I was one of the immense throng that awaited the arrival of the train bringing D'Annunzio to the capital. The great bare place before the terminal station was packed with a patient crowd. The windows of the massive buildings flanking the square were filled with faces. There were faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the National Museum, around the flamboyant fountain, up the avenues. There were soldiers also, many of them, inside and outside of the station, to prevent any excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed. The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained a "mob" as one might find in Berlin. The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince von Bülow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the throng....