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Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy
knowledge that they were made for caverns and darkness; and the melancholy water oozed and sucked
the mud, and crept quietly among the marshy grass and reeds, as if the overthrow of all the ancient
towers and housetops, and the death of all the ancient people born and bred there, were yet heavy on its
conscience.
A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a little town like a large pig-sty, where we passed
the night. Next morning at seven o'clock, we started for Rome.
As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the Campagna Romana; an undulating flat (as you
know), where few people can live; and where, for miles and miles, there is nothing to relieve the terrible
monotony and gloom. Of all kinds of country that could, by possibility, lie outside the gates of Rome,
this is the aptest and fittest burial-ground for the Dead City. So sad, so quiet, so sullen; so secret in its
covering up of great masses of ruin, and hiding them; so like the waste places into which the men
possessed with devils used to go and howl, and rend themselves, in the old days of Jerusalem. We had to
traverse thirty miles of this Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing nothing but
now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and
himself wrapped to the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep. At the end of that distance, we
stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch, in a common malaria-shaken, despondent little
public-house, whose every inch of wall and beam, inside, was (according to custom) painted and
decorated in a way so miserable that every room looked like the wrong side of another room, and, with
its wretched imitation of drapery, and lop-sided little daubs of lyres, seemed to have been plundered from
behind the scenes of some travelling circus.
When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfect fever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and
when, after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like - I am
half afraid to write the word - like LONDON!!! There it lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable
towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome. I
swear, that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it was so like London, at that
distance, that if you could have shown it me, in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing else.
CHAPTER X - ROME
We entered the Eternal City, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, on the thirtieth of January, by the
Porta del Popolo, and came immediately - it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain - on
the skirts of the Carnival. We did not, then, know that we were only looking at the fag end of the masks,
who were driving slowly round and round the Piazza until they could find a promising opportunity for
falling into the stream of carriages, and getting, in good time, into the thick of the festivity; and coming
among them so abruptly, all travel-stained and weary, was not coming very well prepared to enjoy the
scene.
We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles before. It had looked as yellow as it
ought to look, and hurrying on between its worn-away and miry banks, had a promising aspect of
desolation and ruin. The masquerade dresses on the fringe of the Carnival, did great violence to this
promise. There were no great ruins, no solemn tokens of antiquity, to be seen; - they all lie on the other
side of the city. There seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops and houses, such as are to be
found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude
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