There Is No Longer An Extortion For
Hearth-Fires Which Send All The Heat Up The Chimney; There Are Steam
Radiators In Every Room.
There is no longer a tedious bargaining for
rooms; the price is fixed and cannot be abated except for a sojourn of
weeks or months.
But the price is much greater than it used to be - twice
as great almost; for the taxes are heavy and provisions are dear, and
coal and electricity are costly, and you must share the expense with the
landlord. He is not there for his health, and, if for your comfort, you
are not his invited guest. As I have intimated, an apartment of four
rooms with a bath will cost almost as much, with board, as the same
quarters in New York, but you will get far more for your money in Rome.
If you take a single room, even to the south, in many first-class Roman
hotels it will cost you for room and board only two dollars or two and a
half a day, which is what you pay for a far meaner and smaller room
alone in New York; and the Roman board is such, as you can get at none
but our most expensive houses for twice the money. Generally you cannot
get a single room and bath, but at present a very exclusive hotel is
going up in a good quarter which promises, with huge English signs, a
bath with every room and every room full south. One does not see just
how the universal sunny exposure is to be managed, but there can be no
question of the baths; and, with the steam radiators everywhere, the
northernmost room might well imagine itself full south.
Nearly all the hotels have a pleasant tea-room, which is called a winter
garden, because of a pair of palm-trees set under the centre of its
glass roof and the painted bamboo chairs and tables set about. This sort
of garden is found even in the hotels which are almost of the grade of
pensions and of their prices; but generally the pensions proper are
without it. Their rates are much lower, but quite as good people
frequent them, and they are often found in good streets and sometimes
open into or overlook charming gardens; the English especially seem to
like the pensions, which are managed like hotels. They are commonly
without steam-heat, which might account for their being less frequented
by Americans.
There are two supreme hotels in Rome - one in the Ludovisi quarter, as it
is called, and the other near the Baths of Diocletian, which Americans
frequent to their cost, for the rates approach a New York or London
magnificence. The first is rather the more spectacular of the two and is
the resort of all the finer sort of afternoon tea-drinkers, who find
themselves the observed of observers of all nationalities; there is
music and dress, and there are titles of every degree, with as much
informality as people choose, if they go to look, or as much state if
they go to be looked at; these things are much less cumbrously contrived
than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat unauthorized fancy,
is rather more addicted to very elect dinner-parties and suppers. Below
these two are an endless variety of first-rate and second-rate houses,
both in the newer quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been
turned into streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and
avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town which
the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the worst these
places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are not steam-heated.
It has seemed to me that there are not so many _hotels garnis_ in Rome
as there used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant
streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with breakfast in
his rooms, and likes to browse about for his luncheon and dinner, will
easily suit himself. If it comes to taking a furnished apartment for the
season, there is much range in price and much choice in place. The
agents who have them to let will begin, rather dismayingly, "Oh,
apartments in Rome are very dear." But you learn on inquiry that a
furnished flat in the Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full
sun, may be had for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the
rents of palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred
and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and for
this you have linen and silver and all the movables and utensils you
want, as well as several vast rooms opening wastefully from one to
another till you reach the salon. The rents of the like flats, if
vacant, would be a quarter or a third less, though again the agents
begin by telling you that there is very little difference between the
rents of furnished and unfurnished flats. The flats are in every part
of the old town and the new; and some are in noble sixteenth and
seventeenth century palaces, such as we are accustomed to at home only
in the theatre. My own experience is that everybody, especially in
houses where there are no lifts, lives on the top floor. You pass many
other floors in going up, but you are left to believe that nobody lives
on them. When you reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming
inside for their state and beauty, and outside for their magnificent
view, which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome of
St. Peter's. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all round the
horizon.
When you have taken your furnished flat, the same agency will provide
you a cook at ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a
lady's maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to
sleep out of the house.
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