Together Mrs. Q. and I visited the Borghese and Barberini Palaces, the Villa Doria, the Villa Umberto, the Villa d’Este and the Appian Way. We paid a return visit to the Colosseum and idled together in the gardens of the Pincian, the paths of the Gianicolo, the gardens of the Vatican and along the Tiber. It was a pleasure to step into some old court of a palace where the walls were encrusted with fragments of monuments, inscriptions, portions of sarcophagi and the like, found on the place or in excavating, and set into the walls to preserve them--and to listen to this clever, wholesome woman comment on the way the spirit of life builds shells and casts them off. She was not in the least morbid. The horror and cruelties of lust and ambition held no terrors for her. She liked life as a spectacle. CHAPTER XXXIII THE ART OF SIGNOR TANNI The first Sunday I was in Rome I began my local career with a visit to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, that faces the Via Cavour not far from the Continental Hotel where I was stopping, and afterwards San Prassede close beside it. After Canterbury, Amiens, Pisa and St. Peter’s, I confess churches needed to be of great distinction to interest me much; but this church, not so divinely harmonious, exteriorly speaking, left me breathless with its incrustations of marbles, bronzes, carvings, and gold and silver inlay. There is a kind of beauty, or charm, or at least physical excitation, in contemplating sheer gorgeousness which I cannot withstand, even when my sense of proportion and my reason are offended, and this church had that. Many of the churches in Rome have just this and nothing more. At least, what else they may have I am blind to. It did not help me any to learn as I did from Mrs. Barfleur, that it was very old, dating from 352 A. D., and that the blessed Virgin herself had indicated just where this basilica in her honor was to be built by having a small, private fall of snow which covered or outlined the exact dimensions of which the church was to be. I was interested to learn that they had here five boards of the original manger at Bethlehem inclosed in an urn of silver and crystal which is exposed in the sacristy on Christmas Eve and placed over the high altar on Christmas Day, and that here were the tombs and chapels of Sixtus V and Paul V and Clement VIII of the Borghese family and, too, a chapel of the Sforza family. Nevertheless the hodge-podge of history, wealth, illusion and contention, to say nothing of religious and social discovery, which go to make up a church of this kind, is a little wearisome, not to say brain-achey, when contemplated en masse. These churches! Unless you are especially interested in a pope or a saint or a miracle or a picture or a monument or an artist--they are nothing save intricate jewel-boxes; nothing more.