_three days_!"

We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way
we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as
soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of
Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I
remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something
infinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about like
a _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray
with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new
friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my
admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned
here--Contessa Maria Pasolini.

Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the
social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of
the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti,
who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in
its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of
an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose
father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the
neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after
1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which
Anita Garibaldi died.

Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers,
and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking,
combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and
ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we
found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the