Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/135

Rh Between the magnificent equipages, with their splendid and plumed ladies, comes now and then an open hired carriage, in which are seated two or three women of the populace, and the same number of men to match, the women with bare heads, and they too drive in the procession, and wheel round on Monte Pincio, in company with the gay world, and nobody says any thing about it. It appears all to be in due course. In other European cities, and even in the Free States of America, I fancy that people would be somewhat astonished at this kind of equality.

The topics of conversation at the present moment are the last attempt made in Paris against the life of the French Emperor, by means of the infernal machine, and the terrible earthquakes which within the last month have converted several towns of Calabria into heaps of ruins, and caused the destruction of about eighteen thousand human beings! The only one large newspaper of Rome, the official journal, Giornale di Roma, gives the most circumstantial account of these events, as well as of the assistance—“the most efficacious,” as it assures its readers—which the King of Naples has rendered to these afflicted places and people.

For the rest every body is preparing for the Carnival. Provision-dealers are raising their prices. Confectioner's shops are filled with comfits of all sorts and colors, and on the Corso, Piazza Colonna, and Piazza del Popolo, galleries and boxes are being erected for spectators of the festivities of this gay week. For it is not much beyond a week that the grand spectacle of the Roman Carnival extends; and