It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences of the city were not all purely¹ aesthetic². There was, indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort³ in the weather, which travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual⁴ ideas of the season’s clemency⁵ in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense⁶ that it is summer only a little out of humor.

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense⁷ with fire, which we of the winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold⁸ when the itching⁹ and the effort to allay¹⁰ it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid¹¹ churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-

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