The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roman Holidays and Others, by W. D. Howells #61 in our series by W. D. Howells Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: Roman Holidays and Others Author: W. D. Howells Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7422] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 27, 2003] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS *** Produced by Eric Eldred
GLIMPSE OUTSIDE OF
MODERN ROME
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND
LONDON
1908
Copyright, 1908, by
HARPER & BROTHERS.
Copyright, 1908, by
THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.
All rights
reserved. Published October, 1908.
CHAP.
PAGE
I. UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA .......... 1
II. TWO UP-TOWN
BLOCKS INTO SPAIN ....... 14
III. ASHORE AT GENOA
............ 25
IV. NAPLES AND HER
JOYFUL NOISE ....... 37
V. POMPEII REVISITED
............ 55
VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS
............. 68
VII. A WEEK AT
LEGHORN ........... 239
VIII. OVER AT PISA
.............. 259
IX.. BACK AT GENOA
............. 272
X. EDEN AFTER THE
FALL ........... 284
GLIMPSE OUTSIDE OF
MODERN ROME ....... Frontispiece
FUNCHAL BAY
............... Facing p. 6
BOATS AND DIVING
BOYS, FUNCHAL ....... " 12
GIBRALTAR FROM THE
BAY .......... " 14
GIBRALTAR FBOM THE
NEUTRAL GROUND ....." 20
"DAUGHTERS OF
CLIMATE ALONG THE RIVIERA" ..." 26
TYPICAL MONUMENT IN
THE CAMPO SANTO ....." 34
THE CASTEL
DELL7 OVO, NAPLES ........ " 38
OUT-DOOR LIFE IN OLD
NAPLES ........ " 42
UP-STAIRS STREET IN
OLD NAPLES ........ " 48
NAPLES AND THE
CASTEL ST. ELMO FROM THE MOLE . " 50
EXCAVATING AT
POMPEII ........... " 58
THE STREET OF TOMBS,
POMPEII ........ " 60
THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH,
ROME ......... " 76
GLIMPSE INSIDE OF
IMPERIAL ROME ....... " 86
INTERIOR OF
COLOSSEUM FROM THE SOUTH ....." 90
THE SACRED WAY
THROUGH THE FORUM ....." 92
THE ROMAN FORUM
............. " 96
THE SPANISH STEPS
............. " 106
TOWARD THE PINCIAN
HILL .......... " 108
SEPULCHRE OF
ROMULUS, FORUM ........ " 110
TRAJAN'S FORUM AND
COLUMN ......... " 112
THE ROSTRA IN THE
FORUM .......... " 118
THE MOSAICS UNDER
THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH .... " 126
SANTA MARIA SOPRA
MINERVA ......... " 132
CHURCH OF ARA COELI
............ " 134
CHURCH OF SANTA
MAGGIORE ......... " 138
MICHELANGELO'S
"MOSES" IN SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI . " 140
"THE LITTLE STADIUM
WITH ITS GRADINES" . . . . Facing p. 144
CASINO OF THE VILLA
DORIA AND GARDENS .... " 148
THE CARNIVAL (AS IT
ONCE WAS) ........ " 166
THE FOUNTAIN OF
TREVI ........... " 174
COLONNADE AND
FOUNTAIN AT ST. PETER'S .... " 176
SISTINE CHAPEL,
VATICAN PALACE ........ " 182
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO
FROM THE PINCIAN HILL .... " 186
THE BATHS OF
DIOCLETIAN .......... " 198
CHURCH OF ST. JOHN
LATERAN AND LATERAN PALACE . " 204
STAIRWAY AND
FOUNTAIN, VILLA D'ESTE ..... " 210
VILLA FALCONIERI,
ENTRANCE, FRASCATI ..... " 218
IN THE GARDENS OF
THE VILLA FALCONIERI .... " 222
THE MARBLE FAUN
............. " 226
"MARCUS AURELIUS
WITH OUT-STRETCHED ARM" ... " 228
IN THE VILLA MEDICI
............ " 232
THE BATHS OF
CARACALLA ..........' " 236
PIAZZA VICTOR
EMANUEL, LEGHORN ....... " 246
THE CANAL AT LEGHORN
........... " 252
THE CATHEDRAL,
BAPTISTERY, AND LEANING TOWER, PISA " 260
PISA, "WITH ALMOST
ANY OF MY BACKGROUNDS" . . " 268
WASHING IN THE
RIVER, GENOA ........ " 276
REALISTIC GROUP IN
THE CAMPO SANTO ...... " 278
MONACO
................. " 288
THE CASINO, MONTE
CARLO .......... " 300
Many of the
illustrations are from stereographs copyrighted by the H. C.
White Company, New York
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
I
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA.
No drop-curtain, at
any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly imagined, with misty
tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys
and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of Madeira,
when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful
afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often
very holdly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint
from art, had certainly bettered her instruction. During the
waits between acts at the theatre, while studying the magnificent
painting beyond the trouble of the orchestra, I have been most
impressed by the splendid variety which the artist had got into
his picture, where the spacious frame lent itself to his passion
for saying everything; but I remembered his thronging fancies as
meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous reality
before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea,
which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those
precipices and grew more and more translucently purple and yellow
and green, while half a score of cascades shot straight down
their fronts in
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
shafts of snowy
foam, and over their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung
long reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from the sea
the island is all, with its changing capes and promontories and
bays and inlets, one immeasurable mountain; and on the afternoon
of our approach it was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of
which we could only see one leg indeed, but that very stout and
athletic.
There were breadths
of dark woodland aloft on this mountain, and terraced vineyards
lower down; and on the shelving plateaus yet farther from the
heights that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered
white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there were set
white villas. These, as the ship coquetted with the vagaries of
the shore, thickened more and more, until after rounding a
prodigious headland we found ourselves in face of the charming
little city of Funchal: long horizontal lines of red roofs, ivory
and pink and salmon walls, evenly fenestrated, with an ancient
fortress giving the modern look of things a proper mediaeval
touch. Large hotels, with the air of palaces, crowned the upland
vantages; there were bell-towers of churches, and in one place
there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red of the
densely flowering creeper on the side of some favored house.
There was an acceptable expanse of warm brown near the quay from
the withered but unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade,
and in the fine roadstead where we anchored there lay other
steamers and a lead-colored Portuguese war-ship. I am not a
painter, but I think that here are the materials of a water-color
which almost any one else could paint. In the hands of a
scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled drop-curtain.
I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful goes too
far, as it certainly
2
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
does at Madeira, it
leaves you not only sated but vindictive; you wish to mock
it.
The afternoon
saddened more and more, and one could not take an interest in the
islanders who came out in little cockles and proposed to dive for
shillings and sixpences, though quarters and dimes would do. The
company's tender also came out, and numbers of passengers went
ashore in the mere wantonness of paying for their dinner and a
night's lodging in the annexes of the hotels, which they were
told beforehand were full. The lights began to twinkle from the
windows of the town, and the dark fell upon the insupportable
picturesqueness of the prospect, leaving one to a gay-ety of
trooping and climbing lamps which defined the course of the
streets.
The morning broke in
sunshine, and after early breakfast the launches began to ply
again between the ship and the shore and continued till nearly
all the first and second cabin people had been carried off. The
people of the steerage satisfied what longing they had for
strange sights and scenes by thronging to the sides of the
steamer until they gave her a strong list landward, as they
easily might, for there were twenty-five hundred of them. At
Madeira there is a local Thomas Cook & Son of quite another
name, but we were not finally sure that the alert youth on the
pier who sold us transportation and provision was really their
agent. However, his tickets served perfectly well at all points,
and he was of such an engaging civility and personal comeliness
that I should not have much minded their failing us here and
there. He gave the first charming-touch of the Latin south whose
renewed contact is such a pleasure to any one knowing it from the
past. All Portuguese as Funchal was, it looked so like a hundred
little Italian towns that it seemed to me as if I
3
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
must always have
driven about them in calico-tented bullock-carts set on runners,
as later I drove about Eunchal.
It was warm enough
on the ship, but here in the town we found ourselves in weather
that one could easily have taken for summer, if the inhabitants
had not repeatedly assured us that it was the season of winter,
and that there were no flowers and no fruits. They could not, if
they had wished, have denied the flies; these, in a hotel
interior to which we penetrated, simply swarmed. If it was winter
in Funchal it was no wintrier than early autumn would have been
in one of those Italian towns of other days; it had the same
temperament, the same little tree-planted spaces, the same
devious, cobble-paved streets, the same pleasant stucco houses;
the churches had bells of like tone, and if their fagades
confessed a Spanish touch they were not more Spanish than half
the churches in Naples. The public ways were of a scrupulous
cleanliness, as if, with so many English signs glaring down at
them, they durst not untidy out-of-doors, though in-doors it was
said to be different with them. There are three thousand English
living at Funchal and everybody speaks English, however slightly.
The fresh faces of English girls met us in the streets and no
doubt English invalids abound.
We shipmates were
all going to the station of the funicular railway, but our
tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a
clattering little horse-car, which climbed with us through
up-hill streets and got us to the station too soon. Within the
closed grille there the handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed,
black-mustached station-masters (if such was his quality) told us
that we could not have a train at once, though we had been
advised that any ten of us could any time
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
have a train,
because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a
most amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so
great as we would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off
down a pink-and-cream colored avenue near by and admired so much
the curtains of red-and-yellow flowers--a cross between
honeysuckles and trumpet blossoms--overhanging a garden-wall that
two friendly boys began to share our interest in them. One of
them mounted the other and tore down handfuls of the flowers,
which they bestowed upon us with so little apparent expectation
of reward that we promptly gave them of the international copper
coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the station
doubtless feeling guiltier than they. Had we not been accessory
after the fact to something like theft and, as it was Sunday, to
Sabbath-breaking besides? Afterward flowers proved so abundant in
Madeira in spite of its being winter, that we could not feel the
larceny a serious one, and the Sunday was a Latin Sabbath well
used to being broken. The pony engine which was to push our
slanting car over the cogged track up the mountain arrived with
due ceremony of bell and whistle, and we were let through the
grille by the station-master as politely as if we had been each
his considered guest. Then the climb began through the fields of
sugar-cane, terraced vineyards, orchards of fruit trees, and
gardens of vegetables planted under the arbors over which the
grapes were trained. One of us told the others that the
vegetables were sheltered to save them from being scorched by the
summer sun, and that much of the work among them was done by
moonlight to save the laborers from the same fate. I do not know
how he had amassed this knowledge, and I am not sure that I have
the right
5
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to impart it without
his leave. I myself saw some melons lolling on one of the tiled
roofs of the cottages where they had perhaps been pushed by the
energetic forces of the earth and sky. The grape-vines were
quiescent, partly because it was winter, as everybody said, and
partly because the wine culture is no longer so profitable in the
island. It has been found for the moment that Madeira is bad for
the gout, and this discovery of the doctors is bad for the
peasants (already cruelly overtaxed by Portugal), who are leaving
their homes in great numbers and seeking their fortunes in both
of the Americas, as well as the islands of all the seas. It must
be a heartbreak for them to forsake such homes as we saw in the
clean white cottages, with the balconies and terraces.
But there were no
signs of depopulation either of old or young. Smiling mothers and
fathers of all ages, in their Sunday leisure and their Sunday
best, watched our ascent as if they had never seen the like
before, and our course was never so swift but we could be easily
overtaken by the children; they embarrassed us with the riches of
the camellias which they flung in upon us, and they were
accompanied by small dogs which barked excitedly. Our train
almost grazed the walls of the door-yards as we passed through
the succession of the one- and two-story cottages, which dotted
the mountain-side in every direction. When the eye could leave
them it was lured from height to height, and at each rise of the
track to some wider and lovelier expanse of the sea. We could see
merely our own steamer in the roadstead, with the Portuguese
war-ship, and the few other vessels at anchor, but we could never
exhaust the variety of those varied mountain slopes and tops.
Their picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would
beggar any thesaurus of its de-
6
FUNCHAL BAY
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
scriptive reserves,
and yet leave their beauty almost unhinted. A drop-curtain were
here a vain simile; the chromatic glories of colored postal-cards
might suggest the scene, but then again they might overdo it.
Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I do not see
how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It can
never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated:
low lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into
outlying hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep,
till they reach uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken
upward into the everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur
resuming in its unity every varying detail.
I dwell rather
helplessly upon the scenery, because it was what we professedly
went up or half up, or one-tenth or -hundredth up, the mountain
for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the
toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to
attempt anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be
time for lunch, we could walk up to a small church near the
station and see the people at prayer in an interior which did not
differ in bareness and tawdriness from most other country
churches of the Latin south, though it had a facade so
satisfy-ingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly
Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were
at prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress
to give us the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of
every sort, sex, and age, and some, from the hands they held out,
with fingers reduced to their last joints, looked as if they
might be lepers, but I do not say they were. What I am sure of is
that the faces of the worshippers--men, women, and children--when
they came out of
7
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the church were of a
gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might
well have passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which
seemed as often blue as black, and if they had no great beauty
they were seldom quite ugly. I wish I could think we strangers,
as they gazed curiously, timorously at us, struck them as
favorably.
An involuntary
ferocity from the famine which we began to feel may have glared
from our visages, for we had eaten nothing for three hours, which
was long for saloon passengers. At the first restaurant which we
found, and in which we all but sat down at table, our coupons
were not good, but this was not wholly loss, for we recouped
ourselves in the beauties of the walk on which we wandered along
the mountain-side to the right of the restaurant. At the point
where we were no longer confident of our way an opportune native
appeared and Jed us over paths paved with fine pebbles, sometimes
wrought into geometric patterns, and always through pleasing sun
and shade, till we reached a pretty hotel set, with its gardens
before it, on a shelf of level land and commanding a view of our
steamer and the surrounding sea. Tropic growths, which I will
venture to call myrtle, oleander, laurel, and eucalyptus,
environed the hotel, not too closely nor densely, and our
increasing party was presently discovered from the head of its
steps by a hospitable matron, who with a cry of comprehensive
welcome ran within and was replaced by a head-waiter of as
friendly aspect and much more English. He said our coupons were
good there and that our luncheon would be ready in two minutes;
for proof of the despatch with which we should be served he held
up the first and second fingers of his right hand. Restored by
his assurance, we did not really mind waiting twice the
tale
8
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
of all his ten
fingers, and we spent our time variously in wandering about the
plateau, among the wonted iron tables and chairs in front of the
hotel, in being photographed in a fairy grotto behind it, and in
examining the visitors' book in the parlor. The names of visitors
from South Africa largely prevailed, for the Cape Town steamers,
oftener than any others, touch at Madeira, but there was one
traveller of Portuguese race who had written his name in bold
characters above the cry, "Long live the Portuguese Republic."
Soon after the Portuguese monarchy ceased to live for a time in
the person of the murdered king and his heir, but it is doubtful
if the health of the potential republic was as great as
before.
That bright Sunday
morning no shadow of the black event was forecast, and we gave
our unstinted sympathy to our unknown co-republican. The
luncheon, when we were called to it, had merits of novelty and
quality which I will celebrate only as regards the delicate fish
fresh from the sea, and the pease fresh from the garden, with
poached eggs fresh from the coop dropped upon them. The
conception of chops which followed was not so faultless, though
the fruit with which we ended did much to repair any error of kid
which may have mistaken itself for lamb. Perhaps our enthusiasm
was heightened by the fine air which had sharpened our appetites.
At any rate, it all ended in an habitual transaction in real
estate by which I became the owner of the place, without
expropriating the actual possessor, and established there those
castles in Spain belonging to me in so many parts of the
world.
There remained now
nothing for us to do but to toboggan down the mountain, and we
overcame our resolution not to do so far enough to go and look
at
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the toboggans under
the guidance of our head-waiter. When once we had looked we were
lost. The toboggans were flat baskets set on iron-shod runners,
and well cushioned and padded; they held one, two, or three
passengers; the track on which they descended was paved, in
gentle undulations, with thin pebbles set on edge and greased
wherever the descent found a level. A smiling native, with a
strong rope attached to the toboggan, stood on each side of it,
and held it back or pulled it forward, according to the
exigencies of the case. It is long since I slid down hill on a
sled of my own, and I do not pretend to recall the sensation; but
I can remember nothing so luxurious in transportation as the
swift flight of the Madeira toboggan, which you temper at will
through its guides and guards, but do not wish to temper at all
when your first alarm, mainly theoretical, passes into the gayety
ending in exultant rejoicing at the bottom of the
course.
Our two toboggan men
were possibly vigilant and reassuring beyond the common, but one
was quite silently so; the other, who spoke a little English,
encouraged us from time to time to believe that they were "strong
mans," afterward correcting himself in conformity to the rules of
Portuguese grammar, which make the adjective agree in number with
the noun, and declaring that they were "strongs mans." We met
many toboggan men who needed to be "strongs mans" in their ascent
of our track, with their heavy toboggans on their heads; but some
of them did not look strong, and our own arrived spent and
panting at the bottom. Something like that is what always spoils
pleasure in this world. Even when you have paid for it with your
money, some one else has paid with his person twice as much, and
you have not equalled his outlay when you have tipped him your
handsomest.
10
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
A shilling apiece
seemed handsome for those "strongs mans," but afterward there
were watches of the nights when the spirit grieved that the
shilling had not been made two apiece or even half a crown, and I
wish now that the first reader of mine who toboggans down Madeira
would make up the difference for me in his tip to those poor
fellows. I do not mind if he adds a few pennies for the children
who ran before our toboggan and tossed camellias into it, and
then followed in the hopes of a reward, which we tried not to
disappoint.
The future traveller
need not add to the fee of the authorized and numbered guide who
took possession of us as soon as we got out of our basket and led
us unresisting to a waiting bullock sled. He invited himself into
it, and gave himself the best of characters in the autobiography
into which he wove his scanty instruction concerning the objects
we passed. A bullock sled is not of such blithe progress as a
toboggan, but it is very comfortable, and it is of an Oriental
and litter-like dignity, with its calico cushions and curtains.
One could not well use it in New York, but it serves every
purpose of a cab in Funchal, where we noted a peculiar feature of
local commerce which I hesitate to specify, since it cast
apparent discredit upon woman. It was, as I have noted, Sunday;
but every shop where things pleasing or even useful to women were
sold was wide open, and somewhat flaringly invited the custom of
our fellow-passengers of that sex; but there was not a shop where
such things as men's collars were for sale, or anything pleasing
or useful to man, but was closed and locked fast. I must except
from this sweeping statement the cafes, but these should not
count, for women as well as men frequented them, as we
ascertained by going to a very bowery one on the quay and
ordering a bottle of the best and dryest Madeira. We
11
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
wished perhaps to
prove that it was really not bad for gout, or perhaps that it was
no better than the Madeira you get in New York for the same
price. Even with the help of friends, of the sex which could have
been freely buying native laces, hats, fans, photographs,
parasols, and tailor-made dresses, we could not finish that
bottle. Glass after glass we bestowed on our smiling guide, with
no final effect upon the bottle and none upon him, except to make
him follow us to the tender and take an after-fee for showing us
a way which we could not have missed blindfold. It was rather
strange, but not stranger than the behavior of the captain of the
tender, who, when he had collected our tickets, invited a
free-will offering for collecting them, and mostly got
it.
When we were safely
and gladly on board our steamer again, we had nothing to do,
until the deck-steward came round with tea, but watch the
islanders swarming around us in their cockles and diving for
sixpences and shillings, which they caught impartially with their
fingers and toes. With so many all shouting and gesticulating,
one could not venture one's silver indiscriminately; one must
employ some particular diver, and I selected for my investments a
poor young fellow who had lost an arm. With his one hand and his
two feet he never failed of the coin I risked, and I wish they
had been many enough to enable him to retire from the trade,
which even in that mild air kept him visibly shivering when out
of the water. I do not know his name, but I commend him to future
travellers by the token of his pathetic mutilation.
By-and-by we felt
the gentle stir of the steamer under us; the last tender went
ashore, and the divers retired in their cockles from our side.
Funchal began to rearrange the lines of her streets, while
keeping
12
BOATS AND DIVING BOYS,
FUNCHAL
UP AND DOWN
MADEIRA
those of her roofs
and house-walls and terraced gardens. We passed out of the
roadstead, we rounded the mighty headland by which we had
entered, and were once more in face of that magnificent
drop-curtain, which had now fallen upon one of the most vivid and
novel passages of our lives.
II
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
THERE is nothing
strikes the traveller in his approach to the rock of Gibraltar so
much as its resemblance to the trade-mark of the Prudential
Insurance Company. He cannot help feeling that the famous
stronghold is pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of
that institution. As the lines change with the ship's course, the
resemblance is less remarkable; but it is always remarkable, and
I suppose it detracts somewhat from the majesty of the fortress,
which we could wish to be more entirely original. This was my
feeling when I first saw Gibraltar four years ago, and it remains
my feeling after having last seen it four weeks ago. The eye
seeks the bold, familiar legend, and one suffers a certain
disappointment in its absence. Otherwise Gibraltar does not and
cannot disappoint the most exacting tourist.
