This was very disappointing, for I had
always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make
laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of
jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an infection of humor seemed to
spread from them to all the lower classes, who were as ready to joke as
the lower classes of Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of
them. The joking hahit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena,
and at Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with
_bonhomie._ But the Romans were preferably serious, at least with the
average American, though, if I had tried them in their English instead
of my Italian, it might have been different. At times I thought, they
felt the weight of being Romans, as it had descended to them from
antiquity, and that the strain of supporting it had sobered them. In any
case, though there was shouting by night, and some singing of not at all
the Neapolitan quality and still less the Neapolitan quantity, there was
no laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.
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