File:The book of Italian travel (1580-1900) (1903) (14777153271).jpg

Identifier: bookofitaliantra00maug (find matches)
Title: The book of Italian travel (1580-1900)
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Maugham, H. Neville
Subjects: Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : E. P. Dutton, London, G. Richards
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
and then a lonelyhouse, or a villainous-looking shepherd: with matted hair allover his face, and himself wrapped to the chin in a frowsy-brown mantle, tending his sheep. At the end of that distance,we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch, in acommon malaria-shaken, despondent little public-house, whoseevery inch of wall and beam, inside, was (according to custom)painted and decorated in a way so miserable that every roomlooked like the wrong side of another room, and, with itswretched imitation of drapery, and lop-sided little daubs oflyres, seemed to have been plundered from behind the scenesof some travelling circus. When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfectfever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after anothermile or two, the Eternal city appeared, at length, in thedistance; it looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—like LONDON !!! There it lay, under a thick cloud, withinnumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising
Text Appearing After Image:
ROME 333 up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome. Iswear, that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of thecomparison, it was so like London, at that distance, that ifyou could have shown it me, in a glass, I should have takenit for nothing else.—Dickens. THE ANTIQUITIESA General Impression ^ The Coliseum is unlike any work of human hands I eversaw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and thearches built of massy stones are piled on one another, andjut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhangingrocks. It has been changed by time into the image of anamphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, themyrtle, and the fig-tree, and threaded by Htde paths, whichwind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries : thecopsewood overshadows you as you wander through itslabyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowersbloom under your feet. The arena is covered with grass, andpierces, like the skirts of a natural plain, the chasms of

Note About Images