ROYAL VISIT TO ITALY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIX, Issue 8130, 2 May 1906, Page 5

ROYAL VISIT TO ITALY.

LAKE AVERNUS INSPECTED. ROME, April 30. King Edward and Queen Alexandra visited the Cave of tbe Ouraean Sibyl at Lake Avernus. King Edward leaves to-night for London, overland. Queen Alexandra proceeds to Gibraltar. (Avernus, now called Lagod'Averno, is a small, nearly oiroular lake in Campania, Italy. It is about a mile and a-half in uiroumterenoe, and occupies the crater of an extinct volcano. It is in some places as deep as 200 feet, and is almost completely shut in by steep and wooded heights. The sulphurous and mepbitio vapours arising from the lake were believed in ancient times to kill the birds that flew over it; hence, according to some, its Greek appellation. Owing to its gloomy and awful aspect, it became the centre of almost all the fables of the ancients respecting tbe world of shades. Here was located Homer's entrance to the under world; here tbe Cimmerians are said to have dwelt in deep caverns, without ever coming into the light of day; here, also, were placed the Elysian fields, the grove of Hecate, and the grotto of the Cumean Sibyl. Agrippa caused the dense woods to be thinned, by which the place lost much of its wildness, and by a cutting connected it jwith the Lucrine Lake and the sea, so as to make it a kind of harbour, but the voloanio upheaval of the Monte Nuovo in 1538 altered the region, and made Avernus again an inland lake. On its east side are ruins of a temple of A[ <?llo, on its south side what is shown as the famous grotto of Sibyl).