The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so
smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if
they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their
half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon
hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far
into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the
little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many
churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient
stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain
atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a
death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was
thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city's
street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably
gossips with everybody, being everybody's blood relation, as they cannot
fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up
together within the narrow walls for many hundred years.
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