A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other.

Heroes and martyrs, sages and saints and sinners, consuls and popes and emperors, people the weird pageant which to our mind's eye hovers ever mistily amidst the scenes around us.

Here above all places in God's earth it is hard to forget the past and think only of the present.

This, however, is what I now want to do.

Laying aside all memory of what Rome has been, I would again describe what Rome is now.
And thus, in my solitary wanderings about the city, I have often sought to picture to myself what would be the feelings of a stranger who, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, should enter Rome with only that listless curiosity which all travellers feel perforce, when for the first time they approach a great capital.