Miss Callis said
she didn't see why man should be for ever bound up with the vegetable
creation--it was like living in a perpetual salad--and was disposed to
defend the Piazza di Spagna at all points, it looked so nice and
expensive. But Miss Callis's tastes were very distinctly urban.
That druggist's establishment was on the Pincian Hill! It seemed, on
reflection, an outrage. We all looked about us, when we discovered
this, for the other six, and another of the foolish geographical
illusions of the school-room was shattered for each of us. The Rome of
my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is
four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere.
Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and
we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave
unascertained.
Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome. It was
driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward.
And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of
Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception,
reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we
rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built
into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very
Apostles.
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