations seemed too ominous.  And yet the man himself was so attractive—­tall, stalwart, and well looking—­no feature of his face or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who concealed worse than Caligula’s ugliness from sight in secret chambers—­that I shook this preconception from my mind.  As it turned out, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous namesake but the name.  On a long and trying journey, he showed neither sullen nor yet ferocious tempers; nor, at the end of it, did he attempt by any master-stroke of craft to wheedle from me more than his fair pay; but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him for a keepsake, with the frank goodwill of an accomplished gentleman.  The only exhibition of his hot Italian blood which I remember did his humanity credit.

While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box to thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy.  He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerous quarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to the mercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position.  But when he came back, hot and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only applaud his zeal.