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It was an attempt, no doubt, to render the physical aspect of death cheerful, but there was no good sense in it. We went down also into another tomb close by, the walls of which were ornamented with medallions in stucco. These too all of them such adornments as would have suited a festal hall were made to be buried forthwith in eternal darkness.
The simple stucco ceiling presents a central rosette, which passes over by light conventional floral forms into the general pattern of the ceiling. The frieze also, which is made of the same material, presents a similar but somewhat more compact floral pattern as its chief motive.
The forum, or market-place, was near by, where the courts sat, and where the people came together to transact business. The dwellings were on the sides of the hill, or on the plain beneath. The streets were narrow. The exterior of the houses was plain. They were of brick, generally covered with stucco, and whitewashed. Glass was too costly to be much used: hence the openings in the walls were few.
Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type, fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the art nouveau, standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them.
It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies.
Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison houses, and at the low native roofs. These had each its little platform, its monohoshi, where much white washing was drying in the sun. At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare. "What is that?" said Asako; "it looks like a church."
STUCCO. A stucco for walls, &c. may be formed of the grout or putty, made of good stone-lime, or the lime of cockle-shells, which is better, properly tempered and sufficiently beat, mixed with sharp grit-sand, in a proportion which depends on the strength of the lime: drift-sand is best for this purpose, and it will derive advantage from being dried on an iron plate or kiln, so as not to burn; for thus the mortar would be discoloured.
Before the serpent painted in Pansa's house is or was a projecting brick intended to support a lamp: the painting in consequence of its situation could be seen only by persons within the house: but upon the opposite wall there is or was a cross worked in bas relief upon a panel of white stucco, so situated as to be visible to all persons passing.
The stucco had fallen off in places, and in the upper story the windows had been broken away till their open ings were a world too wide.
Before the façade was a most curious row of bizarre small houses of stucco, nearly every one of which was a sort of saloon or café, and the street before them was quite obstructed by small round tables and chairs at which, in the afternoon from four to five, the shopkeepers and bourgeois of the town gathered for the afternoon "aperitif," whatever it might be, and to discuss politics.
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