Sabina, Land of Olive Trees and Hill Towns

It would be easy to think the Sabine country of northeastern Lazio was a land forgotten by time. The view, yesterday and today, is sketched by the soft profiles of the hills against which stood, and still stand, castles among the green, carefully drawn rows of olive trees.

Even now, the countryside must be much like what the Roman legions saw, and later the pilgrims, and still later the travelers on the Grand Tour. It must be what the prefect De Tournon saw when the French government, after the Jacobin interlude, charged him with drafting a report on the economic situation of the papal states.