Towards four o’clock the carriages kept on increasing. The troop of ladies dressed in white, in stuffs of spring-like softness, of young girls in summerish muslin, in straw hats covered with flowers, became thicker, and at that moment the _fragolata_ presented an enchanting appearance. Under the wooded plateau of the Piazza di Siena, amidst thick groups of tall trees, with their shining, almost metallic, verdure, and yet transparent with the softness of May, a large counter had been placed, on whose white cloth bunches of roses and baskets of strawberries, most graceful rustic baskets, covered with favours and ribbons of soft colours, and all sorts of strawberries, big and small, were placed on broad fresh leaves. Behind the stall were five or six ladies, Donna Flaminia Colonna, Margherita Savelli, the Princess della Marsiliana, Countess Maria Santacroce, and Maria Guasco, whose care was the sale of the baskets.
Other ladies, especially the young ladies, carried around baskets of the early strawberries come from the mountain and the garden, offering them to the groups which kept forming little by little in increasing numbers. These amateur saleswomen are nearly all beautiful. There are Donna Teresa Santacroce, the liveliest and most seductive of Roman society girls; Miss Jenkins, an English girl, who seemed to have escaped from one of Lawrence’s pictures; Mademoiselle de Klapken, an irresistible Hungarian, and Stefania Farnese, with her white complexion, chestnut hair, smiling eyes and mouth, dressed in white like a Grecian Erigone.
Amidst the trees, scattered everywhere, are little tables covered with the whitest cloths, sprinkled with rose-leaves, and seats for the people to sit and taste the strawberries, while ladies offer milk, cream, and sugar. Little conversations take place politely without hurry or bustle, just as at a promenade or a dance, and the groups round the stall and the charming assistants around the little tables, which are gradually filled, form a phantasmagoria of colours which is renewed every moment, and assumes the most unexpected and delightful aspects for appreciative eyes.
The little tables are now all taken, and the luscious fruit bathed in cream and covered with sugar moisten beautiful lips. The men even yield to the seductions of the fine, fresh food. Everywhere baskets are offered and taken, and the fruit is poured into the plates and saucers. The girls offer roses, and roses are in every lady’s hands and in every lady’s waist. Bunches of roses are on every table, and every man has a rose in his buttonhole. Several foreign ladies, lovers of flowers, have their arms laden with them. One Frenchwoman has filled her parasol with them; an English girl of eighteen has placed a cluster of the freshest white roses under the rim of her straw hat and is the picture of happy youth.