During her own stay in Rome, however, there was something which interested her more than Roman politics or Roman monuments. It was the philanthropic work of a Convent School. Every visitor to Rome knows the Trinità de' Monti. The flight of steps between the church and the Piazza di Spagna is celebrated alike for its own beauty and for the flower-girls and women in peasant-costume who frequent it. The church itself contains many fine works of art, and the choral service is one of the attractions of ecclesiastical Rome. The neighbourhood is rich in artistic and literary associations. Florence Nightingale had sympathetic eyes and ears for all these things; but what attracted her most was the convent attached to the church, with its school for girls, and (in another part of the city) its orphanage. She was broad-minded, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in relation to church creeds. It was by works, not faith, or at any rate by faith issuing in works, that she weighed the churches. It was characteristic of the thoroughness of her mental character that during this sojourn in Rome she made a methodical study of Roman doctrine and ritual. Among her papers and note-books belonging to this time, there are careful analyses of the theory of Indulgence, of the Real Presence, of the Rosary, and so forth. She made, too, a careful collation of the Latin Breviary with the English Prayer-Book. She summed up her comparative study of the churches in this generalization: "The great merit of the _Catholic Church_: its assertion of the truth that God still inspires mankind as much as ever. Its great fault: its limiting this inspiration to itself. The great merit of _Protestantism_: its proclamation of freedom of conscience within the limits of the Scriptures. Its great fault: its erection of the Bible into a master of the soul." Her deep sense of the self-responsibility of every human soul kept her free from any inclination to Roman doctrine; but she was profoundly impressed by the practical beneficence of Roman sisterhoods. An example of such beneficence she found in the school and orphanage of the Dames du Sacré C[oe]ur. She had picked up a poor girl called Felicetta Sensi, and procured her admission as a free boarder, paying for her care and education for many years. She formed a warm attachment to the Lady Superior, the Madre Sta. Colomba. She studied the organization, rules, and methods of the large school, and for ten days she went into Retreat in the Convent.[39] Her intercourse with the Madre Sta. Colomba, of whose talk and spiritual experiences she made full and detailed notes, made a very deep impression on her mind. She studied rules and organization, but, as in all her studies, she was seeking a motive, as well as, and indeed more than, a method. Many years later, a friend wrote to her: "It seems to me that the greatest want among nurses is _devotion_. I use the word in a very wide sense, meaning that state