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CHAPTER IX
THE ROAD TO ROME
SIENA, crowning its precipitous hillside, stands, to-day, unchanged from what it was in the days of the Triumvirate. Church tower and castle wall jut out into a vague mystery of silhouetted outline, whether viewed by daylight or moonlight. The great gates of the ramparts still guard the approach on all sides, and the Porta Camollia of to-day is the same through which the sons of Remus entered when fleeing from their scheming Uncle, Romulus.
Siena’s Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is a landmark. Dante called it “a great square where men live gloriously free,” though then it was simply the Piazza; and the picture is true to-day, in a different sense. In former days it was a bloody “mis-en-scène” for intrigue and jealousy; but, to-day, simply the centre of the life and movement of a prosperous, thriving, though less romantic city of thirty thousand souls.
This great Piazza is rounded off by a halo of magnificent feudal palaces, whose very names are romantic.
All about Siena’s squares and street corners are innumerable gurgling, spouting fountains, many of them artistically and monumentally beautiful, and a few even dating from the glorious days of old.
Dante sang of Siena’s famous fountains which, in truth, form a galaxy of artistic accessories of life hardly to be equalled in any other city of Siena’s class. Leaving that “noble extravagance in marble,” Siena’s Cathedral, and its churches quite apart, the city ranks as one of the most interesting tourist points of Italy.
Siena has still left a relic of mediævalism in the revival of its ancient horse racing festa, when its great Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is built up and barricaded like a circus of Roman times. Chariot races, gladiatorial combats and bull fights, all had their partisans among municipalities, but Siena’s choice was horse racing. And each year, “Il Palio,” on July the 2nd and on August the 16th, becomes a great popular amusement of the Sienese. It is most interesting, and still picturesquely mediæval in costuming and setting; and is a civic function and fête a great deal more artistically done – as goes without saying – than the Guy Fawkes celebrations of London, or the fourth of July “horribles” in America. For the thoroughly genuine and artistic pageant Anglo Saxons have to go to Italy. There is nothing to be learned from the Mardi-Gras celebrations of Paris nor the carnivals of the Cote d’Azur.
Some one has said that Siena sits on the border land between idyllic Tuscany and the great central Italian plain. Literally this is so. It marks the distinction between the grave and the gay so far as manners and customs and conditions of life go. On the north are the charming, smiling hills and vales, bright with villas, groves and vines; whilst to the south, towards Rome and the Campagna, all is of an austerity of present day fact and past tradition. Indeed, the landscape would be stern and repellent, were it not picturesquely savage.
Straight runs the highroad to Rome via Viterbo, or makes a détour via Montepulciano and Orvieto. At Asinalunga, Garibaldi was arrested by government spies, by the order of the monarch to whom he had presented the sovereignty of Naples. Such is official ingratitude, ofttimes! The town itself is unworthy of remark, save for that incident of history.
By the direct road the mountains of Orvieto and Montepulciano rise grimly to the left. The towns bearing the same names are charming enough from the artistic point of view, but are not usually reckoned tourist sights.
Montepulciano is commonly thought of slight interest, but it is the very ideal of an unspoiled mediæval town, with a half dozen palazzo façades, which might make the name and fame of some modern scene painter if he would copy them.
Chiusi, on the direct road, lies embedded in a circle of hills and surrounded by orange groves. It is nothing more nor less than a glorified graveyard, but is unique in its class. Lars Porsena of Clusium comes down to us as a memory of school-time days, and for that reason, if no other, we consider it our duty to visit the Etruscan tombs of Clusium, the modern Chiusi.
There are three distinct tiers, or shelves, of these ancient tombs, and interesting enough they are to all, but only the antiquary will have any real passion for them, so most of us are glad enough to spin our way by road another fifty odd kilometres to Orvieto.
Four kilometres of a precipitous hill climb leads from the lower road up into Orvieto, zig-zagging all the way. It is the same bit of roadway up which the Popes fled in the middle ages when hard pressed by their enemies. Clement VII, one of the unhappy Medici, fled here after the sinning Connétable Bourbon attempted the sacking of Rome; and a sheltering stronghold he found it.
