Perugia

'I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, the romantic, the æsthetic fallacy - almost everything has an antique queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim and battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count her beads in and remember.'

from Transatlantic Sketches - Henry James

Chiaroscuro's Neighbour

'The squalor of Rome is certainly a stubborn fact, and there is no denying that it is a dirty place. 'Don't talk to me of liking Rome', an old sojourner lately said to me; 'you don't really like it till you like the dirt.' This statement was a shock to my nascent passion; but - I blush to write it - I am growing to think there is something in it. 'What you call dirt', an excellent authority has affirmed, 'I call colour;' and it is certain that, if cleanliness is next to godliness, it is a very distant neighbour to chiaroscuro. That I have came to relish dirt as dirt, I hesitate yet to affirm; but as I admit as I walk about the streets and glance under black archways into dim old courts and up mouldering palace facades at the coloured rags that flap over the twisted balustrades of balconies, I find I very much enjoy their 'tone'.'

from Transatlantic Sketches - Henry James