The second day of July, if we follow out our proposed seven days’ pilgrimage, brings us to a spot in the Corso which so hums and stirs with modern life that it is difficult for the imagination to connect it with antiquity at all. Not that the Corso itself has the appearance of a modern street by any means. Narrow and anything but straight, with great palaces and mean buildings crowding promiscuously and set as close together as possible—princely houses flanked by humble shops—with cross streets debouching into it every few hundred yards, and pouring forth a stream of traffic, spreading away here and there as if pushed out by main force, but yielding as little as possible of the coveted sidewalks, it is the real artery of Rome, pulsing with the life of a people who, from the days of Julius Cæsar to our own, have carried on existence in the open air. There the lawyers discuss their cases, the politicians air their opinions; the young men, at a certain hour of the afternoon, stand in long lines, like troops on guard, on the outer edge of the sidewalk, to ogle and criticise the women who roll by in their carriages trying to look unconscious of the enfilade. But the morning is the Corso’s real prime, a midday of spring for choice, when, from a cloudless sky, the sun in his zenith rakes the long street from the Piazza di Venezia to the Popolo without leaving so much as an inch of shade as a refuge from his fierce rays, except where the shop-awnings extend a merciful protection to foot-passengers. The flower vendors are everywhere, offering whole baskets of lilacs—the fat Roman lilacs—carnations, and roses for a franc or two, and eagerly offering to carry the burden home for one on the spot. The great ladies, who would rather die than be seen in the Corso on foot in the afternoon, are racing about in twos and threes, dressed as simply as possible, it is true, but with the huge diamond earrings, from which they never part, focussing the sunbeams, while their high-voiced, intimate chatter and proud faces express their complete contempt for and ignoring of any human being outside their own aristocratic circle. This is the golden hour for the dressmakers and milliners and jewellers, and their faces are wreathed in smiles as they fly about to satisfy the wealthy customers who make the morning their own. Few foreigners are seen; they haunt the Piazza di Spagna and the Via Condotti, the street of the jewellers, who work solely for them in Etruscan gold and cameos and mosaics, ornaments which no Roman would ever think of buying or wearing, though they are far more artistic than the Frenchified tiaras and rivières to be seen on the Corso.