delling stucco has covered vast surfaces of
unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of
all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account
would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the
existence of a quantity of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of
which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather.
It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of
houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the
building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and
never to be inhabited--landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of
dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have
fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant
to be the homes of a rich middle class, and given over at derisory rents
to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the
face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage.

But Trastevere escaped, being despised by the builders on account of its
distance from the chief centres. It has even preserved something of the
ancient city in its looks and habits. Then, as now, the wine shops and
cook shops opened directly upon the street, because they were, as they
still often are, mere single, vaulted chambers, having no communication
with the inner house by door or stairway. The little inner court, where
the well is, may have been wider in those days, but it must always have
been a cool, secluded place, where the women could wrangle and tear one
another's hair in decent privacy. In the days when everything went to
the gutter, it was a wise precaution to have as few windows as possible
looking outward. In old Rome, as in Trastevere, there must have been an
air of mystery about all dwelling-houses, as there is everywhere in the
East. In those days, far more than now, the head of the house was lord
and despot within his own walls; but something of that power remains by
tradition of right at the present time, and the patriarchal system is
not yet wholly dead. The business of the man was to work and fight for
his wife and children, just as to fight and hunt for his family were the
occupations of the American Indian. In return, he received absolute
obedience and abject acknowledgment of his superiority. The
government-fed Indian and the Roman father of today do very little
fighting, working, or hun