Few if any regions in the world can rival in romance the classical Campagna. Not the least of the evils of the Pagan Renaissance was the disastrous attempt to separate what the Church had joined together—poetry and faith, romance and philosophy. The Christian Renaissance acted far otherwise. There is no real break between Dante and Tasso, Giotto and the Della Robbias, or Donatello ; the same Catholic sap nourished these varying tendrils of the same vine.

A true romantic work is also classical, and the classics have far more of the romantic than is commonly admitted, and the most classical of landscapes may well challenge a primacy of romance.

We may admit at the outset, with Digby, that much of Italian scenery is in itself greatly inferior to northern

We take into account the disparaging words that even Ruskin himself once used of the Roman Campagna.