Martial And Petronius
Arbiter Must Hide Their Diminished Heads Before Baffo.
The owner of this
book chose to read out loud, quite unsolicited, several choice sonnets of
this poet for our edification during the journey; and this branch of
litterature seemed to be the only one with which he was acquainted.
When the examination was over I took leave of my fellow travellers, and
repaired to the German Hotel in the Via de' Condotti, where I engaged
an apartment, and sat down to dinner at an excellent table d'hote at five
o'clock. There was a profusion of everything, particularly of fish and
game. Mullets and wild boar are constant dishes at a Roman table. The
mullets at Rome are small but delicious, and this was a fish highly prized
by the ancient Romans. Game of all kinds is very cheap here, from the
abundance of it that is to be met with in wild uninhabited wastes of Latium
and in the Pontine marshes. Every peasant is a sportsman and goes
constantly armed with fire-arms, not only to kill game, but to defend
himself against robbers, who infest the environs of Rome, and who sometimes
carry their audacity so far as to push their reconnaissances close to the
very walls of the city. At the German Hotel the price of the dinner at
table d'hote, including wine at discretion, is six paoli, about three
franks. I pay for an excellent room about three paoli per diem and my
breakfast at a neighbouring Caffe costs me one paolo. A paolo is
worth about five pence English. There are ten paoli to a scudo Romano
and ten bafocchi to a paolo, The bafocco is a copper coin.
ROME, 12th Sept.
A great number of Germans dine at the table d'hote of Franz's hotel.
Among them I distinguished one day a very intelligent Bavarian Jew. I
proposed to him a walk to the Coliseum the following morning, as
independent of the benefit I derived from his conversation I was curious to
see whether it was true or not that the Jews always avoided walking under
the Arch of Titus, which was erected in commemoration of the capture of
Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus, in the reign of Vespasian. On stepping
out of the Hotel Allemand, the first thing that met my eye was the
identical beggar described by Kotzebue in his travels in Italy, and he
gives the very same answer now as then to those who give him nothing, viz.,
Pazienza.
We crossed the Piazza di Spagna, ascended the superb flight of steps of
the Trinita de' Monti, where there is a French church called the Church
of St Louis: near it is the Villa Medici, which is the seat of the French
Academy of the fine arts at Rome. We then filed along the Strada Felice
till we arrived at the church of Santa Maria maggiore, a superb edifice,
the third church in Rome in celebrity, and the second in magnificence.
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