st! At moments
like these I feel that one needs be entirely engrossed either in
making two ends meet (a clerk or shopkeeper, or one of these
haranguing archaeologists holding forth under the Arch of Drusus) for
his dinner or in tea parties and "jours," and "sport," to endure the
company of Rome.

I went into the vigna of S. Cesario for the key of the church. It is
the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those
mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico,
seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and
Borgia suppers. And in this church and the neighbouring one the
impression of the inscriptions recording succession of popes and
cardinals, all the magnificent locusts who came swarm after swarm, to
devour this land, leaving the broken remains of their hurried
magnificence, volutes, plaster churches, and, inscriptions!
inscriptions!

_April_ 13.

II.

VILLA FALCONIERI.

Villa Falconieri, Frascati--abandoned, overgrown--the wonderful
outline of huge Mondragone, with its pines against the mountains. All
these villas near each other, and while they open up into the hill and
woods (the lovely delicate rose of the budding chestnuts) are still
almost within hail of the little town across the valley. So different
from the Tuscan villa, even the grandest, say Mte. Gufoni, which is
only the extended _fattoria_, its place chosen by the accident of
agricultural business. This mouldering rococo villa is inhabited in
summer by the Trappists of Tre Fontane, of that Abbey of St. Anastasia
which was the suzerain of all Maremma, great part of Umbria and the
Tuscan islands! At the end of their miserably cultivated little
_orto_, presiding over the few leeks and garlics, on the balustrade
towards Rome of all divinities, who but Hortorum Deus!

Near Grottaferrata in a flat green field, a nun, all in white, was
seated under one of the big olives: a curious biblical figure.

_April_ 26.

III.

PORTA LATINA.

Yesterday with P. D. P. at Porta Latina. He told me an extraordinary
thing. In the blocked-up arch of that suppressed gate, at the end of a
blind alley, an old old couple--a man of ninety and a woman of eighty,
had taken up their abode for months; helped occasionally by the monks
of the neighbouring convent (with pretty rose-garden) of S. Giovanni a
Porta Latina, to whom however permission was refused (the Superior
referring to the Card. Vicar and t