eBooks Base 2000

There are also lemons and oranges;
stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber;
cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece;
bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung
together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men
sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards
on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a
shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or
figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old
white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a
short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the
ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of
scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The
piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with
straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there
is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome.


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