As it is impossible for coaches to
penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded and
otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many private chairs
are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great
lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame. The sedans and
lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of
patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells
through these confined streets all day long. They follow them, as
regularly as the stars the sun.
When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and
the Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day, when I
first saw it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of
summer skies: which its narrow perspective of immense mansions,
reduced to a tapering and most precious strip of brightness,
looking down upon the heavy shade below! A brightness not too
common, even in July and August, to be well esteemed: for, if the
Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in as many
midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when,
looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of
deep and brilliant blue.
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