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Updated: June 26, 2025
To Robert Fisher, Englishman, abiding in Italy, greetings: ... I hesitated not a little to write to you, beloved Robert, not that I feared lest so great a sunderance in time and place had worn away anything of your affection towards me, but because you are in a country where even the house-walls are more learned and more eloquent than are our men here, so that what is here reckoned polished, fine and delectable cannot there appear anything but crude, mean and insipid.
So that I cannot but think that part of the wealth which now lies buried in these doubtful luxuries, might most wisely and kindly be thrown into a form which would give perpetual pleasure, not to its possessor only, but to thousands besides, and neither tempt the unprincipled, nor inflame the envious, nor mortify the poor; while, supposing that your own dignity was dear to you, this, you may rely upon it, would be more impressed upon others by the nobleness of your house-walls than by the glistening of your sideboards.
But then she moved on. Her bearing was broken; from behind she looked like one of those elderly, shipwrecked females from the "Ark," who shuffled along by the house-walls in trodden-down men's shoes, and always boasted a dubious past. "Good God!" thought Pelle, "is her dream over already? Good God!"
It was all so old, so different, so silent, so baffling the narrow, crooked street; the solid house-walls that hemmed them in; the strange tongue, strange dress, strange customs; the absence of smiling faces or friendly greetings; the sudden mystery of seeking for one whom we must not seem to seek, and the consciousness of an enemy, Ferdinand Ramero, whom we must avoid that it is small wonder that we lived in fairyland.
If I have a field, and a town grows up to it of its own accord, and somebody offers me four times as much as I gave for it, I hardly see why I should be reckoned a thief and a robber if I pocket the proffered cash. To take another illustration. I may have on my house-walls a picture for which I gave twenty pounds.
It might be worse, an' ye might be left back there yerself decoratin' about ten square yards of trench. 'Tut-tut-tut-tut' went the maxim behind them again. 'Tutt-tutt yourself, you stammer-an'-spit blighter, said the disconsolate mouth-organ loser, and 'D'you think we can chance a smoke yet? as the platoon moved out on the road and behind the shelter of some ruined house-walls.
His small hammer sounded above their talk, the tar-barrels, wood-stacks and old house-walls that they had burnt, and their drinking and merriment until they had not a penny left, haw-haw! The hammer rang above it all. Jan Peter had gone in a boat over to the islands, and seen so many bonfires, both there and on the hills round, that it was impossible to count them. Yes, when a fellow's drunk!
The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted.
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