The morning which
found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the bland
afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking
coracles surrounded our steamer, with crews eager to plunge into
the hissing brine for shillings or equivalent quarters. The
whitecaps looked snow cold as they tossed under the sharp north
wind, and the tender which put us ashore had all it could do to
embark and disembark us upright, or even aslant. But, once in the
lee of the rocky
14
GIBRALTAR FROM
THE BAY
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
Africa breathed a
genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits faintly
shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook's carriages which warmed
us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or
four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly
well kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the
pictures of Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and
were curtained and cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are
yet unknown in southern Europe, and these mediaeval arks bounded
over the stones with a violence which must once have been
characteristic of those in the illustrations. But the English of
our English-speaking driver was all that we could have asked for
the shillings we paid Cook for him, or, if it was not, it was all
we got. He was an energetic young fellow and satisfyingly Spanish
in coloring, but in his eagerness to please he was less grave
than I could now wish; I now wish everything in Spain to have
been in keeping.
What was most
perfectly, most fittingly in keeping was the sight of the Moors
whom we began at once to see on the wharves and in the streets.
They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their
caliph, if he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick
out of his kingdom and established his own race and religion in
the Peninsula. Moslem costumes can have changed very little in
the last eleven or twelve hundred years, and these handsome
fellows, who had come over with fresh eggs and vegetables and
chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could not have been handsomer
when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of coops and
baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with bare,
red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had
a
15
ROMAN HOLIDAYS
AND OTHERS
head shaved
perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's
brother out of the Arabian Nights; the sparse mustache and
short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they
squatted on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or
waited for custom in their little market among the hen-coops and
the herds of rather lean, dispirited turkeys (which had not the
satisfaction of their American kindred in being fattened for the
sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys are served lean), these
Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental race. It was
greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a
market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market
could be much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more
picturesque. Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the
dapper figures of the red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers,
with blue, blue eyes and incredible red and yellow hair, lounging
or hurrying orderlies with swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless
privates no doubt bent 'upon quite definite business or pleasure.
Now and then an English groom led an English horse through the
long street from which the other streets in Gibraltar branch up
and down hill, for there is no other level; and now and then an
English man or woman rode trimly by.
The whole place is
an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The strictly
South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute
protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so
clean and maintains order by means of policemen showing under the
helmets of the London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In
the shops the saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our
driver, indeed, looked more Spanish than he spoke
English.
16
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
His knowledge of our
rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of certain
conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain
why we could not see the old disused galleries of the
fortifications. I do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt
if we really did so, but we embittered life for that well-meaning
boy by our insistence upon them, and we brought him under unjust
suspicion of deceit by forcing him to a sort of time-limit in
respect to them. We appealed from him to the blandest of
black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who directed us
to a certain government office for a permit. There our
application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to
another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by
incidentally learning that the galleries could not be seen till
after three o'clock. As our ship sailed at that hour, we were
probably saved a life-long disappointment.
Everywhere the rock
of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town; but the
fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really
distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the
top. Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the
war-like harness of the stronghold shows through the civil dress
of the town in barracks and specific forts and gray battle-ships
lying at anchor in the docks. But all is simple and reserved, in
the right English fashion. The strength of the place is not to be
put forth till it is needed, which will be never, since it is
hard to imagine how it can ever be even attempted by a hostile
force. This is not saying, I hope, that an American fleet could
not batter it down, nor leave one letter of the insurance
advertisement after another on the face of the
precipice.
There is a pretty
public garden at Gibraltar in that
17
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
part of the town
which is farthest from the steamer's landing, and this proved the
end of our excursion in our state coach. We found other state
coaches there, and joined their passengers in strolling over the
pleasant paths and trying to make out what bird it was singing
somewhere in the trees. We made out an almond-tree in bloom,
after some dispute; and, in fact, the climate there was much
softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft that it required
great force of character to keep from buying the flowers which
some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is a mild
monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly
failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military
memories in the world than is good for it, and as these were
undoubtedly military memories, I cannot much blame myself in the
matter. After viewing them, there was nothing left to do but to
get lunch, which we got extremely good at the hotel where a
friend led us. There was at this hotel a head-waiter, in a
silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who imagined our
wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking more of
the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true
friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that
morning at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but
we turned from the poetic experience of this omelette in the
greedy hope of better things. Better things there could not be,
but the fish was as good as the fish at Madeira, and the belief
of the chops that they were lamb and not kid seemed better
founded.
There had been an
excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have as good at
some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and the
lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and
Spanish
18
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
undertones, was not
cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific
charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An
English dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking
in the waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of
where and what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well
content as if we had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The
table-waiter took an extra fee for confiding that he was a
Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in Gibraltar; whether
he was right or not I do not know, but it was certainly not his
fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.
It is said that
living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of house
rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin
Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and
their dark-green shutters. There is an English residential
quarter at the east end of the town, where the houses may be
different, for all I know; the English of our driver or the hire
of our state coach did not enable us to visit that suburb, where
the reader may imagine villas standing in grounds with lawns and
gardens about them. The English have prevailed nothing against
the local civilization in most things, while they have infected
it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should
not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite
small house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they
think it dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course,
it is an artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the
town in turn lives upon the fortress.
The English plant
themselves nowhere without gathering English conveniences or
conventions about them; Americans would not always think them
comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a
hunt,
19
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
there is a lending
library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is bridge, there
is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do not know
it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard,
because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which
they will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even
in golf links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the
invaders as Gib, and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn,
though in summer it is frightfully hot, held out on the knees and
insteps of the rock to the burning African sun, which comes up
every morning over the sea after setting Sahara on
fire.
All this foreign
life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life which has so
long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of outlasting
the English. I do not know what the occupations and amusements of
that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough. There
must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the
two, which would form a curious inquiry, but Avould probably not
lend itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there
is another neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed
after luncheon, in order to say that we had been in Spain. That
was the country of many more youthful dreamers in my time than, I
fancy, it is in this. We used then, much more than now, to read
Washington Irving, his Tales of the Alhambra, and his
history of The Conquest of Granada, and we read Prescott's
histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world and
the new. We read Don Quixote, which very few read now, and
we read Gil Blas, which fewer still now read; and all
these constituted Spain a realm of faery, where every sort of
delightful things did or could happen. I for my part
20
GIBRALTAR FROM THE
NEUTRAL GROUND
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
had always expected
to go to Spain and live among the people I had known in those
charming books, yet I had been often in Europe, and had spent
whole years there without ever going near Spain. But now, I saw,
was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching with us
asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral territory
and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth
had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming
immediately true. It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of
Spanish travel that the driver of the state coach which we first
engaged should, when we presently came back, have replaced
himself by another for no other reason than, perhaps, that he
could so provide us with a worse horse. I am not sure of this
theory, and I do not insist upon it, but it seems
plausible.
As soon as we
rounded the rock of Gibraltar and struck across a flatter country
than I supposed could be found within fifty miles of Gibraltar,
we were swept by a blast which must have come from the Pyrenees,
it was so savagely rough and cold. It may be always blowing there
as a Spanish protest against the English treatment of the neutral
territory; in fact, it does not seem quite the thing to build
over that space as the English have done, though the structures
are entirely peaceable, and it is not strange that the Spaniards
have refused to meet them half-way with a good road over it, or
to let them make one the whole way. They stand gravely opposed to
any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish documents
the place is styled "Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great
Britain," and there is a little town which you see sparkling in
the sun no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the
mayor is also mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a
vear, and many people living
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
for generations over
the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses that they personally
or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its pathos, but as
a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make that road
through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that
our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes
almost flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always
extended toward us. They were probably most of them serious, but
some of the younger ones recognized the bouffe qtiality of
their calling. One pleasant starveling of ten or twelve entreated
us for bread with a cigarette in his mouth, and, being rewarded
for his impudence, entered into the spirit of the affair and
asked for more, just as if we had given nothing.
A squalid little
town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached, and we
left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief
public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form
of examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an
American frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions
with the long javelins with which they are armed for the
detection of smuggling among the natives who have been shopping
in Gibraltar. As the gates of that town are closed every day at
nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife, and everybody is shut
either in or out, it may easily happen with shoppers in haste to
get through that they bring dutiable goods into Spain; but the
official javelins rectify the error.
We left our
belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in
Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I
think a pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it
was not. It was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise
unkempt, with the usual yellowish or grayish
buildings,
22
TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO
SPAIN
rather low and
rather new, as if prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They
were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a
fresh-looking cafe restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with
bright-green tiles. An alguazil--I am certain he was an alguazil,
though he looked like an Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked
hat--loitered into a police station; but I remember no one else
during our brief stay in that street except those bouffe
boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but
they were willing to accept charity on any terms. Otherwise our
Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without
incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we
had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish
picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black
chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate
that it was time it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly
confiscated by the customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by
the populace from a poetic admirer, I do not know, but I hope it
is now in the keeping of some dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will
wear it while murmuring through her lattice to her novio
on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to be worn as a
veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and
could hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the
grille, with one little olive hand, so that the novio
would think it was a black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift
from him, it would be all right, anyway.
Our visit to Spain
did not wholly realize my early dreams of that romantic land, and
yet it had not been finally destitute of incident. Besides,
we had not gone very far into the country; a third block
might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on
the
23
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
steamer before three
o'clock, and we dared not go beyond the second. Even within this
limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance was
satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent
street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary,
Western American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe
that the shops and restaurants had not eked out their height with
dashboard fronts. It was not a place that I would have chosen for
a summer sojourn; the sense of a fly-blown past must have become
a vivid part of future experience, and yet I could imagine that
if one were born to it, and were young and hopeful, and had some
one to share one's youth and hope, that Spanish street, which was
all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its charm. I
do not say that even for age there was not a railway station by
which one might have got away, though there was no sign of any
trains arriving or departing--perhaps because it was not one
o'clock in the morning, which is the favorite hour of departure
for Spanish trains.
When we turned to
drive back over the neutral territory the rock of Gibraltar
suddenly bulked up before us, in a sheer ascent that left the
familiar Prudential view in utterly inconspicuous
unimpressive-ness. Till one has seen it from this point one has
not truly seen it. The vast stone shows like a half from which
the other half has been sharply cleft and removed, that the sense
of its precipitous magnitude may unrelievedly strike the eye; and
it seems to have in that moment the whole world to tower up in
from the level at its feet. No dictionary, however unabridged,
has language adequate to convey the notion of it.
III
ASHORE AT
GENOA
THE pride of
Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to the
level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the
Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe
is the rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the
snow-topped Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly
rounded, velvety heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard
of the Palisades above the point where they have been blasted
away for road-making material if one wishes to keep up one's
spirits. The last time I came home the Mediterranean way I had a
struggle with myself against excusing our sandy landscape, when
we came in sight of it, with its summer cottages for the sole
altitudes, to some Italian fellow-passengers who were not
spellbound by its grandeur. I had to remember the Rocky
Mountains, which I had never seen, and all the moral magnificence
of our life before I could withhold the words of apology pressing
to my lips. I was glad that I succeeded; but now, going back by
the same route, I abandoned myself to transports in the beauty of
the Mediterranean coast which I hope were not untrue to my
country. Perhaps there is no country which can show anything like
that beauty, and America is no worse off than the rest of the
world; but I am not sure that
25
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
I have a right to this
consolation. Again there were those
"Silent pinnacles of
aged snow,"
flushed with the
Southern sun; in those sombre slopes of pine; again the olives
climbing to their gloom; again the terraced vineyards and the
white farmsteads, with villages nestling in the vast clefts of
the hills, and all along the sea-level the blond towns and cities
which broidei the hem of the land from Marseilles to Genoa. One
is willing to brag; one must be a good American; but, honestly,
have we anything like that to show the arriving foreigner? For
some reason our ship was abating the speed with which she had
crossed the Atlantic, and now she was swimming along the
Mediterranean coasts so slowly and so closely that it seemed as
if we could almost have cast an apple ashore, though probably we
could not. We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice for
Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because
our course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed
Nice long before we did. It did not matter; all those places were
alike beautiful under the palms of their promenades, with their
scattered villas and hotels stretching along their upper levels,
and the ranks of shops and dwellings solidly forming the streets
which left the shipping of their ports to climb to the gardens
and farms beyond the villas. Cannes, Mentone, Ventimiglia,
Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that their fair
succession, or did they follow in another order? Once more it did
not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft
January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them
suffused in dim rose
"DAUGHTERS OF CLIMATE
ALONG THE RIVIERA"
ASHORE AT
GENOA
before we drifted
into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk beside a steamer which had
left New York on the same day as ours. By her vast size we could
measure our own and have an objective perception of our grandeur.
We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but you cannot
be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your
magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a
due sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could
not help pitying the people on that other ship, who must have
suffered shame from our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she
was of nearly the same tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do
with the case.
After the creamy and
rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the Riviera, it
was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce like
Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether
it looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her
from the thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the
harbor. Most European towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets
rather tired of putting into one's word paintings, but the roofs
of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray are her serried house walls,
and gray her many churches and bell-towers. The sober tone
gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye has
noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern
Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not
refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is
something businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood
if you are true to America, and recalls you to duty if you are
not.
I had not been in
Genoa since 1864 except for a few days in 1905, and I saw changes
which I will mostly not specify. Already at the earlier date
the
27
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
railway had cut
through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and left the old
palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce
noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of
freight-cars. But there had remained up to my last visit that
grot on the gardened hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules
helplessly overlooked the offence offered by the railroad; and
now suddenly here was the lofty wall of some new edifice
stretching across in front of the Hercules and wholly shutting
him from view; for all I know it may have made him part of its
structure.
Let this stand for a
type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and has passed or
is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is full of
very living Italians, the quickest-witted people in the world,
who are alert to seize every chance for bettering themselves
financially as they have bettered themselves politically. For my
part, I always wonder they do not still rule the world when I see
how intellectually fit they are to do it, how beyond any other
race they seem still equipped for their ancient primacy. Possibly
it is their ancient primacy which hangs about their necks and
loads them down. It is better to have too little past, as we
have, than too much, as they have. But if antiquity hampers them,
they are tenderer of its vast mass than we are of our little
fragments of it; tenderer than any other people, except perhaps
the English, have shown themselves; but when the time comes that
the past stands distinctly in the way of the future, down goes
the past, even in Italy. I am not saying that I do not see why
that railroad could not have tunnelled under the Doria garden
rather than cut through it; and I am waiting for that new
building to justify its behavior toward that poor old Hercules;
but in the
28
ASHORE AT
GENOA
mean time I hold
that Italy is for the Italians who now live in it, and have to
get that better living out of it which we others all want our
countries to yield us; and that it is not merely a playground for
tourists who wish to sentimentalize it, or study it, or sketch
it, or make copy of it, as I am doing now.
All the same I will
not deny that I enjoyed more than any of the improvements which I
noted in Genoa that bit of the old Doria palace-grounds which
progress has left it. The gray edifice looks out on the
neighboring traffic across the leanness of a lovely old garden,
with statues and stone seats, and in the midst a softly
soliloquizing fountain, painted green with moss and mould. When
you enter the palace, as you do in response to a custodian who
soon comes with a key and asks if you would like to see it, you
find yourself, one flight up, in a long glazed gallery, fronting
on the garden, which is so warm with the sun that you wish to
spend the rest of your stay in Genoa there. It is frescoed round
with classically imagined portraits of the different Dorias, and
above all the portrait of that great hero of the republic. I do
not know that this portrait particularly impresses you; if you
have been here before you will be reserving yourself for the
portrait which the custodian will lead you to see in the ultimate
chamber of the rather rude old palace, where it is like a living
presence.
It is the picture of
a very old man in a flat cap, sitting sunken forward in his deep
chair, with his thin, long hands folded one on the other, and
looking wearily at you out of his faded eyes, in which dwell the
memories of action in every sort and counsel in every kind.
Victor in battles by land and sea, statesman and leader and sage,
he looks it all in that wonderful effigy, which shuns no effect
of his more than ninety years, but con-
29
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
fesses his great age
as a part of his greatness with a pathetic reality. The white
beard, with "each particular hair" defined, falling almost to the
pale, lean hands, is an essential part of the presentment, which
is full of such scrupulous detail as the eye would unconsciously
take note of in confronting the man himself and afterward supply
in the remembrance of the whole. As if it were a part of his
personality, on a table facing him, covered with maps and papers,
sits the mighty admiral's cat, which, with true feline
im-passiveness, ignores the spectator and gives its sole regard
to the admiral. There are possibly better portraits in the world
than this, which was once by Sebastiano del Piombo and is now by
Titian; but I remember none which has moved me more.
We tried in vain for
a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance at the riches
of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed around
the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the
pillars were "All inlady, all inlady" with different marbles,
and, after a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers
and the masons were sharing between them in the prayers and
repairs always going on in cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to
the hotel where we had sojourned in great comfort three years
before. Genoa has rather a bad name for its hotels, but we had
found this one charming, perhaps because when we had objected to
going five flights up the landlord had led us yet a floor higher,
that we might walk into the garden. It is so in much of Genoa,
where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid
contrast between the levels of the front door and the back gate.
Many of the streets have been widened since Heine saw the
gossiping neighbors touching knees across them, but nothing less
than an earthquake could change the
30
ASHORE AT
GENOA
temperamental
topography of the place. It has its advantages; when there is a
ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up from the
kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of
stairs. It cannot he denied, either, that the steep incline gives
a charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and
driveways and trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi
(there is a Via Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and
village, and ought to be a dozen), compactly built, but giving
here and there over the houses' shoulders glimpses of the gardens
lurking behind them, is of a dignity full of the energy which a
flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts. Without the
inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never have
got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo
Santo; and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by
involuntarily straining forward from our places. But the Campo
Santo was richly worth the effort, for to visit that famous
cemetery is to enjoy an experience of which it is the unique
opportunity.
I wish to celebrate
it because it seems to me one of the frankest expressions of
national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity--in others.
The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all
the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I
was perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture
which I had heard of so much. I will own that they went far
beyond my expectation and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be
supposed that it is only inferior artists who have abandoned
themselves to the excesses of fidelity so abundant in the Campo
Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory
and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast
residence of the dead (as
31
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
it gives you the
cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the
place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality.
Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where
the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it
were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the
dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark of
being one of a standard chamber-set in the early
eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons
and daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of
that day. I recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter,
in a tie-back, embraced in their grief and turning their faces
away from their mother toward the spectator; and doubtless there
were others whom to describe in their dress would render as
grotesque. It is enough to say that the artist, of a name well
known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as true to the
moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their
faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great
periods of art used to do with their historical and scriptural
people--he has put them in the dress of his own time and place;
and it is impossible to deny him a convincing logic. No sophistry
or convention of drapery in the scene could have conveyed its
pathos half so well, or indeed at all. It does make you shudder,
I allow; it sets your teeth on edge; but then, if you are a real
man or woman, it brings the lump into your throat; the smile
fails from your lip; you pay the tribute of genuine pity and awe.
I will not pretend that I was so much moved by the meeting in
heaven of a son and father: the spirit of the son in a cutaway,
with a derby hat in his hand, gazing with rapture into the face
of the father's spirit in a long sack-coat holding his marble
bowler elegantly away
32
ASHORE AT
GENOA
from his side, if I
remember rightly. But here the fact wanted the basis of
simplicity so strong in the other scene; in the mixture of the
real and the ideal the group was romanticistic.
There are
innumerable other portrait figures and busts in which the civic
and social hour is expressed. The women's hair is dressed in this
fashionable way or that; the men's beards are cut in conformity
to the fashion or the personal preference in side whiskers or
mustache or imperial or goatee; and their bronze or marble faces
convey the contemporary character of aristocrat or bourgeois or
politician or professional. I do not know just what the reader
would expect me to say in defence of the full-length figure of a
lady in decollete and trained evening dress, who enters
from the tomb toward the spectator as if she were coming into a
drawing-room after dinner. She is very beautiful, but she is no
longer very young, and the bare arms, which hang gracefully at
her side, respond to an intimation of embonpoint in the
figure, with a slightly flabby over-largeness where they lose
themselves in the ample shoulders. Whether this figure is the
fancy of the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct
herself, who wished to be shown to after-time as she hoped she
looked in the past, I do not know; but I had the same difficulty
with it as I had with that father and son; it was romanticistic.
