Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/152

162 up and down the Corso, between the Piazza di Venezia and del Popolo, for two hours. That which interested me most, was to see the handsome Roman women in their holiday-costume. Standing in open loges in the lower story of the houses, they receive with stoical resignation the showers of comfits and bouquets which are incessantly aimed at their gold-adorned heads. Women of the peasant-class, dressed as if for a wedding-festival, with bare heads, adorned with red ribbons and grand ornaments, were also the principal figures in many of the carriages. Amongst the carriages were many which resembled the old Koman chariots, half a dozen persons, or more, standing in them in fantastic costume, sometimes very handsome. One carriage was filled with Neapolitan fishermen in holiday-dresses. Very few of the noble families of Rome, it was said, took part this year in the carriage-parade. The streets swarmed with harlequins, punchinellos, and jesters, who leaped about talking to people in the carriages and on foot, inviting to drink, pretending themselves to be intoxicated, and spilling the beer or water on the right hand and left. Crowds of castanet-players and dancers, in every variety of laughable, grotesque, and most frequently tatterdemalion costume; beating drums, and so on, making a horrible din. Sometimes in the midst of all this wild confusion, a kind of French Courtier would come, mincing along, in old-fashioned costume, leading a lady, also in antique attire, and gazing to the right hand and the left, through an immense opera-glass, making in the mean time the most polite bows. However much he might be pushed about, or be-powdered; mattered