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strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted
chambers: among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again,
as every palace is succeeded by another--the terrace gardens
between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves
of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
thirty, forty feet above the street--the painted halls, mouldering,
and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining
out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls
are dry--the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding
wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing
in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than
elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more
recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out what
seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial-
-the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large
palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close
by-ways--the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid
passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the
vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming
with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people--make up,
altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead:
so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and
lowering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a
sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and
look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the
inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of
an extravagant reality!

The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all
at once, is characteristic. For instance, the English Banker (my
excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized
Palazzo in the Strada Nuova. In the hall (every inch of which is
elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as a police-station in
London), a hook-nosed Saracen's Head with an immense quantity of
black hair (there is a man attached to it) sells walking-sticks.
On the other side of the doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief
for head-dress (wife to the Saracen's Head, I believe) sells
articles of her own knitting; and sometimes flowers. A little
further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg. Sometimes,
they are visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart, but
who has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the
ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of
cellar-steps to speak to somebody. A little further in, a few men,
perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they may be
chairmen waiting for their absent freight. If so, they have
brought their chairs in with them, and there THEY stand also.

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