Wholly realistic and rightly actual was that figure of an old
woman who is said to have put by all her savings from the grocery
business that she might appear properly in the Campo Santo, and
who is shown there short and stout and common, in her ill-fitting
best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable and
touching dignity.
If I am giving the
reader the impression that I went
33
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to the Campo Santo
in my last stop at Genoa, I am deceiving him; I record here the
memories of four years ago. I did not revisit the place, but I
should like to see it again, if only to revive my recollections
of its unique interest. I did really revisit the
Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived the pleasure I had
known before in its wonderful Van Dycks. Most wonderful was and
will always be the "Boy in White," the little serene princeling,
whoever he was, in whom/ the painter has fixed forever a
bewitching mood and moment of childhood. "The Mother with two
Children" is very well and self-evidently true to personality and
period and position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that
"Boy in White," though she and her children are otherwise so
wonderful. Now that I speak of her, however, she rather grows
upon my recollection as a woman greater than her great world and
proudly weary of it.
She was a lady of
that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold grandeur and
splendor, renews at once all one's faded or fading sense of the
commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her
greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since
Rome began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state
their business men housed themselves in and environed themselves
with! Their palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public
edifices of our less simple State capitols could equal in size
and not surpass in cost. Their folie des grandeurs
realized illusions in architecture, in sculpture, and in painting
which the assembled and concentrated feats of those arts all the
way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire blocks
eastward could not produce the likeness of. We have the same
madness in our brains; we have even a Roman megalomania,
but
34
TYPICAL MONUMENT IN THE
CAMPO SANTO
ASHORE AT
GENOA
the effect of it in
Chicago or Pittsburg or Philadelphia or New York has not yet got
beyond a ducal or a princely son-in-law. The splendors of such
alliances have still to take substantial form in a single
instance worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the
commercial republics of Italy. This does not mean that our rich
people have not so much money as the Italians of the Renaissance,
but that perhaps in their folie des grandeurs they are a
different kind of madmen; it means also that land and labor are
dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our
pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort
rather than size in their houses, and do not like the cold feet
which the merchant princes of Italy must have had from generation
to generation. I shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics
when I went to the Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly
tirge the reader to do so when he goes.
He will not so much
need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless a
tramontana is blowing, and there was none on our half-day.
But in any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking
cab-horse we could find, and he turned out better than his
driver, who asked a fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to
show his tariff, when his wickedness was apparent from the
printed rates. He explained that the part we were looking at was
obsolete, and he showed us another part, which was really for
drives outside the city; but we agreed to pay it, and set out
hoping for good behavior from him that would make up the
difference. Again we were deceived; at the end he demanded a
franc beyond even his unnatural fare. I urged that one should be
reasonable; but he seemed to think not, and to avoid controversy
I paid the extortionate franc. I remembered that just a month
before,
35
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in New York, I had
paid an extortionate dollar in like circumstances.
Nevertheless, that
franc above and beyond the stipulated extortion impoverished me,
and when we came to take a rowboat back to our steamer I beat the
boatman down cruelly, mercilessly. He was a poor, lean little
man, with rather a superannuated boat, and he labored harder at
the oar than I could bear to see without noting his exertion to
him. This was fatal; instantly he owned that I was right, and he
confessed, moreover, that he was the father of a family, and that
some of his children were then suffering from sickness as well as
want. What could one do but make the fare up to the first demand
of three francs after having got the price down to one and a
half? At the time it seemed to me that I was somehow by this
means getting the better of the cabman who had obliged me to pay
a franc more than his stipulated extortion, but I do not now hope
to make it appear so to the reader.
IV
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
WE heard the joyful
noise of Naples as soon as our steamer came to anchor within the
moles whose rigid lines perhaps disfigure her famous bay, while
they render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose to us,
hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory
of her sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which
seemed to have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had
slowed up. It was not a largo boat, but it managed to contain two
men with mandolins, a mother of a family with a guitar, and a
young girl with an alternate tambourine and umbrella. The last
instrument was inverted to catch the coins, such as they were,
which the passengers flung down to the minstrels for their
repetitions of "Santa Lucia," "Funicoli-Funicola," "II
Cacciatore," and other popular Neapolitan airs, such as "John
Brown's Body" and "In the Bowery." To the songs that had a waltz
movement the mother of a family performed a restricted dance, at
some risk of falling overboard, while she smiled radiantly up at
us, as, in fact, they all did, except the young girl, who had to
play simultaneously on her tambourine and her inverted umbrella,
and seemed careworn. Her anxiety visibly deepened to despair when
she missed a shilling, which must have looked as large to her as
a full moon as it sank slowly down into the sea.
37
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
But her despair did
not last long; nothing lasts long in Naples except the joyful
noise, which is incessant and perpetual, and which seems the
expression of the universal temperament in both man and beast.
Our good-fortune placed us in a hotel fronting the famous Castel
dell' Ovo, across a little space of land and water, and we could
hear, late and early, the cackling and crowing of the chickens
which have replaced the hapless prisoners of other days in that
fortress. At times the voices of the hens were lifted in a choral
of self-praise, as if they had among them just laid the mighty
structure which takes its name from its resemblance to the egg
they ordinarily produce. In other lands the peculiar note of the
donkey is not thought very melodious, but in Naples before it can
fade away it is caught up in the general orchestration and ceases
in music. The cabmen at our corner, lying in wait by scores for
the strangers whom it is their convention to suppose ignorant of
their want of a carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one
another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity,
murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar
off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment
when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque
the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples;
and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the
trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only
that they approach it in the prevailing tendency of all the local
discords to soften and lose themselves in the general unison.
This embraces the clatter of the cabs, which are seldom less than
fifty years old, and of a looseness in all their joints
responsive to their effect of dusty decrepitude. Their clatter
penetrates the volumed tread of the myriad feet
38
THE CASTEL DELL'
OVO, NAPLES
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
in a city where, if
you did not see all sorts of people driving, you would say the
whole population walked. Above the manifold noises gayly
springing to the sky spreads and swims the clangor of the
church-bells and holds the terrestrial uproar in immeasurable
solution. It would be rash to say that the whole population of
Naples is always in the street, for if you look into the shops or
cafes, or, I dare say, the houses, you will find them quite full;
but the general statement verifies itself almost tiresomely in
its agreement with what everybody has always said of Naples. It
is so quite what you expect that if you could you would turn away
in satiety, especially from the swarming life of the poor, which
seems to have no concealments from the public, but frankly works
at all the trades and arts that can be carried on out-of-doors;
cooks, eats, laughs, cries, sleeps, wakes, makes love, quarrels,
scolds, does everything but wash itself--clothes enough it washes
for other people's life. There is a reason for this in the fact
that in bad weather at Naples it is cold and dark and damp
in-doors, and in fine so bright and warm and charming without
that there is really no choice. Then there is the expansive
temperament, which if it were shut up would probably be much more
explosive than it is now. As it is, it vents itself in volleyed
detonations and scattered shots which language can give no sense
of.
For the true sense
of it you must go to Naples, and then you will never lose the
sense of it. I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke up
the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in
the Castel dell' Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the
cab-drivers quarrelling, and the cries of the street vendors, and
the dogs barking, and the children wailing, and their mothers
scolding, and the clatter of
39
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
wheels and hoops and
feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful Neapolitan
noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after my
first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old. As
soon as possible, when the short but sweet Vincenzo had brought
up my breakfast of tea and bread-and-butter and honey (to which
my appetite turned from the gross superabundance of the steamer's
breakfasts with instant acquiescence), and announced with a smile
as liberal as the sunshine that it was a fine day, I went out for
those impressions which I had better make over to the reader in
their original disorder. Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the
day before, was now of a soft, smoky white, and the sea, of a
milky blue, swam round the shore and out to every dim island and
low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was full of people on
foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey pleasure-carts, and the
familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and beggars began with my
first steps toward what I remembered as the Toledo, but what now
called itself, with the moderner Italian patriotism, the Via
Roma. The sole poetic novelty of my experience was in my being
offered loaves of bread which, when I bought them, would be given
to the poor, in honor of what saint's day I did not learn. But it
was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over
the book-counter was charming, since it was a condition of her
flirtation with the far younger man beside me who wanted
something far more interesting from her than any brief sketch of
the history of Naples, in either English or Italian or French or,
at the worst, German. She was very pretty, though rather
powdered, and when the young man went away she was
sympathetically regretful to me that there was no such sketch, in
place of which she offered me several large histories in
more
40
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
or less volumes. But
why should I have wanted a history of Naples when I had Naples
itself? It was like wanting a photograph when you have the
original. Had I not just come through the splendid Piazza San
Ferdinando, with the nobly arcaded church on one hand and the
many-statued royal palace on the other, and between them a lake
of mellow sunshine, as warm as ours in June?
What I found Naples
and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr.
Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages)
found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother,
"are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much
that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively
kind of animals, more industrious than Italians usually are; they
work till evening; then they take their lute or guitar (for they
all play) and walk about the city or upon the seashore with it,
to enjoy the fresco." There was, in fact, a bold gayety in the
aspect of the city, without the refinement which you do not begin
to feel till you get into North Italy. When I came upon church
after church, with its facade of Spanish baroque, I lamented the
want of Gothic delicacy and beauty, but I was consoled abundantly
later in the churches antedating the Spanish domination. I had no
reason, such as travellers give for hating places, to be
dissatisfied with Naples in any way. I had been warned that the
customs officers were terrible there, and that I might be kept
hours with my baggage. But the inspector, after the politest
demand for a declaration of tobacco, ordered only a small valise,
the Benjamin of its tribe, opened and then closed untouched; and
his courteous forbearance, acknowledged later through the hotel
porter, cost me but a dollar. The hotel itself was
inexpressibly
41
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
better in lighting,
heating, service, and table than any New York hotel at twice the
money--in fact, no money could buy the like with us at any hotel
I know of; but this is a theme which I hope to treat more fully
hereafter. It is true that the streets of Naples are very long
and rather narrow and pretty crooked, and full of a damp cold
that no sunlight seems ever to hunt out of them; but then they
are seldom ironed down with trolley-tracks; the cabs feel their
way among the swarming crowds with warning voices and smacking
whips; even the prepotent automobile shows some tenderness for
human life and limb, and proceeds still more cautiously than the
cabs and carts--in fact, I thought I saw recurrent proofs of that
respect for the average man which seems the characteristic note
of Italian liberty; and this belief of mine, bred of my first
observations in Naples, did not, after twelve weeks in Italy,
prove an illusion. If it is not the equality we fancy ourselves
having, it is rather more fraternity in effect.
The failure of other
researches for that sketch of Neapolitan history left me in the
final ignorance which I must share with the reader; but my
inquiries brought me prompt knowledge of one of those charming
features in which the Italian cities excel, if they are not
unique. I remember too vaguely the Galleria, as they call the
beautiful glazed arcade of Milan, to be sure that it is finer
than the Galleria at Naples, but I am sure this is finer than
that at Genoa, with which, however, I know nothing in other
cities to compare. The Neapolitan gallery, wider than any avenue
of the place, branching in the form of a Greek cross to four
principal streets, is lighted by its roof of glass, and a hundred
brilliant shops and cafes spread their business and leisure over
its marble floor. Nothing could be archi-
42
OUT-DOOR LIFE IN OLD
NAPLES
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
tecturally more
cheerful, and, if it were not too hot in summer, there could be
no doubt of its adaptation to our year, for it could be easily
closed against the winter by great portals, and at other seasons
would give that out-door expansion which in Latin countries
hospitably offers the spectacle of pleasant eating and drinking
to people who have nothing to eat and drink. These spectators
could be kept at a distance with us by porters at the entrances,
while they would not be altogether deprived of the gratifying
glimpses.
I do not know
whether poverty avails itself of its privileges by visiting the
Neapolitan gallery; but probably, like poverty elsewhere, it is
too much interested by the drama of life in its own quarter ever
willingly to leave it. Poverty is very conservative, for reasons
more than one; its quarter in Naples is the oldest, and was the
most responsive to our recollections of the Naples of 1864.
Overhead the houses tower and beetle with their balconies and
bulging casements, shutting the sun, except at noon, from the
squalor below, where the varied dwellers bargain and battle and
ply their different trades, bringing their work from the dusk of
cavernous shops to their doorways for the advantage of the
prevailing twilight. Carpentry and tailoring and painting and
plumbing, locksmithing and copper-smithing go on there, touching
elbows with frying and feeding, and the vending of all the
strange and hideous forms of flesh, fish, and fowl. If you wish
to know how much the tentacle of a small polyp is worth you may
chance to see a cent pass for it from the crone who buys to the
boy who sells it smoking from the kettle; but the price of cooked
cabbage or pumpkin must remain a mystery, along with that of many
raw vegetables and the more revolting viscera of the
less-recognizable animals.
43
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
The poor people
worming in and out around your cab are very patient of your
progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare,
perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps
because they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are
not always crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter
expands here and there into market-plates, like the fish-market
where the uprising of the fisherman Masaniello against the
Spaniards fitly took place; and the Jewish market-place, where
the poor young Corra-dino, last of the imperial Hohenstaufen
line, was less appropriately beheaded by the Angevines. The open
spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking alleys, but if you
have the intelligent guide we had you approach them through the
triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that is
something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the
guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.
He had been six
years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he had got
work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That was
in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then
another, and came away at last through some call home, honoring
and loving the Americans as the kindest, the noblest, the
friendliest people in the world. I tried, politely, to persuade
him that we were not all of us all he thought us, but he would
not yield, and at one place he generously claimed a pre-eminence
in wickedness for his fellow-Neapolitans. That was when we came
to a vast, sorrowful prison, from which an iron cage projected
into the street. Around this cage wretched women and children and
old men clustered till the prisoners dear to them were let into
it from the jail and allowed to speak with them. The scene was as
public as all of life and death is in Naples,
44
NAPLES AND HEE JOYFUL
NOISE
and the publicity
seemed to give it peculiar sadness, which I noted to our guide.
He owned its pathos; "but," he said, "you know we have a terrible
class of people here in Naples." I protested that there were
terrible classes of people everywhere, even in America. He would
not consent entirely, but in partly convincing each other we
became better friends. He had a large black mustache and gentle
black eyes, and he spoke very fair English, which, when he wished
to be most impressive, he dropped and used a very literary
Italian instead. He showed us where he lived, on a hill-top back
of our gardened quay, and said that he paid twelve dollars a
month for a tenement of five rooms there. Schooling is compulsory
in Naples, but he sends his boy willingly, and has him especially
study English as the best provision he can make for him--as heir
of his own calling of cicerone, perhaps. He has a little farm at
Bavello, which he tills when it is past the season for
cultivating foreigners in Naples; he expects to spend his old age
there; and I thought it not a bad lookout. He was perfectly
well-mannered, and at a hotel where we stopped for tea he took
his coffee at our table unbidden, like any American fellow-man.
He and the landlord had their joke together, the landlord warning
me against him in English as "very bad man," and clapping him
affectionately on the shoulder to emphasize the irony. We did not
demand too much social information of him; all the more we valued
the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now rather
poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of
business. I could have told him that the American nobles were
increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not
have known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was
himself a moderate in politics, but
45
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
he told us, what
seems to be the fact everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest
party in Naples is the Socialist party.
He went with me
first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa Chiara, to show
me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a secret,
lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where
the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St.
Jannarius, perhaps because it was not then in the act of
liquefying; but I am thankful to say I saw one of his
finger-bones. My guide had made me observe how several of the
churches on the way to this were built on the sites and of the
remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the world-old
sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival
antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune.
The sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill
sanctuary above them, and he was so full of rheumatism that you
could almost hear it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful
sage, and satisfied with the fee which my guide gave him and
which he made small, as he explained, that the sacristan might
not be discontented with future largesse. I need not say that
each church we visited had its tutelary beggar, and that my happy
youth came back to me in the blindness of one, or the mutilation
of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At Santa Chiara I
could not at first make out what it was which caused my heart to
rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was
closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice
in a cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and
open it, just as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the
past.
Our day ended at
sunset--a sunset of watermelon red--with a visit to the Castel
Nuovo, where my guide
46
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
found himself at
home with the garrison, because, as he explained, he had served
his term as a soldier. He was the born friend of the custodian of
the castle church, which was the most comfortable church for
warmth we had visited, and to which we entered by the bronze
gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the Aragonese
victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was
newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the
battles between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel
over the people one or other must make its prey; but whether it
was to the greater advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on
by the house of Aragon and then that of Bourbon for the next six
hundred years after the Angevines had retired from the banquet is
problematical. History is a very baffling study, and one may be
well content to know little or nothing about it. I knew so little
or had forgotten so much that I scarcely deserved to be taken
down into the crypt of this church and shown the skeletons of
four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put to death--two
laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by dividing
crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and
dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met
them, poor things, too late in my life to Avish for their further
acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story
and make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader's
imagination, along with most other facts of my observation in
Naples.
I was at some pains
to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if I could have
found more of them no doubt I should have been more interested in
these skeletons. Eor forty-odd years I had remembered the
prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets
branching
47
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
from a busy avenue
and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps.
When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and
in a few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of
such a public staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found
it more charming even than I remembered. All the way to the top
it was banked on either side with glowing masses of flowers and
fruits and the spectacular vegetables of the South, and between
these there were series of people, whom I tacitly delegated to
make the ascent for me, passing the groups bargaining at the
stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I think of
is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead
level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though
there are places on the East River where we might easily have
inclined markets.
Other associations
of that far past awoke with my identification of the hotel where
we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those days
the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered
then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a
mere pension, though it looks over the same length of
palm-shaded, statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I
remembered them, and the statues had grown up and seemed to have
had large families since my day; but the lovely sea was the same,
with all the mural decorations of the skyey horizons beyond, dim
precipices and dreamy island tops, and the dozing Vesuvius
mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a file of
fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means of
a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a
splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy,
bare legs, and always there
48
UP-STAIRS STREET IN OLD
NAPLES
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
were beggars, both
of those who frankly begged and those who importuned with
postal-cards. This terrible traffic pervades all southern Europe,
and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired
bargains. In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene
with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own that it has its
rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell, or fail to
sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor problem, so
many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should take
to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with
such acquired slang as "Skiddoo to twenty-three"? One who had no
postal-cards had English enough to say he would go away for a
penny; it was his price, and I did not see how he could take
less; when he was reproached by a citizen of uncommon austerity
for his shameless annoyance of strangers, I could not see that he
looked abashed--in fact, he went away singing. He did not take
with him the divine beauty of the afternoon light on the sea and
mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were content with our
bargain.
In fact, it would be
impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that incomparable
environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know, the
night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six
days out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and
five days of at least a May or September warmth; and though one
day was shrill and stiff with the tramontana, it was of as
glorious sunshine as the rest. The gale had blown my window open
and chilled my room, but with that sun blazing outside I could
not believe in the hurricane which seemed to blow our car up the
funicular railway when we mounted to the height where the famous
old Convent of San Martino
49
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
stands, and then
blew us all about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our
search for the right way to the monastery. It was worth more than
we suffered in finding it; for the museum is a record of the most
significant events of Neapolitan history from the time of the
Spanish domination down to that of the Garibaldian invasion; and
the church and corridors through which the wind hustled us abound
in paintings and frescos such as one would be willing to give a
whole week of quiet weather to. I do not know but I should like
to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it from
my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars
at their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the
more easily could the sun warm us through in spite of the
tramontana.
I do not know that
Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which Venice and
Genoa are excellent. Those cities were adorned by their sons with
palaces of an outlook worthy of their splendor. But in the other
Italian cities the homes of her patricians were crowded into the
narrow streets where their architecture fails of its due effect.
It is so with them in Naples, and even along the Villa Nazionale,
where many palatial villas are set, they seclude themselves in
gardens where one fancies rather than sees them. These are, in
fact, sometimes the houses of the richest bourgeoisie--bankers
and financiers--and the houses which have names conspicuous in
the mainly inglorious turmoil of Neapolitan history help unnoted
to darken the narrow and winding ways of the old city. A glimpse
of a deep court or of a towering facade is what you get in
passing, but it is to be said of the sunless streets over which
they gloom that they are kept in a modern neatness
beside
50
NAPLES AND THE CASTEL
ST. ELMO FROM THE MOLE
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
which the dirt of
New York is mediaeval. It is so with most other streets in
Naples, except those poorest ones where the out-door life insists
upon the most intimate domestic expression. Even such streets are
no worse than our worst streets, and the good streets are all
better kept than our best.