This Papal city of refuge is, to-day, a more or less squalid place, with here and there a note of something more splendid. On the whole Orvieto’s charm is not so much in the grandeur of its monuments as in their character. The cathedral is reckoned one of the great Gothic shrines of Italy, and that, indeed, is the chief reason for most of the tourist travel. The few mediæval palaces that Orvieto possesses are very splendid, though they, one and all, suffer from their cramped surroundings.
The Hotel Belle Arti, to-day, with a garage for automobiles, was the ancient Palazzo Bisenzi. It had a reputation among travellers, of a decade or a generation ago, of being a broken-down palace and a worse hotel. If one wants to dwell in marble halls and sleep where royal heads have slept, one can do all this, at Orvieto, for eight or nine lire a day.
One enters Viterbo, forty-seven kilometres from Orvieto, by the highroad to Rome. The little town preserves much of its mediæval characteristics to-day, though, indeed, it is a progressive, busy place, of something like twenty thousand souls, most of whom, appear to be engaged in the wine industry. On the Piazza Fontana is a magnificent Gothic fountain dating from the thirteenth century, and the Municipio, on the Piazza del Plebiscito, is of a contemporary period, with a fine fountained court-yard.
In the environs of Viterbo is a splendid palace, built by Vignola for the Cardinal Farnese, nephew of the Pope Paul III. In form it was a great square mass with its angles reinforced by square towers, with a circular court within, surrounded by an arcade by which one entered the various apartments. It was, perhaps, the most originally conceived work of its particular epoch of Renaissance times; and all the master minds and hands of the builders of the day seem to have had more or less to do with it. These Italians of the Renaissance were inventors of nothing; but their daring and ingenuity in combining ideas taken, bodily, from those of antiquity, made more successful and happy combinations than those of the architects of to-day, who build theatres after the models of Venetian palaces, and add a Moorish minaret; or railway stations on the plan of the Parthenon, and put a campanile in the middle, like the chimney of a blast furnace. The Italian campanile was a bell-tower, to be sure, but it had nothing in common with the minaret of the east, nor the church spire of the Gothic builder in northern climes.
From Siena the coast road to Rome, practically the same distance as the inland route, is one of surprising contrast. It approaches the coast at Grosseto, seventy kilometres from Siena, and thence, all the way to Rome, skirts the lapping waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Off shore is Elba, with its Napoleonic memories, and the Island of Monte Cristo which is considered usually a myth, but which exists in the real to-day, as it did when Dumas romanced (sic) about it. A long pull of a hundred kilometres over a flat country, half land, half water, brings one to Civita-Vecchia, eighty kilometres from the Eternal City itself.
Civita-Vecchia is a watering-place without historical interest, where the Romans come to make a seaside holiday. Hotels of all ranks are here, and garage accommodations as well. The Italian mail boats for Sardinia leave daily, if one is inclined to make a side trip to that land of brigandage and the evil-eye, which are reputed a little worse than the Corsican or Sicilian varieties.
One enters the heart of Rome by the Porta Cavalleggeri and crosses the Ponte S. Angelo to get his bearings.
The hotels of Rome are like those of Florence. One must hunt his abiding place out for himself, according to his likes and dislikes. The Grand-Hotel and the Hotel de la Minerve are vouched for by the Touring Club, and the former has garage accommodation. At either of these modern establishments you get the fare of Paris, Vienna, London and New York, and very little that is Italian. You may even bathe in porcelain tubs installed by a London plumber and drink cocktails mixed by an expert from Broadway.
This makes one long for the days when a former generation ate in a famous eating house which stood at the southeast corner of the Square Saint Eustace. It was the resort of artists and men of letters and the plats that it served were famous the world over.
The Romans’ pride in Rome is as conventional as it is ancient. They promptly took sides when the “Italians” entered their beloved city in 1870. The priests, the higher prelates, and the papal nobility were “for the Pope,” but the great middle class, the common people, were for the “Italians.” Traditions die hard in Rome, and many an old resident will tell tales to-day of the blessings of a Papal Government, which formerly forbade the discussion of religion or politics in public places, and “contaminating” books and newspapers were stopped at the frontier. Even a non-smoker was considered a protestor against the Papacy, because to smoke was to be a supporter of the Papal Government’s revenue from the tobacco trade.
