These cheeses are of all sizes and all shapes, from the great, round,
flat cheese that we are accustomed to see in country grocery stores, to
the queer-shaped caciocavallo, which looks like an Indian club and is
eaten with fruit.

There are dried vegetables and dried fruits such as were never dreamed
of in your limited experience, and even the grocer himself, the smiling
and cosmopolitan Verga, confesses that he does not know the names of all
of them.

As you go out into the street you blink at the transformation, for you
have been thousands of miles away. You think that surely there can be
nothing more. Wait a bit. Turn the corner and walk along Grant avenue
toward the Hill. See, here is a window full of bread. Look closely at it
and you will notice that it is not like the bread you are accustomed to.
Count the different kinds. Fourteen of them in all, from the long sticks
of grissini to the great slid loaves weighing many pounds. Light bread,
heavy bread, good bread, soft bread, hard bread, delicate bread, each
having its especial use, and all satisfying to different appetites.

Now go a little further to the corner, cross the street and enter the
store of the Costa Brothers. It is a big grocery store and while you
will not find the sausage and mystifying mass of food products in such
lavish display and profuseness, as in the previous place, if you look
around you will find this even more interesting, for it is on a
different plane. Here you find the delicacies and the niceties of
Italian living. At first glance it looks as if you were in any one of
the American grocery stores of down-town, but a closer examination
reveals the fact that these canned goods and these boxes and jars, hold
peculiar foods that you are unaccustomed to. Perhaps you will find a