I am not sure that
there are even more beggars in Naples than in New York, though I
will own that I kept no count. In both cities beggary is common
enough, and I am not noting it with disfavor in either, for it is
one of my heresies that comfort should be constantly reminded of
misery by the sight of it--comfort is so forgetful. Besides, in
Italy charity costs so little; a cent of our money pays a man for
the loss of a leg or an arm; two cents is the compensation for
total blindness; a sick mother with a brood of starving children
is richly rewarded for her pains with a nickel worth four cents.
Organized charity is not absent in the midst of such volunteers
of poverty; one day, when we thought we had passed the last
outpost of want in our drive, two Sisters of Charity suddenly
appeared with out-stretched tin cups. Our driver did not imagine
our inexhaustible benovelence; he drove on, and before we could
bring him to a halt the Sisters of Charity ran us down, their
black robes flying abroad and their sweet faces flushed with the
pursuit. Upon the whole it was very humiliating; we could have
wished to offer our excuses and regrets; but our silver seemed
enough, and the gentle sisters fell back when we had given
it.
That was while we
were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of the prospect along
the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored
postal-card will suffice better than the most hectic
word-painting. The worst of Italy is the superabundance of the
riches it offers
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ear and eye and
nose--offers every sense--ending in a glut of pleasure. At the
point where we descended from our carriage to look from the
upland out over the vast hollow of land and sea toward Pozzuoli,
which is so interesting as the scene of Jove's memorable struggle
with the Titans, and just when we were really beginning to feel
equal to it, a company of minstrels suddenly burst upon us with
guitars and mandolins and comic songs much dramatized, while the
immediate natives offered us violets and other distracting
flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to neutralize
each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those
restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do
not know whether you are eating the chef-d'oeuvre of a
cook or a composer.
It was at the new
hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of the
never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a
Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide
stopped with us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to
climb four nights of stairs for it to the magnificent salon
overlooking the finest postal-card prospect in all Naples. We
lingered long upon it, in the balcony from which we could have
dropped into the sunset sea any coin which we could have brought
ourselves to part with; but we had none of the bad money which
had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort rather abounds
in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for false
francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know
by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current
pieces. At the bookseller's they would not take a perfectly good
five-franc piece because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes
of all the bad money one innocently takes for good? One
fraudulent franc I made a virtue of throwing away;
53
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL
NOISE
but I do not know
what I did with a copper refused by a trolley conductor as
counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously, and perhaps I
gave that copper in charity.
As we drove
hotehvard through the pink twilight we met many carriages of
people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do
not know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world
severely from their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly
appointed coachmen and footmen ought to be both, and that old
gentlemen who frown over their white mustaches have no right to
their looks if they are neither. It was, at any rate, the hour of
the fashionable drive, which included a pause midway of the Villa
Nazionale for the music of the military band.
The band plays near
the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at the earlier
hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and
wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the
ages of fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from
its torpor in the bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry
tentacles the food lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is
it to see it rise and reach with those prehensile members, as
with the tails of a multi-caudate ape, some rocky projection of
its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow, and vanish there
in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and bloom of the
deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men's "bones are coral made"
seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly
wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not
pleasure in store for the traveller who turns from them to the
company of shad softly and continuously circling in their tank,
and regarding the spectators with a surly dignity becoming to
people in better so-
53
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ciety than others.
One large shad, imaginably of very old family and independent
property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his
flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him. Mostly his
expression is very severe; but in milder moments he offers a
perverse resemblance to some portraits of Washington.
All our days in
Naples died like dolphins to the music which I have tried to
impart the sense of. The joyful noises which it was made up of
culminated for us on that evening when a company of the street
and boat musicians came into the hotel and danced and sang and
played the tarantella. They were of all ages, sexes, and bulks,
and of divers operatic costumes, but they were of one temperament
only, which was glad and childlike. They went through their
repertory, which included a great deal more than the tarantella,
and which we applauded with an enthusiasm attested by our
contributions when the tambourine went round. Then they repeated
their selections, and at the second collection we guests of the
hotel repeated our contributions, but in a more guarded spirit.
After the second repetition the prettiest girl came round with
her photographs and sold them at prices out of all reason. Then
we became very melancholy, and began to steal out one by one. I
myself did not stay for the fourth collection, and I cannot
report how the different points of view, the Southern and the
Northern, were reconciled in the event which I am not sure was
final. But I am sure that unless you can make allowance for a
world-wide difference in the Neapolitans from yourself you can
never understand them. Perhaps you cannot, even then.
V POMPEII
REVISITED
BECAUSE I felt very
happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation, and being
alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by
the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to
myself that I would do something that would surprise him, and I
gave him his fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was
surprised, for he ran after me into the station, as I supposed,
to extort more. He was holding out a franc toward me, and I asked
the guide who was bothering me to take him to Pompeii (where
there are swarms of guides always on the grounds) what the matter
was. "It is false," he explained, and this proved true, though
whether the franc was the one I had given the driver or whether
it was one which he had thoughtfully substituted for it to make
good an earlier loss I shall now never know. I put it into my
pocket, wondering what I should do with it; the question what you
shall do with counterfeit money in Italy is one which is apt to
recur as I have hinted, and in despair of solving it at the
moment I threw the false franc out of the car-window; it was the
false franc I have already boasted of throwing away.
This was, of course,
after I got into the car, and after I had suffered another wrong,
and was resolved
55
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
at least to be good
myself. I had taken first-class tickets, but, when we had
followed several conductors up and down the train, the last of
them said there were no first-class places left, though I shall
always doubt this. I asked what we should do, and he shrugged. I
had heard that if you will stand upon your rights in such a
matter the company will have to put on another car for you. But I
was now dealing with the Italian government, which has
nationalized the railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted
the rolling stock; and when the conductor found us places in a
second-class carriage, rather than quarrel with a government
which had troubles enough already I got aboard. I suppose really
that I have not much public spirit, and that the little I have I
commonly leave at home; in travelling it is burdensome. Besides,
the second-class carriage would have been comfortable enough if
it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had not been washed
since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the destruction of
Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.
The country through
which we made the hour's run was sympathetically squalid. We had,
to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean enough; but
the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while the
earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging
manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it
had been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with
stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters
of life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco
shanties which the men and women working in the fields would lurk
in at nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building,
and at one place there was a large macaroni manufactory,
with
50
POMPEII
REVISITED
far stretches of the
product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We
passed through towns where women and children swarmed, working at
doorways and playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies
everywhere winter melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them,
such as you can buy at the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and
will keep buying when once you know how good they are. In Naples
they sell them by the slice in the street, the fruiterer carrying
a board on his head with the slices arranged in an upright
coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of some savage
prince.
Our train was slow
and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from arriving at
Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city is
gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but,
after you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide,
you pass through this decorative zone and find yourself in the
first of streets where the past makes no such terms with the
present. If some of the houses of an ampler plan had little
spaces beyond the atrium planted with such flowers as probably
grew there two thousand years ago, and stuck round with tiny
figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's fancy; but it
did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and moss,
and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the
roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken
columns and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated
verdure painted in the favorite hue of ruin.
Most of the places I
re-entered through my recollection of them, but to this
subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer
and vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the
vic-
57
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
tims of the
disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of
death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had
left in the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy
museum where one visits them the first thing within the city
gates. But their effect was not cumulative; there were more
writhing women and more contorted men; hut they did not make
their tragedy more evident than it had been when I saw them,
fewer hut not less affecting, all those years ago. It was the
same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of
the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip
instead of built up, a good third had been added to the count of
its streets and houses. There were not, so far as I could see,
more ruts from chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the
thoroughfares, but some convincingly two-storied dwellings had
been exhumed, and others with ceilings in better condition than
those of the earlier excavations; there were more
all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors were
almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of
the stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater
monotony; the revelation of house after house, nearly the same in
design, did not gain im-pressiveness from their repetition; just
as the case would be if the dwellings of an old-fashioned
cross-town street in New York were dug out two thousand years
after their submergence by an eruption of Orange Mountain. The
identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested to the
archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally
unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist's word for the
fact. One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns
and vague foundations and broken altars. Among the later
discoveries certain of the public baths are in the
best
58
EXCAVATING AT
POMPEII
POMPEII
REVISITED
repair, both
structurally and decoratively, and in these one could replace the
antique life with the least wear and tear of the
imagination.
I could not tell
which the several private houses were; but the guide-books can,
and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their names
would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In
Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new
ones were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older
ones. Not more recognizably than these, they had been devoted to
the varied uses known to advanced civilization in all ages: there
were dwellings, and taverns and drinking-houses and
eating-houses, and there were those houses where the feet of them
that abide therein and of those that frequent them alike take
hold on hell. In these the guide stays the men of his party to
prove the character of the places to them from the frescos and
statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so indulged had
not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can be no
doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered
which poisons Christian life, and which, while the social
conditions remain the same from age to age, will poison life
forever.
The pictures on the
walls of the newly excavated houses are not strikingly better
than those I had not forgotten; but of late it has been the
purpose to leave as many of the ornaments and utensils in
position as possible. The best are, as they ought to be, gathered
into the National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart
a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered
accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image
of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been
laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly
memories
59
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
unhindered by other
companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in
order to see it aright. One should not perhaps
"Go visit it by the
pale moonlight,"
but if one could
have it all to one's self by day, such a gray day as we had for
it, there is no telling what might happen. One thing only would
certainly happen: one would get lost. It never was a town of
large area; and, like all spaces that have been ruined over, it
looked smaller than it would have looked if all its walls were
standing with all their roofs upon them. Still, it was a mesh of
streets, out of which you would in vain have sought your way if
you had been caught in it alone; though it is mostly so level
that if you had mounted a truncated column almost anywhere you
could have looked over the labyrinth to its verge.
It was not much
crowded by visitors; though there were strings of them at the
heels of the respective guides, with, I thought, a prevalence of
the Germans, who are now overrunning Italy; I am sorry to say
they are not able to keep it cheap, at least for other
nationalities. Among these I noted two little smiling, shining,
twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks for the capture of that
classical antiquity which could never really belong to them.
Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what keeps us
alien even more than the want of a common Christian
tradition.
"The glory that was
Greece And the grandeur that was Rome"
could never mean to
our brown companions what they meant to us; but they put on a
polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and were
so gentle
60
THE STREET OF TOMBS,
POMPEII
POMPEII
EEVISITED
and friendly that
one could almost feel they were fellow-men. Very likely they
were; at any rate, until we are at war with them I shall believe
so.
Our guide, whom we
had really bought the whole use of at the gate, thriftily took on
another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to find that
the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or
Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most
homogeneous people under the sun, and likest a large family. We
all frankly got tired at about the same time at the same place,
and agreed that we had, without the amphitheatre, had enough when
we ended at the Street of Tombs, where the tombs are in so much
better repair than the houses. For myself, I remembered the
amphitheatre so perfectly from 1864 that I did not see how I
could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had already
turned into literature; and though Pompeii is but small, the
amphitheatre is practically as far from the Street of Tombs,
after you have walked about the place for two hours, as the
Battery is from High Bridge. There is no Elevated or Subway at
Pompeii, and even the lines of public chariots, if such they
were, which left those ruts in the lava pavements seem to have
been permanently suspended after the final destruction in the
year 79.
We were not only
very tired, but very hungry, and we asked our guide to take us
back the shortest way. I suggested a cross-cut at one point, and
he caught at the word eagerly, and wrote it in his note-book for
future use. He also acted upon it instantly, and we cut across
the back yards and over the kitchen areas of several absent
citizens on our way back. Our guide was as good and true as it is
in the nature of guides to be, but absolute goodness and truth
are rather the attributes of American travellers; and you will
not escape the
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
small graft which
the guides are so rigorously forbidden to practise. Pompeii is no
longer in the keeping of the Italian army; with the Italian
instinct of decentralization the place has claimed the right of
self-government, and now the guides are civilians, and not
soldiers, as they were in my far day. They do not accept fees,
but still they take them; and our guide said that he had a
brother-in-law who had the best restaurant outside the gate,
where we could get luncheon for two francs. As soon as we were in
the hands of the runner for that restaurant the price augmented
itself to two francs and a half; when we mounted to the
threshold, lured on by the fascinating mystery of this increase,
it became three francs, without wine. But as the waiter justly
noted, in hovering about us with the cutlery and napery while he
laid the table, a two-fifty luncheon was unworthy such lords as
we. When he began to bring on the delicious omelette, the
admirable fish, the excellent cutlets, he made us observe that if
we paid three francs we ought to eat a great deal; and there
seemed reason in this; at any rate, we did so. The truth is, that
luncheon was worth the money, and more; as for the Vesuvian wine,
it had the rich red blood of the volcano in it, and it could not
be bought in New York for half a franc the bottle, if at all; at
thrice that sum in Naples it was not a third as good.
If there had been
anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we could not
have done it, we were so spent with our two hours' walk through
Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating.
Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day
forty-three years before when I had broiled over the same ground
under the blazing sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference
in the muscles and emo-
63
POMPEII
REVISITED
tions of
twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of the
white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a
much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than
had accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year
1864. During most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly
sleeping under its ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a
century it had wakefully, however unwillingly, witnessed such
events as the failure of secession and the abolition of slavery,
the unification of Italy and Germany, the fall of the Second
Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition of the
Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the
Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the
purification of municipal politics, the invention of wireless
telegraphy, and the general adoption of automobiling. These
things, and others like them, had perhaps not aged Pompeii so
much as they had aged me, but their subjective effect was the
same, and upon the whole I was not altogether sorry to have added
scarcely a new impression of the place to those I had been
carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were
plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs,
gardens, columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but
qualitatively the Greater Pompeii was now not different from the
lesser which I remembered so well.
This, at least, was
what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in the National
Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian things, new
and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show there
beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a
few streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things
than all the lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this
would I
63
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
turn against Pompeii
at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of
it under that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the
background, and the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than
ever it could have been in life, inscribed upon the broadly
opened area of the gentle slopes within its gates. Whether one
had not better known it dead than alive, one might not wish
perhaps to say; but the place itself is curiously without pathos;
Newport in ruins might not be touching; possibly all skeletons or
even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii is a skeleton, or at
the most a mummy, of the past.
Seeing what
antiquity so largely was, however, one might be not only resigned
but cheerful in the ef-facement of any particular piece of it;
and for a help to this at Pompeii I may advise the reader to take
with him a certain little guide-book, written in English by a
very courageous Italian, which I chanced to find in Naples.
Though it treats of the tragical facts with seriousness, it is
not with equal gravity that one reads that sixteen years before
the Vesuvian eruption "the region had been shaken by strong
sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants to forsake
precipitately their habitations. But being the amazement up, they
got one's home again as soon as the earth was quiet and all fear
and sadness went off by memory." Signs of the final disaster to
follow were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were
crossed by currents of carbonic acid; "the domestic animals were
also very sensible of the approaching of the scourge; they lost
the habitual vivacity, and having the food in disgust, had from
time to time to complain with mournful wailings, without
justified reasons. . . . The sky became of a thick darkness, . .
. interrupted only
64
POMPEII
REVISITED
by flashes of light
which the lava riverberated, by the bloody gliding of the
thunderbolts, by the incandescence of enormous projectiles,
thrown to an incommensurable highness. . . . Death surprised the
charming town; houses and streets became the tombs of the
unhappies hit by an atrocious torture."
The author's study
of the life of Pompeii is notable for diction which, if there
were logic in language, would be admirable English, for while yet
in his mind it must have been "very choice Italian." He tells us
that "Pompei's dwellings are surprising by their specific
littleness," and explains that "Pompei inhabitants, for the
habitudes of the climate could allow, lived almost always to the
open sky," just as the Naples inhabitants do now. "They got home
only to rest a little, to fulfill life wants, to be protected by
bad weather. They spent much time during the day in forum,
temples, thermes, tennis-court, or intervened to public sports,
religious functions and meetings. . . . Few houses only had
windows. The sunlight and ventilation to the ancients was given
through empty spaces in the roofs. . . . Hoofs knocked under the
weight of materials thrown out by Vesuvius; it is undoubted,
however, that roofs were provided with covers or supported
terraces. In the middle of the roofs was cut an ouerture through
which air and light brought their benefits to the underlaid
ambients. . . . Proprietor disposed the locals according to his
own delight. . . . So that, there were bed, bath, dining, talking
and game rooms." In the peristyle "the ground was gardened, the
area shared in flower beds, had narrow paths; herbs, flowers,
shrubs were put with art well in order on flower beds, delighted
from time to time by statues of various subjects," as may be
noted in the actual restorations of some of the Pompeian
houses,.
65
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
As for their
spiritual life, "Pompeian's religion, like by Roman people, was
the Paganism. Deities were worshipped in the temples with
prayers, sagrifices, vows, and festivities. . . . Banquets to the
Deity were joined to prayers. In fact, dining tables were dressed
near the altars, and all around them on dining beds,
tricli-nari, placed Divinities statues as these were
assembled to own account to the joyous banquest." Auspices or
auguries "gave interpretation to thunders, lightnings, winds,
rain crashes, comets, or to bird songs and flights. . . .
Horuspices inquired the divine will on the animal bowels,
sacrificed to the altar; they took out further indications by
fleshes and bowels flames when burnt on the altar."
An important feature
of Pompeian social life was the bath, which "was one of the
hospitality duty, and very often required in several religious
functions. . . . Large and colossal edifices were quite furnished
with all the necessary for care and sport. Besides localities for
all kind of bath--cold, warm, steam bath--didn't want parks,
alleys, and porticos in order to walk; lists rings for gymnastic
exercises, conversation and reading rooms, localities for
theatrical representations, swimming stations, localities for
scientific disquisitions, moral and religious teachings. The most
splendid art works adorned the ambient."
When we pass to the
popular amusements we are presented with the materials of
pictures vividly realized in The Last Days of Pompeii, but
somewhat faded since. "In the beginning gladiators' rank was made
by condemned to death slaves and war prisoners. Later also
thoughtless young men, who had never learned an advantageous
trade, became gladiators." In the arena they engaged in sham
fights till the spectators demanded blood. Then, "sometimes one
pro-
66
POMPEII
REVISITED
vided one's self
nets for wrapping up the adversary, who, hit by a trident much,
frequently die. When the gladiator was deadly wounded, forsaking
the arm, struck down and stretching the index, asked the people
grace of life. The spectators decided up his destiny, turning the
thumb to the breast, or toward the ground. The thumb turned
toward the ground was the unlucky's death doom, and he had
without fail the throat cut off."
Such, dimly but
unmistakably seen through our Italian author's well-reasoned
English, were the ancient Pompeians; and, upon the whole, the
visitor to their city could not wish them back in it. I preferred
even those modern Pompeians who followed us so molestively to the
train with bargains in postal-cards and coral. They are very
alert, the modern Pompeians, to catch the note of national
character, and I saw one of them pursuing an elderly American
with a spread of hat-pins, primarily two francs each, and with
the appeal, evidently studied from some fair American girl: "Buy
it, Poppa! Six for one franc. Oh, Poppa, buy it!"
I had again lavished
my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had my Utah friend,
who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to secure a
first-class carriage. "When I can't go first-class in Italy, I'll
go home." I promptly and proudly agreed with him, but I concealed
my morning's experience of the fact that in Italy you may
sometimes go second class when you have paid first. I agreed with
him, however, in not minding the plunder of Italian travel,
since, with all the extortions, it would come to a third less
than you expected to spend. His was the true American
spirit.
VI ROMAN
HOLIDAYS
I
HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND
APARTMENTS
"SHALL I not take
mine ease in mine inn?" the traveller asks rather anxiously than
defiantly when he finds himself a stranger in a strange place,
and he is apt to add, if he has not written or wired ahead to
some specific hotel, "Which of mine inns shall I take mine ease
in?" He is the more puzzled to choose the more inns there are to
choose from, and his difficulty is enhanced if he has not
considered that some of his inns may be full or may be too dear,
and yet others undesirable.
The run from Naples
in four hours and a half had been so flattering fair an
experience to people who had last made it in eight that they
arrived in Rome on a sunny afternoon of January preoccupied with
expectations of an instant ease in their inn which seemed the
measure of their merit. They indeed found their inn, and it was
with a painful surprise that they did not find the rooms in it
which they wanted. There were neither rooms full south, nor over
the garden, nor off the tram, and in these circumstances there
was nothing for it but to drive to some one else's inn and try
for
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
better quarters
there. They, in fact, drove to half a dozen such, their demands
rising for more rooms and sunnier and quieter and cheaper, the
fewer and darker and noisier and dearer were those they
found.
The trouble was that
they found in the very first alien hotel where they applied an
apartment so exactly what they wanted, with its four rooms and
bath, all more or less full south, though mostly veering west and
north, that they carried the fatal norm in their consciousness
and tested all other apartments by it, the earlier notion of
single rooms being promptly rejected after the sight of it. The
reader will therefore not be so much, astonished as these
travellers were to learn that there was nothing else in Rome
(where there must be about five hundred hotels, hotels
garnis, and pensions) that one could comparatively stay even
overnight in, and that they settled in that alluring apartment
provisionally, the next day being Sunday, and the crystalline
Saturday of their arrival being well worn away toward its topaz
and ruby sunset. Of course, they continued their search for
several days afterward, zealously but hopelessly, yet not
fruitlessly, for it resulted in an acquaintance with Roman hotels
which they might otherwise never have made, and for one of them
in literary material of interest to every one hoping to come to
Rome or despairing of it. The psychology of the matter was very
curious, and involved the sort of pleasing self-illusion by which
people so often get themselves over questionable passes in life
and come out with a good conscience, or a dead one, which is
practically the same thing. These particular people had come to
Rome with reminiscences of in-expensiveness and had intended to
recoup themselves for the cost of several previous winters in New
York hotels by the saving they would make in their
Roman
69
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
sojourn. When it
appeared, after all the negotiation and consequent abatement,
that their Roman hotel apartment would cost them hardly a fifth
less than they had last paid in New York, they took a guilty
refuge in the fact that they were getting for less money
something which no money could buy in New York. Gradually all
sense of guilt wore off, and they boldly, or even impudently,
said to themselves that they ought to have what they could pay
for, and that there were reasons, which they were not obliged to
render in their frankest soliloquies, why they should do just
what they chose in the matter.
The truth is that
the modern Roman hotel is far better in every way than the hotel
of far higher class, or of the highest class, in New York. In the
first place, the managers are in the precious secret, which our
managers have lost, of making you believe that they want you;
and, having you, they know how to look after your pleasure and
welfare. The table is always of more real variety, though vastly
less stupid profusion than ours. The materials are wholesomer and
fresher and are without the proofs, always present in our hotel
viands, of a probationary period in cold storage. As for the
cooking, there is no comparison, whether the things are simply or
complexly treated; and the service is of that neatness and
promptness which ours is so ignorant of.
Your agreement is
usually for meals as well as rooms; the European plan is
preferably ignored in Europe; and the table d'hote
luncheon and dinner are served at small, separate tables; your
breakfast is brought to your room. Being old-fashioned, myself, I
am rather sorry for the small, separate tables. I liked the one
large, long table, where you made talk with your neighbors; but
it is gone, and much facile
70
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
friendliness with
it, on either hand and across the board. The rooms are tastefully
furnished, and the beds are unquestionable; the carpets warmly
cover tho floor if stone, or amply rug it if of wood. The
steam-heating is generous and performs its office of "roasting
you out of the house" without the sizzling and crackling which
accompany its efforts at home. The electricity really
illuminates, and there is always an electric lamp at your
bed-head for those long hours when your remorse or your digestion
will not let you sleep, and you must substitute some other's
waking dreams for those of your own slumbers. Above all, there is
a lift, or elevator, not enthusiastically active or convulsively
swift, but entirely practicable and efficient. It will hold from
four to eight persons, and will take up at least six without
reluctance.
It must be clearly
understood that the ideal of American comfort is fully and
faithfully realized, and if the English have reformed the Italian
hotels in respect of cleanliness, it is we who have brought them
quite to our domestic level in regard to heat and light. But if
we want these things in Rome, we must pay for them as we do at
home, though still we do not pay so much as we pay at home. The
tips are about half our average, but whether they are given
currently or ultimately I do not know. Who, indeed, knows about
others' tips anywhere in the world? I asked an experienced
fellow-citizen what the custom was, and he said that he believed
the English gave in going away, but he thought the spirits of the
helpers drooped under the strain of hope deferred, and he
preferred to give every week. The donations, I understood, were
pooled by the dining-room waiters and then equally divided; but
gifts bestowed above stairs were for the sole behoof of him or
her who took them. Germans are said to give less
71
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
than Anglo-Saxons,
and it is said that Italians in some cases do not give at all.
But, again, who knows? The Italians are said never to give drink
money to the cabmen, but to pay only the letter of the tariff. If
I had done that in driving about to look up worse hotels than the
one I chose first and last, I should now be a richer man, but I
doubt if a happier. Two cents seems to satisfy a Roman cabman;
five cents has for him the witchery of money found in the road;
but I must not leave the subject of hotels for that of cabs,
however alluringly it beckons.
The reader who knows
Italy only from the past should clear his mind of his old
impressions of the hotels. There is no longer that rivalry
between the coming guest and the manager to see how few or many
candles can be lighted in his room and charged in the bill; there
are no longer candles, but only electricity. There is no longer
an extortion for hearth-fires which send all the heat up the
chimney; there are steam radiators in every room. There is no
longer a tedious bargaining for rooms; the price is fixed and
cannot be abated except for a sojourn of weeks or months. But the
price is much greater than it used to be--twice as great almost;
for the taxes are heavy and provisions are dear, and coal and
electricity are costly, and you must share the expense with the
landlord. He is not there for his health, and, if for your
comfort, you are not his invited guest. As I have intimated, an
apartment of four rooms with a bath will cost almost as much,
with board, as the same quarters in New York, but you will get
far more for your money in Rome. If you take a single room, even
to the south, in many first-class Roman hotels it will cost you
for room and board only two dollars or two and a half a day,
which is what you pay for a far meaner and smaller
room
72
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
alone in New York;
and the Roman board is such, as you can get at none but our most
expensive houses for twice the money. Generally you cannot get a
single room and bath, but at present a very exclusive hotel is
going up in a good quarter which promises, with huge English
signs, a bath with every room and every room full south. One does
not see just how the universal sunny exposure is to be managed,
but there can be no question of the baths; and, with the steam
radiators everywhere, the northernmost room might well imagine
itself full south.
Nearly all the
hotels have a pleasant tea-room, which is called a winter garden,
because of a pair of palm-trees set under the centre of its glass
roof and the painted bamboo chairs and tables set about. This
sort of garden is found even in the hotels which are almost of
the grade of pensions and of their prices; but generally the
pensions proper are without it. Their rates are much lower, but
quite as good people frequent them, and they are often found in
good streets and sometimes open into or overlook charming
gardens; the English especially seem to like the pensions, which
are managed like hotels. They are commonly without steam-heat,
which might account for their being less frequented by
Americans.
There are two
supreme hotels in Rome--one in the Ludovisi quarter, as it is
called, and the other near the Baths of Diocletian, which
Americans frequent to their cost, for the rates approach a New
York or London magnificence. The first is rather the more
spectacular of the two and is the resort of all the finer sort of
afternoon tea-drinkers, who find themselves the observed of
observers of all nationalities; there is music and dress, and
there are titles of every degree, with as much informality as
people choose, if they go to look, or as
73
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
much state if they
go to be looked at; these things are much less cumbrously
contrived than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat
unauthorized fancy, is rather more addicted to very elect
dinner-parties and suppers. Below these two are an endless
variety of first-rate and second-rate houses, both in the newer
quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been turned into
streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and
avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town
which the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the
worst these places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are
not steam-heated.
It has seemed to me
that there are not so many hotels garnis in Rome as there
used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant
streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with
breakfast in his rooms, and likes to browse about for his
luncheon and dinner, will easily suit himself. If it comes to
taking a furnished apartment for the season, there is much range
in price and much choice in place. The agents who have them to
let will begin, rather dismayingly, "Oh, apartments in Rome are
very dear." But you learn on inquiry that a furnished flat in the
Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full sun, may be had
for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the rents of
palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred
and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and
for this you have linen and silver and all the movables and
utensils you want, as well as several vast rooms opening
wastefully from one to another till you reach the salon. The
rents of the like flats, if vacant, would be a quarter or a third
less, though again the agents begin by telling you that there is
very
74
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
little difference
between the rents of furnished and unfurnished flats. The flats
are in every part of the old town and the new; and some are in
noble sixteenth and seventeenth century palaces, such as we are
accustomed to at home only in the theatre. My own experience is
that everybody, especially in houses where there are no lifts,
lives on the top floor. You pass many other floors in going up,
but you are left to believe that nobody lives on them. When you
reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming inside for
their state and beauty, and outside for their magnificent view,
which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome
of St. Peter's. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all
round the horizon.
When you have taken
your furnished flat, the same agency will provide you a cook at
ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a lady's
maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to
sleep out of the house. Then will come the question of
provisions, and these seem really to be dear in Rome. Meats and
vegetables both are dear, and game and poultry. Beef will be
forty cents a pound, and veal and mutton in proportion; a chicken
which has been banting for the table from its birth will be forty
cents; eggs which have not yet taken active shape are twenty-five
and thirty cents throughout winters so bland that a hen of any
heart can hardly keep from laying every day. I am afraid I am no
authority on butter and milk, and groceries I do not know the
prices of; but coffee ought to be cheap, for nobody drinks
anything but substitutes more or less unabashed.
For the passing
stranger, or even the protracted so-journer, whose time and money
are not too much at odds, a hotel is best, and a hotel in the new
quarter is
75
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
pleasanter than one
in the old quarters. Ours, at any rate, was in a wide, sunny, and
(if I must own it) dusty street, laid out in a line of beauty on
the borders of the former Villa Ludovisi, where the aging or
middle-aging reader used to come to see Guercino's "Aurora" in
the roof of the casino. Now all trace of the garden is hidden
under vast and vaster hotels and great blond apartment-houses,
and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been
spared, though it is no longer so accessible to the public.
Still, there is a garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks
across the sun and dust of its street into the useful vegetation
of the famous old Capuchin convent, with the church, to which I
came so eagerly so long ago to revere Guido's "St. Michael and
the Dragon" and the decorative bones of the good brothers braided
on the walls and roofs of the crypt in the indissoluble community
of floral and geometric designs.
All through the
months of February and March I woke to the bell that woke the
brothers to their prayers before daybreak and burst the
beauty-sleep of the hotel-dwellers, who have so far outnumbered
the monks since the obliteration of the once neighboring villa.
This was, of course, a hardship, and one thought things of that
bell which the monks were too good to say; but being awake, and
while one was reading one's self to sleep again, one could hear
the beginning of the bird singing in the modern garden in the
rear which followed upon the bell-ringing. I do not know what
make or manner of bird it was that mostly sang among the palms
and laurels and statues, but it had a note of liquid gold, which
it poured till a certain flageo-lettist, whom I never saw, came
to the corner under the villa wall and blew his soul into one end
of his instrument and out of the other in the despondent
breath-
76
THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH,
ROME
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ings of most
melancholy music. Then, having attuned the spirits of his
involuntary listeners to a pensive sympathy, he closed with that
international hymn which does not rightly know whether it is "My
Country, 'tis of Thee," or "God Save the King," but serves
equally for the patriotism of any English or Americans in
hearing. I do not know why this harmless hymn, which the
flageolettist gave extremely well, should always have seemed to
provoke the derision of the donkey which apparently dwelt in
harmony with the birds in that garden, but the flageolettist had
no sooner ended than the donkey burst into a bray, loud, long,
and full of mockery, with a close of ironical whistling and most
insolent hissing; you would think that some arch-enemy of the
Anglo-Saxon race was laughing the new-felt unity of the English
and Americans to scorn. Later, but still before daylight, came
the wild cry of a boy, somewhere out of perdition, following the
deep bass invitation of his father's lost spirit to buy his
wares, whatever they were. We never knew, but we liked that boy's
despairing wail, and would not have missed it for ever so much
extra slumber. When all hope of more sleep was past there was no
question of the desirability of the boy who visibly arranged his
store of oranges on the curbstone under the villa wall, and
seemed to think that they had a peculiar attraction from being
offered for sale in pairs. His cry filled the rest of the
forenoon.
The Italian spring
comes on slowly everywhere, with successive snubs in its early
ardor from the snows on the mountains, which regulate the climate
from north to south. We could not see that it made more speed
behind the sheltering walls of the Capuchin convent garden than
in other places. The old gardener whom we saw pottering about in
it seemed to potter no more
77
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
actively at the end
of March than at the beginning of February; on the first days of
April a heap of old leaves and stalks was sending up the ruddy
flame and pleasant smell that the like burning heaps do with us
at the like hour of spring--in fact, vegetation had much more
reason to be cheerful throughout February than at any time in
March. Those February days were really incomparable. They had not
the melting heat of the warm spells that sometimes come in our
Februaries; but their suns were golden, and their skies
unutterably blue, and their airs mild, yet fresh. You always
wanted a heavy coat for driving or for the shade in walking;
otherwise the temperature was that of a New England April which
was resolved to begin as it could carry out. But March came with
cold rains of whole days, and with suns that might overheat but
could not be trusted to warm you. The last Sunday of January I
found ice in the Colosseum; but that was the only time I saw ice
anywhere in Rome. In March, however, in a moment of great
exasperation from the mountains, it almost snowed. Yet that month
would in our climate have been remembered for its beauty and for
a prevailing kindness of temperature. The worst you could say of
it was that it left the spring in the Capuchin garden where it
found it. But possibly, since the temporal power was overthrown,
the seasons are neglected and indifferent. Certainly man seems so
in the case of the Capuchin convent. Great stretches of the poor
old plain edifice look vacant, and the high wall which encloses
it is plastered and painted with huge advertisements of clothiers
and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and other
events out of keeping with its character and
tradition.
The sentimentalists who
overrun Rome from all the
78
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Northern lands will
tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which
has sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their
griefs with the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I,
who am a sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share
them. No doubt the Newer Rome has made mistakes, but, without
defending her indiscriminately, I am a Newer-Roman to the core,
perhaps because I knew the Older Rome and what it was like; and
not all my brother and sister sentimentalists can say as
much.
II
A PRAISE OF NEW
ROME
Rome and I had both
grown older since I had seen her last, but she seemed not to show
so much as I the forty-three years that had passed. Naturally a
city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no one
knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since
1864 as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age.
In fact, I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at
our second meeting, in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so
warm a friend of youth (in others) that I was not sorry to find
Rome young, or merely new, in so many good things. At the same
time I must own that I heard no other foreigner praising her for
her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian,who had seen Rome
earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the Ghetto
should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had
perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a
shame, and an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also
thought the Tiber Embank-
78
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ments a wicked
sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks of other days
invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters of the
town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that
overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an
effect of disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown
to the lover of the picturesque. There used to be a particular
type of typhoid known as Roman fever, but now quite unknown,
thanks to the Tiber Embankments and to the light and air let into
the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for which the injudicious
grieve so loudly. The perfect municipal housekeeping of our time
leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley unswept; every
morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces formerly almost
impassable to the foot and quite impossible to the
nose.
I am speaking
literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand why
some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and
avenues, should look askance at the decency of the newer Rome and
feign it an offence against beauty and poetry, I do not see why a
Londoner, who himself lives in a well-kept town, should join with
any of my fellow-barbarians in hypocritically deploring the
modern spirit which has so happily invaded the Eternal City. The
Londoner should rather entreat us not to be humbugs and should
invite us to join him in rejoicing that the death-rate of Rome,
once the highest in the civilized world, is now almost the
lowest. But the language of Shakespeare and Milton is too often
internationally employed in deploring the modernity which has
housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One
must confine one's self to instances, and one may take that of
the Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much
peace and pleasure except when I
80
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
was reminded that it
was formed by plotting the lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots
and building it up in attractive hotels and apartment-houses.
Even then I did not suffer so keenly as some younger people, who
had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though there are still
villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not really miss
the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise, and
the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The
villa was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it
signified, even in its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor,
which is a poor thing at best; and the quarter is now for the
pleasure and pride of great numbers of tourists, mostly of that
plutocracy from which a final democracy is inevitably to evolve
itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in this; and in
humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find that
things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been
painted.
There is no doubt
but at one time, directly after the coming of the capital, Rome
was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome has grown
up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now
"stuffs out her vacant garments with her form" pretty fully. One
must not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied,
but most of them are; and if now the property of the speculators
is the property of the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and
the law does not spare them the least of their duties to their
tenants; or so, at least, it is said.
Another typical
wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome, was the
building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so
called, where Zola in his novel of Rome has placed most of
the squalor which he so lavishly employs in its
contrasts.
81
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in
spite of himself; but after I had read his book I made it my
affair to visit the scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere
dei Prati. When I did so I found that I had already passed
through the quarter without noting anything especially poor or
specifically miserable, and I went a third time to make sure that
I had not overlooked something impressively lamentable. But I did
not see above three tenement-houses with the wash hung from the
windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and misery, in a
space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York I
could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred.
In this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are
everywhere in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to
look as slovenly as our streets look when they have just been
"cleaned," I knew that the next morning these worst avenues of
Rome would be swept as our best never have been since the days of
Waring.
Beyond the tenements
the generous breadth of the new streets has been bordered by
pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type, fleetingly
touched but not spoiled by the taste of the art nouveau,
standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one
could look over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers
about them. Like suburban effects are characteristic of the new
wide residential streets on the hither side of the Tiber, and on
both shores the streets expand from time to time into squares,
with more or less tolerable new monuments--say, of the Boston
average--in them. The business streets where they bear the lines
of the frequently recurrent trams are spacious and straight, and
though they are not the Corso, the Corso
82
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
itself, it must be
remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive, and
is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have
no space to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals
betray a glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether
these palaces are outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from
what sight one can get of them; no, not even the most besotted
sentimentalist of those who bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome
when they mean Rome of the Renaissance. How much of that Rome has
been erased by modern Rome I do not know, but I think not so much
as people pretend. Some of the ugly baroque churches have been
pulled down to allow the excavation of imperial Rome, but there
are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is said the princely
proprietors of the old palaces which are let in apartments along
the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are going to pull
them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of modern
rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of
hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately
domiciles, and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they
spoke of these rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices
of the sort, and I should not be surprised if I went back to Rome
after another forty-three years to find most of them standing in
1951 where they now stand in 1908. Rome was not built in a day,
and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt within the brief period
that will make me one hundred and fourteen years old. By that
time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I can
say to the few survivors: "There, you see that new Rome never
went half so far as you expected."
But no doubt it will
go further than it has yet gone,
83
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in the way that is
for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer
quarters, of which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial
centre, my just American pride was flattered by tho sign on a
handsome apartment-house going up in gardened grounds, which
advertised that it was to be finished with a lift and
steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied with
lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread
from the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance
with the impassioned American demand to be warm all round when
one is in-doors. New Rome is not going so fast and so far but
that it will keep, to whatever end it reaches, one of the
characteristic charms of the old and older Rome. I shall expect
to see when I come back in 1951 the same or the like corners of
garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage peering over them,
that now enchant the passer in the street; from the windows of my
electric-ele-vatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look down
into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange
espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the
midst of oleanders and of laurels
"Shaking its loosened
silver in the sun."
Slim cypresses will
then as now blacken through the delicate air against the blue
sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some
sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which
now possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be
cut down, while the ilex will darken in its place and help the
eternal youth of the marbles to a greener old age of moss and
mould in the gloom of its spreading shade. All these things
beautifully abound in Rome now, as they always have abounded, and
there is no reason to fear that they will cease to
abound.
84
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Rome grows, and as
Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there must forever
be a great and famous capital where there has always been one.
The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it
might well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth
and heaven which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in
the world. The climate is beyond praise for a winter which is
mild without being weak; there is a summer of tolerable noonday
heat, and of nights deliciously cool; the spring is scarcely
earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall is a long, slow
decline from the temperature of October to the lowest level of
January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The embrowning
or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling to
their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost
to loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them
away.
So it is said by
those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the Roman
meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can
believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the
prevalence of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine,
flatters January with an illusion of June, and under our hotel
windows I was witness of the success of the sycamore leaves in
keeping a grip of their native twigs even after the new buds came
to push them away. In the last days of March a plum-tree hung its
robe of white blossoms over the wall of the Capuchin convent from
the garden within; but the almond-trees had been in bloom for six
weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more warmly
flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.
Still, a mild winter
and an endurable summer will not of themselves make a great
capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the
past made
85
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Rome the capital of
the world, first politically and then religiously. Whether they
will make it so hereafter remains to be seen. In the sense of all
the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my profound faith in
the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and they will
have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most
liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a
pull with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her
its head city. The only European capitals comparable with her are
London, Paris, and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York,
which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a
possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres.
Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance
in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other
capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic,
literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary
political centre of the greatest republic of any time and of a
nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the future.