Rome without the forestieri, or strangers, would lose considerable of its present day prosperity. Rome exploits strangers; there is no doubt about that; that is almost its sole industry. As Henri Taine said: “Rome is nothing but a shop which sells bric-à-brac.” He might have added: “with a branch establishment which furnishes food and lodging.”
The Roman population, as Roman, is now entirely absorbed by “the Italian.” No more are the contadini, the peasants of the Campagna, or the bearded mountaineers of the Sabine hills, different from their brothers of Tuscany or Lombardy; their physiognomies have become the same. The monks and seminarists and priests and prelates are still there, but only by sufferance, like ourselves. They are no more Romans than are we. Tourists in knickerbockers, awe-struck before the art treasures of the Vatican, and cassocked priests on pilgrimage are everywhere in the city of the Cæsars and the Popes. The venerable Bede was half right only in his prophecy.
“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls – the world!”
Rome is still there, and many of its monuments, fragmentary though they be.
The difference in the grade (ground level) of modern Rome, as compared with that of antiquity, a difference of from sixty to seventy feet, may still be expected to give up finds to the industrious pick and shovel properly and intelligently handled. The archæological stratum is estimated as nine miles square.
Rome is a much worked-over field, but the desecrations of the middle ages were hardly less disastrous to its “antiquities” than the new municipality’s transformations. Some day the seven hills will be levelled, and boulevards and public gardens laid out and trees planted in the Forum; then where will be the Rome of the Cæsars? “Rome, Unhappy City!” some one has said, and truly; not for its past, but for its present. Whatever the fascination of Rome may be it is not born of first impressions; the new quarters are painfully new and the streets are unpicturesque and the Tiber is dirty, muddy and ill-smelling. Byron in his day thought differently, for he sang: “the most living crystal that was e’er.” Should he come back again he would sing another song. These elements find their proper places in the city’s ensemble after a time, but at first they are a disappointment.
Next to Saint Peter’s, the Vatican and the Colosseum, the Castle of Sant’Angelo is Rome’s most popular monument. It has been a fortress for a thousand years. For a thousand years a guard has been posted at its gateway.
The ruin of men which has passed within its walls is too lengthy a chronicle to recount here. Lorenzo Colonna, of all others, shed his blood most nobly. Because he would not say “Long live the Orsini,” he was led to the block, a new block ready made for this special purpose, and having delivered himself in Latin of the words: “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” gave up his life in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, “on the last day of June when the people of Rome were celebrating the festivity of the decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle.” This was four centuries and more ago, but the circling walls and the dull, damp corridors of the Castel Sant’Angelo still echo the terror and suffering which formerly went on within them. It is the very epitome of the character of the structure. Its architecture and its history are in grim accord.
Within the great round tower of Sant’Angelo was imprisoned the unnatural Catherine Sforza while the Borgias were besieging her city.
The Castel of Sant’Angelo and the bridge of the same name are so called in honour of an Angel who descended before Saint Gregory the Great and saved Rome from a pest which threatened to decimate it.
Close to the bridge of Sant’Angelo, just opposite Nona’s Tower, once stood the “Lion Inn,” kept by the lovely Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Cæsar, Gandia and Lucrezia Borgia. She was an inn-keeper of repute, according to history, and her career was most momentus. The automobilist wonders if this inn were not a purveyor of good cheer as satisfactory as the great establishments with French, English and German names which cater for tourists to-day.
The Villa Medici just within the walls, and the Villa Borghese just without, form a group which tourists usually do as a morning’s sight seeing. They do too much! Anyway one doesn’t need to take his automobile from its garage for the excursion, so these classic villas are only mentioned here.
To describe and illustrate the Villa Medici one must have the magic pen of a Virgil and the palette of a Poussin and a Claude Lorrain. In antiquity the site was known as the Collis Hortorum, the Hillside of Gardens. Lucullus, Prince of Voluptuousness, and Messaline, the Empress of debauch, there celebrated their fêtes of luxury and passion, and it became in time even a picnic ground for holiday making Romans.
The Villa Medici was originally built for Cardinal Ricci in 1540, but by the end of the century had come into the hands of Cardinal Alessandro di Medici. The Tuscan Grand Dukes owned it a century or so later on, and it was finally sold to the French to house the academy of arts founded at Rome by Louis XV.
