Immediately after witnessing and writing her account of the Battle of Waterloo, a conservative Protestant, Charlotte Eaton (1788–1859), travelled into the Papal territories. With Napoleon’s defeat fresh on her mind, she undertook the daunting task of writing a more complete and accurate description of Roman art and ruins than had been achieved by her predecessors. During her two-year stay in Rome (1816–1818), she visited every critical monument, artwork, and church, cataloging each in her comprehensive three-volume text, Rome in the Nineteenth Century. Though Eaton purportedly wrote her travel guide to remedy the deficiencies of earlier travel writers she deemed ‘inaccurate’ and ‘inadequate’, her fascinating narrative offers a biased view of Roman monuments and artifacts. She undercuts her meticulous detailing of Roman artifacts with a moralistic commentary, suggesting a link between Catholicism and poverty. She finds herself repulsed by Catholic ritual, dismissing the Italian women as ‘indolent, useless, and vain’. In unpacking ‘dirt’ as a metaphor for poor housekeeping, lax female sexual mores, and indulgent Catholic religious practices, Eaton uncovers the extensive web of religious, cultural, and nation-state anxieties in nineteenth-century Britain that operated powerfully on this female writer’s imagination.