The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the Golden House of Nero.  When a guidebook tries to be humorous it only succeeds in being foolish.  Practical jokes are out of place in a guidebook anyway.  Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick smokehouse, which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture land for goats for a great many years; imagine the debris as having been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are visible; surround the whole with distressingly homely buildings of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars and loafers and souvenir venders—­and you have the Golden House where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively early age.

In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best to recreate before my mind’s eye the scenes that had been enacted here once on a time.  I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall, as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of the gods.  I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings.  I could not make it.  I tried until I was lame in both legs and my back was strained.  It was no go.

If I had been a poet or a historian, or a person full of Chianti, I presume I might have done it; but I am no poet and I had not been drinking.  All I could think of was that the guide on my left had eaten too much garlic and that the guide on my right had not eaten enough.  So in self-defense I went away and ate a few strands of garlic myself; for I had learned the great lesson of the proverb: 

When in Rome be an aroma!

Chapter XXII

Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones

When I reached Pompeii the situation was different.  I could conjure up an illusion there—­the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy.  It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know Naples you will readily understand what a high compliment that is for Pompeii.