The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
world and the interior world, it partakes of both.
The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
is perished.
Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
inside here is the immemorial shadow.
Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
the Renaissance.
In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
abstraction of Christ.
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