Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1

At a concert she saw the Abbe Liszt, “whose vanity and desire to attract attention were most apparent.”

Though the sober light of middle age showed Rome less magical than of old, yet the days were full of delight.

“In these scarce three weeks,” she cries, “how much have we seen, how little recorded and described! So sweet has been the fable, that the intended moral has passed like an act in a dream — a thing of illusion and intention, not of fact. Impotent am I, indeed, to describe the riches of this Roman world,--its treasures, its pleasures, its flatteries, its lessons. Of so much that one receives, one can give again but the smallest shred, --a leaf of each flower, a scrap of each garment, a proverb for a sermon, a stave for a song. So be it; so, perhaps, it is best.”

“Last Sunday I attended a Tombola at Piazza Navona.... I know the Piazza of old. Sixteen years since I made many a pilgrimage thither, in search of Roman trash. I was not then past the poor amusement of spending money for the sake of spending it. The foolish things I brought home moved the laughter of my little Roman public. I appeared in public with some forlorn brooch or dilapidated earring; the giddy laughed outright, and the polite gazed quietly. My rooms were the refuge of all broken-down vases and halting candelabra. I lived on the third floor of a modest lodging, and all the wrecks of art that neither first, second, nor fourth would buy, found their way into my parlor, and stayed there at my expense. I recall ”