There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept there is no alternative. The _donna di servizio_ or maid-of-all-work goes out each morning to spend an enjoyable half-hour or more, meeting her friends and making shrill bargains at the shop doors. An Italian's servant will buy a halfpenny worth of bacon-fat or lard or preserved tomato, and as such small quantities cannot be weighed she receives a spoonful of lard or a dab of butter wrapped up in a leaf, and the whole is tied up and carried home in a brilliant cotton handkerchief. The man-cook will not condescend to one of these shopping handkerchiefs. He will carry a few parcels, but he generally returns, a small boy in his wake bearing a basket on his head wherein all his purchases are displayed. The prevalent custom in Rome is for the servant to give the least possible price for all she buys, and to charge her mistress a higher one, the balance going into her own pocket. Servants of unimpeachable honesty in every other respect will succumb to this temptation. If serving foreigners, they can often double their wages, and so well is the practice recognised that the mistress who is too watchful to permit it is spoken of as giving only a _mesata secca_, a dry wage. [Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI Built in 1549 for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Alfonso II., Duke of Ferrara. It passed thence to the heir of this family, the Duke of Modena. See pages 172, 174.] Rome used to be one of the cheapest of European cities to live in; rents were low and food was cheap; meat was three sous the pound, and when it rose to four the Romans were indignant. Heavy taxation under the Italian Government has now changed all this. Beef is seventeen sous the pound, and rents have been almost doubled in the past twenty years. Wages are still very moderate. A woman servant gets from eighteen to thirty francs a month, a man thirty to sixty. If an English mistress engages an Italian servant, even if he or she is said to know their work, she must begin from the rudiments and even then there comes a point beyond which instruction fails to produce any result. The refinements of English service are looked upon as so many curious rites without meaning, and our standard of cleanliness and our fastidiousness are a perpetual source of wonder.