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Those who have recently visited Sampaolo will remember the Hôtel de Rome as a small, new, spick-and-span establishment, built at the corner of the Piazza San Guido and the Riva Vittorio Emmanuele, and presenting none of that "local colour in the shape of dirt and discomfort" which we are warned to expect in Italy, if we depart from the track beaten by the tourist.
In talking to elderly persons who can remember Florence forty and fifty years ago I find that nothing so distresses them as the loss of the old quarter for the making of this new spacious piazza; and probably nothing can so delight the younger Florentines as its possession, for, having nothing to do in the evenings, they do it chiefly in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele.
"It's a wine for children, but it might amuse you all to taste it on its native heath; and you could drink the health of Vittorio Alfieri in a better world." Mamma thought that proceeding rather too Popish for a professed Presbyterian; nevertheless, we decided to have the wine.
Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
Full of memories and of what else, then, but the past can she dream? For her there is no future. Her convent is suppressed, the great cloister has become a military gymnasium. What has she, then, in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, for instance? the past is all that we have left her.
Of course, should you meet with any accident, telegraph to the Vittorio Emmanuele, at Brindisi. Money," she said, almost bitterly, "would be telegraphed; and so, I say" he listened breathlessly "au revoir at Brindisi!" she concluded, giving him her hand, with a frank smile. As Alan Hawke descended the stair, he growled. "A woman without a heart, and not without a head!"
"In any event you had better occupy the vacant seat and drive those two gentlemen to the city, where you can secure the means of bringing back your carriage." In this guise the party returned to Palermo, evoking much wonderment all the way through the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, whence no less than six outraged policemen followed them to the Hotel de France to obtain their names and addresses.
When the Vittorio showed that in veering away from the Monterey she had done so only in order to make a sweep around to the west, and when she had headed south and the mattresses lowered along her starboard side showed plainly to Captain Horn that she was about to attack him and how she was going to do it, his first thought was to embarrass her by reversing his course and steering this way and that, but he instantly dismissed this idea.
Many youths have doubtless been to the full as indifferent as Vittorio Alfieri to all the objects of interest on their road; but they have been so from frivolity and giddiness, and no one was ever less frivolous or giddy than the young Alfieri.
This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, as it were, of two long-repressed, long solitary intellectual lives, austerely satisfied with itself and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have sufficed for the happiness of two such over-wrought natures as were at that moment Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany.
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