Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: setting sun; the sky is still above her serene and beautiful; her eyes, which are perhaps tired with waiting for the sunrise, may still rest themselves on her own green fields and many gardens of olives. It is only at evening sometimes that you may surprise a kind of fear in her eyes, when suddenly above the Vesper bells at sunset she hears the electric tram, that has so lately been thrust upon her, rush without ceremony or weariness up her hillside, and with clanging iron and all the noise of modernity hurry through her ancient Corso, past the Palazzo Municipio, which in its beautiful old age it threatens to destroy, and has already brutally shaken; past the Duomo, which it ignores, into the Piazza Danti, whence it has already expelled the beautiful bronze statue of Pope Julius in. But after all, this modern contrivance, with its network of wires, its noise, and its convenience, is the one modern thing that has invaded her. The great beautiful oxen still stand patiently in her market-place, or draw the plough over her fields; her sons still sow broadcast, over the land they tread with their bare feet, the corn and the maize; the priest still blesses her fields; the tiny cross of bamboo with a branch of olive, silver in the wind, still marks her fields as the gifts of God to her who still remembers Him. In her cathedral the wedding-ring of the Blessed Virgin, mystic, wonderful, is safe in its many caskets. Her beautiful miracle-picture of Madonnina draws its crowd of pilgrims, and she herself, the queen of hill cities, is still beautiful within and without her Etruscan walls, on which Rome and the Middle Age and the Renaissance have not forgotten to leave their marks as beautiful and as indestructible. Her streets are even yet named nobly—Via della Cupa, Via della Conca, Via dei P...