eploring the modernity
which has housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One
must confine one's self to instances, and one may take that of the
Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much peace and
pleasure except when I was reminded that it was formed by plotting the
lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots and building it up in attractive
hotels and apartment-houses. Even then I did not suffer so keenly as
some younger people, who had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though
there are still villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not
really miss the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise,
and the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The villa
was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in
its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at
best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers
of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is
inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in
this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find
that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been painted.

There is no doubt but at one time, directly after the coming of the
capital, Rome was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome
has grown up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now
"stuffs out her vacant garments with her form" pretty fully. One must
not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of
them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of
the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare
them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is
said.

Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome,
was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so
called, where Zola in his novel of _Rome_ has placed most of the squalor
which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts. In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of
himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the
scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I
found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting
anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third
time to make sure that I had not