Отрывок из книги
Hugh Mrs. Fraser
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The report of a cannon rent the hot, still air, the midday gun from Castel Sant' Angelo. Instantly every church bell in Rome broke into peals of sound, echoing the announcement of high noon to the city. Fra Tommaso had leaped to his ropes and was working like a demon, trying to outring all the neighboring bells, and especially the one of Santa Eulalia, the convent on the other side of the river; between it and San Severino there was on this point an ancient rivalry which deafened all who lived near either.
Mariuccia departed well content, and at once made her way to the indicated address. The Palazzo Santafede was a huge pile belonging to the prince of that name, and running the whole length of the street which separated the Ripetta from a large quiet piazza, where five well-known palaces had faced each other in dignified seclusion for some centuries past, while many a tragedy and comedy had been played in the great rooms behind their tall, impenetrable walls. The Santafede residence stretched four-square round a vast sunny courtyard where a fountain bubbled in the center, and battered statues of more or less doubtful merit stood on pedestals under the deep colonnade which ran round three sides and afforded shelter for the prince's stables. The present prince was a very young man, with pronounced sporting tendencies, and beautiful English carriage horses and Irish hunters were groomed under the colonnade in the morning. The Princess Mother lived with her son on the "piano nobile," the first floor of the palace, in solemn and unchanging state. All the other apartments, there being no married sons to be housed, were let to tenants whose worldly importance diminished with each flight of stairs they climbed—monsignori, diplomatists, nobles who had no dwelling of their own in Rome paid high rents for spacious suites of rooms on second and third floors. Above these came modest apartments occupied by humbler individuals; and the vast attics, which a couple of centuries ago had accommodated four or five hundred retainers, were now let out, even in single rooms, to all who could satisfy the maestro di casa of their respectability.
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