and when the idea is grasped, one asks, naturally enough, how the people
lived who built such houses--the people whose heirs, far reduced in
splendour, if not in fortune, are driven to let four-fifths of their
family mansion, because they find it impossible to occupy more rooms
than suffice the Emperor of Germany or the Queen of England. One often
hears foreign visitors, ignorant of the real size of palaces in Rome,
observe, with contempt, that the Roman princes 'let their palaces.' It
would be more reasonable to inquire what use could be made of such
buildings, if they were not let, or how any family could be expected to
inhabit a thousand rooms, and, ultimately, for what purpose such
monstrous residences were ever built at all.

The first thing that suggests itself in answer to the latter question as
the cause of such boundless extravagance is the inherited giantism of
the Latins, to which reference has been more than once made in these
pages, and to which the existence of many of the principal buildings in
Rome must be ascribed. Next, we may consider that at one time or
another, each of the greater Roman palaces has been, in all essentials,
the court of a pope or of a reigning feudal prince. Lastly, it must be
remembered that each palace was the seat of management of all its
owner's estates, and that such administration in those times required a
number of scribes and an amount of labour altogether out of proportion
with the income derived from the land.

At first sight the study of Italian life in the Middle Age does not seem
very difficult, because it is so interesting. But when one has read the
old chronicles that have survived, and the histories of those times, one
is amazed to see how much we are told about people and their actions,
and how very little about the way in which people lived. It is easier to
learn the habits of the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the ancient Romans,
or the Assyrians, than to get at the daily life of an Italian family
between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, from such books as we
have. There are two reasons for this. One is the scarcity of literature,
excepting historical chronicles, until the time of Boccaccio and the
Italian storytellers. The other is the fact that what we call the Middle
Age was an age of transition from barbarism to the civilization of the
Renascence, and the Renascence was reached by sweeping away all the
barbarous things that had gone before it.

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