But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so
simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or
possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers
passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from
their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such
things. However it was, I took the apartment, and found it, though
small, apt for me, as Ariosto said of his house, and I dwelt in it with
my family a month or more in great comfort and content. In fact, it
seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of
passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the
Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the
fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe
that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero
had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told
me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal
progress.
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