Should stop to admire them (for many of them
have an air of antique beauty and majesty of countenance which is
remarkably striking), they will instantly order the females to retire, with
an air of asperity.
Whether they really be the pure descendants of the ancient Romans is
difficult to say: but it is by no means improbable, since even to this day
they intermarry solely with one another, and refuse to give their daughters
in marriage to foreigners or to those of mixed blood.
Instances have been known of these families, who are for the most part very
poor, refusing the most advantageous offers of marriage made to their
daughters by rich foreign merchants and artists, on the ground merely that
the suitors were not Romani but Barbari.
As for the bourgeoisie of Rome in general, they have been for some
centuries back and are a very mixed race, composed of all the nations of
Europe. Most of the foreign artists who come here to study the fine arts,
viz., Belgians, Dutch, German, French, English, Swedes, Danes, Poles and
Russians, as well as those from other parts of Italy, struck with the
beauty of the women, and pleased with the tranquility and agreeable society
that prevails in this metropolis, and the total freedom from all gene and
etiquette, marry Roman women and fix here for life: so that among this
class you meet with more foreign names than Roman; and it is this sort of
colonisation which keeps up the population of Rome, which would otherwise
greatly decrease as well from the celibacy of the number that become
priests, as from the malaria that prevails in and about the city in July
and August.
ROME, 19th Sept.
I have been employed for the last two days in visiting some of the
churches, palazzi and villas of modern Rome; but the number is so
prodigious and there are such a variety of things to be seen in each that I
shall only make mention of a few; indeed there are many that I have not
seen and probably shall not have time to see. As sacred things should
precede profane, let us begin with the churches.
The first that claims the attention of the traveller after St Peter's, is
the church of St John Lateran which is the oldest church in Christendom,
and was the metropolitan of Rome and of the Christian world before the
building of St Peter's. It lies very nearly in a right line with the
Piazza di Spagna, and on a prolonged line, forming an obtuse angle with
the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which, as I first visited, I shall
first describe and afterwards resume what I have to remark on the subject
of St John Lateran.
