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. . . Fortunately there is little changed here: my old Albergo, ruinous with earthquake is down and done with but few novelties are observable except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere to Cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. No more Pippas at least of the silk-winding sort! 'But the pretty type is far from extinct.
As I looked from the albergo I could see a gradation of colours, from the purple red to the deepest of sea blue, rising like an immense tent from the dark green of the trees and the fields, here and there dotted with little white houses, with their red roofs, while in front the Luzzara Tower rose majestically in the twilight.
There was no sign of a church, nothing but dirty huts, and in the midst, one of two stories, rejoicing in the name of Albergo del Sole, the first story of which was a black and cavernous smithy, where certain swarthy knaves, looking like banditti out of a job, sat smoking sulkily.
No doubt it is because the crypt is of this century, while the other two churches are of the thirteenth. There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after dining at the little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part of the town except the churches, is remarkably clean, my companion set out to climb up to the castle, and I wandered back to the great church.
He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergo di Siena, overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnuts and acacias make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerable extent. The front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and the mountains between Grosseto and Volterra.
Before me was a long low cabin, with a row of four or five windows and no upper storey; a miserable hut of rubble and plaster, stained with ancient dirt and, at this moment, looking soaked with moisture. Above the doorway I read "Osteria Centrale"; on the bare end of the house was the prouder inscription, "Albergo Nazionale" the National Hotel.
He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino's inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair's-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price.
Establishing myself at the Albergo Reale for this and the two following days, I sallied out, to wander everywhere and see everything. Milan is of ancient days; and few cities have seen greater changes of fortune.
The inevitable discussion began, the discussion so familiar nowadays, and which would have sounded so odd to the English painters who were wont to call themselves "historical," Where is the line between subjects for the easel and subjects for the desk? What distinguishes the art of the illustrator from the art of the artist? That was a great evening round the table at the Albergo del Sole.
I left the cathedral tired out, dazed with weariness and sunlight, and fell asleep in a chair as soon as I got back to my room, on the fifth floor of the Albergo dell' Agnello. I had been asleep for about an hour, perhaps, when I thought I heard a voice near me repeating "Illustre Signore!" I did not wake. The voice continued with a murmur of sibilants: "Illustrissimo Signore!"
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