But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a
capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state,
deep-rooted in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race
of which we are ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire
without a present equal. Paris is France in the sense of
representing the intense life of a nation unsurpassed in the
things which enlighten and ennoble the human intellect and
advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong will
of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of
sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than
in any positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal
more nearly reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than
80
GLIMPSE INSIDE OF
IMPERIAL ROME
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
any other modern
state. Berlin is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not
so exclusively Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and
destined, lies in just the fact that she is not and never can be
exclusively Italian. Human interests too universal and imperative
for the control of a single race, even so brilliant and so gifted
as the Italian race, which is naturally and necessarily in
possession, centre about her through history, religion, art, and
make every one at home in the city which is the capital of
Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling Japs
going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest
and unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or
explicitly, the right to dispute the Italian theory and practice
in its control. But every Occidental stranger (if any one of
European blood is a stranger in the home of Christianity) I knew
to be there in a mood more or less critical, and in a disposition
to find fault with the Rome which is now making, or making
over.
We journeyers or
sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience to
ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the
future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for
us to visit her in comfort at every season and to come away
without having come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the
sort of motherly, or at the worst step-motherly, welcome which
she gives to all us closely or distantly related children of
hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and her immortal beauty; in
spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which she rises every
morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and corner of her
dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving air; in
spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs,
and
87
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the miraculous poise
she maintains between the antagonism of State and Church; in
spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in spite of
her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the
solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast
scale of antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a
thing to be hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of
her youth, come from our North and West and censure and criticise
and carp. I have seldom conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome
who could not improve her in some phase or other, who could not
usefully advise her, who, at the best, did not patronize her. I
offer myself as almost the sole example of a stranger who was
contented with her as she is, or as she is going to be without
his help; and I am the more confident, therefore, in suggesting
to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances which
her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully mismanaged in
her civic schemes. A good round tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon
all sojourners, if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining
in such a chorus of criticism of Rome would give them the
indefeasible right to their opinions and would help to replete a
treasury which they believe is always in danger of being
exhausted.
III THE COLOSSEUM
AND THE FORUM
As I have told, the
first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was at the
Colosseum the day after our arrival. For some unknown reason I
was going to
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
begin with the Baths
of Caracalla, but, as it happened, these were the very last ruins
we visited in Rome; and I do not know just what accident diverted
us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped because it was on the way
to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At any rate, I shall
never regret that we began with it.
After twoscore years
and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not say that in
1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to sell me
postcards--these are a much later invention of the Enemy--but I
am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches,
and looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The
Colosseum itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a
minion of the wicked Italian government had once scraped its
flowers and weeds away and cleaned it up so that it was perfectly
spoiled. But it would take a good deal more than that to spoil
the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of the mediaeval nobles,
who quarried their palaces from it, nor the industrial enterprise
of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into workshops, nor
the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in it that
hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most stupendous
variety shows that the world has yet witnessed. The terrible
stunts in which men fought one another for the delight of other
men in every manner of murder, and wild beasts tore the limbs of
those glad to perish for their faith, can be as easily imagined
there as ever, and the traveller who visits the place has the
assistance of increasing hordes of other tourists in imagining
them.
I will not be the
one to speak slight of that enterprise which marshals troops of
the personally conducted through the place and instructs them in
divers languages concerning it. Save your time and
money
89
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
so, if you have not
too much of either, and be one of an English, French, or German
party, rather than try to puzzle the facts out for yourself, with
one contorted eye on your Baedeker and the other on the object in
question. In such parties a sort of domestic relation seems to
grow up through their associated pleasures in sight-seeing, and
they are like family parties, though politer and patienter among
themselves than real family parties. They are commonly very
serious, though they doubtless all have their moments of gayety;
and in the Colosseum I saw a French party grouped for photography
by a young woman of their number, who ran up and down before them
with a kodak and coquet-tishly hustled them into position with
pretty, bird-like chirpings of appeal and reproach, and much
graceful self-evidencing. I do not censure her behavior, though
doubtless there were ladies among the photographed who thought it
overbold; if the reader had been young and blond and
svelte, in a Parisian gown and hat, with narrow russet
shoes, not too high-heeled for good taste, I do not believe he
would have been any better; or, if he would, I should not have
liked him so well.
On the earlier day
which I began speaking of I found that I was insensibly attaching
myself to an English-hearing party of the personally conducted,
in the dearth of my own recollections of the local history, but I
quickly detached myself for shame and went back and meekly hired
the help of a guide who had already offered his services in
English, and whom I had haughtily spurned in his own tongue. His
English, though queer, was voluminous; but I am not going to drag
the reader at our heels laden with lore which can be applied only
on the spot or in the presence of postal-card views of the
Colosseum. It is enough that before my guide released us we
knew
90
INTERIOR OF
COLOSSEUM FROM THE SOUTH
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
where was the box of
Caesar, whom those about to die saluted, and where the box of the
Vestals whose fatal thumbs gave the signal of life or death for
the unsuccessful performer; where the wild beasts were kept, and
where the Christians; where were the green-rooms of the
gladiators, who waited chatting for their turn to go on and kill
one another. One must make light of such things or sink under
them; and if I am trying to be a little gay, it is for the
readers' sake, whom I would not have perish of their realization.
Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience or his
science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could
commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible.
However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his
rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless
bringing himself up as the guide of coming generations of
tourists. There had been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the
white dust of the street before our hotel, but the cold of the
early morning, though it had not been too much for the birds that
sang in the garden back of us, had left a skim of ice in damp
spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon, the ice was
visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where crowds of
people wandered severally or collectively about in the
half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and
down, in every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so
picturesque as a little group of monks who had climbed to a
higher tier of the arches and stood looking down into the depths
where we looked up at them, denned against the sky in their black
robes, which opened to show their under robes of white. They were
picturesque, but they were not so monumental as an old,
unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping
side-whiskers, not above
91
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
a purple suspicion
of dye, who sat on a broken column and vainly endeavored to
collect his family for departure. Whenever he had gathered two or
three about him they strayed off as the others came up, and we
left him sardonically patient of their adhesions and defections,
which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we
struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to
our carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat
jerry-built apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on
into the salmon sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we
found waiting us at our hotel, with the statues on the
balustrated wall of the villa garden behind it effectively posed
in the tender light, together with the eidolons of those
picturesque monks and that monumental American.
We could safely have
stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer brings danger of
Roman fever, which people used to take in the Colosseum, unless I
am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She, indeed, I
believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the
place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights
of the season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored
lights of the fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was
quite vivid enough without that, and the vision of the Colosseum
remained, and still remains, the immense skeleton of the
stupendous form stripped of all integumental charm and broken
down half one side of its vast oval, so that wellnigh a quarter
of the structural bones are gone.
With its image there
persisted and persists the question constantly recurrent in the
presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial Rome was not
rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those
world-con-
92
THE SACRED WAY THROUGH
THE FORUM
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
querors was first
immensity and then beauty, as much as could survive consistently
with getting immensity into a given space. The question is most
of all poignant in the Forum, which I let wait a full fortnight
before moving against it in the warm sun of an amiable February
morning. On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day to
dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was
then called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud
among the broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it
were, sedulously cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has
since been done, and which could not but have been done, by the
eager science as much involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the
task, has resulted in a more potent suggestion of what the Forum
was in the republican or imperial day than what that simple, old,
unassuming Cow Field afforded. There were then as now the
beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the temple porches,
with their pillars; there was the "unknown column with the buried
base"; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation; and
it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the
riches which archasology has dug up for it by lowering the
surface of the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping
clean the buried pavements; by identifying the storied points; by
multiplying the fragments of basal or columnar marbles and
revealing the plans of temples and palaces and courts and tracing
the Sacred Way on which the magnificence of the past went to
dusty death. After all, the imagination is very childlike, and it
prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the
materials are very abundant or complex, it can make little out of
them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in self-defence.
The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow
93
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Field becomes in the
mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the resurrection of
the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.
If the visitor would
have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the place was like
when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic
reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest
building across the way from the official entrance to the Forum.
One cannot say but this is intensely interesting, and it affords
the consolation which the humble (but not too humble) spirit may
gather from witness of the past, that the fashion of this world
and the pride of the eyes and all ruthless vainglory defeated
themselves in ancient Rome, as they must everywhere when they can
work their will. If one had thought that in magnitude and
multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had but to
look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but
beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas
and columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly
painted and gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the
least, and crowding severally upon one another, without relation
or proportion. Their mass is supremely tasteless, almost
senseless; that mob of architectural incongruities was not only
without collective beauty, but it was without that far commoner
and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This has come to
it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word
vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome
in tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at
least paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I
doubt if it would have been even photographable to anything but a
picture post-card effect.
But as yet I
wandered in the Forum safe from the
94
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
realization of its
ugliness when it was in its glory. I cannot say that even now it
is picturesque, but it is paintable, and certainly it is
pathetic. Stumps of columns, high and low, stand about in the
places where they stood in their unbroken pride, and though it
seems a hardship that they should not have been left lying in the
kindly earth or on it instead of being pulled up and set on end,
it must be owned that they are scarcely overworked in their
present postures. More touching are those inarticulate heaps,
cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there together and
waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and
translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must
always be remembered that when they were coherent they were only
beautiful parts of a whole that was brutally unbeautiful. We have
but to use the little common-sense which Heaven has vouchsafed
some of us in order to realize that Rome, either republican or
imperial, was a state for which we can have no genuine reverence,
and that mostly the ruins of her past can stir in us no finer
emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the sake of knowledge,
and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of human
interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody,
archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their
recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the
grave of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as
dramatic a spectacle as anything one can well witness; for that
soil is richer than any gold-mine in its potentiality of
treasure, and it must be strictly scrutinized, almost by
particles, lest some gem of art should be cast aside with the
accumulated rubbish of centuries. Yet this drama, poignantly
suggestive as it always must be, was the least incident of
that
95
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
morning in the Forum
which it was my fortune to pass there with other better if not
older tourists as guest of the Genius Loci. It was not quite a
public event, though the Commend atore Boni is so well known to
the higher journalism, and even to fiction (as the reader of
Anatole France's La Pierre Blanche will not have
forgotten), that nothing which he archseolog-ically does is
without public interest, and this excursion in the domain of
antiquity was expected to result in identifying the site of the
Temple of Jupiter Stator. It was conjectured that the temple
vowed to this specific Jupiter for his public spirit in stopping
the flight of a highly demoralized Roman army would be found
where we actually found it. Archaaology seems to proceed by
hypothesis, like other sciences, and to enjoy a forecast of
events before they are actually accomplished. I do not say that I
was very vividly aware of the event in question; I could not go
now and show where the temple stood, but when I read of it in a
cablegram to the American newspapers I almost felt that I had dug
it up with my own hands.
Of many other facts
I was at the time vividly aware: of the charm of finding the
archaeologist in an upper room of the mediaeval church which is
turning itself into his study, of listening to his prefatory
talk, so informal and so easy that one did not realize how
learned it was, and then of following him down to the scene of
his researches and hearing him speak wisely, poetically,
humorously, even, of what he believed he had reason to expect to
find. We stood with him by the Arch of Titus and saw how the
sculptures had been broken from it in the fragments found at its
base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the
kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need
not have the trouble of carrying the
96
THE ROMAN
FORUM
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
sculptures away
before burning them. A handful of iridescent glass from a
house-drain near by, where it had been thrown by the servants
after breaking it, testified of the continuity of human nature in
the domestics of all ages. A somewhat bewildering suggestion of
the depth at which the different periods of Rome underlie one
another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or cistern
which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern at
another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like
a potter's clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have
antedated the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in
the small building which seems the provisional repository of the
archaeologist's finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in
the coffins of split trees still shutting them imperfectly in.
Mostly the bones and bark were of the same indifferent interest,
but the eternal pathos of human grief appealed from what mortal
part remained of a little child, with beads on her tattered tunic
and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in the
presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of
yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the
Rome of the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of
the Kings, the Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which
a shaft sunk in the Forum would successively pierce in reaching
those aboriginals whose sepulchres alone witnessed that they had
ever lived.
It is the voluble
sorrow common to all the emotional visitors in Rome that the past
of the different generations has not been treated by the present
with due tenderness, and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in
point. But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the
wilding growths in the Colosseum and
97
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
scraped it to a
bareness which nature is again trying to clothe with grass and
weeds, it ought to be remembered that it is another Italian
archaeologist who has set laurels all up and down the slopes of
the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to bloom
wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help
repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which
seem no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a
constructive surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists
objected to those laurels where the birds sing so sweetly;
perhaps they thought them not strictly scientific; but when the
German Kaiser, who always knows so much better than all the other
Germans put together, visited the Forum, he liked them, and he
parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial charge, "Laurels,
laurels, evermore laurels." After that the emotional tourist must
be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his laurels to
Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him a perpetual crown of
them.
IV
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN
NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS
It is not every
undeserving American who can have the erudition and divination of
the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a visit
to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company
of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be
had for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for
all I know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who
lead people about the ruins in Rome, and instruct them
in
98
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the fable, and
doubtless in the moral, of the things they see. If I had profited
by their learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than any
the average American has about him, I should now be tiring the
reader with knowledge which I am so willingly leaving him to
imagine in me. If he is like the average American, he has really
once had some nodding acquaintance with the facts, but history is
apt to forsake you on the scene of it, and to come lagging back
when it is too late. In this psychological experience you feel
the need of help which the peripatetic historian supplies to the
groups of perhaps rather oblivious than ignorant tourists of all
nations in all languages, but preferably English. We Anglo-Saxons
seem to be the most oblivious or most ignorant; but I would not
slight our occasionally available culture any more than I would
imply that those peripatetic historians are at all like the
cicerones whom they have so largely replaced. I believe they are
instructed and scholarly men; I offer them my respect; and I wish
now that I had been one of their daily disciples, for it is full
sixty years since I read Goldsmith's History of Rome. As I
saw them, somewhat beyond earshot, they and their disciples
formed a spectacle which was always interesting, and, so far as
the human desire for information is affecting, was also
affecting. The listeners to the lecturers would carry back to
their respective villages and towns, or the yet simpler circles
of our ordinary city lift, vastly more association with the
storied scene than I had brought to it or should bring away. In
fact, there is nothing more impressive in the floating foreign
society of Rome than its zeal for self-improvement. No one
classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to
be a traveller he is really one of them; and it is with
difficulty I
99
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
keep myself from the
appearance of patronizing them in these praises, which are for
the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to be
without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of
their application reached to all the historical and actual
interests, to the religious as well as the social, the political
as well as the financial; but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially
turned to the study of antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer
past. There was given last winter a series of lectures at the
American School of Archaeology by the head of it, which were
followed with eager attention by hearers who packed the room. But
these lectures, which were so admirably first in. the means of
intelligent study, seemed only one of the means by which my
fellow-tourists were climbing the different branches of
knowledge. All round my apathy I felt, where I did not see, the
energy of the others; with my mind's ear I heard a rustle as of
the turning leaves of Baedekers, of Murrays, of Hares, and of the
many general histories and monographs of which these intelligent
authorities advised the supplementary reading.
If I am not so
mistaken as I might very well be, however, the local language is
less studied than it was in former times, when far fewer Italians
spoke English. My own Italian was of that date; but, though I
began by using it, I found myself so often helped for a forgotten
meaning that I became subtly demoralized and fell luxuriously
into the habit of speaking English like a native of Rome. Yet
tacitly, secretly perhaps, there may have been many people who
were taking up Italian as zealously as many more were taking up
antiquity. One day in the Piazza di Spagna, in a modest little
violet of a tea-room, which was venturing to open in the face of
the old-established and densely thronged
100
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
parterre opposite, I
noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall, young
Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to
the very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair. She
looked like some of those athletic-minded young women of Ibsen's
plays, and the pile of books on the table beside her tea
suggested a student character. When she had finished her tea she
put these books back into a leather bag, which they filled to a
rigid repletion, and, after a few laconic phrases with the
tea-girl, she went out like going off the stage. Her powerful
demeanor somehow implied severe studies; but the tea-girl--a
massive, confident, confiding Roman--said, No, she was studying
Italian, and all those books related to the language, for which
she had a passion. She was a Swede; and here the student being
exhausted as a topic, and my own nationality being ascertained,
What steps, the tea-girl asked, should one take if one wished to
go to New York in order to secure a place as cashier in a
restaurant?
My facts were not
equal to the demand upon them, nor are they equal to anything
like exact knowledge of the intellectual pursuits of the many
studious foreign youth of all ages and sexes whom one meets in
Rome. As I say, our acquaintance with Italian is far less useful,
however ornamental, than it used to be. The Romans are so quick
that they understand you when they speak no English, and take
your meaning before you can formulate it in their own. tongue. A
classically languaged friend of mine, who was hard bested in
bargaining for rooms, tried his potential landlord in Latin, and
was promptly answered in Latin. It was a charming proof that in
the home of the Church her mother-speech had never ceased to be
spoken by some of her children, but I never heard
101
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of any Americans,
except my friend, recurring to their college courses in order to
meet the modern Latins in their ancient parlance. In spite of
this instance, and that of the Swedish votary of Italian, I
decided that the studies of most strangers were archaeological
rather than philological, historical rather than literary,
topographical rather than critical. I do not say that I had due
confirmation of my theory from the talk of the fellow-sojourners
whom one is always meeting at teas and lunches and dinners in
Rome. Generally the talk did not get beyond an exchange of
enthusiasms for the place, and of experiences of the morning, in
the respective researches of the talkers.
Such of us as were
staying the winter, of course held aloof from the hurried
passers-through, or looked with kindly tolerance on their
struggles to get more out of Rome in a given moment than she
perhaps yielded with perfect acquiescence. We fancied that she
kept something back; she is very subtle, and has her reserves
even with people who pass a whole winter within her gates. The
fact is, there are a great many of her, though we knew her afar
as one mighty personality. There is the antique Rome, the
mediaeval Rome, the modern Rome; but that is only the beginning.
There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church, which
divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion;
but here is a field so vast that Ave may not enter it without
danger of being promptly lost in it. There is the Rome of the
visiting nationalities, severally and collectively; there is
especially the Anglo-American Rome, which if not so populous as
the German, for instance, is more important to the Anglo-Saxons.
It sees a great deal of itself socially, but not to the exclusion
of the sympathetic Southern temperaments which seem to have
a
102
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
strange but not
unnatural affinity with it. So far as we might guess, it was a
little more Clerical than Liberal in its local politics; if you
were very Liberal, it was well to be careful, for Conversion
lurked under many exteriors which gave no outward sign of it; if
the White of the monarchy and the Black of the papacy divide the
best Roman families, of course foreigners are more intensely one
or the other than the natives. But Anglo-Saxon life was easy for
one not self-obliged to be of either opinion or party; and it was
pleasant in most of its conditions. In Rome our
internationali-ties seemed to have certain quarters largely to
themselves. In spite of our abhorrence of the destruction and
construction which have made modern Rome so wholesome and
delightful, most of us had our habitations in the new quarters;
but certain pleasanter of the older streets, like the Via
Sistina, Via del Babuino, Via Capo le Case, Via Gregoriana, were
our sojourn or our resort. Especially in the two first our
language filled the outer air to the exclusion of other
conversation, and within doors the shopmen spoke it at least as
well as the English think the Americans speak it. It was pleasant
to meet the honest English faces, to recognize the English
fashions, to note the English walk; and if these were oftener
present than their American counterparts, it was not from our
habitual minority, but from our occasional sparsity through the
panic that had frightened us into a homekeeping foreign to our
natures.
In like manner our
hyphenated nationalities have the Piazza di Spagna for their own.
There are the two English book-stores and the circulating
libraries, in each of which the books are so torn and dirty that
you think they cannot be quite so bad in the other till you try
it; there seems nothing for it, then, but to
103
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
wash and iron the
different Tauchnitz authors, and afterward darn and mend them.
The books on sale are, of course, not so bad; they are even quite
clean; and except for giving out on the points of interest where
you could most wish them to abound, there is nothing in them to
complain of. There is less than nothing to complain of in the
tea-room which enjoys our international favor except that at the
most psychological moment of the afternoon you cannot get a
table, in spite of the teas going on in the fashionable hotels
and the friendly houses everywhere. The toast is exceptional; the
muffins so far from home are at least reminiscent of their native
island; the tea and butter are alike blameless. The company, to
the eye of the friend of man, is still more acceptable, for, if
the Americans have dwindled, the English have increased; and
there is nothing more endearing than the sight of a roomful of
English people at their afternoon tea in a strange land. No type
seems to predominate; there are bohemians as obvious as clerics;
there are old ladies and young, alike freshly fair; there are the
white beards of age and the clean-shaven cheeks of youth among
the men; some are fashionable and some outrageously not;
peculiarities of all kinds abound without conflicting. Some talk,
frankly audible, and others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide
purr, tacit or explicit, close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving,
in that assemblage of mutually repellent personalities, for the
nonce united, would best denote the universal content.
