Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know anything.

They always throw out a few feelers they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. 'Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?” I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match.

All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.

She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it.

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain