Giovanni after the "Hotel Vittoria" fare--tempted me to press forwards.
A boorish and unreliable-looking individual volunteered three pieces of
information--that the house was built thirty years ago, that a large
nursery for plants lies about ten kilometres distant, and that this
particular domain covers "two or four thousand hectares." A young
plantation of larches and silver birches--aliens to this region--seemed
to be doing well.

Not far from here, along my track, lies Santa Barbara, two or three
huts, with corn still green--like Verace (above Acri) on the watershed
between the Ionian and upper Grati. Then follows a steep climb up the
slopes of Mount Pettinascura, whose summit lies 1708 metres above
sea-level. This is the typical landscape of the Sila Grande. There is
not a human habitation in sight; forests all around, with views down
many-folded vales into the sea and towards the distant and fairy-like
Apennines, a serrated edge, whose limestone precipices gleam like
crystals of amethyst between the blue sky and the dusky woodlands of the
foreground.

Here I reposed awhile, watching the crossbills, wondrously tame, at work
among the branches overhead, and the emerald lizard peering out of the
bracken at my side. This _lucertone,_ as they call it, is a local beast,
very abundant in some spots (at Venosa and Patirion, for example); it is
elsewhere conspicuous by its absence. The natives are rather afraid of
it, and still more so of the harmless gecko, the "salamide," which is
reputed highly poisonous.

Then up again, through dells and over uplands, past bubbling streams,
sometimes across sunlit meadows, but oftener in the leafy shelter of
maples and pines--a long but delightful track, winding always high above