is, supposing the master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they
are not in, she answers your "_Amici!_" with "_No ghe ne xe!_"
(Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and
fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You
bow and give good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and
on the common stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names,
and you certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and
more especially of Southern Europe, is shown abroad; under the domestic
roof it dwindles and disappears. And indeed it is no wonder, considering
how dispiriting and comfortless most of the houses are. The lower windows
are heavily barred with iron; the wood-work is rude, even in many palaces
in Venice; the rest is stone and stucco; the walls are not often papered,
though they are sometimes painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature
of the interior is the frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows
shut imperfectly, the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while
to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift
slantingly from the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the
stoves are of plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the
balconies alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the
streets, or look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted
ceilings, go far to make the houses habitable.

It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you get
in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the Grand
Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken in
consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of residence
by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to
enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances,
becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger.