At first, only the mediæval portion of the town absorbed and attracted Irene. She spent days in wandering through labyrinths of narrow, dirty, unpaved streets, where people, horses, donkeys, tramways, and bicycles moved along, an apparently inextricable mass, in the uneven roadway. She felt sad and sick at heart at sight of the miserable dwellings—rather hovels than houses—in which, till the present day, the poor of Rome find shelter. What a contrast between these wretched abodes and the magnificence of the neighbouring Palazzos, with their splendid courtyards and marble colonnades enclosing little gardens overgrown with palms and orange-trees! Even the luxury of the Palazzos, however, depressed Irene. Her mind wandered back to the Middle Ages, and it seemed to her that she had found the key to all the cruelty and injustice of those dark, bygone days. How could kindness and honour and mercy flourish in such gloomy palaces, in such dismal narrow alleys where God’s sunlight never penetrated? No wonder, indeed, if humanity, having at last thrown off the mediæval régime, hastened, immediately after the French Revolution, to escape from these labyrinths of dark and crooked alleys, and invented a new type of towns, whose streets were broad and flooded with sunshine. The only bright spots that relieved, to Irene, the gloom of mediæval Rome, were the Piazzas, with their gorgeous fountains. Here was the best place for observing the Roman crowd, a crowd always interesting and characteristic, even though robbed, in these days, of its picturesque national costume. There is a woman, hatless and coatless, in spite of the cold winter’s day, sitting by the fountain with a child in her arms, drawing water and finishing her _bambino’s_ toilet in the open air. Opposite her, on the doorstep of someone’s house, a young carpenter is resting, having left the new table he was carrying to a customer in the middle of the road, in everyone’s way. The slight frown on his pink, dirty face distinctly says: “Gone are the good old times! Where are the bandits that used to hide among the ruins of the Campagna, and receive with open arms fellows like me, who love a gay, careless life, and have no mission for hard work?”