In those months which followed there were few indeed who did not suffer in the almost universal financial cataclysm.  All that Contini and others, older and wiser than he, had predicted, took place, and more also.  The banks refused discount, even upon the best paper, saying with justice that they were obliged to hold their funds in reserve at such a time.  The works stopped almost everywhere.  It was impossible to raise money.  Thousands upon thousands of workmen who had come from great distances during the past two or three years were suddenly thrown out of work, penniless in the streets and many of them burdened with wives and children.  There were one or two small riots and there was much demonstration, but, on the whole, the poor masons behaved very well.  The government and the municipality did what they could—­what governments and municipalities can do when hampered at every turn by the most complicated and ill-considered machinery of administration ever invented in any country.  The starving workmen were by slow degrees got out of the city and sent back to starve out of sight in their native places.  The emigration was enormous in all directions.

The dismal ruins of that new city which was to have been built and which never reached completion are visible everywhere.  Houses seven stories high, abandoned within a month of completion rise uninhabited and uninhabitable out of a rank growth of weeds, amidst heaps of rubbish, staring down at the broad, desolate streets where the vigorous grass pushes its way up through the loose stones of the unrolled metalling.  Amidst heavy low walls which were to have been the ground stories of palaces, a few ragged children play in the sun, a lean donkey crops the thistles, or if near to a few occupied dwellings, a wine seller makes a booth of straw and chestnut boughs and dispenses a poisonous, sour drink to those who will buy.  But that is only in the warm months.  The winter winds blow the wretched booth to pieces and increase the desolation.  Further on, tall facades rise suddenly up, the blue sky gleaming through their windows, the green moss already growing upon their naked stones and bricks.  The Barbarini of the future, if any should arise, will not need to despoil the Colosseum to quarry material for their palaces.  If, as the old pasquinade had it the Barbarini did what the Barbarians did not, how much worse than barbarians have these modern civilizers done!

The distress was very great in the early months of 1889.  The satisfaction which many of the new men would have felt at the ruin of great old families was effectually neutralized by their own financial destruction.  Princes, bankers, contractors and master masons went down together in the general bankruptcy.  Ugo Del Ferice survived and with him Andrea Contini and Company, and doubtless other small firms which he protected for his own ends.  San Giacinto, calm, far-seeing, and keen as an eagle, surveyed the chaos from the height of his magnificent fortune, unmoved and immovable, awaiting the lowest ebb of the tide.  The Saracinesca looked on, hampered a little by the sudden fall in rents and other sources of their income, but still superior to events, though secretly anxious about Orsino’s affairs, and daily expecting that he must fail.