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Updated: June 1, 2025
When I asked for the Times they took the Times at the Nazionale the waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the Signore Tedesco has it," and the Signore Tedesco, a mild German student who for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any table save our own.
For this is the trouble: The café is not an English institution and something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it would not answer at all as the Nazionale had answered in Rome, the Orientale in Venice.
There was no Via Nazionale then, and the buildings which now make the Via delle Quattro Fontane a continuous line of street existed only in the case of a few isolated houses and convents. It was a very comfortable apartment, roomy, sunny, and quiet.
It was barely four o'clock, and it was his idea to ramble in this wise, without any predetermined programme, through Rome at that delightful hour when the sun sinks in the refreshed and far blue atmosphere. Almost immediately, however, he found himself in the Via Nazionale, along which he had driven on arriving the previous day.
By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the natives. The café we chose was the Nazionale Aragno in the Corso, the largest and most gorgeous in Rome.
He had a half-formed idea of walking back through the Villa Nazionale, spending an hour at the Aquarium, and then to his hotel for luncheon. It occurred to him at the moment that there was a steamer from Genoa on the Monday following, that he was tired of wandering about aimlessly and alone, and that there was really no reason why he should not take the said steamer and go home.
Foreigners did not often find their way into the Nazionale. They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as women in Rome never dined, or so I gathered from my observations at the Posta, the Falcone and the Cavour, they never drank coffee.
From the same point in the Via Nazionale, a street with flights of steps could be seen to the left, and below a white stone column. "Nothing doing; I don't know what that is either," thought Caesar; "the truth is that one is terribly ignorant. To make matters even, what a well of knowledge about questions of finance there is in my cranium!"
They roamed on for nearly an hour, fancying that only a few minutes had passed by. Approaching the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, near the Aquarium, they stopped an instant. There were fewer people and more life here than in the road to Posilipo.
The first expedient of enterprise was the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip.
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