Transcribed by from the 1861 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Rome in 1860. 
By
Edward Dicey.

Cambridge: 
Macmillan and co. 
And 23, Henrietta street, Covent garden,
London.
1861.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

* * * * *

Cambridge: 
Printed by C. J. Clay, M.A. 
At the University press

* * * * *

To
Mr. And Mrs Robert Browning

CHAPTER I. THE ROME OF REAL LIFE.

My first recollections of Rome date from too long ago, and from too early an age, for me to be able to recall with ease the impression caused by its first aspect.  It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of Rome fairly.  Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’s reverence for the shrine of his worship.  The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery.  A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other.  Heroes and martyrs, sages and saints and sinners, consuls and popes and emperors, people the weird pageant which to our mind’s eye hovers ever mistily amidst the scenes around us.  Here above all places in God’s earth it is hard to forget the past and think only of the present.  This, however, is what I now want to do.  Laying aside all memory of what Rome has been, I would again describe what Rome is now.  And thus, in my solitary wanderings about the city, I have often sought to picture to myself what would be the feelings of a stranger who, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, should enter Rome with only that listless curiosity which all travellers feel perforce, when for the first time they approach a great capital.  Let me fancy that such a traveller—­a very Gallio among travellers—­is standing by my side.  Let me try and tell him what, under my mentorship, he would mark and see.

It shall not be on a bright, cloudless day that we enter Rome.  To our northern eyes the rich Italian sun-light gives to everything, even to ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due.  No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull.  The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance.  It matters little by what gate or from what quarter we enter.