It is useless for a modern writer to attempt to describe the quiet charm of the surroundings of the Villa Borghese, the nearest of the great country houses to the centre of Rome. Many have tried to do so, but few have succeeded. Better far that one should point the way thither, make a personal observation or two and then onward to Tivoli, Albano or Frascati.
One word on the Forum ere leaving. Not even the most restless automobilist neglects a stroll about the Forum, no matter how often he may have been here before, though its palaces of antiquity have little more than their outline foundations to tell their story to-day.
Commendatore Boni, who has charge of the excavations, brought to light recently a curiously inscribed stone tablet, which, owing to the archaic Latin it contained, he found it impossible to read. A number of learned Latinists and archæologists soon gathered about him. This is what they read:
QUE
STAELA VI
A
DEGLIA SINI
While some declared that “que” was an enclitic conjunction, and that therefore the inscription must be incomplete, others asserted that the word was an abbreviation of “queo,” and that the inscription might be read: “I am able to gaze upon the star without pain.”
While the dispute was on, a peasant of the Campagna passed by. He approached and asked the reason of the crowd. He was told, and gazing at the inscription for several minutes he read slowly:
“Questa e la via degli asini” (“This is the way of asses.”).
And the Latinists, the archæologists, and the other savants crept quietly away, while the Commendatore in good, modern Tuscan made some remarks unprintable and untranslatable.
CHAPTER X
THE CAMPAGNA AND BEYOND
THE environs of Rome – those parts not given over to fox-hunting and horse-racing, importations which have been absorbed by the latter day Roman from the forestieri– still retain most of their characteristics of historic times. The Campagna is still the Campagna; the Alban Hills are still classic ground, and Tivoli and Frascati – in spite of the modernisms which have, here and there, crept in – are still the romantic Tivoli and Frascati of the ages long gone by.
The surrounding hills of Rome are, really, what give it its charm. The city is strong in contrast from every aspect, modernity nudging and crowding antiquity. Rome itself is not lovely, only superbly and majestically overpowering in its complexity.
The Rome of romantic times went as far afield as Otricoli, Ostia, Tivoli and Albano, and, on the east, these outposts were further encircled by a girdle of villas, gardens and vineyards too numerous to plot on any map that was ever made.
Such is the charm of Rome; not its ruined temples, fountains and statues alone; nor yet its great churches and palaces, and above all not the view of the Colosseum lit up by coloured fires, but Rome the city and the Campagna.
There is no question that the Roman Campagna is a sad, dreary land without a parallel in the well populated centres of Europe. Said Chateaubriand: “It possesses a silence and solitude so vast that even the echoes of the tumults of the past enacted upon its soil are lost in the very expansiveness of the flat marshy plain.”
Balzac too wrote in the same vein: “Imagine something of the desolation of the country of Tyre and Babylon and you will have a picture of the sadness and lonesomeness of this vast, wide, thinly populated region.”
The similes of Balzac and of Chateaubriand hold good to-day. Long horned cattle and crows are the chief living things – and mosquitoes. One can’t forget the mosquitoes.
Here and there a jagged stump of a pier of a Roman aqueduct pushes up through the herb-grown soil, perhaps even an arch or two, or three or five; but hardly a tangible remembrance of the work of the hand of man is left to-day, to indicate the myriads of comers and goers who once passed over its famous Appian Way. The Appian Way is still there, loose ended fragments joined up here and there with a modern roadway which has become its successor, and there is a very appreciable traffic, such as it is, on the main lines of roadway north and south; but east and west and round about, save for a few squalid huts and droves of cattle, sheep and goats, a wayside inn, a fountain beneath a cypress and a few sleepy, dusty hamlets and villages, there is nothing to indicate a progressive modern existence. All is as dead and dull as it was when Rome first decayed.
Out from Rome, a couple of leagues on the Via Campagna, on the right bank of the Tiber, one comes to the sad relic of La Magliana, the hunting lodge of the Renaissance Popes. The evolution of the name of this country house comes from a corruption of the patronymic of the original owners of the land, the family of Manlian, who were farmers in 390 B. C.
