This, I Thought, Would Acquaint Me With The Different
Churches, And On The Way To Them I Should Make Friends With The Various
Quarters.
Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the
unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column
or obelisk, statue, "storied urn or animated bust" or mere tablet, would
be safe from my indirect research.
Before I knew it, I should know Rome
by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had
forgotten it.
I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have
been coining by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and
realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was
burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his
sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well
as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the thrill which
the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere
mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was
that had moved me so. Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a
second time. It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy
the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given
over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such
homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above
all, onions.
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