When A Guidebook Tries To Be Humorous It
Only Succeeds In Being Foolish.
Practical jokes are out of place
in a guidebook anyway.
Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick
smokehouse, which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots
and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture land
for goats for a great many years; imagine the debris as having
been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are
visible; surround the whole with distressingly homely buildings
of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars
and loafers and souvenir venders - and you have the Golden House
where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident
and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason
of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively
early age.
In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best
to recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted
here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall,
as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a
splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on
the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and
all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as
arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the
clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained
at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome
flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen
who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace
as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the
many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings.
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