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Then it slid gently to the floor, and left me with a chill and damp linen sheet over me, the thermometer being below zero, and I afflicted with a cough. Next morning I fled fled to Milan was stabbed there by the Tramontana, fell ill, escaped to Genoa, and there recovered.
The cabman who, yesterday evening, took me to Palazzo Gabbrielli instead of Palazzo Orsini, excused himself saying that priests even blunder at the altar "anche li preti sbajano all' altare." Very Roman! With E. de V. on Monte Mario. The weather has cleared; slight tramontana, pure sky, with white storm- or snow-clouds collected like rolled-up curtains, everywhere on the horizon.
The story may not be true, and yet if it were! Rome never was healthy. The tramontana visited it then as now, fever, too, and sudden death. To emperors it was fatal. Since Caesar a malaria had battened on them all. Nerva escaped, but only through abdication.
To sit at Christmastide in a large lofty room before a meagre fire of sputtering smoky logs, with Vesuvius wrapped from crest to base in a white mantle of new fallen snow, and with an icy tramontana from the bleak Abruzzi howling round the house, bending the bay trees and penetrating into every corner of the chamber, is by no means the ideal picture of a winter in the Sunny South; yet this is only what the traveller must be prepared to face, and is very likely to obtain.
Slowly but painstakingly the reconstruction proceeds. Painted ceilings are being put back, mosaic floors are being pieced together, cornices are taking the place of terrible papering and boarding: enough of all of the old having remained for the scheme to be faithfully completed. Stepping warily over the crazy floors of these vast rooms, one does not envy Taglioni when the Tramontana blew.
I do not know but I should like to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it from my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars at their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the more easily could the sun warm us through in spite of the tramontana. I do not know that Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which Venice and Genoa are excellent.
I remember that standing on the Capo di Monte, which overlooks the little, picturesque, and crowded beach of the Marina Grande, and Sorrento, a spot that teems with all that is poetic in the fisher man's life, he of whom I have spoken, once pointed to the transparent vault above, and said, 'There is the moon of America! The colors of the rocket were not more vivid than the stars that night, for a Tramontana had swept every impurity from the air, far upon the neighboring sea.
In a doorway of a great house, in one of the narrow streets, a little boy of eight was crouching behind one of the stone pillars as he tried to keep out of the grip of the tramontana.
During my stay in Rome there were dull and dispiriting days, with the Alban hills white to their bottom. Others were clear, with the piercingly cold Tramontana sweeping the streets; but more frequently the sirocco was blowing, accompanied with deluges of rain, and flashes of lightning that made the night luminous as the day, and peals that rocked the city on its foundations.
I shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics when I went to the Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly urge the reader to do so when he goes. He will not so much need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless a tramontana is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in any case we did not walk.
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