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.

Santa Maria Maggiore is the third church in importance, but the second in magnificence in Rome.  Before its facade stands a single column of granite of the Corinthian order.  The facade of this church is beautiful but it would be far better without the campanile, which I think always disfigures a church of Grecian architecture; besides it is not in the centre of the building.  The church is richly adorned with mosaics and its several chapels are admirable from the execution of their architecture and sculpture and the value