that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which
is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy
street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a
fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic
piece of sculpture into a great stone basin. These fountains are often
of immense size and most elaborate design. . . . .

There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the
orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the
very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry
vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental. If an
antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would
point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over
unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often
I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a
church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that
were laid above twenty centuries ago. It is strange how our ideas of
what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in
which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or
re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand
years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and
scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent
epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that
stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican
antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an
account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the
olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad
I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before
visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for
their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older