One old woman assured me, that when she was a child her father had
let an apartment to the very man, and that he took the room for
a month, and though he spontaneously offered ten times as high a
price as the owner could ever have asked, he never slept there. He
had secretly married a Roman girl who was imprisoned for breaking the
law by marrying a Protestant, and he opened her prison doors with his
'wand,' that is, he bribed the jailer to admit him to pass all his
time in prison with her; ultimately he carried her off to England,
but she soon died there.
Another pointed out to me a shop where in former days had been a
butcher, whose daughter had charmed a rich Englishman, who carried
her off to his own country, and married her there. But this was a
very tetra (sad, gloomy) story, for after many years she came back
looking like the ghost of herself. She had gone away a blooming girl,
the pride and the admiration of the whole neighbourhood; she came
back prematurely grey, hollow-eyed, and thin as a skeleton.
She said it was the climate had disagreed with her, and further than
that she would say nothing. But who knows what she may not have had
to go through!
Bresciani has made the same tradition the groundwork of one of his
most interesting romances.]