Roman Holidays, and Others

No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts,...

The morning which found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the bland afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking coracles surrounded our steamer, with crew...

Let this stand for a type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and has passed or is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is full of very living Italians, the q...

What I found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the “Elegy” used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. “The stree...

All our days in Naples died like dolphins to the music which I have tried to impart the sense of. The joyful noises which it was made up of culminated for us on that evening whe...

I had again lavished my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had my Utah friend, who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to secure a first-class carriage. “Wh...

I am speaking literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand why some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and avenues, should look askance at the d...

With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise...

It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this, for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than the Spanish Steps seen from below,...

One of the most comfortable of these galleries was that in which Caligula was justly done to death, or, if not Caligula, it was some other tyrant who deserved as little to live....

There were not many people in St. Peter's that afternoon, so that I could give undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement at one point and grinding the marble s...

I did not get as far as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman stay, though we came again and again to the park (as we should call it, rather than villa), sometimes to wal...

Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman, who owned to have seen the affair, why...

Our height above the cheers helped preserve us from the sense of anything ironical in them, and there was an advantage in the outlook from our elevation which the wayfarer in ca...

I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with...

The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to th...

He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp, broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that there was not a steam-roller in al...

We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again, we had the applause of the childr...

The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wrap...

This festive preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which Leghorn enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the season glisten and twitter and flutter...

If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty minutes which might so much better hav...

The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected shower, and that it should be pro...

The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts, and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold...

Nowhere, I think, is the “sweet security of streets” felt more than in Monte Carlo. Whether the control of that good Administration of the Casino reaches to the policing of the...