Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part one - III
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hung out to dry between the broken ribs of the venetian
blinds, stood massive stone palaces with lattice windows and
protruding cornices. Once Jenny had to take him by the arm
— a scarlet automobile came hooting out of a gate in baroque
style, turned with difficulty, and came speeding up the narrow
street, where the gutters were full of cabbage leaves and other
refuse.
He enjoyed it all — it was so strange and southern. Year
after year his fantastic dreams had been destroyed by everyday
petty reality, till at last he had tried to sneer at himself and
correct his fancies in self-defence. And so now he tried to
convince himself that in these romantic quarters lived the same
kind of people as in every other big city — shopgirls and
factory workers, typographers and telegraph operators, people who
worked in offices and at machines, the same as in every part
of the world. But it gave him pleasure to think that the houses
and the streets, which were the image of his dreams, were
obviously real as well.
After walking through small, damp and smelly streets they
came into an open space in the sunlight. The ground was
raked up at random; heaps of offal and rubbish lay between
mounds of gravel; dilapidated old houses, some of them partly
pulled down, with rooms showing, stood between classical ruins.
Passing some detached houses, which looked as if they had
been forgotten in the general destruction, they reached the
piazza by the Vesta temple. Behind the big, new steam-mill
and the lovely little church with the pillared portico and the
slender tower, the Aventino rose distinct against the sunny
sky, with the monasteries on the hill, and dust-grey, nameless
ruins among the gardens on the slope.
The thing that always gave him a shock — in Germany and
in Florence — was that the ruins he had read about and
imagined standing in a romantic frame of green leaves with flowers
in the crevices, as you see them in old etchings or on the
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