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