The road out from Rome, by the crumbling Circus Maxentius, the lone fragments of Aqueduct, and the moss-grown tomb of Cecilia Metellag, runs for a dozen kilometres at a dead level, to rise in the next dozen or so to a height of four hundred and sixty odd metres just beyond Albano, when it descends and then rises again to Velletri ultimately to flatten out and continue along practically at sea-level all the way to Cassino, a hundred and ninety kilometres from Rome. The classification given to this road by the Touring Club Italiano is “mediocre e polveroso,” and one need not be a deep student of the language to evolve its meaning.
A little farther away, but still within sight of the Eternal City, just before coming to Albano, is Castel Gandolfo, a Papal stronghold since the middle ages. Urban VIII built a Papal palace here, and the seigniorial château, since transformed into a convent, was a sort of summer habitation of the Popes. The status of the little city of two thousand souls is peculiar. It enjoys extra-territorial rights which were granted to the papal powers by the new order of things which came into being in 1871. A zone of loveliness surrounds the site which overlooks, on one side, the dazzling little Albano Lake and, on the other, stretches off across the Campagna to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Just beyond Castel Gandolfo is Albano, still showing vestiges of the city of Domitian, which, in turn, was built upon the ruins of that of Pompey. Albano’s fortifications rank as the most perfect examples of their class in all Italy. They tell a story of many epochs; they are all massive, and are largely built in rough polygonal masonry. Towers, turrets and temples are all here at Albano. Still the town is not ranked as one of the tourist sights.
The Albano Lake is another one of those mysterious bodies of water without source or outlet. It occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, so some day it may disappear as quickly as it came. Concerning its origin the following local legend is here related: “Where the lake now lies there stood once a great city. Here, when Jesus Christ came to Italy, he begged alms. None took compassion on Him but an old woman who gave Him some meal. He then bade her leave the city: she obeyed; the city instantly sank and the lake rose in its place.”
This legend is probably founded on some vague recollection or tradition of the fall of the city of Veii, which was so flourishing a state at the time of the foundation of Rome, and possessed so many attractions, that it became a question whether Rome itself should not be abandoned for Veii. The lake of Albano is intimately connected with the siege of Veii and no place has more vivid memories of ancient Roman history.
Here, overlooking the lake, once rose Alba Longa, the mother city of Rome, built by Ascanius, the son of Æneas, who named it after the white sow which gave birth to the prodigious number of thirty young.
On the shore of the lake, opposite Albano, is Rocca di Papa. The convent of the Passionist Fathers at Rocca di Papa, (the city itself being the one-time residence of the Anti-pope John) was built by Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts, of materials taken from an ancient temple on the shores of Lake Albano.
Rocca di Papa is a most picturesque little hilltop village. Its sugar-loaf cone is crowned with an old castle of the Colonnas which remained their possession until 1487, when the Orsini in their turn took possession.
Frascati, on the Via Tusculum, about opposite Castel Gandolfo, as this historic roadway parallels that of Claudius Appius, was Rome’s patrician suburb, and to-day is the resort of nine-tenths of the excursionists out from Rome for a day or an afternoon.
Frascati, the villa suburb, and Tivoli alike depend upon their sylvan charms to set off the beauties of their palaces and villas. It was ever the custom among the princely Italian families – the Farnese, the Borghese, and the Medici – to lavish their wealth on the laying out of the grounds quite as much as on the building of their palaces.
Frascati’s villas and palaces cannot be catalogued here. One and all are the outgrowth of an ancient Roman pleasure house of the ninth century, and followed after as a natural course of events, the chief attraction of the place being the wild-wood site (frasche), really a country faubourg of Rome itself.
The Popes and Cardinals favoured the spot for their country houses, and the nobles followed in their train. The chief of Frascati’s architectural glories are the Villa Conti, its fountains and its gardens; the Villa Aldobrandini of the Cardinal of that name, the nephew of Pope Clement VIII; and the Villa Tusculana, or Villa Ruffinella, of the sixteenth century, but afterwards the property of Lucien Bonaparte and the scene of one of Washington Irving’s little known sketches, “The Adventure of an Artist.” The Villa Falconieri at Frascati, built by the Cardinal Ruffini in the sixteenth century, formerly belonged to a long line of Counts and Cardinals, but the hand of the German, which is grasping everything in sight, in all quarters of the globe, that other people by lack of foresight do not seem to care for, has acquired it as a home for “convalescent” German artists. Perhaps the omnific German Emperor seeks to rival the functions of the Villa Medici with his Villa Falconieri. He calls it a hospital, but it has studios, lecture rooms and what not. What it all means no one seems to know.
