LibriVox Forum

Yet even for the foreigner the supreme interest of Rome must be that it is no mere museum, but a living city still. Busy with churches and temples, statues and paintings, inscriptions and sites, we are apt to overlook the contemporary Romans whom we have not come forth to see. To themselves they must necessarily be the most important part of the Eternal City; and the greater number of them are not princes and dukes with historic names, nor even renowned churchmen, or patriots and kingdom builders, but good, simple, workaday, middle-class persons such as are the backbone of all countries and of all societies.
It is among such unnoticed folk that Grazia Deledda has taken us in Nostalgie; and it is not too much to say that her pages have a distinction and a force which recalls, at least in a measure, the style qui rugit of the author of Madame Bovary.