In the broad part of an open walk, the whole town passing and repassing, sat elegantly dressed ladies, with their husbands or lovers, mothers with their daughters, and occasionally a group of modest girls alone, eating or drinking with as little embarrassment as at home, and preserving toward each other that courtesy of deportment which in these classes of society can result only from being so much in public.
— from Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate by Nathaniel Parker Willis