Explore "Our own Set" by Ossip Schubin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"And what shall we do to-morrow? " Sempaly would ask Zinka almost every evening when he met her, fresh and smiling, at some party; he had made it his task to help her to find her lost Rome and devoted himself to it with praiseworthy diligence.
The disappointment that she had experienced in her expedition under the guidance of the _botta_ driver to the ruins of the capital of the Caesars is a common enough phenomenon; it comes over almost everyone who sets out with his fancy crammed with the mystical cobwebs that recent literature has spun round the name of Rome, to see for the first time that dense mass of splendor and rubbish among the bare modern houses. And the disappointment is greatest in those who come from a long stay in Venice or Verona. Rome has none of the seductive charm of those North Italian cities. Its architecture is sombre and heavy, and the prevailing hues in winter are a sober grey and a dull bluish-green, more suggestive of a subtly toned tempera picture than of a glowing oil painting. It is vain to look for the sheen of the shimmering lagoons or the fantastic outline of the campaniles against the sky of Venice; for the half-ruined frescoes, or amber sunshine of Verona.