The following extract presents the American writer Eleanor Clark's first impressions on visiting Rome in the 1940s. Fountains You walk close to your dreams. Sometimes it seems that these pulsing crowds, with their daily and yearly rhythms established so long ago none of it has to be decided any more, with their elbows and knees and souls touching and rubbing and everybody most pleased and agreeable when it is like that, in a bus for instance, will in another minute all be naked, or will have fish tails or horses' behinds like the characters of the fountains. For the Anglo-Saxon mind, ruled by conscience and the romantic, rigid in its privacies, everything here is shocking—an endless revelation and immersion; this is the vocabulary of our sleep; and the key image is always water. That is the great assault of Rome, and it is total and terrible. It is really strange that foreigners of the polite centuries always used to wax so romantic about the fountains of Rome, and the music supposed to represent them was such as any young girl could listen to. The truth is, they are extremely indecent, in various ways. Their number is indecent, much as the lives of the Caesars were; common reason expires here; it is of their nature too to make those lives quite ordinary, nothing surprises you beside them. Their settings are apt to be extravagant; they can have sprung up anywhere, be tacked anywhere on the sides of buildings or are themselves a whole house wall; and their details have the candid, smiling sadism of dreams. But the worst is the life around them, and their part in it. They are not only memory, or the living singleness of time, though they are that too and the city would have fallen apart under the weight of its past a long time ago without them; this is easy to see; you notice at once when there is a drought and the fountains become quiet and stale, or empty, how old everything begins to look. But there is another unity or community within every single moment to which they are essential, and that is where the real outrage comes. The romantic, the idealist, the tender-minded of any vein dies a thousand deaths in these fountains; their every dolphin is his nemesis¹. The very genius spent on them makes them shocking. They are not objets d'art² held off from life and treated with respect as they would be anywhere else; there is a closeness, an imminence of touch around them that nothing in our life has except dreams and sex, whence the awful burden on those. They are always being drunk from and splashed in and sat on, everybody dips into them as into his own private memory and quite often they have all kinds of rubbish in their lovely basins, because although the street cleaners of Rome are many and hard-working they cannot be everywhere at once. ¹ nemesis: the agent of someone's downfall. ² objets d'art: artistic objects.