Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ch. III.] FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ROME. 61 CHAPTER III. First impressions of Rome.—Mr. Cockerell.—Dr. Bunsen.—English Society. —Naples.—Tivoli.—Enthusiasm for Italian Landscape.—Starts for Greece.—Corfu.—Zante.—Patras. —Delphi.—Corinth.—Khemil Bey.— The Plague.—Athens.—Sicily.—Return to Rome. The young Painter was soon settled, in No. 1, Via de' Cappuccini, "the people, a woman and her daughter, very " kind—and I am upon the whole better off than I ever " was in London." Letters of introduction were then delivered, and his French recommendations immediately opened the Villa Medici (French Academy) under M. The- venin, to him, where he drew every evening and attended conversaziones every Wednesday. He also drew from the antique sculpture in the Vatican, then, with the help of the British Government, restored to the Pope. Phillip and Alexander Visconti, brothers to the antiquary at Paris, were also very kind to him. Charles Eastlake immediately condemned the style of modern painting at Rome, remarking that the modern sculpture was far superior. " There " is, however, a French taste about Canova ;—a Dane, " called Turwalzen, is very celebrated, and firmer and " purer." Gibson had not yet come. In Rome now as a young man, as in London when a boy, he began by active explorations 011 foot, and soon mastered its topography. He also soou reported himself as having been " in the ball of St. Peter's," which meant all over it. " But, whether from accident or an unconscious " impulse, I visited the "ancient ruins before St. Peter's."He knew these so well from Piranesi's engravings, and from other sources, that the Arch of Severus, quite cleared instead of half buried, took him by surprise. He enters carefully into a description of the excavations made by the French, and then making b...