The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

CHAPTER XXXI.

THROUGH EUROPE - THE CATACOMBS UNDERNEATH ROME
- NINE HUNDRED MILES OF SILENT UNDERGROUND
STREETS - SIX MILLION DEAD BURIED THERE.
The Road from Marseilles to Rome - The Museum of all the Ages -
A World in Itself - The Eternal City - Giving Ourselves up to
Sight - seeing - The Campagna that once Contained over Thirty
Towns and Cities - Peopled by over Three Million Inhabitants" Where Cwesar fell, slain by the Hands of Traitors " - " Hannibal
Encamped on Yonder Hills" - The Arena of the Colosseum -
Drenched with the Blood of Christians thrown to Wild Beasts -
Sixty Thousand Soldiers in St. Peter's, and the Church not Crowded
-Fifteen Miles through the Grounds of the Vatican-The Vatican
Museum - The Sistine Chapel - The Catacombs - Where the Early
Christians Buried their Dead - The Resting-place of Six Million
Dead - Inscriptions on the Walls - A History of Conflict and Blood
-Besieged by Beggars - Pompeii - Buried by an Overflow of Yesuvius for Sixteen Centuries.
W E had planned for a visit of two, months in Italy,
amid the classic antiquities of Rome, Florence,
Naples, Yenice, and other world-renowned cities. Rome
was our first objective point, and thither we hastened, stopping only at Marseilles by the way. Few public highways
combine in themselves such elements of natural beauty as
the road from Marseilles to Rome. The Mediterranean is
on one side, with its deep blue waters, the Apennines are to
the north, with united, wavy outline, and overhead is the
heavenliest azure sky. All the way a panoramic picture
entrances the vision, in which are mingled groves of orange
and lemon, groups of fantastic olive trees, clad in silvery
sage-green foliage, oriental palms, spreading fig trees, hedges
of tamarisk, aloes, and oleander,- all enhanced by a bril..
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