care of him within, all persons on the line of
march cross themselves and kneel, the women
covering their heads with apron or handkerchief
as in any other holy place, crying, "Oh, Santo
Bambino, give us thy blessing! Oh, Santo
Bambino, cure our diseases; lower the water of
the Tiber; heal Angelina's leg; give us a good
carnival; or send an accident to a rival!" In
'49 the triumvirate did great honour to this
famous doll. They gave him the Pope's own
coach for his private use; but Mr. Story does
not say whether his cures were more wonderful
then than before or since.

The Romans, like most other people, have
their special meals for certain occasions. At
Christmas-time the dainties are torone and pan
giallo. Torone is a hard candy, made of honey
and almonds, and covered over with crystallised
sugar; and pan giallo is a mass of plums, and
citron, and almonds, and sugar, pine-seeds, and
pistachio-nuts, all in a tough and tight mass of
sweet and solid. During Lent the buns called
maritozze—made of the edible kernels of the pine
cone, lightened with oil and sugared—are among
the favourite exercises of the faithful; and on
Saint Joseph's day, under the gay booths
decorated with huge green branches, and hung with
red and gold draperies, are to be found the
delicious frittelle di San Giuseppe—dough-nuts,
made of flour, sometimes mixed with rice, fried
in large caldrons of boiling oil and lard, and
served out on polished platters, with an immense
expenditure of voice, and gesture, and song, and
saucy repartee, and sounding laughter. At Easter
there are eggs, and the grand illumination, and
beautification of the ham and cheese shops—the
pizziccheria, or what we should call
cheese-mongers. In May there is the berlingozzo, a
kind of jumble-cake cut in rings and decorated
with fine red tassels—and when spring has
really come, this is May-time too—prima vera,
or the first true thing, as they call it—then
comes the festival of the kitchen gardens, and a
whole population flinging itself on snowy
cauliflowers, fleshy artichokes, on asparagus softly
tinted, and cabbage gloriously golden in its
green, on all manner of garden-stuff, either fried
in oil or bathed in milky sauce, with the sensation
of children plunging into the bowels of a
Christmas pudding. And spring brings not
only cabbages and artichokes, but acres of
sweet-scented Parma violets, hyacinths heavy
with perfume, lilies of the valley, periwinkles,
anemones, cyclamen, "morning glories"—oh!
all the thousand lovely children of the warm
rain and the teeming earth, which bloom
nowhere in greater beauty and luxuriance than in
the country round about Rome. Then comes
the limonaro, or lemonade-seller; then the value
of the fountain; then the caffès have their
choicest groups sitting out by the doors, and
whole families live on the pavement, and transact
their domesticities in full view of the whole
world; then the Campagna is enchanted ground,
and Rome a city of infinite glory; then life is
strong within every one, even to the ghastly
saccone and the cowled Franciscan; then the
contadini sing and the contadine listen, and the
great black eyes of the Roman girls grow tender
and bright, and the Church finds abundance of
work in the betrothal and marriage festivals
everywhere abounding; and then the priests
and beggars beg with tenfold fervour, knowing
the unloosening of the chilly blood which the
warm influence of the first true thing brings.
But then come fevers to the unwary and death
to the rash, and the need of guarding against
draughts and sudden chills, too much indulgence
in watery fruits, heavy meats, or heating wines,
exposure to the evening dews, sleeping with
the window open, and such-like untimely follies
of overmuch daring, according to the proved
wisdom of the natives themselves, who
naturally understand their climate better than
strangers. But strangers always think
themselves the wisest, so get caught in the toils
before they are aware, and too often pay the
penalty of their rashness with their health or
their lives.

And now comes the season of games, for the
Romans are fond of out-of-door games, and
excel in more ways than one of ball practice.
The favourite place for pallone, a kind of racket,
is on the summit of the Quattro Fontane, in the
Barberini grounds, and the players are dressed
in thin tight-fitting skin-dresses, with a ribbon
round the arm, red or blue, to mark the side.
Then there is the game of bocce, played with
one small ball and any number of big ones, the
game consisting in planting the big ones close
to the small one, or lecco, who is my leader;
and there is ruzzola, or disc-throwing; and
chess for the caffè goers; dominoes for the caffè
goers also; and morra for all the world; and
the lottery for more than all the world. And
the worst of all is the lottery, which, however,
the paternal papal government allows, though it
refuses its permission to hunting in the
Campagna because a certain clumsy young noble fell
off his horse one day, and got badly hurt.
Whereupon, hunting was forbidden, but
gambling, which hurts both soul and estate, not
only the body, holds full sway.

The Italians have no vanity, save, perhaps, in
their clothes when they are very finely dressed;
and then they do peacock themselves
unmistakably. For their own natural beauty, they have
no thought of self-gratulation; and, if told that
they are lovely, that they have fine eyes or
magnificent hair, that their limbs are statuesque, or
their lips like the Cupid's bow, they will only
laugh, and say "Ma che?" deprecatingly, as
if they would add, "And what of that?—it is
by no virtue of my own!" But praise their
clothes, into which they have put money, taste,
and discretion, emphatically "my own," and
they will show the soft spot then! And as they
have no vanity they have no sensitiveness about
personal defects, but take good or ill from the
hands of their great mother with the same
equanimity. They cannot understand the Anglo-Saxon
huffiness on this point, but will introduce
your friend by all manner of nicknames, if
by chance they have forgotten his rightful one.