Italy and France, an Editor's Holiday (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ...some of the readers of my Romeward Bound letters who have no taste for worms. They want " no slovenly unhandsome corse betwixt the wind and their nobility." Let them skip this letter. It scarcely belongs to the thirty-six which have gone before. It is nearly all borrowed, with no hope of ever being repaid, in kind, at any rate, from Commendatore de Rossi's Italian work, via the translation and compilation of two Cambridge professors. I was only able to visit the chief Catacombs of Rome--those of St. Callixtus and of the Basilica of St. Sebastian; and of these I only saw what whetted my appetite. The fatherly care of some one has all but shut them up, or emptied them of those ancient, if not sacred, relics of which we have been accustomed to read. My imagination, evidently not posted up for a generation, had pictured miles of streets, stones, crucifixes, memorial tablets, suggestive and melancholy inscriptions, and rude drawings and carvings of emblems of faith; and I was warned before leaving THE CATACOMBS. 213 home of the danger of getting lost in the dreary windings of hundreds of miles of long streets of the dead. But the danger would have been of my own choosing..One friend did indeed lag behind at St. Callixtus, and gave us momentary anxiety--but only for a moment. The " miles of streets " are divided among seventy Catacombs, and those into which we and the general public are admitted have their streets too well barricaded, and the bit of tallow candle given each visitor cut too short to allow any " meanderings" in devious ways. The streets are very narrow, the turns numerous, and the ups and downs considerable; but the wary, or the lazy, guide gives no time for a sensational story. Roma Sottermnea, or underground Rome, tells all about the...