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Giving and Receiving (Essay index reprint series)
Giving and Receiving - Essay index reprint series Author:E. V. Lucas 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: guistic indolence or suffer every kind of discomfort. Thus should I leam the language. All hotels are alike—no matter where they are —and so long as I was in one... more » of them I should not acquire a single indigenous phrase; but in rooms the vocabulary would grow and the syntax gradually be acquired. That (I said) is the only way—to live in rooms among the people. I possessed a few words, of course. One cannot frequent London restaurants and be utterly ignorant of Italian. But they were very few, and all, or nearly all, bore rather upon physical requirements than, say, philosophy. Signor Benedetto Croce's wisdom remained a sealed book to me, although I could make some kind of a success in ordering either a collasione or a pranzo. But such words as I had were, so to speak, single bricks. There was a total lack of mortar. I could command spaghetti, but I could not then say, "I don't like these spaghetti. They are insufficiently cooked. Perhaps I could have something else instead." By going into residence in rooms in a thoroughly Italian house I felt that all these little defects would be put right. Cheaper too. Having decided upon the neighbourhood I preferred—somewhere near the famous night ofsteps—I began to look about for placards with notices of apartments to let. (I forget the phrase, but I knew it then.) There were many, and I visited them all, but some objection was always present. Often it was merely personal distaste on my side, but usually it was the circumstance that English was spoken. Most English people seeking rooms in Rome prefer, it seems, that their own tongue should be the only one that is employed. Hence a smattering of English was common among the landladies, and they freely boasted of it. At last, however, I struck a piece of good fortune. I came to a la...« less