Such Of Us As Were Staying The Winter, Of Course Held Aloof From The
Hurried Passers-Through, Or Looked With Kindly Tolerance On Their
Struggles To Get More Out Of Rome In A Given Moment Than She Perhaps
Yielded With Perfect Acquiescence.
We fancied that she kept something
back; she is very subtle, and has her reserves even with people who pass
a whole winter within her gates.
The fact is, there are a great many of
her, though we knew her afar as one mighty personality. There is the
antique Rome, the mediaeval Rome, the modern Rome; but that is only the
beginning. There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church,
which divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion;
but here is a field so vast that Ave may not enter it without danger of
being promptly lost in it. There is the Rome of the visiting
nationalities, severally and collectively; there is especially the
Anglo-American Rome, which if not so populous as the German, for
instance, is more important to the Anglo-Saxons. It sees a great deal of
itself socially, but not to the exclusion of the sympathetic Southern
temperaments which seem to have a strange but not unnatural affinity
with it. So far as we might guess, it was a little more Clerical than
Liberal in its local politics; if you were very Liberal, it was well to
be careful, for Conversion lurked under many exteriors which gave no
outward sign of it; if the White of the monarchy and the Black of the
papacy divide the best Roman families, of course foreigners are more
intensely one or the other than the natives.
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