The half-forgotten
shadows of my childhood, hidden behind the beautiful, came to view,
called forth by kindred miseries. We had to live comparatively simply,
and my dignified old mother, as well as I, had to climb the four
chilly, dimly lighted, stony flights to our apartment, where it was
cold and uncomfortable too. To let Lucia go about alone in Rome, like
an English girl in London, was simply out of the question. I myself had
to be very much on my guard against suspicious persons who whisperingly
accosted me with foul proposals. And a stroll through the section San
Lorenzo on a bleak December day, where I saw, how my poor people, kept
in ignorance and filth, manfully battle against suffering and misery,
made me feel that Italy, when her glorious sunlight fades, is still
ever the land of the "sofferenza" and still deserves the cry of
lamentation:
"Ahi, selva Italia! di dolore ostello!"
This sorrowful word never leaves me; often do I sigh it through the
stillness of my gloomily respectable house, the abode of the old Dutch
merchants; and then too perchance I scream it out into the gale on the
open sea-dike where my petty fellow citizens cannot hear it.
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