I arrived in Genoa the evening the Kaiser landed from Corfu, and witnessed the pompous and important event. In Pisa, I stepped into a demonstration of students, who were moving rapidly about the city closing the schools and making speeches to each other, as a protest against harsh treatment of Italians by the Austrian government in Trieste, the passionate _leit motiv_ of Italia Irredenta that runs through all current Italian thought and feeling. In Florence I began to understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome, where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century. Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the twentieth, has left its traces. It is the one city in Europe to study western civilization, an endless source of suggestion, stimulation and delight. It is the one city where the ancient and the ultra-modern live side by side, both brimming over with vitality. The Church and the most advanced and determined body of social revolutionists living side by side; the Vatican galleries faced by the futurist; a statue of Ferrer just outside Bernini’s colonnade; rampant democracy confronting Prince Colonnas and Borgheses; Renaissance palaces, and blocks of monstrous apartments built in the mad speculation after 1870; all the tendencies and ideas of all Europe contending there in Rome, at once the most ancient and the most modern city we know. What is a month in Rome!