significance it remained to him a purely sensuous impression, the vision
of a golden leisure: not a solution of life's perplexities, but at best
an honourable escape from them.


3.2.

"To know Rome is to have assisted at the councils of destiny!" This cry
of a more famous traveller must have struggled for expression in Odo's
breast as the great city, the city of cities, laid her irresistible hold
upon him. His first impression, as he drove in the clear evening light
from the Porta del Popolo to his lodgings in the Via Sistina, was of a
prodigious accumulation of architectural effects, a crowding of century
on century, all fused in the crucible of the Roman sun, so that each
style seemed linked to the other by some subtle affinity of colour.
Nowhere else, surely, is the traveller's first sight so crowded with
surprises, with conflicting challenges to eye and brain. Here, as he
passed, was a fragment of the ancient Servian wall, there a new stucco
shrine embedded in the bricks of a medieval palace; on one hand a lofty
terrace crowned by a row of mouldering busts, on the other a tower with
machicolated parapet, its flanks encrusted with bits of Roman sculpture
and the escutcheons of seventeenth-century Popes. Opposite, perhaps, one
of Fuga's golden-brown churches, with windy saints blowing out of their
niches, overlooked the nereids of a barocco fountain, or an old house
propped itself like a palsied beggar against a row of Corinthian
columns; while everywhere flights of steps led up and down to hanging
gardens or under archways, and each turn revealed some distant glimpse
of convent-walls on the slope of a vineyard or of red-brown ruins
profiled against the dim sea-like reaches of the Campagna.