But if the vicinity of the town has lost some of its ancient charm, if modern Spezzia reminds us too much, now of Woolwich, now of a "new neighborhood" on the outskirts of London, we have but to pass into the uplands, escaping from the neighborhood of forts, to find the same beauties as the mountains of this coast ever afford. There the sugar-cane and the vine, the fig and the olive cease, though the last so abounds that one might suppose it an indigenous growth; there the broken slopes are covered with scrub oak and dwarf pine; there the myrtle blossoms, hardly ceasing in the winter months; there the strawberry-tree shows its waxen flowers, and is bright in season with its rich crimson berries. Even the villages add a beauty to the landscape--at any rate, when regarded from a distance; some are perched high up on the shoulders of hills, with distant outlooks over land and sea; others lie down by the water's edge in sheltered coves, beneath some ruined fort, which in olden time protected the fisher-folk from the raids of corsairs. Such are Terenza and Lerici, looking at each other across the waters of the little "Porto;" and many another village, in which grey and white and pink tinted houses blend into one pleasant harmony of color. For all this part of the coast is a series of rocky headlands and tiny bays, one succession of quiet nooks, to which the sea alone forms a natural highway. Not less irregular, not less sequestered, is the western coast of the Bay of Spezzia, which has been already mentioned. Here, at Porto Venere, a little village still carries us back in its name to classic times; and the old church on the rugged headland stands upon a site which was once not unfitly occupied by a temple of the seaborn goddess. The beauty of the scene is enhanced by a rocky wooded island, the Isola Palmeria, which rises steeply across a narrow strait; though the purpose to which it has been devoted--a prison for convicts--neither adds to its charm nor awakens pleasant reflections.
To some minds also the harbor itself, busy and bright as the scene often is, will suggest more painful thoughts than it did in olden days. For it is no preacher of "peace at any price," and is a daily witness that millennial days are still far away from the present epoch. Here may be seen at anchor the modern devices for naval war: great turret-ships and ironclads, gunboats and torpedo launches--evils, necessary undoubtedly, but evils still; outward and visible signs of the burden of taxation, which is cramping the development of Italy, and is indirectly the heavy price which it has to pay for entering the ranks of the great Powers of Europe. These are less picturesque than the old line-of-battle ships, with their high decks, their tall masts, and their clouds of canvas; still, nothing can entirely spoil the harbor of Spezzia, and even these floating castles group pleasantly in the distance with the varied outline of hills and headlands, which is backed at last, if we look southward, by the grand outline of a group of veritable mountains--the Apuan Alps.