Anania felt ready for the conquest of the world. Civita Vecchia was black and damp under the morning sky, but it seemed picturesque and beautiful to him.
Daga, who had been on the continent for a year, smiled at his companion's enthusiasm.
The noisy arrival of the express train gave the Sardinian youth an electric shock, a sense of terror, the first giddy impression of a civilization, violent, even destructive. The red-eyed monster would ravish him away as the wind ravishes the leaves. He would be pitched into a cauldron of new life, boiling over with terrible joys and griefs. Ah! that would be life in reality! dreamed of but never known I civilization! the human ebb and flow! the omnipotent palpitation of the great collective heart! Then he looked out of the train and watched the long melancholy lines of the Campagna Romana, warm green under the autumnal sun, reminding him of the tablelands of his home; but the new life upon which he was entering usurped all his thoughts obliterating the landscape, putting memory to flight. Everything, the walls, the trees, the bushes, the air itself, seemed in motion flying madly by, as if terrified, as if pursued by some unseen monster. Only the express train, itself a monster but beneficent, protecting, the immense warrior of civilization, advanced violently towards the persecutor dragon to fall upon and destroy it.
In Rome, the two students lived on the third floor of a huge house in Piazza della Consolazione, kept by a widow with two pretty daughters—telegraphists at a newspaper office. The companionship of Daga, a chameleon-like personage, sometimes merry, sometimes hypochondriacal, often choleric, often apathetic, always egotistical and sarcastic, was a great solace to Anania during the first days of his residence in the capital. The pair slept in one room, divided by a screen made out of a yellow rug. The room was vast but dark, with one little window looking out on the internal court. Anania's first glance from this window filled him with dismay. From the lurid depths of the court rose high walls of dirty yellow, pierced with irregular windows from which exhaled kitchen odours of grease and onions. Iron rods ran along the walls and across the court; from them depended miserable garments of doubtful cleanliness, one of these rods passed just under the student's window, long strands of twisted pack-thread floating from it. Anania stood looking gloomily at the faded walls, but Battista Daga shook the rod and laughed.
"Look!" he said, "the rings on this rod and the skeins of thread dance as if they were alive. It's amusing!"
Anania looked, and saw the resemblance to marionettes.
Battista went on. "That's life! an iron rod spanning a dirty court and men who dance suspended over an abyss."
"Don't destroy my illusions," said Anania, "I'm dull enough without your philosophy. Let's go out. I'm smothering." They went out and walked till they were tired, bewildered by the noise of carriages and trams, by the splendour of the lamps, by the violent rush and raucous cries of the motors, above all by the surging of the crowd.
Anania felt depressed, alone in a desert, alone on a stormy sea. Had he fallen or cried out none would have heard or seen him; the crowd would have stepped on his prostrate form without looking at it. He remembered Cagliari with yearning nostalgia. Oh enchanted balcony, picture of the sea, sweet eye of the Evening Star! Here no stars were to be seen, no horizon; only a repellent conglomeration of stones and among them a swarm of men, who to the young barbarian seemed of a race inferior to his own.
For the first days Rome, seen through bewildered eyes under the influence of fatigue and of the dark habitation in Piazza della Consolazione, caused him almost feverish sadness. In the older part of the town, in the narrow streets, the stuffy shops, the wretched dwellings whose doors seemed mouths of caverns, Anania thought of the poorest Sardinian village which was dowered at least with light and air. In the modern streets everything seemed too big, the houses were like mountains, the piazzas the size of tancas. Was this the intoxicating Rome, great but never oppressive, which he had imagined at Civita Vecchia?