We arrived in Rome about six weeks ago, at a time when it was still
empty, the hot, the notoriously feverish Rome,
and this circumstance, along with other practical difficulties in finding a
place to live, helped make the restlessness around us seem as if it would never
end, and the unfamiliarity lay upon us with the weight of homelessness. In
addition, Rome (if one has not yet become acquainted with it) makes one feel
stifled with sadness for the first few days: through the gloomy and lifeless
museum-atmosphere that it exhales, through the abundance of its pasts, which
are brought forth and laboriously held up (pasts on which a tiny present
subsists), through the terrible overvaluing, sustained by scholars and
philologists and imitated by the ordinary tourist in Italy, of all the
disfigured and decaying Things, which, after all, are essentially nothing more
than accidental remains from another time and from a life that is not and should
not be ours.