Ciatti must have been an honest chronicler. Had we been given his early possibilities of making history in our own fashion, we must inevitably have told a credulous public that the ark itself rested upon the spurs of the Apennines and disgorged its contents on the hill where stands the present city of Perugia. But Ciatti withheld his hand from this, and we too must bare our heads before the fact of Ararat, and only hold to that of Noah, in his five-hundredth year or so, wandering unwearied forth to form a mighty nation on the coasts of Italy!
But before leaving Ciatti and his early myths, we must do him the justice to say that he was not utterly ignorant of a dim nation and of dimmer monsters living perhaps before the days of the Deluge. The old monk, like other wise historians, sets to work to hunt up the heraldry of his native city, and thus he explains the origin of the griffin on the city arms. The enthralling hunt described savours surely of something in an even earlier age?
"Now it so happened that, when the people of Perugia and of Narni were at the height of their prosperity, they became consumed by a very warlike spirit, and cultivated freely all military exercises, and on one occasion they challenged each other to a trial of prowess in a celebrated hunt. They agreed to meet in the mountains round about Perugia, which were then the haunt of fierce and terrifying wild beasts, and having come to that mountain which now takes its name from the event (Monte Griffone) they found there a griffin, which the Perugians captured and killed. After some dispute the monster was divided, the skin and claws being best worthy of preservation were taken by the Perugians, whilst the body fell to the people of Narni. In memory of this occurrence the Perugians took for their arms a white griffin--white being the natural colour of that animal--while the people of Narni took a red griffin, corresponding to the part which had fallen to their share, on a white field."[3]
But, to pass from the realms of myth to those of reality, it seems quite certain that the Etruscans--or Rasenae as they are sometimes called--spread themselves over a large part of Italy, building and fortifying their cities, making roads and laws and temples, and casting the light of an older art and civilisation upon the land to which they came as colonists. One of the chief of their cities was Perugia. Fragments of the old walls, built perhaps three thousand years ago, still stand in places, clean-cut, erect, and menacing, around the Umbrian city.