offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and all such rubbish; in
other parts vegetables, comprising, at this season, green peas, onions,
cauliflowers, radishes, artichokes, and others with which I have never
made acquaintance; also, stalls or wheelbarrows containing apples,
chestnuts (the meats dried and taken out of the shells), green almonds in
their husks, and squash-seeds,--salted and dried in an oven,--apparently
a favorite delicacy of the Romans. There are also lemons and oranges;
stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber;
cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece;
bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung
together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men
sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards
on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a
shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or
figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old
white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a
short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the
ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of
scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The
piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with
straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there
is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome.

On one side of the piazza is the Church of St. Agnes, traditionally said
to stand on the site of the house where that holy maiden was exposed to
infamy by the Roman soldiers, and where her modesty and innocence were
saved by miracle. I went into the church, and found it very splendid,
with rich marble columns, all as brilliant as if just built; a frescoed
dome above; beneath, a range of chapels all round the church, ornamented
not with pictures but bas-reliefs, the figures of which almost step and