I must confess that I have had difficulty about the ruins. Brick,
particularly in this climate, doesn't show its age. I find it hard to
distinguish between a ruin and a building in the course of construction.
When I got out of the station I saw a huge brick building across the
street, which had been left unfinished as if the workmen had gone on
strike. I learned that it was the remains of the Baths of Diocletian.
Opening a door I found myself in a huge church, which had a long history
I ought to have known something about, but didn't.

"Now read this, and try to take it in: 'Returning to the Cancelleria, we
proceed to the Piazza Campo de' Fiori, where the vegetable market is
held in the morning, and where criminals were formerly executed. The
bronze statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned here as
a heretic in 1600, was erected in 1889. To the east once lay the Theatre
of Pompey. Behind it lay the Porticus of Pompey where Caesar was
murdered, B.C. 44.'

"It economizes space to have the vegetable market and the martyrdom of
Giordano Bruno and the assassination of Julius Caesar all close together.
But they are too close. The imagination hasn't room to turn round.
Especially as the market-women are very much alive and cannot conceive
that any one would come into the Piazza unless he intended to buy
vegetables. Somehow the great events you have read about don't seem to
have impressed themselves on the neighborhood. At any rate, you are
conscious that you are the only person in the Piazza Campo de' Fiori who
is thinking about Giordano Bruno or Julius Caesar; while the price of
vegetables is as intensely interesting as it was in the year 1600 A.D.
or in 44 B.C.

"How am I to get things in their right perspective? When I left home I
had a pretty clear and connected idea of history. There was a logical
sequence. One period followed another. But in these walks in Rome the
sequence is destroyed. History seems more like geology than like logic,
and the strata have all been broken up by innumerable convulsions of
nature. The Middle Ages were not eight or ten centuries ago; they are
round the next block. A walk from the Quirinal to the Vatican takes you
from the twentieth century to the twelfth. And one seems as much alive
as the other. You may go from schools where you have the last word in
modern education, to the Holy Stairs at the Lateran, where you will see
the pilgrims mounting on their knees as if Luther and