CHAPTER VI.
"What do we eat to-day ?" asked Paoluccio, the innkeeper on the Frascati road, as he came in from the glare and the dust and sat down in his own black kitchen.
"Beans and oil," answered his wife.
"An apoplexy take you!" observed the man, by way of mild comment.
"It is Friday," said the woman, unmoved, though she was of a distinctly apoplectic habit.
The kitchen was also the eating-room where meals were served to the wine-carters on their way to Rome and back.

The beams and walls were black with the smoke of thirty years, for no whitewash had come near them since the innkeeper had married Nanna.

It was a rich, crusty black, lightened here and there to chocolate brown, and shaded off again to the tint of strong coffee.

High overhead three hams and half a dozen huge sausages hung slowly curing in the acrid wood smoke.

There was an open hearth, waist high, for roasting, and having three square holes sunk in it for cooking with charcoal.