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Updated: May 31, 2025
She was cleaner, in person and in clothes, than such itinerants generally are; and, having been in her day a strapping BONA ROBA, she did not even yet neglect some attention to her appearance; wore a large amber necklace, and silver ear-rings, and had her laid fastened across her breast with a brooch of the same metal.
The nearest approach that I got to an answer was from one of the old beadles, who replied to my question, "Chi sa?" "E una roba da lontano;" and with this explanation that the governor was "a thing that came from a distance," I was obliged to rest satisfied.
The minister brought his hand down upon the table. "You'll do no such thing!" he thundered. "The girl's got to be here when he comes. As for her dress, can't she borrow from you? The Lord knows that though only the wife of a poor parson, you might throw for gewgaws with a bona roba! Go trick her out, and bring her here. I'll attend to the wine and the books."
All this might have been forgiven you, in that you have been our leader for years, and that we have signed articles to serve under you while the voyage lasts. But now we have heard of this bona roba on board, and we know that you are poisoned to the marrow, and that while you rot there will be no safety for any of us, but that we shall all be turned into filth and corruption.
Story gave me his book called Roba di Roma, which I will tell you does not mean Italian robes you might think so; it means things about Rome. I will also tell you, in case that your Italian does not go so far, that when I say that the Storys live in the third piano. I do not mean an upright or a grand piano is the Italian for story.
He has given the public two law-books, commonly attributed to his eminent father; the delightful Roba di Roma, which embodies the actual animate beauty and interest of Roman life; a volume of poems, Graffiti d'Italia, full of fine dramatic fragments and studies of character in the manner of Browning, descriptions which are pictures, and sweet verses which live in the heart; and a number of essays in the pleasantest style of table-talk.
"Sixteen cents for garbage like that! The Signorina would better let me make her bargains for her. Gia! Gia! No Italian lady would have paid more than eleven sous for such useless roba. It is evident that the Signorina's countrymen eat gold when at home, they think so little of casting it away!"
How little is it generally known, by those who don't purchase, what large sums are squandered in Italy upon heaps of rubbish, palmed off and sold under the imposing names, roba antica, roba dei scavi, and the like; and how little seems it known by those who do, that of all markets for such acquisitions, the worst that an uninitiated dilettante can have to do with is the Italian!
Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him.
I had not always the fine sense of being booty which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, "E roba mia!" It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen, but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome.
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