Hard by this
tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader will no
doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps without
me; after the first time, I never climbed them. The elevator
costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there
104
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
is sometimes drama
thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more
or less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator
and the young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that
the elevator will hold only eight persons, but one memorable
afternoon the ticket-seller insisted upon giving a ticket to a
tall, young English girl who formed an unlawful ninth. The
elevator-man, a precisian of the old school, expelled her; the
ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again the elder
stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded its
violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into
unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator
and out of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were
enjoying it so much that it might never have ended if she had not
taken the affair into her own hands. She finally followed the
ticket-seller back to his desk, to which he retired after each
act of the melodrama, and threw her ticket violently down. "Here
is your ticket!" she said in English so severe that he could not
help understanding and cowering before it. "Give me back my
money!" He was too much stupefied by her decision of character to
speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got into
our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously
repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way
up. This did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in
parting, and assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only
old-fashioned Romans seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay
of manners which the comfortable classes everywhere like to note
in the uncomfortable. Then some ladies of our number went off on
a platform across the house-tops to which the elevator had
brought us, as if they expected to go down the
105
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
chimneys to their
apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the Piazza Trinita
de' Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost
balustrade of the Spanish Steps.
It is notable, but
not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this, for, seen
from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than the
Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the
most charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing
better than a post-card (which I could have bought him on the
spot for fifty a franc), knows how the successive stairways part
and flow downward to right and left, like the parted waters of a
cascade, and lose themselves at the bottom in banks of flowers.
No lovelier architectural effect was ever realized from a happy
fancy; but, of course, the pictorial effect is richer from below,
especially from the Via dei Condotti, where it opens into the
Piazza di Spagna. I suppose there must be hours of the day, and
certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the
Steps have not the sunset on them. But most of the time they have
the sunset on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the
banks of daffodils and lilies and anemones and carnations and
roses and almond blossoms, keeping the downpour of the marble
cascades from flooding the piazza, and mounts, mellowing and
yellowing, up their gray stone, until it reaches the Church of
Trinita de' Monti at the top.
There it lingers, I
should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown facade in an
effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once it has
blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart
ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you
can bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit
of feeling yourself so. It is a
106
Spanish Steps
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
charm that imparts
itself more in detail and is less exclusively the effect of
perpetual sunset. From the parapet against which you lean you
have a perfecter conception of the architectural form than you
get from below, and you are never tired of seeing the successive
falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then coming together
on the broad landings and again parting and coming
together.
If there were once
many models, male, female, and infant, brigands, peasants, sages,
and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems to me
there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there
for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and
transfer them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in
noticeable number. I saw some small boys in steeple-crowned soft
hats and short jackets, with their little legs wound round with
the favorite bandaging of brigands; and some mothers suitable for
Madonnas, perhaps, with babes at the breast; there was a
patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to pose for the
prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons; but for
the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls,
fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly
below those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole
neighborhood abounds in opportunities for charity, and at the
corner of the Via Sistina there is a one-legged beggar who
professes to black shoes in the intervals of alms-taking, and who
early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied escaping by him to
my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he joyously overtook
me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are capable; he
wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our species,
that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.
107
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
On a Sunday evening
I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye the people
who were coining back from their promenade on the Pincian Hill,
and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps.
On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I
dare say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a
little dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the
circus. Two pretty girls, smartly dressed in hats and gowns
exactly alike, and doubtless sisters, if not twins, passed down
to the same level. One was with a handsome young officer, and
walked staidly beside him, as if content with her quality of
captive or captor. The other was with a civilian, of whom she was
apparently not sure. Suddenly she ran away from him to the verge
of the next fall of steps, possibly to show him how charmingly
she was dressed, possibly to tempt him by her grace in flight to
follow her madly. But he followed sanely and slowly, and she
waited for him to come up, in a capricious quiet, as if she had
not done anything or meant anything. That was all; but I am not
hard to suit; and it was richly enough for me.
Her little comedy
came to its denouement just under the shoulder of the rose-roofed
terrace jutting from a lowish, plainish house on the left, beyond
certain palms and eucalyptus-trees. It is one of the most sacred
shrines in Rome, for it was in this house that the "young English
poet whose name was writ in water" died to deathless fame three
or fourscore years ago. It is the Keats house, which when he
lived in it was the house of Severn the painter, his host and
friend. I had visited it for the kind sake of the one and the
dear sake of the others when I first visited Rome in 1864; and it
was one of the earliest stations of my second pilgrimage. It is
now in form for any
108
Toward the Pincian
Hill
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and all visitors,
but the day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple
and tasteful keeping. A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced
matron inquired my pleasure when she followed me into the
ground-floor entrance from somewhere without, and then,
understanding, called hor young daughter, who led me up to the
room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed his last sigh.
It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish Steps,
with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch
of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and
heard him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I
remember some such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very
gentle old man and fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying
poet, as he well might be, and I was glad to be one of the many
Americans who, he said, came to grieve with him for the dead
poet.
Now, on my later
visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill within the
house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of
Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in
that bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook.
Afterward I saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a
generous stove, for people who came to see the Keats and Shelley
collections of books and pictures; but still the sense of that
day remains. The young girl sympathized with my sympathy, and
wished to find a rose for me in the trellis through which the
rain dripped. She could not, and I suggested that there would be
roses in the spring. "No," she persisted, "sometimes it makes
them in the winter," but I had to come away through the reeking
streets without one.
When it rains, it rains
easily in Rome. But the
109
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
weather was divine
the evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish
Steps. The sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a
cheerful light of electrics shone up at me from the Via dei
Condotti. I stood and thought of as much as I could summon from
the past, and I was strongest, I do not know why, with the
persecutions of the early Christians. Presently a smell of dinner
came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I was
reminded to go home to my own table d'hote. My one-legged
beggar seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was
intercepted by the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of
matches. She was not wakened by the fall of my ten-centime piece
in her tray, but the boy drowsing beside her roused himself, and
roused her to the dreamy expression of a gratitude quite out of
scale with my alms.
V AN EFFORT TO BE
HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY
My visit to the
Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my ignorance and the
intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured site of the
Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the second
visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings
when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with
whom I sauntered from point to point, preying upon their
knowledge for my emotion concerning each. Information is an
excellent thing--in others; and but for these friends I should
not now be able to say that this mouldering heap of brickwork,
rather than that, was Julius Caesar's
110
SEPULCHRE OF ROMULUS,
FORUM
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
house; or just where
it was that Antony made his oration over the waxen effigy which
served him for Caesar's body. They helped me realize how the
business life and largely the social life of Rome centred in the
Forum, but spared me so much detail that my fancy could play
about among its vanished edifices without inconvenience from the
clutter of shops and courts and monuments which were ultimately
to hem it in and finally to stifle it. They knew their Forum so
well that they could not only gratify any curiosity I had, but
could supply me with curiosity when I had none. For the moment I
was aware that this spot or that, though it looked so improbable,
was the scene of deeds which will reverberate forever; they
taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly supposed
fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I learned
to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, because
she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that
Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was
buried in the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of
it as I could imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They
also showed me the rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the
mass-meetings of the republican times, and they showed me the
lake, or the puddle left of it, into which Curtius (or one of
three heroes of the name) leaped at an earlier day as a specific
for the pestilence which the medical science of the period had
failed to control. In our stroll about the place we were joined
by one of the several cats living in the Forum, which offered us
collectively its acquaintance, as if wishing to make us feel at
home. It joined us and it quitted us from time to time, as the
whim took it, but it did not abandon us wholly till we showed a
disposition to believe in that lake of Curtius,
111
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
so called after
those three public-spirited heroes, the first being a foreigner.
Then the cat, which had more than once stretched itself as if
bored, turned from us in contempt and went and lay down in a
sunny corner near the tomb of Romulus, and fell
asleep.
It is quite possible
that my reader does not know, as lately I did not, that the Roman
Forum is but one of several forums connected with it by ways long
centuries since buried fathoms deep and built upon many stories
high. But I am now able to assure him that in the whole region
between the Roman Forum and the Forum of Trajan, which were
formerly opened into each other by the removal of a hill as tall
as the top of Trajan's Column, you pass over other forums hidden
beneath your feet or wheels. You cannot be stayed there, however,
by the wonders which archaeology will yet reveal in them (for
archaeology has its relentless eye upon every inch of the ground
above them), but you will certainly pause at the Forum of Trajan,
where archaeology, as it is in Commendatore Boni, has had its way
already. In fact, until his work in the Roman Forum is finished,
the Forum of Trajan must remain his greatest achievement, and the
sculptured column of the great emperor must serve equally as the
archaeologist's monument. I do not remember why in the old time I
should have kept coming to look at that column and study the
sculptured history of Trajan's campaigns, toiling around it to
its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one
cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level
and the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area
below is free only to a large company of those cats which seem to
have their dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of
ancient Rome. People come to feed the Trajan cats with
the
112
TRAJAN'S FORUM AND
COLUMN
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
fish sold near by
for the purpose, and one morning, in pausing to view his column
from the respectful distance I had to keep, I counted no less
than thirteen of his cats in his forum. They were of every age
and color, but much more respectable in appearance than the cats
of the Pantheon, which have no such sunny expanse as that forum
for their quarters, but only a very damp corner beside the
temple, and seem to have suffered in their looks and health from
the situation. It was afterward with dismay that I realized the
fatal number of the Trajan cats coming to their breakfast that
morning so unconscious of evil omen in the figure; but as there
are probably no statistics of mortality among the cats of Rome, I
shall never know whether any of the thirteen has rendered up one
of their hundred and seventeen lives.
However, if I
allowed myself to go on about the cats of Rome, either ancient or
modern, there would be no end. For instance, in a statuary's shop
in the Via Sistina there is a large yellow cat, which I one day
saw dressing the hair of the statuary's boy. It performed this
office with a very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high
rotary table where ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving,
and pausing from time to time, as it licked the boy's thick,
black locks, to get the effect of its labors. On other days or at
other hours it slept under the table-top, unvexed by the
hammering that went on over its head. Even in Rome, where cats
are so abundant, it was a notable cat.
If you visit the
Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be hurried
home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my
case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way
hotelward at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier
time, but which, is now super-
8 113
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
seded by the more
authentic temple in the Forum. I had long revered the first in
its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute of unwilling
renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient Rome and
so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle, than
the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure
the owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it
scattered over the world must share my pious reluctance. The
custodian is still very proud of it, and would have lectured me
upon it much longer than I let him; as it was, he kept me while
he could cast a blazing copy of the Popolo Romano into the
cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how deep it was.
He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the
traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee,
and it seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near
lunch-time, let the traveller look well about him in the dusty
little piazza there, for the Temple of Fortune, with its bruised
but beautiful facade, is hard by, as much in the form that
Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected after all this
time.
Perhaps the Circus
of Marcellus is on the traveller's way home to lunch; but he will
always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in with
mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his
cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the
circus. A glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to
the Campidoglio, with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at
top, may be a fortunate accident of his course. If this happens
it will help to rehabilitate for him the Rome of the paganism to
which these divinities remained true through all temptations to
Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of their sojourn,
forgotten, in the Ghetto. It
114
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
is hardly possible
that his glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's
head where he sits his bronze charger--an extremely fat one--so
majestically in the piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious
of being the most noble equestrian statue which has ridden down
to us from antiquity.
A more purposed
sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of chance,
though I myself always liked chance encounters with the monuments
of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the
nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of
Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find
out where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day,
driving through the little piazza where it lurks behind the
Piazza Co-lonna, I looked up, and there, in awe-striking
procession, stood the mighty antique columns sustaining the
entablature of mediaeval stucco with their fluted marble. I could
not say why their poor, defaced, immortal grandeur should have
always so affected me, for I do not know that my veneration was
due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no arch or
pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the
reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed
five times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor's in the next
piazza (at Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have
almost worn your new clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized
that the Column of Marcus Aurelius was not the more famous Column
of Trajan. There is, in fact, a strong family likeness between
these columns, both being bandaged round from bottom to top with
the tale of the imperial achievements and having a general effect
in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the dignity of
that melancholy yet vigorous ruin
115
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of the Temple of
Neptune, or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient
Rome. It survives having been a custom-house and being a
stock-exchange without apparent ignominy, while one feels an
incongruity, to say the least, in the Column of Marcus Aurelius
looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of
New York. Whether this is worse than for the Palazzo di Venezia
to confront the American Express Company where it is housed on
the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is that
I believe the Temple of Neptune would have been superior to
either fate; though I may be mistaken.
Ruin, nearly
everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the environment;
and even the monuments of the past which are in comparatively
good repair have not always the keeping that the past would
probably have chosen for them. One that suffers as little as any,
if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch
you are apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside
it or across its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with
post-card boys and their bargains. In spite of them, the sight of
the temple does mightily lift the heart; and though you may have
had, as I had, forty-odd years to believe in it, you must waver
in doubt of its reality whenever you see it. It seems too great
to be true, standing there in its immortal sublimity, the temple
of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the saints by
Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration equally
as classic or catholic. It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in
the very latest edition of Murray's Handbook as "the
best-preserved monument of ancient Rome"; worthy the praise of
the fastidious and difficult Hare as "the most perfect pagan
building in the city"; worthy whatever higher laud my unconsulted
Baede-
116
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ker bestows upon it.
But I speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if
he comes upon it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its
vast bronze doors closing against him until three o'clock; there
are many sadder things in life than not seeing the interior of
the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or
going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and
is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and
Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide
Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks
down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the
visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not
suffice to fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely
relieve.
I proved the fact by
successive visits; but, after all my content with the outside of
the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome is not
the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building,
but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get
this in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine
Hill, but you get something more nearly like it than anything I
can think of at the moment. In that imperial and patrician and
plutocratic residential quarter you see, if you are of the
moderately moneyed middle class, what the pride of life must
always come to when it has its way; and your consolation is full
if you pause to reflect how some day Fifth Avenue and the two
millionaire blocks eastward will be as the Palatine now
is.
Riches and power are
of the same make in every time, though they may wear different
faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very wealthy
members of our smart set to keep this fact in mind when they
visit that huge sepulchre of human vainglory.
117
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
But I will not
pretend that I did so myself that matchless April morning when I
climbed over the ruins of the Palatine and found the sun rather
sick-eningly hot there. That is to say, it was so in the open
spaces which were respectively called the house of this emperor
and that, the temple of this deity or that, whose divine honors
half the Caesars shared; in the Stadium, beside the Lupercal, and
the like. The Lupercal was really imaginable as the home of the
patroness wolf of Rome, being a wild knot of hill fitly overgrown
with brambles and bushes, and looking very probably the spot
where Caesar would thrice have refused the crown that Antony
offered him. But for the rest, one ruin might very well pass for
another; a temple with a broken statue and the stumps of a few
columns could very easily deceive any one but an archaeologist.
Fortunately we had the charming companionship of one of the most
amiable of archaeologists, who was none the less learned for
being a woman; and she made even me dimly aware of identities
which would else have been lost upon me. To be sure, I think that
without help I should have known the Stadium when I came to it,
because it seemed studied from that in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and, though it was indefinitely more dilapidated, was so
obviously meant for the same sorts of games and races. I do not
know but it was larger than the Cambridge Stadium, though I will
not speak so confidently of its size as of that deathly cold in
the vaults and subterranean passages by which we found our way to
the burning upper air out of the foundations and basements of
palaces and temples and libraries and theatres that had ceased to
be.
One of the most
comfortable of these galleries was that in which Caligula was
justly done to death, or,
118
THE ROSTRA IN THE
FORUM
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
if not Caligula, it
was some other tyrant who deserved as little to live. But for our
guide I should not have remembered his slaughter there, and how
much satisfaction it had given me when I first read of it in
Goldsmith's History of Rome; and really you must not
acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for you forget them
just when you could turn them to account. History is apt to
forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward;
and you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow
to remind you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not
known. Suetonius, Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad
preparations for a visit to the Palatine, but it is better to
have read them yesterday than the day before if you wish to draw
suddenly upon them for associations with any specific spot. If I
were to go again to the Palatine, I would take care to fortify
myself with such structural facts from Hare's Walks in
Rome, or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was
the home of Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula
and Septimius Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their
next friends, and that it radically differed from the Forum in
being exclusively private and personal to the residents, while
that was inclusively public and common to the whole world. I
strongly urge the reader to fortify himself on this point, for
otherwise he will miss such significance as the place may
possibly have for him. Let him not trust to his impressions from
his general reading; there is nothing so treacherous; he may have
general reading enough to sink a ship, but unless he has a cargo
taken newly on board he will find himself tossing without ballast
on those billowy slopes of the Palatine, where he will vainly try
for definite anchorage.
119
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
The billowy effect
of the Palatine, inconvenient to the explorer, is its greatest
charm from afar, in whatever morning or evening light, or sun or
rain, you get its soft, brownish, greenish, velvety masses.
Distance on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If
you can believe the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum
gate, ruin has been even kinder to the Palatine than to the
Forum, with which it was equally ugly when in repair, if taken in
the altogether, however beautiful in detail. As you see it in
that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar horror, such
a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power can
produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the
sense of a superior collective right can inspire, you will
imagine the Palatine. Mount Morris, at One Hundred and
Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously built upon by the
multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to house
themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems
to have been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even
allowing for the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand
years, could show no such prospect twenty centuries hence as we
got that morning from a bit of wilding garden near the Convent of
San Bonaventura, on the brow of the Palatine. Some snowy tops
pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across the
Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and stumbled
to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in rugged,
monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the
whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome
120
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
sank round it. The
Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken
syllables of its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at
our feet in that bit of garden where the roses were blooming and
the plum-trees were blowing and the birds were singing, there
stretched itself in the grass a fallen pillar wreathed with the
folds of a marble serpent, the emblem of the oldest worship under
the sun, as I was proud to remember without present help. It was
the same immemorial, universal faith which the Mound Builders of
our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents they shaped
uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at them, and
doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose,
cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis
and Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the
humanest touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried
scene. It made one feel very old, yet very young--old with the
age and young with the youth of the world--and very much at
home.
VI
PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH
THE PAST
I was myself part of
the antiquity with which I have been trying to be honest; and,
though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of the
nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes
had passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as
concerned my own consciousness, practically of the period of the
Pantheon, say. The Pantheon, in fact, was among my first
associations with Rome. I lodged very near it, in the next
piazza, so that, if we were not contemporaries, we were
companions, and I could not
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
go out of my hotel
to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it.
Perhaps I wished to pass by it, and might really have found my
way to the Corso without the Pantheon's help.
I have no longer a
definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in the very
simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which
runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and
then stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero
was so simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my
means; or possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it
from wayfarers passing through Venice, where I then lived, and
able to commend it from their own experience of it; people in
that kind day used to do such things. However it was, I took the
apartment, and found it, though small, apt for me, as Ariosto
said of his house, and I dwelt in it with my family a month or
more in great comfort and content. In fact, it seemed to us the
pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of passing
strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called
the Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure
play of the fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I
came to believe that, in the many improvements which had befallen
Rome, Via del Gambero had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller
from antique lands had told me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped
out by the march of municipal progress. At any rate, I had so
long resigned the hope of revisiting the quiet scene that when I
revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of ages, and one day
found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from something like a
hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called Via
del
122
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Gambero still
existed in that neighborhood. I said that I had once lodged in it
forty-odd years before; but I believed it had been demolished.
Not at all, the shopman said; it was just behind his place; and
what was the number of the house? I told him, and he laughed for
joy in being able to do me a pleasure; me, a stranger from the
strange land of sky-scratchers (grattacieli), as the
Italians not inadequately translate sky-scrapers. If I would
favor him through his back shop he would show me how close I was
upon it; and from his threshold he pointed to the corner twenty
yards off, which, when I had turned it, left me almost at my own
door.
