The _Flavia Victoria_ is just under the legal building height, and contains five stories. On the street there are several shops of the usual kind, also several separate entrances whereof the doorways, flanked with pillars, give access to certain extra-select flats above; but most of the tenants have to go in through the central portal under the eyes of a porter. Upon entering they find themselves in a fairly ample square court, upon which open many windows of the tiers of rooms in the upper stories. There is a fountain in the court, but the pavement below is decidedly slimy and dirty. Quantities of half-naked small children are scampering about in noisy play. The windows, however, like those facing upon the streets, often have balconies on which simple boxes of flowers are blooming. The blue Italian sky above and the bars of intense sunlight upon the flag-stones make the filthiness of the court and the dinginess of the yellow stuccoed walls less obnoxious. Dirt and even the numerous fleas lose part of their terrors amid picturesque surroundings in a mild climate. =28. The Flats in an Insula.=--From the courtyard several staircases, often dark and dank, rise to the tenements above. The _Flavia Victoria_ is a fair-sized insula, and just as in European flat buildings later, can contain many social strata under one ample roof. In the apartments on the first floor, there are really comfortable suites, each with a series of rooms--living room (_atrium_), dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, and the like, chambers not large indeed, but sufficient for a modest household keeping perhaps ten slaves. The walls are covered with bright frescoes, and the floors with very fair mosaics. Such a superior apartment can bring some 10,000 sesterces ($400) per year, and a good many flats rent for even more.[15] The rentals fall rapidly as the tenants scale higher. In the second floor the apartments are much smaller; there is merely a living room and a few smaller chambers. The appointments are correspondingly mean and dingy, while the annual rent is only 2000 sesterces ($80); and between the prosperous grain factor on the third floor and the hard-working brickyard superintendent on the fourth there is never the least sociability. =29. The Cheap Attic Tenements and Their Poor Occupants.=--Both unite, however, in despising the wretched creatures who plod wearily up to the dirty, vermin-infested sleeping pockets upon the fifth or sixth stages, where, under the roof tiles, the hot sun beats pitilessly. If we care to thrust ourselves into the tiny chambers of the unfortunate Codrus, the bath attendant, we will find, perhaps “a bed too small for the dwarf Procula, a marble slab whereon are set six small food jars and a small drinking cup, a statue of Chiron [some decaying heirloom], and an old chest of Greek books gnawed by the unlettered mice.”[16]