f every degree, with as much
informality as people choose, if they go to look, or as much state if
they go to be looked at; these things are much less cumbrously contrived
than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat unauthorized fancy,
is rather more addicted to very elect dinner-parties and suppers. Below
these two are an endless variety of first-rate and second-rate houses,
both in the newer quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been
turned into streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and
avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town which
the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the worst these
places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are not steam-heated.

It has seemed to me that there are not so many _hotels garnis_ in Rome
as there used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant
streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with breakfast in
his rooms, and likes to browse about for his luncheon and dinner, will
easily suit himself. If it comes to taking a furnished apartment for the
season, there is much range in price and much choice in place. The
agents who have them to let will begin, rather dismayingly, "Oh,
apartments in Rome are very dear." But you learn on inquiry that a
furnished flat in the Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full
sun, may be had for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the
rents of palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred
and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and for
this you have linen and silver and all the movables and utensils you
want, as well as several vast rooms opening wastefully from one to
another till you reach the salon. The rents of the like flats, if
vacant, would be a quarter or a third less, though again the agents
begin by telling you that there is very little difference between the
rents of furnished and unfurnished flats. The flats are in every part
of the old town and the new; and some are in noble sixteenth and
seventeenth century palaces, such as we are accustomed to at home only
in the theatre. My own experience is that everybody, especially in
houses where there are no lifts, lives on the top floor. You pass many
other floors in going up, but you are left to believe that nobody lives
on them. When you reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming
inside for their state and beauty, and outside for the