And for the most part they had been variously stricken by the pestilence.

For once, the heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars--every caricature of the human type--ravaged beyond what could have been thought possible if it were to survive at all.
Meantime, the farms were less carefully tended than of old: here and there they were lapsing into their natural wildness: some villas also were partly fallen into ruin.

The picturesque, romantic Italy of a later time--the Italy of Claude and Salvator Rosa--was already forming, for the delight of the modern romantic traveller.
And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on crossing the Tiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth, the Tiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water.

Nature, under the richer sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to the conditions around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to be a less burdensome sense of the mere business of life.

How dreamily the women were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steep streets with the great water-pots resting on their heads, like women of Caryae, set free from slavery in old Greek temples.