To the right and left the barren mountains reared their enormous
baldness to the sun, deserts raised up broadside, as it were, and set on
end, that their bareness might be the better seen and known to the world
around. Here and there, from their bases, dark wooded spurs ran out
across the rising valley, and the road wound round them, in and out, and
up and down, and over stone bridges big and little, and then up in
terribly steep ascent, southeastwards to high Laviano, looking towards
the pass by which the highway leads from Ciliento to Basilicata.
In Laviano, facing the wretched houses, stood the grand beginning of a
wretchedly unfinished building, one of those utter failures of great
hopes, which trace the track of invading liberty through the south. It
came, it saw, and it began many things--but it did not conquer and it
completed very little. In the first wild enthusiasm of the Garibaldian
revolution, even poor, hill-perched, filth-stricken, pig-breeding
Laviano was to be a city, and forthwith, in the general stye, the walls
of a great municipal building, from which lofty destinies were to be
guided and controlled in the path to greatness, began to rise, with
strength of stone masonry, and arches of well-hewn basalt, and divisions
within for halls and stairways, and many offices. But the beams of the
first story were never laid across the lower walls. There was no more
money, and what had been built was a palace for the pigs.
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