The After-Season in Rome

One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody
that the state of mind of many a forestiero in Rome is one
of intense impatience for the moment when all other
forestieri shall have taken themselves off. One may
confess to this state of mind and be no misanthrope. The place
has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of
the barbarians that that estimable character the passionate
pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. He
has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the
all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see
itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn't
simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or
historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy
genius loci into confidential utterance; it isn't simply
that St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing
with the false note of the languages without style: it is the
general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become
for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and curiosity-
shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who
haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples.
But you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass
away, when Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to
yourself. "You may like her more or less now," I was assured at
the height of the season; "but you must wait till the month of
May, when she'll give you all she has, to love her. Then
the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries
and ruins are empty, and the place," said my informant, who was a
happy Frenchman of the Académie de France, "renait a
ellememe." Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible
prevision of what Rome must be in declared spring. Certain
charming places seemed to murmur: "Ah, this is nothing! Come back
at the right weeks and see the sky above us almost black with its
excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid,
and the white roses tumble in odorous spray and the warm radiant
air distil gold for the smelting-pot that the genius loci
then dips his brush into before making play with it, in his
inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion."

A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the
first time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change.
Something delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn't
give a name, but which presently shone out as the fact that there
were but half as many people present and that these were chiefly
the natural or the naturalised. We had been docked of half our
irrelevance, our