It Is A Palace Enclosing A
Quadrangle Of Whole Acres (I Will Not Own To Less), With A Stately
Colonnade Following As Far Round As The Reader Likes.
When he passes
through all this magnificence he will come out on a grassy terrace, with
a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the
Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough).
A weird sort of barbaric
stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars
that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the
top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches
must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of
these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college
there, where only the sons of noble families are received for education.
As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old
and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with
their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls
a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole
of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing
colder thaa it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup,
and hot, that they could get.
After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing,
in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical
merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming
to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram
back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it.
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