CASA ROSA, May 18.
Such a fanfare of bells as greeted our ears on the morning of our first awakening in Casa Rosa!
"Rise at once and dress quickly, Salemina!" I said. "Either an heir has been born to the throne, or a foreign Crown Prince has come to visit Venice, or perhaps a Papal Bull is loose in the Piazza San Marco. Whatever it is, we must not miss it, as I am keeping a diary."
But Peppina entered with a jug of hot water, and assured us that there were no more bells than usual; so we lay drowsily in our comfortable little beds, gazing at the frescoes on the ceiling.
One difficulty about the faithful study of Italian frescoes is that they can never be properly viewed unless one is extended at full-length on the flat of one's honourable back (as they might say in Japan), a position not suitable in a public building.
The fresco on my bedroom ceiling is made mysteriously attractive by a wilderness of mythologic animals and a crowd of cherubic heads, wings and legs, on a background of clouds; the mystery being that the number of cherubic heads does not correspond with the number of extremities, one or two cherubs being a wing or a leg short.
Whatever may be their limitations in this respect, the old painters never denied their cherubs cheek, the amount of adipose tissue uniformly provided in that quarter being calculated to awake envy and jealousy on the part of the predigested-food-babies pictured in the American magazine advertisements.
Padrona Angela furnishes no official key to the ceiling-paintings of Casa Rosa; and yesterday, during the afternoon call of four pretty American girls, they asked and obtained our permission to lie upon the marble floor and compete for a prize to be given to the person who should offer the cleverest interpretation of the symbolisms in the frescoes. It may be stated that the entire difference of opinion proved that mythologic art is apt to be misunderstood. After deciding in the early morning what our bedroom ceiling is intended to represent (a decision made and unmade every day since our arrival), Salemina and I make a leisurely toilet and then seat ourselves at one of the open windows for breakfast.