“To Rome!” cried I, eagerly. “_Dare_ you!”
My story of longing, discouragement, dreads—that had darkened into superstitious presentiments—followed. The day went smoothly enough after the confession, and the reassurances that it elicited. We secured smaller and brighter bed-rooms, and almost warmed them by ruinously dear fires, devouring as they did basketful after basketful of the Lilliputian logs. It was the business of one _facchino_ to feed the holes in the walls of the three rooms we inhabited in the day-time. Other friends called—cordial and lavish of kind offices and offers as are compatriots when met upon foreign soil. One family—old, old friends of Caput—had, although now resident in Florence, lived for a year in Rome, and laughed to scorn our fears of the climate. They rendered us yet more essential service in suggestions as to clothing, apartments, and general habits of life in Central Italy. To the adoption of these we were, I believe, greatly indebted for the unbroken health which was our portion as a household during our winter in the dear old city.
We were in Florence ten days. Nine were repetitions, “to be continued,” of such weather as we had left in Paris. One was so deliciously lovely that, had not the next proved stormy, we should have postponed our departure. We made the most of the sunshine, taking a carriage, morning and afternoon, for drives in the outskirts of the town and in the suburbs, which must have given her the name of _bella_. The city proper is undeniably and irremediably ugly. The streets are crooked lanes, in which the meeting of two carriages drives foot-passengers literally to the wall. There are no sidewalks other than the few rows of cobble-stones slanting down from the houses to the gutter separating them from the middle of the thoroughfare. The far-famed palaces are usually built around courtyards, and present to the street walls sternly blank, or frowning with grated windows. If, at long intervals, one has snatches through a gateway of fountains and conservatories, they make the more tedious block after block of lofty edifices that shut out light from the thread-like street—shed chill with darkness into these dismal wells. This is the old city in its winter aspect. Wider and handsome streets border the Arno—a sluggish, turbid creek—and the modern quarters are laid out generously in boulevards and squares. We modified our opinions materially the following year, when weather and physical state were more propitious to favorable judgment. Now, we were impatient to be gone, intolerant of the praises chanted and written of _Firenze_ in so many ages and tongues. The happiest moment of our stay within her gates was when we shook off so much of her mud as the action could dislodge from our feet and seated ourselves in a railway carriage for Rome.