A Rogue's Tragedy by Bernard Capes — Read

There was a jumble of old streets and buildings in Turin, flourishing out of sight behind the Palazzo Reale -- like a scrap of wild thicket overlooked in the reclamation of a waste -- which, to the many enamoured of orderliness and respectability, was a scandal, and to the few, having an eye for haphazard picturesqueness, the solitary oasis in a desert of uniformity. This irregular quarter, called "L'Anonimo," possessed the qualities of its heterodoxy, and was consistent in nothing but its moral unconformableness. It was not so much a rookery as a hive, whence gold-ringed _donnaccias_ flew to gather their honey, and, having collected, came back to store it, against a winter's day, in their unconventual little cells. It was always very vivid and very busy -- a never-ending fair, full of life and frivolity. Its stalls displayed a characteristic opulence of cheap Parisian hosiery and Genoese jewellery. White ankles twinkled for ever in its doorways. Its stones were dinted with the clatter of little gilded heels. It had its own _cafés_, and its lottery-office, of course, and its Government shops for the sale of salt and tobacco; for even nonconformity had to subscribe to the relentless _gabelle_. Finally, it had its drones; but they for the most part loafed at home.

It was not so very bad, this quarter, even at its heart, and rippled into less and less expression of itself the further one got from it, like the concentric rings extending from a splash in water. At quite a little distance it began to merge into a compromise with order -- became a sort of sedate St John's Wood -- until, down by the Dora, it lapped itself away in an unimpeachable colony of washerwomen.