In the Subura, where at night women sat in high chairs, ogling the
passer with painted eyes, there was still plenty of brick; tall
tenements, soiled linen, the odor of Whitechapel and St. Giles.
The streets were noisy with match-peddlers, with vendors of cake
and tripe and coke; there were touts there too, altars to
unimportant divinities, lying Jews who dealt in old clothes, in
obscene pictures and unmentionable wares; at the crossings there
were thimbleriggers, clowns and jugglers, who made glass balls
appear and disappear surprisingly; there were doorways decorated
with curious invitations, gossipy barber shops, where, through the
liberality of politicians, the scum of a great city was shaved,
curled and painted free; and there were public houses, where
vagabond slaves and sexless priests drank the mulled wine of
Crete, supped on the flesh of beasts slaughtered in the arena, or
watched the Syrian women twist to the click of castanets.

Beyond were gray quadrangular buildings, the stomach of Rome,
through which, each noon, ediles passed, verifying the prices, the
weights and measures of the market men, examining the fish and
meats, the enormous cauliflowers that came from the suburbs,
Veronese carrots, Arician pears, stout thrushes, suckling pigs,
eggs embedded in grass, oysters from Baiae, boxes of onions and
garlic mixed, mountains of poppies, beans and fennel, destroying
whatever had ceased to be fresh and taxing that which was.

On the Via Sacra were the shops frequented by ladies; bazaars
where silks and xylons were to be had, essences and unguents,
travelling boxes of scented wood, switches of yellow hair, useful
drugs such as hemlock, aconite, mandragora and cantharides; the