Italian Hours

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK-1

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK

December 28, 1872.—In Rome again for the last three days—that second visit which, when the first isn’t followed by a fatal illness in Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn’t drink of the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse hadn’t I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings before to take the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting Triton i