We All Did This, Whatever Our Nation - American, English, German, Or
Italian - And Then We Mounted To The Hurricane-Deck Of Our Propeller And
Entered Into A Generous Rivalry For The Best Seats.
We had a roof over
our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could
Have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not
rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the
morning's warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We
passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar
terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of
wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of
market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the
tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino
had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees
were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we
found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.
There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with
those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and
cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts' tails blowing
picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our
advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near
one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome,
but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk
rather far from the stations before they reached home.
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