Minor villas are found dotted all over Frascati’s hills, with charming vistas opening out here and there in surprising manner. Not all are magnificently grand, few are superlatively excellent according to the highest æsthetic standards, but all are of the satisfying, gratifying quality that the layman will ever accept as something better than his own conceptions would lead up to. That is the chief pleasure of contemplation, after all.
Above Frascati itself lies Tusculum, founded, says tradition, by a son of Ulysses, the birthplace of Cato and a one time residence of Cicero. This would seem enough fame for any small town hardly important enough to have its name marked on the map, and certainly not noted down in many of the itineraries for automobile tourists which cross Italy in every direction. More than this, Tusculum has the ruins of an ancient castle, one day belonging to a race of fire-eating, quarrelsome counts who leagued themselves with any one who had a cause, just or unjust, for which to fight. Fighting was their trade, but Frederic I in 1167 beat them at their own game and razed their castle and its town of allies huddled about its walls. That is why Tusculum has not become a tourist resort to-day, but the ruin is still there and one can imagine a different destiny had fate, or a stronger hand, had full sway.
From Albano, another cross road, via Velletri to Valmontone, leads in twenty odd kilometres to Palestrina, whence one may continue his way to Subiaco and thence to Tivoli and enter Rome again via the Porta San Lorenzo, having made a round of perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometres of as varied a stretch of Italian roadway as could possibly be found. The gamut of scenic and architectural joys runs all the way from those of the sea level Campagna and its monumental remains to the verdure and romance of the Alban and Sabine Hills and the splendours of the memories of the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli.
Lying well back from the Alban hills is Palestrina, the greatest stronghold of the Colonnas and where a branch of the family still maintains a country house. The cradle of this great family, which gave so many popes to Rome, and an inspiration and a divinity to Michelangelo, was a village near Palestrina. It had a Corinthian column rising in its piazza and from it the Colonna took their family arms. It is found on all documents relating to their history; on tapestries, furniture and medals in many museums and in many wood carvings in old Roman churches.
Palestrina, too, has memories of Michelangelo. The treasures of masterpieces left by him are scattered all over Italy to keep fresh the memory of his name and fame.
Subiaco should be made a stopping place on every automobilist’s itinerary out from Rome. Some wit has said that any one living in a place ending with o was bound to be unhappy. He had in mind one or two sad romances of Subiaco, though for all that one can hardly see what the letters of its name have got to do with it. Subiaco has for long been the haunt of artists and others in search of the picturesque, but not the general run of tourists.
Subiaco is still primitive in most things, and this in spite of the fact that a railway has been built through it in recent years. In feudal times the town could hardly have been more primitive than now, in fact the only thing that ever woke it from lethargy was a little game of warfare, sometimes with disaster for the inhabitants and sometimes for the other side.
The castle of the ruling baron sat high upon the height. What is left of it is there to-day, but its capture has been made easier with the march of progress. Down from the castle walls slopes the town, its happy, unprogressive people as somnolent as of yore.
Subiaco is one of the most accessible and conveniently situated hill towns of Italy, if any would seek it out. Nero first exploited Subiaco when he built a villa here, as he did in other likely spots round about. Nero built up and he burned down and he fiddled all the while. He was decidedly a capricious character. History or legend says that Nero’s cup of cheer was struck from his hand by lightning one day when he was drinking the wine of Subiaco here at his hillside villa. He escaped miraculously, but he got a good scare, though it is not recorded that he signed the pledge!
Subiaco’s humble inn, “The Partridge,” is typical of its class throughout Italy. It is in no sense a very comfortably installed establishment, but it is better, far better, than the same class of inn in England and America, and above all its cooking is better. A fowl and a salad and a bottle of wine and some gorgonzola are just a little better at “La Pernice” than the writer remembers to have eaten elsewhere under similar conditions.