Leaving the studio, they walked a few steps to a house that was literally all front-door; for the entrance was the entire width of the building, and a buffalo-team could have passed in without let. Outside stood a wine-cart, from which they were unloading several small casks of wine. The driver's seat had a hood over it, protecting him from the sun, as he lazily sleeps there, rumbling over the tufa road, to or from the Campagna, and around the seat were painted in gay colors various patterns of things unknown. In the autumn, vine-branches with pendent, rustling leaves decorate hood and horse, while in spring or summer, a bunch of flowers often ornaments this gay-looking wine-cart.
The interior of the shop was dark, dingy, sombre, and dirty enough to have thrown an old Flemish Interior artist into hysterics of delight. There was an olla podrida browniness about it that would have entranced a native of Seville; and a collection of dirt around, that would have elevated a Chippeway Indian to an ecstasy of delight. The reed-mattings hung against the walls were of a gulden ochre-color, the smoked walls and ceiling the shade of asphaltum and burnt sienna, the unswept stone pavement a warm gray, the old tables and benches very rich in tone and dirt; the back of the shop, even at midday, dark, and the eye caught there glimpses of arches, barrels, earthen jars, tables and benches resting in twilight, and only brought out in relief by the faint light always burning in front of the shrine of the Virgin, that hung on one of the walls.
In a wine-shop this shrine does not seem out of place, it is artistic; but in a lottery-office, open to the light of day, and glaringly common-place, the Virgin hanging there looks much more like the goddess Fortuna than Santa Maria.
But they are inside the wine-shop, and the next instant a black-haired gipsy-looking woman with flashing, black eyes, warming up the sombre color of the shop by the fiery red and golden silk handkerchief which falls from the back of her head, Neapolitan fashion, illuminating that dusky old den like fireworks, asks them what they will order?
'A foglietta of white wine.'
'Sweet or dry?' she asks.
'Dry,' (asciùtto,) said Rocjean.
There it is on the table, in a glass flask, brittle as virtue, light as sin, and fragile as folly. They are called Sixtusses, after that pious old Sixtus V. who hanged a publican and wine-seller sinner in front of his shop for blasphemously expressing his opinion as to the correctness of charging four times as much to put the fluoric-acid government stamp on them as the glass cost. However, taxes must be raised, and the thinner the glass the easier it is broken, so the Papal government compel the wine-sellers to buy these glass bubbles, forbidding the sale of wine out of any thing else save the bottiglie; and as it raises money by touching them up with acid, why, the people have to stand it. These fogliette have round bodies and long, broad necks, on which you notice a white mark made with the before-mentioned chemical preparation; up to this mark the wine should come, but the attendant generally takes thumb-toll, especially in the restaurants where foreigners go, for the Roman citizen is not to be swindled, and will have his rights: the single expression, 'I AM A ROMAN CITIZEN,' will at times save him at least two baiocchi, with which he can buy a cigar. There was a time when these words would have checked the severest decrees of the highest magistrate: now when they fire off 'that gun,' the French soldiers stand at its mouth, laugh, and say; 'Boom! you have no balls for your cartridges!'
The wine finished, our two artists took up their line of march for the object that had outlived so many millions on millions of human beings, and at last reached it, discovering its abode afar off, by the crowd of fair-and unfair, or red-haired Saxons, who were thronging up a staircase of a house near the Ripetta, as if a steamboat were ringing her last bell and the plank were being drawn in.
'And pray, can you tell me, Mister Buller, if it's a positive fact that the man has been so long as they say, at work on the thing?'