I heard the best passage of the opera of "Romeo and Juliet" delightfully played in the church of _San Gaetano_ this morning. I was coming from the _café_, where I had been breakfasting, when the sound of the organ drew me in. The communion was administering at one of the side chapels, the showy Sunday mass was going on at the great altar, and the numerous confession boxes were full of penitents, _all female_, as usual. As I took a seat near the communicants, the sacred wafer was dipped into the cup and put into the mouth of a young woman kneeling before the railing. She rose soon after, and I was not lightly surprised to find it was a certain errand-girl of a bachelor's washerwoman, as unfit a person for the holy sacrament as wears a petticoat in Florence. I was drawn by the agreeable odor of the incense to the paling of the high altar. The censers were flung by unseen hands from the doors of the sacristy at the sides, and an unseen chorus of boys in the choir behind, broke in occasionally with the high-keyed chant that echoes with its wild melody from every arch and corner of these immense churches. It seems running upon the highest note that the ear can bear, and yet nothing could be more musical. A man knelt on the pavement near me, with two coarse baskets beside him, and the traces of long and dirty travel from his heels to his hips. He had stopped in to the mass, probably, on his way to market. There can be no greater contrast than that seen in Catholic churches, between the splendor of architecture, renowned pictures, statues and ornaments of silver and gold, and the crowd of tattered, famished, misery-marked worshippers that throng them. I wonder it never occurs to them, that the costly pavement upon which they kneel might feed and clothe them.[6] Penitential processions are to be met all over Florence to-day, on account of the uncommon degree of sickness. One of them passed under my window just now. They are composed of people of all classes, upon whom it is inflicted as a penance by the priests. A white robe covers them entirely, even the face, and, with their eyes glaring through the two holes made for that purpose, they look like processions of shrouded corpses. Eight of the first carry burning candles of six feet in length, and a company in the rear have the church books, from which they chant, the whole procession joining in a melancholy chorus of three notes. It rains hard to-day, and their white dresses cling to them with a ludicrously ungraceful effect.