Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling
Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and
unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the
right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But
every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in
the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less
critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now
making, or making over.
We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience
to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the
future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to
visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having
come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at
the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or
distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and
her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which
she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and
corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving
air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and
the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and
Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in
spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the
solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of
antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be
hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from
our North and West and censure and criticise and carp.
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