THE NEGLECTED OLD PALAZZO with its high stucco ceilings, its wall frescoes and mosaic floors, with heavy yellow damask hangings at the big windows, vases standing on brackets and mantelshelves, carved doors, and sombre halls filled with pictures, – that palazzo, when they had moved into it, by its very appearance kept alive in Vronsky the pleasant delusion that he was not so much a Russian landowner and equerry without a post as an enlightened connoisseur and art patron, and withal a modest artist himself, who had renounced the world, his connections and ambitions, for the sake of the woman he loved.
El viejo y abandonado palazzo –de altos techos, frescos en los muros y suelo de mosaico, con grandes cortinas de seda en las altas ventanas, jarrones en las consolas y chimeneas de puertas esculpidas con lóbregas y desiertas estancias llenas de cuadros–, desde que se instalaron en él, mantenía en Vronsky la agradable equivocación de que no era un propietario ruso y un coronel retirado, sino un aficionado exquisito, un mecenas, y hasta un pintor modesto que abandonaba el mundo, relaciones y ambiciones por la mujer amada.