VIII. Fiumicino
IX. Via Ardeatina
X. San Teodoro

WINTER 1904.

I. Palo
II. A Walk at Dusk
III. Tusculum
IV. St. Peter's
V. The Crypts
VI. San Stefano
VII. Via Latina

SPRING 1905.

I. Rome again

Postscript

THE SPIRIT OF ROME.

LEAVES FROM A DIARY.

DIS MANIBVS SACRVM.

* * * * *

TO ALL THE FRIENDS
LIVING AND DEAD
REAL AND IMAGINARY
MORTAL AND IMMORTAL
WHO HAVE MADE ROME
WHAT IT IS TO ME.

EXPLANATORY AND APOLOGETIC.

I was brought up in Rome, from the age of twelve to that of seventeen,
but did not return there for many years afterwards. I discovered it
anew for myself, while knowing all its sites and its details;
discovered, that is to say, its meaning to my thoughts and feelings.
Hence, in all my impressions, a mixture of familiarity and of
astonishment; a sense, perhaps answering to the reality, that Rome--it
sounds a platitude--is utterly different from everything else, and
that we are therefore in different relations to it.

Probably for this reason I have found it impossible to use up, in what
I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I
cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the
colour of one mood. And whatever may have happened there to my small
person has left no trace in what I have written. What I meet in Rome
is Rome itself. Rome is alive (only the more so for its occasional air
of death), and one is too busy loving, hating, being harassed or
soothed, and ruminating over its contradictions, to remember much of
the pains and joys which mere mortals have given one in its presence.

A similar reason has prevented all attempt to rewrite or alter these
notes. One cannot sit down and attempt a faithful portrait of Rome; at
least I cannot. And the value of these notes to those who love Rome,
or are capable of loving it, is that they express, in however
stammering a manner, what I said to myself about Rome; or, perhaps, if
the phrase is not presumptuous, what Rome, day after day and year
after year, has said to me.

_Autumn_, 1903.

THE SPIRIT OF ROME.

I.

FIRST RETURN TO ROME.

Strange that in the confusion of impressions, not new mainly, but
oddly revived (the same things transposed by time into new keys), my
most vivid impression should be of something so impersonal, so
unimportant, as an antique sarcophagus serving