Chapter 23 Summary

The gondolas of Venice are a wondrous thing to Mark Twain. Most are painted black, which Twain calls the color of mourning. He says people mourn in Venice, for their past and for the city's poverty and ruins. But it is curious to watch people travel in gondolas just as naturally as they would a street carriage. Children visit friends with the gondola, women go shopping, and men attend business meetings.

After so much time away from home, Twain notices that some of his American friends are forgetting how to speak English. He looks in the hotel registries to find that many of them have signed their names in both English and whatever the current country's language is. He says it is one thing to show off one's own culture in a foreign land, but quite another to bring a foreign culture back...