Middlemarch

by George Eliot

She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes. To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that imperial and papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain;

Dorothea experiences a number of contrasts, jarring or baffling, in Rome. The art of the Eternal City amid real life and poverty. The contrasts of historical ages. The mix of artistic styles and ideas. Etc. She experiences the city as a jumble of masques.