Ah, Rome - the Roma of the Ancients - the Mistress of the Olden
World - the Sacred City! Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak!
It is customary for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks,
to carry on like this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if
they did speak, they would doubtless speak Italian, which would
leave him practically where he was before. And so, having said
it myself according to formula, I shall proceed to state the actual
facts:
If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a
splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and
a beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of,
and a hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of
a tragic mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using
the water, and a great, overpowering smell - yes, you can see a
Roman smell; a cart mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on
him, and a driver with ten cents' worth on him; a palace like a
dream of stone, entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels; a new,
shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a
cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its
walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched
like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal
ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and
porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from
one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew
of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden
courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the
center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted
silver and which carries more than its weight in dirt - if in
addition everybody in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy,
and is trying to sell you something or wheedle you out of something,
or pick your pocket of something - you need not, for confirmatory
evidence, seek the vast dome of St. Peter's rising yonder in the
distance, or the green tops of the cedars and the dusky clumps of
olive groves on the hillsides beyond - you know you are in Rome.
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