That was the day
we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not
quite so
All-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough
and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage,
behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on
walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four.
The Appian Way, as at present constituted, is a considerable
disappointment. For long stretches it runs between high stone
walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways, where votive lamps burn
before small shrines, and by the tombs of such illustrious dead
as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii. At more frequent
intervals are small wine groggeries. Being built mainly of Italian
marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance
to be found in all Italy - except a linen collar that has been
starched in an Italian laundry - the tombs are in a pretty fair
state of preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most
desperately in need of immediate repairing.
A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles
about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling
freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor's household.
Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with;
and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey.
A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he
might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded
surroundings of a stable.
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