Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/32

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The other day we young people went to Albano. We set out early in the brightest of weather; the road went beneath the great aqueduct with its dark-brown masses sharply defined against the clear sky, so to Fraseati, from there to the monastery of Grottaferrata, where there are beautiful frescoes by Domenichino, then to Marino which lies very picturesquely on a hillside, and so we came to Castel Gandolfo on the lake. All these landscapes repeat the first impression I had of Italy, not so much of something striking or startlingly beautiful, as one imagines them, but with a wonderful beneficent and calming effect. They are pictures in which the gentle outlines make a very charming whole full of fine points of shading and light. And here I must sing the praises of my monks who are always there to accentuate the picture and give it tone with all their various draperies, their quiet devotional carriage and their shadowlike look. From Castel Gandolfo to Albano there goes a charming shady alley of evergreen oaks sloping down to the lake, and along it goes a perpetual fluttering of all sorts of monks, who enliven the scene, or perhaps bring out its loneliness. By the town a pair of begging friars were marching along, then came a troop of young Jesuits, presently we spied a young and elegant ecclesiastic lying among the bushes with a book, and next it was a pair of monks in the forest frightening off the birds with their flintlocks, and then we arrived at a monastery encircled by a crowd of small chapels. Here all was quiet for a time, but there came out a stupid-looking, dirty Capuchin loaded with heavy bouquets of