Excerpt from In the Abruzzi This is the wild land of the Abruzzi, set apart from the rest of Italy by its untamable configuration and the rigour of its winter climate. Recently it has been opened up, and is now criss-crossed by a network of excellent roads, some of them only remade after many intervening centuries; while its few railroads are veritable world wonders in the way they round the mountains, and scale the mountains, and burrow the mountains, the trains seeming to hang on by their eyelids. From Rome to Pescara on the Adriatic, you need no longer foot a step Of the way, nor trust to the Old Shaky diligences and if you would see railway enterprise in a sublimely audacious aspect, travel by the line from Terni to Aquila and Sulmona, still better from Sulmona to Castel di Sangro, the latter section being, I believe, one of the highest in Europe. But in the main, the railroads follow the ancient traditional routes Of communication, and, save for a month or two in summer, seem only to serve a few market-folks and for the transport of soldiers. Even the newer roads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.