in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel
and the Stanze. One could have the statues as
much to one’s self as one liked; there were courts
with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a
view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist
intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and
domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows
there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful
morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which
did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with
wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This
in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an
evening star of glittering silver that brightened
as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be
of as many minds in March as in April at New York.
But through all one’s remembrance of the Roman
winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like
that grace of Botticelli’s Primavera in his
Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer,
though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel,
and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not
penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and
the churches you must blow your nails if you wish
to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors,
there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you.
She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in
your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that
open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming
into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised—that is,
if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an
Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth,
but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly
than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious
prejudice against shivering. If you are a beggar,
as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal
heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you
select as being most in the path of charity, and cling
to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow
the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain
of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon
pity, but preferably I should say they were blind,
and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly
rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I
remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican
Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way
to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five
centessimi did not suffice to abate.
SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
