English to Italian Art/Literary Architecture

Bath
There is a poignancy to the diminutive side of Bath, or if not a poignancy, a
wistfulness.
The backs of Bath buildings are very revealing. A few of the swankiest terraces are
grand behind too, but for the most part Bath's builders did not much care about rear
elevations, and successive improvers and developers have stuck their additions
haphazardly on the back walls, giving half Bath a hodge-podge, job-lot look which I
particularly like. The back of Marlborough Buildings offers one such spectacle. This is
a large range of terrace houses, built speculatively in the late 1780s. From the front it
looks decorous, especially No. 9 (where I live). From the back it looks an enthralling
muddle. There are allotment gardens back there, and if you stroll among their beans
and chrysanthemums, looking up to the massive wall of masonry above, the effect is
troglodytic. It is as though a natural rock-face stands there, pitted with the thousand
caves and burrows that are its windows. There are thirty-three houses in the row, and
from the back all look different. Some have six floors, some five. Some are
impeccably maintained, some look like slums. Their windows are splodged or hacked
almost indeterminately across the cliff, and there are balconies stuck on here and
there, and outhouses, and jutting alcoves like Turkish mahrabiyas, and sham
windows here, and blocked doors there, and racks for flower-boxes, and washing
lines, and sometimes the curtains look richly velvet, and sometimes they appear to
consist of a couple of discarded blankets strung up on cord.

grazie!