In Fact, There Is Nothing More Impressive In
The Floating Foreign Society Of Rome Than Its Zeal For Self-Improvement.
No one classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to
be a traveller he is really one
Of them; and it is with difficulty I
keep myself from the appearance of patronizing them in these praises,
which are for the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to
be without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of their
application reached to all the historical and actual interests, to the
religious as well as the social, the political as well as the financial;
but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially turned to the study of
antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer past. There was given last
winter a series of lectures at the American School of Archaeology by the
head of it, which were followed with eager attention by hearers who
packed the room. But these lectures, which were so admirably first in.
the means of intelligent study, seemed only one of the means by which my
fellow-tourists were climbing the different branches of knowledge. All
round my apathy I felt, where I did not see, the energy of the others;
with my mind's ear I heard a rustle as of the turning leaves of
Baedekers, of Murrays, of Hares, and of the many general histories and
monographs of which these intelligent authorities advised the
supplementary reading.
If I am not so mistaken as I might very well be, however, the local
language is less studied than it was in former times, when far fewer
Italians spoke English. My own Italian was of that date; but, though I
began by using it, I found myself so often helped for a forgotten
meaning that I became subtly demoralized and fell luxuriously into the
habit of speaking English like a native of Rome. Yet tacitly, secretly
perhaps, there may have been many people who were taking up Italian as
zealously as many more were taking up antiquity. One day in the Piazza
di Spagna, in a modest little violet of a tea-room, which was venturing
to open in the face of the old-established and densely thronged parterre
opposite, I noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall,
young Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to the
very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair. She looked like some
of those athletic-minded young women of Ibsen's plays, and the pile of
books on the table beside her tea suggested a student character. When
she had finished her tea she put these books back into a leather bag,
which they filled to a rigid repletion, and, after a few laconic phrases
with the tea-girl, she went out like going off the stage. Her powerful
demeanor somehow implied severe studies; but the tea-girl - a massive,
confident, confiding Roman - said, No, she was studying Italian, and all
those books related to the language, for which she had a passion.
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