.. 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.
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