r facilities. There would seem to be no conceivable reason
why these conveniences should not be at hand in Rome as well as in New
York. As for the climate, with warm houses to live in, it would be
charmingly comfortable, for the deadly cold is not in the temperature
out of doors, but only in the interiors. One is warm in the sunshine in
the streets, when he is fairly frozen in the house. Mentioning this,
however, with wonder that some enterprising American did not begin such
building operations, a friend who has lived for sixteen years in Rome
replied that the Italians would never permit it; that no foreigner is
allowed to come in here and initiate business operations. And the
Italians continue building after the old and clumsy fashion of five
hundred years ago.

Italy has a curiously pervasive and general suspicion of any latter-day
comfort. The new apartment houses of from four to seven stories are
largely without any elevator; if there is one it usually only ascends
about halfway, and it is so clumsy and slow in its methods, so poorly
supported by power, that half the time it does not run at all. The
streets of Rome are paved with rough stones; the sidewalks are very
narrow; the lighting is inadequate. Bathrooms are rare and insufficient
in number, and all interior lighting and heating arrangements lack much
that is desirable according to American ideas of comfort.

Still the Eternal City is so impressive in and of itself that sunshine
or storm, comfort or the reverse, can hardly affect one's intensity of
joy and wonder and mysterious, unanalyzable rapture in it. The
twentieth-century Rome is a very different affair from the Rome on which
Hawthorne entered one dark, cold, stormy winter night more than half a
century ago. In the best modern hotels one may be as comfortable as he
likes, with all the fascinations of life added besides. No wonder that
Rome is one of the great winter centres, with some of the most
interesting people in the world always to be found under the spell of
its enchantment.

The Rome of to-day is a curious mixture of ruins and of modern buildings
which are neither modern nor mediaeval in their structure, but many of
which combine the most picturesque features of the latter with the
latest beauty of French and American architectural art. The classic
buildings are now largely in unpleasant surroundings; as, for instance,
the Pantheon, which is surrounded by a fish market, with unspeakable
odors