Read "A Roman Singer" by F. Marion Crawford online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was really not so long ago -- only one year. The sirocco was blowing up and down the streets, and about the corners, with its sickening blast, making us all feel like dead people, and hiding away the sun from us. It is no use trying to do anything when it blows sirocco, at least for us who are born here. But I had been persuaded to go with Nino to the house of Sor Ercole to hear my boy sing the opera he had last studied, and so I put my cloak over my shoulders, and wrapped its folds over my breast, and covered my mouth, and we went out. For it was a cold sirocco, bringing showers of tepid rain from the south, and the drops seemed to chill themselves as they fell. One moment you are in danger of being too cold, and the next minute the perspiration stands on your forehead, and you are oppressed with a moist heat. Like the prophet, when it blows a real sirocco you feel as if you were poured out like water, and all your bones were out of joint.
Foreigners do not feel it until they have lived with us a few years, but Romans are like dead men when the wind is in that quarter.