ruined houses from which the people have fled, and where it is Death to
sleep: these houses being three miles outside a gate of Rome at its
farthest extent. Leaving Rome by the opposite side, we travel for many
many hours over the dreary Campagna, shunned and avoided by all but the
wretched shepherds. Thirteen hours' good posting brings us to Bolsena (I
slept there once before), on the margin of a stagnant lake whence the
workpeople fly as the sun goes down--where it is a risk to go; where
from a distance we saw a mist hang on the place; where, in the
inconceivably wretched inn, no window can be opened; where our dinner
was a pale ghost of a fish with an oily omelette, and we slept in great
mouldering rooms tainted with ruined arches and heaps of dung--and
coming from which we saw no colour in the cheek of man, woman, or child
for another twenty miles. Imagine this phantom knocking at the gates of
Rome; passing them; creeping along the streets; haunting the aisles and
pillars of the churches; year by year more encroaching, and more
impossible of avoidance."

From Rome they posted to Florence, reaching it in three days and a half,
on the morning of the 20th of November; having then been out six weeks,
with only three days' rain; and in another week they were at Venice.
"The fine weather has accompanied us here," Dickens wrote on the 28th of
November, "the place of all others where it is necessary, and the city
has been a blaze of sunlight and blue sky (with an extremely clear cold
air) ever since we have been in it. If you could see it at this moment
you would never forget it. We live in the same house that I lived in
nine years ago, and have the same sitting-room--close to the Bridge of
Sighs and the Palace of the Doges. The room is at the corner of the
house, and there is a narrow street of water running round the side: so
that we have the Grand Canal before the two front windows, and this wild
little street at the corner window: into which, too, our three bedrooms
look. We established a gondola as soon as we arrived, and we slide out
of the hall on to the water twenty times a day. The gondoliers have
queer old customs that belong to their class, and some are sufficiently
disconcerting. . . . It is a point of honour with them, while they are
engaged, to be always at your disposal. Hence it is no use telling them
they may go home for an hour or two--for they won't go. They roll
themselves in shaggy capuccins, great coa