The only part of the building which was at
all lively and pleasant was the first storey, overlooking the Tiber,
which the ambassador himself occupied. From the gallery there, containing
the famous frescoes of Annibale Caracci, one can see the Janiculum, the
Corsini gardens, and the Acqua Paola above San Pietro in Montorio. Then,
after a vast drawing-room comes the study, peaceful and pleasant, and
enlivened by sunshine. But the dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other
apartments occupied by the /personnel/ look out on to the mournful gloom
of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet
high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of
them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier
tables mingling with modern /bric-a-brac/. And things become abominable
when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there
you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing
but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats
and spiders. The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its
dusty archives. Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two
floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation. Reserved by the owner of the
palace, the ex-King of Naples, it has become a mere lumber-room where
/maquettes/, unfinished statues, and a very fine sarcophagus are stowed
away amidst all kinds of remnants.
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