CONTRASTS

Old Bergamo is completely old. Nothing in it is
modern, except bits of sanitation here and there.
It is the essence of the natural-pifturesque. Its
fanes look miraculous in photographs, and also
in the stone-flesh. Its piazza has two public
libraries, but whether anyone ever goes into them
I know not. I didn't. It has a fountain, little
cafe-restaurants, a little hotel, some shops, a barber,
some quidnuncs, and a few children who spend
half an hour in staring at you and then rush off like
red Indians.

We were saying how delightfully one could live
there for ever and ever. But one couldn't live
there in delight. Because one's mere permanent
presence would be unnatural, and would ruin the
inta&ness of the place. A grand hotel stuck like
a toy on the huge flank of an alp is unnatural
enough. The French Riviera is unnatural enough,
though its unnaturalness is fast becoming the
natural. But British inhabitants in old Bergamo,
with their craze for modernizing the interiors of
houses, their morbid insistence on comfort, and
their repudiation of the environments in which
they plant themselvesa would be an offence.

We ate lunch and drank good coffee on the
piazza, viewed the monuments, flaunted a red
guide-book, purchased postcards, and descended
the steep, narrow cobbled streets to our proper
refuge, new Bergamo.

Travel is full of startling contrasts : one of the
most startling is that between the richly decorated,

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