If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry, this is Ceres’.  The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot catch it.  And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of the agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a twelfth-century tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet.  It actually casts a flush of green over their city piazza—­the wide light-grey pavements so vast that to keep them weeded would need an army of workers.  That army has not been employed; and grass grows in a small way, but still beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles.  Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly prompts the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazza into a square.  The shrub is to take the place not so much of the pavement as of the importunate grass.  For it is hard to be beaten—­and the weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant!  The sun takes its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the “third” (which is in truth the fourth) Rome.

When I say grass I use the word widely.  Italian grass is not turf; it is full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic.  No richer scents throng each other, close and warm, than these from a little hand-space of the grass one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine or the Alban hills.  Moreover, under the name I will take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican.  That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious and nothing furtive.  And outside one lateral window on a ledge to the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad.  Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any parapet it may have round a corner.

Moreover, in Italy the vegetables—­the table ones—­have a wildness, a suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the tilling.  Wildish peas, wilder asparagus—­the field asparagus which seems to have disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his manifestations of frugality—­and strawberries much less than half-way from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost—­these are all Italian things of savage savour and simplicity.  The most cultivated of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but something better, as her city is yet not a town but something better, and her wilderness something better than a desert.  In all the three there is a trace of the little flying heels of the runaway.