Read "Anthony Adverse" by Hervey Allen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The inn of the "Blue Frog" had for several generations been one of the best kept caravansaries of the Mediterranean littoral. Perhaps more than any other institution in Livorno--and it was an institution--it had realized the original dreams of the Medicean founders of the free port by attaining a complete cosmopolitanism.
Like all really great inns, it had not depended for support nor derived its atmosphere from a purely genteel clientele, which is so dully alike everywhere. It had catered to everybody, from travelling cardinals to sailors getting rid of their pay. And it had done so by sprawling out along the piazza, into various pavilions where each kind of man could find others like himself gathered together eating and drinking, playing and talking according to his nationality and class. In that respect the "Blue Frog" was unique.