and all the circumstances were most favourable for a meditative walk
amid such magnificent memories. The inhabitants of Rome pay respect to
the Sunday so far as abstaining from labour is concerned; but they
make up for this by throwing open their museums and places of interest
on that day, which indeed is the only day in which they are free to
the public; and they take a large amount of recreation for doing a
small amount of penance in the interests of religion. Still there is
very little bustle or traffic in the streets, especially in the
morning; and one meets with no more disagreeable and incongruous
interruptions on the way to church in the Eternal City than he does at
home. At the head of the Capo le Case is a small church, beside an old
ruinous-looking wall of tufa, covered with shaggy pellitory and other
plants, which might well have been one of the ramparts of ancient
Rome. It is called San Guiseppe, and has a faded fresco painting on
the gable, representing the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt,
supposed to be by Frederico Zuccari, whose own house--similarly
decorated on the outside with frescoes--was in the immediate vicinity.
From the windows of my rooms, I could see at the foot of the street
the fantastic cupola and bell-turret of the church of St. Andrea delle
Fratte, which belonged to the Scottish Catholics before the
Reformation, and is now frequented by our Catholic countrymen during
Lent, when sermons are preached to them in English. It is the parish
church of the Piazza di Spagna, and the so-called English quarter. The
present edifice was only built at the end of the sixteenth century,
and, strange to say, with the proceeds of the sale of Cardinal
Gonsalvi's valuable collection of snuff-boxes; but its name, derived
from the Italian word _Fratta_, "thorn-bush," would seem to imply that
the church is of much greater antiquity, going back to a far-off time
when the ground on which it stands was an uncultivated waste. A
miracle is said to have happened in one of the side chapels in 1842,