In that transmuted
Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged, and there
was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had
sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible
youth. I had not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at
home; but, standing across the way and looking up at the window,
it seemed to me that I might have seen my own young face peering
out in a somewhat suspicious question of the old eyes staring up
so fixedly at it. Who was I, and what was I doing there? Was I
waiting, hanging idly about, to see the Armenian archbishop
coming to carry my other self in his red coach to the Sistine
Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was no
harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was
a chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the
wall there behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my
proud young double that we were one, and that I was going in the
archbishop's red coach as well; he would never have believed it
of my gray hairs and sunken figure. I could not even ask him what
had become of the grocer near by, whom I used
123
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to get some homely
supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or the like, when I came
out in the December mornings, and who, when I said that it was
very cold, would own that it was un poco rigidetto, or a
little bit stiffish. The ice on the pavement, not clean-swept as
now, but slopped and frozen, had been witness of that; the ice
was gone and the grocer with it; and where really was I? At the
window up there, or leaning against the apse of the church
opposite? What church was it, anyway? I never knew; I never
asked. Why should I insist upon a common identity with a man of
twenty-seven to whom my threescore and ten could only bring
perplexity, to say the least, and very likely vexation? I went
away from Via del Gambero, where the piety of the reader will
seek either of myselves in vain. In my earlier date one used to
see the red legs of the French soldiers about the Roman streets,
and the fierce faces of the French officers, fierce as if they
felt themselves wrongfully there and were braving it out against
their consciences. Very likely they had no conscience about it;
they had come there over the dead body of the Roman Republic at
the will of their rascal president, and they were staying there
by the will of their rascal emperor, to keep on his throne the
pope from whom the Italians had hoped for unity and liberty. No
one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very
likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his
countrymen, who may have expected too much. But then the French
had been there fifteen years, and were to be there another
fifteen years yet. Now they are gone, with the archbishop's red
coach, and the complaisant grocer, and the young man of
twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the things that
the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no doubt,
in our monotonous round of him.
124
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
To-day, instead of
the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue legs of the
Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their
officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of
the Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging
on lavender. They are soldierly men none the less for their
gentler aspect, and perhaps something the more; and a better
thing yet is that there are comparatively few of them. There are
few of the privates also, far fewer than the priests and the
students of the ecclesiastical schools, who dress like priests
and go dashing through the streets in files and
troops.
I have an impression
that one sees about the proportion of Italian soldiers in Rome
that one sees of American soldiers in Washington, or, at least,
not many more. The barracks are apparently outside the walls;
there you meet cavalry going and coming, and detachments of
bersaglieri; or riflemen, pushing on at their quick trot,
or plainer infantry trudging wearily. Certainly, in a capital
where the Church holds itself prisoner, there is no show of force
on the part of its captors; and this is pleasant to the friend of
man and the lover of Italy for other reasons. In the absence of
the military you can imagine that not only does the state not
wish to boast its political supremacy in the ancient capital of
the Church, but it does not desire to show the potentiality of
holding its own against the republic which is instinct there. The
monarchy is the consensus of all the differing wills in Italy,
which naturally would not for the most part have chosen a
monarchy. But never was a monarchy so mild-mannered or seated so
firmly, for the present at least, in the affection and reason of
its people.
This is not the
place (as writers say who have not prepared themselves with the
requisite ideas at a given
125
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
point) to speak of
the situation in Rome; and I meant only to note that there are
more ecclesiastics than conscripts to be seen there. Of all the
varying costumes of the varying schools, none is so pleasing, so
vivid, as that of the German students as they rush swiftly by in
their flying robes of scarlet. The red matches the ruddy health
in their cheeks, and there is a sort of gladness in their fling
that wins the liking as well as the looking; so that almost one
would not mind being a German student of theology one's self.
There are other-costumes running in color from violet, and blue
with orange sashes, to unrelieved black and black trimmed with
red; but I cannot remember which nationality wears
which.
I am not sure but
one sees as many priests in Rome now as in the times when they
ruled it; and I am no such Protestant that I will pretend I do
not like a monsignore when I meet him, either in the street or at
afternoon tea, as one sometimes may. I have no grudge against
priests of any rank; but I did not seek to see them at the
functions, as I used in the old days to do. Shall I say that I
now rather tolerated than welcomed myself there through the
hospitality which so freely opens the churches of the Church to
all comers of whatever creed? What right had I, a heretic and
recusant, to come staring and standing round where the faithful
were kneeling and praying? If we could conceive of our
fast-locked conventicles being thrown as freely open, could we
conceive of Catholics wandering up and down their naves and
aisles while the hymning or preaching went on? After being so
high-minded in the matter, shall I confess that I was a good deal
kept out of the churches by the cold in them? It was a sort of
stored cold, much greater than that outside, though there was
something warming
126
THE MOSAICS UNDER THE
CAPUCHIN CHURCH
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to the fancy, at
least, in the smoke and smell of the incense.
Even with the Church
of the Capuchins, which we lived opposite, I was dilatory, though
in my mediaeval days it had been one of the first places to which
I hurried. In those days everybody said you must be sure and go
to the Capuchins', because Guide's "St. Michael and the Enemy"
was there, and still more because the wonderful bone mosaics in
the cemetery under the church were not on any account to be
missed. I suspect that in both these matters I had then a very
crude taste, but it was not from my greater refinement that I now
let the Capuchin church go on long un-revisited. It was, for one
thing, too instantly and constantly accessible across the street
there; and it is well known human nature is such that it will not
seek the line of the least resistance as long as it can help.
Besides, I could hardly believe that it was really the Capuchin
church which I had once so hastened to see, and I neglected it
almost two months, contenting myself with the display of those
hand-bills on the convent walls, spreading largely and glaringly
incongruous over it. When I did go I found the Guido ridiculous,
of course, in the painter's imagination of the archangel as a
sort of dancing figure in a tableau vivant, and yet of a
sublime authority in the execution. To be more honest, I had
little feeling about it and less knowledge.
It was not so cold
in the church as I had expected; and in the succession of side
chapels, beginning with the St. Michael's and opening into one
another, we found a kind of domesticity close upon cosiness,
which we were enjoying for its own sake, when we were aware of a
pale, gentle young girl who seemed to be alone there. She asked,
in our unmistakable native accents, if we were going to see the
Capuchin mosaics in their
127
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
place below; and one
of us said, promptly, No, indeed; but relented at the shadow of
disappointment that came over the girl's face, and asked, Was she
going? The girl said, Oh, she guessed she could see them some
other time; and then she who had spoken ordered him who had not
spoken to go with her. I do not know what question of propriety
engaged them with reference to her going alone with the handsome
young monk waiting to accompany her; but he was certainly too
handsome for a monk of any age. We followed him, however, and I
had my usual nausea on viewing the decoration of the ceilings and
walls of the place below; it always makes me sick to go into that
place; between realizing that I am of the same make as the
brothers composing those mosaics, and trying to imagine what the
intricate patterns will do at the Resurrection Day, I cannot
command myself. Neither am I supported by the sight of some
skeletons, the raw material of that grewsome artistry, deposited
whole in their coffins in the niches next the ground, though
their skulls smile so reassuringly from their cowls; their
cheeriness cannot make me like them. But my companion seemed to
be merely interested; and I fancied her deciding that it all
quite came up to her expectations, while I translated for her
from the monk that the dead used to be left in the hallowed earth
from Jerusalem covering the ground before they were taken up and
decoratively employed, but that since the Italian occupation of
Rome the art had fallen into abeyance. She said nothing, but when
we came out she stood a moment on the pavement beside our cab and
confessed herself a New England girl, from an inland town, who
was travelling with relatives. She had been sick, and she had
come alone, as soon as she could get out, to see the wonders of
the Capuchin church, because she had
128
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
heard so much of
them. We said we hoped she had been pleased, and she said, "Oh
yes, indeed," and then she said, "Well, good-bye," and gently
tilted away, leaving us glad that there could still be in an old,
spoiled world such sweetness and innocence and easily gratified
love of the beautiful.
Taking Rome so
easily, so provisionally, while waiting the eventualities of the
colds which mild climates are sure to give their frequenters from
the winterlands, I became aware of a latent anxiety respecting
St. Peter's. I did not feel that the church would really get away
without our meeting, but I felt that it was somehow culpably
hazardous in me to be taking chances with it. As a family, we
might never collectively visit it, and, in fact, we never did;
but one day I drove boldly (if secretly) off alone and renewed my
acquaintance with this contemporary of mine; for, if you have
been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you find that you are
coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and the imperial
Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at least,
to that of Pius IX. St. Peter's will not be, by any means,
your oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long
standing that you may not wish to use it with all the frankness
which its faults invite. If you say, when you drive into its
piazza between the sublime colonnades which stretch forth their
mighty embrace as if to take the whole world to the church's
heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's, you will not be
wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there where the
temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit
was sober and already waning, with a breeze in which the
fountains streamed flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the
population of statues
129
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
above the colonnades
defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable all that
I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we could
have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth,
but may very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply
stamped in my remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding
myself in an environment far more familiar than any other I could
think of at the time. It was measurably the same within the
church, but it was not quite the same in the reserves I was
obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged to take in my rapture.
The fact is, that unless you delight in a hugeness whose bareness
no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal, you do not find
the interior of St. Peter's adequate to the exterior. In the mere
article of hugeness, even, it fails through the interposition of
the baldachin midway of the vast nave, and each detail seems to
fail of the office of beauty more lamentably than
another.
I had known, I had
never forgotten, that St. Peter's was very, very baroque, but I
had not known, I had not remembered how baroque it was. It is not
so badly baroque as the Church of the Jesuits either in Rome or
in Venice, or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is
badly baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture
as in the sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and
popes it could not be more baroque; they swagger in their niches
or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the
most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must
generously grieve. It is not conceivably the taste of the church
or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world, now withered
and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil in
art
130
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
from its evil life.
The saints and the popes are, assthetically, lamentable enough;
but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are mostly the
sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are inexpressible--some
of these creatures ought really to be put out of the place; but I
suppose their friends would say they ought to be left as typical
of the period. In the case of that merciless miscreant, Queen
Christina of Sweden, who has her monument in St. Peter's, there
would be people to say she must have her monument in some place;
but, all the same, remembering Monaldeschi--how he was stabbed to
death by her command, the kinder assassins staying their hands
from time to time, while his confessor went vainly to implore her
pardon--it is shocking to find her tomb in the prime church in
Christendom. At first it offends one to see certain pontiffs with
mustaches and imperials and goatees; but, if one reflects that so
they wore them in life, one perceives right in it; only when one
comes to earlier or later popes, bearded in medieval majority or
shaven in the decent modern fashion, one can endure those others
only as part of the prevailing baroque of the church. Canova was
not so Greek or even so classic as one used to think him, but one
hardly has a moment of repose in St. Peter's till one comes to a
monument by him and rests in its quiet. It is tame, it is even
weak, if you like; but compared with the frantic agglomeration of
gilt clouds and sunbursts, and marble and bronze figures in the
high-altar, it is heavenly serene and lovely.
There were not many
people in St. Peter's that afternoon, so that I could give
undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement at
one point and grinding the marble smooth with a slow, secular
movement, as if he were part of its age-Ions: waste and
re-
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
pair. Another day,
the last day I came, there were companies of the personally
conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the
lectures in several languages, which no more stirred the immense
tranquillity than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy
of the temple: you were vaguely sensible of the one and of the
other like things heard and seen in a drowse. It was a pleasant
vagueness in which all angularities of feeling were lost, and you
were disposed to a tolerance of the things that had hurt or
offended you before. As a contemporary of the edifice, throughout
its growth, you could account for them more and more as of their
periods. Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came,
however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in
your presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a
connoisseur much or little instructed. If you had been there,
say, as a worshipper, would you have been afflicted by the
incongruities of the sculptures or by the whole baroque keeping?
Possibly this consideration made you go away much modester than
you came. "After all," you may have said, "it is not a gallery;
it is not a museum. It is a house of prayer," and you emerged,
let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the
beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.
VII CHANCES IN
CHURCHES
If any one were to
ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I should
temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was
none. Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the
instinct
132
SANTA MARIA SOPRA
MINERVA
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of imperial Rome for
ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct
collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in
the innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other. This
position will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I
may be driven in, especially by travellers who have seen the
churches I did not see. I took my chances, they theirs; for
nobody can singly see all the churches in Rome; that would need a
syndicate.
If imperial Rome was
beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to imagine the
things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be
unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the
beauty of its religious aspiration--that is, if it was the Goths
who invented Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was.
Anyway, there is said to be but one Gothic church in Rome, and
this I did not visit, perhaps because I felt that I must inure
myself to the prevalent baroque, or perhaps from mere perversity.
I can merely say in self-defence that, on the outside, Santa
Maria sopra Minerva no more promised an inner beauty than Il
Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the power
of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches
sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in
scuplture, in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures
at points in the roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at
others. Marvels of riches are lavished upon chapels and altars,
which again are so burdened with bronze gilded or silver plated,
and precious stones wrought and unwrought, that the soul, or if
not the soul the taste, shrinks dismayed from them. Execution in
default of inspiration has had its way to the last excess; there
is nothing that it has not done to show what it can do; and all
that it has done is a
133
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
triumph of misguided
skill and power. But it would be a mistake for the spectator to
imagine that anything has been done from the spirit in which he
receives it; everything is the expression of devoted faith in the
forms that the art of the time offered.
In the monstrous
marble tableau, say, of "Religion Triumphing Over Heresy," he may
be very sure that the artist was not winking an ironical eye
where he made Faith spurning Schism with her foot look very much
like a lady of imperfect breeding who has lost her temper; he was
most devoutly in earnest, or at least those were so, both cleric
and laic, for whom he wrought his prodigy. We others, pagans or
Protestants, had better understand that the children of the
Church, and especially the poor children, were serious through
all the shows that seem to us preposterous; they had not
renounced something for nothing; if they bowed that very fallible
thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for their reward and
could gladly accept whatever symbol of it was offered
them.
No matter how
baroque any church was, it could express something of this
sincerity, and in their way the worshippers seemed always simply
at home in it. In San Lorenzo in Lucina, where I went to see the
truly sublime "Crucifixion" by Guido (there is also a bar of St.
Lawrence's gridiron to be seen, but I did not know it at the
time) I liked the unconsciousness of the girl kneeling before the
high altar and provisionally gossiping with the young sacristan
before she began her devotions. She gave her mind to them when he
asked me if I wished to see the Guido, for I could see her lips
moving while she shared my veneration of that most affecting
masterpiece; the more genuinely affecting because it expresses
the
134
CHURCH OP ARA
COELI
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
rapture and not the
anguish of the Passion. I have no doubt she was grateful when the
sacristan proposed my having the electric light turned on it, and
when, though that I knew it would cost me something more, I
assented.
They have the
electric light now in all the holy places, and notably in the
dungeon where St. Peter was imprisoned, and where the custodian
was so proud of it, as the lastest improvement, and as far more
satisfactory than candles. The shrine of the miraculous Bambino
in the Church of Ara Coeli is also lighted by electricity, which
spares no detail of the child's apparel and appearance. To other
eyes than those of faith it has the effect of a life-size but not
life-like doll, piously bedizened and jewelled over, but rather
ill-humored looking, or, if not that, proud looking or severe
looking. To the eyes in which its sickbed visits have dried the
tears it must wear an aspect of heavenly pity and beauty; and I
am very willing to believe that these are the eyes which see it
aright. As it was, and taking it literally, it seemed far less
mechanical and unfeeling than the monk who pulled it out and
pushed it back on its wheeled platform. But he must get tired of
showing it to the unbelievers who come out of curiosity, and very
likely I should, if I were in his place, as nonchalantly wipe
across the glass front of the shrine the card with the Bambino's
legend printed in various languages on it, which you may then buy
with the blessing from the glass for whatever you choose to
give.
Where art and
antiquity are so abundant as in Rome, the Bambino incident is
probably what the reader, when he has visited the Church of Ara
Coeli will chiefly remember, and I will not pretend to be any
better than the reader, though I will say that I have
135
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
a persistent sense
of something important about the roof; and there are the
Pinturrichio frescos, which an old Sienese like me must have the
taste for. The not easily praiseful Hare says it is "one of the
most interesting of Christian churches," and without allowing
that there are any other sorts of churches I may allow that this
is one of the least unlovely in Rome. Trinita de' Monti seemed to
be another, but only, I dare say, subjectively, because of the
exquisite pleasure we had one afternoon in March when we went
into it for the nuns' singing of the Benediction. That, we had
been told, was something which no one coming to Rome should miss;
and we were so anxious not to miss it that on our way to the
Pincian Hill we stopped at the foot of the church-steps, and
reassured ourselves of the hour through the kindness of an
English-speaking nurse-maid at the bottom and of a gentle nun at
the top, who both told us the hour would be exactly
five.
When we came back at
that time and bought our way into the church by rightful payment
to the two blind beggars who guarded its doors, we found it
packed with people who bad been more literally punctual. They
were of all nations, but a large part were Anglo-Americans, and a
young girl of this race rose and gave her seat, with a sweet
insistence that would not be denied, to that one of us who
deserved it most. He who was left leaning against the soft side
of a pillar hesitated whether to make some young priests
spreading over undue space on one of the benches push up, and he
enjoyed a rich moment of self-satisfaction in his forbearance. He
was there, to be sure, an alien and a heretic, out of mere
curiosity, and they were there probably so rapt in their devout
attention that they did not notice their errant step-brother, and
so did not think
136
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to offer him the
hospitality of their mother church's house. But he would not make
any such allowance; he condemned them with the unsparing severity
of the strap-hanger in a trolley-car, who blushes with shame for
the serried rows of men sitting behind their newspapers. When he
was at his wit's end to find excuse for them a priest on another
bench made room, and he sank down glad to forgive and forget; but
now he would not have yielded his place to any other Protesant in
Christendom.
In the collective
curiosity he lost the sense of self-reproach for his own, and
eagerly bent his gaze on the group of officiating priests at the
high altar beyond the grille of the choir. The altar was all a
blaze of electric lights, and there was a novel effect in their
composition in the crosses resting diagonally on either side of
it. Next the grille showed the feathers and fashions of the
mothers and sisters of the young girls from the school of the
adjoining Convent of the Sacred Heart, and midway between these
visitors, like a flock of white birds stooping on some heavenly
plain, the white veils of the girls stretched in lovely levels to
left and right. Nothing could have attuned the spirit for the
surprise awaiting it like this angelic sight; and when the voices
of the nuns fell suddenly from the organ gallery, behind all the
people, like the singing of the morning stars molten in one
adoring music and falling from the zenith down, whatever moments
of innocent joy life might have had it could have had none
surpassing that.
But when we came out
the self-mockery with which life is apt to recover itself from
any exaltation began. In returning from the Pincio the only cab
we had been able to get was the last left of the very worst cabs
in Rome, and we had bidden the driver wait for us
137
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
at the church-steps,
not without some hope that he would play us false. But there he
was, true to his word, with such disciplined fidelity as that of
the Roman sentinels who used to die at their posts; and we
mounted to ours with the muted prayer that we, at least, might
reach home alive. This did not seem probable when the driver
whipped up his horse. It appeared to have aged and sickened while
we were in the church, though we had thought it looked as bad as
could be before, and it lurched alarmingly from side to side,
recovering itself with a plunge of its heavy head away from the
side in which its body was sinking. The driver swayed on his box,
having fallen equally decrepit in spite of the restoratives he
seemed to have applied for his years and infirmities. His clothes
had put on some such effect of extreme decay as those of Rip Van
Winkle in the third act; there was danger that he would fall on
top of his falling horse, and that their raiment would mingle in
one scandalous ruin. Via Sistina had never been so full of people
before; never before had it been so long to that point where we
were to turn out of it into the friendly obscurity of the little
cross street which would bring us to our hotel. We could not
consent to arrive in that form; we made the driver stop, and we
got out and began overpaying him to release us. But the more
generously we overpaid him the more nobly he insisted upon
serving us to our door. At last, by such a lavish expenditure as
ought richly to provide for the few remaining years of himself
and his horse, we prevailed with him to let us go, and reached
our hotel glad, almost proud, to arrive on foot.
Hare tells me, now
it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by
keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the
Via Sistina.
138
CHURCH OF SANTA
MAGGIOHE
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
I reached that
church by quite another way after many postponements; for I
thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But
really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the exceptional
dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of its
most noble nave is thickly plated with the first gold mined in
South America, which Ferdinand and Isabella gave that least
estimable of the popes, Alexander VI. Now I know that it is far
richer than any gold could make it in the treasures of history
and legend, which fairly encrust it in every part. Doubtless some
portion of this wealth my fellow-sightseers were striving to
store up out of the guide-books which they bore in their hands
and from which they strained their eyes to the memorable points
as they slowly paced through the temple. Some were reading one to
another in bated voices, and I thought them ridiculous; but
perhaps they were wise, and rather he was ridiculous who marched
by them and contented himself with a general sense of the
grandeur, the splendor. More than any other church except that of
San Paolo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore imparts this sense,
for, as I have already pretended, St. Peter's fails of it.
Without as well as within the church is spacious and impressive
from its spaciousness; but it seems more densely fringed than
most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic pins. On going
in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out you do
not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in
spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the
driver while he made a last, a humorous appeal. "Skiddoo?" he
asked in my native speech. "Yes," I sullenly replied, "skiddoo!"
But it is now one of the regrets which I shall always feel for my
wasted opportunities in Rome that I did not buy all
139
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
his post-cards.
Patient gayety like his merited as much.
As it was, I drove
callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San Pietro in
Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for
Michelangelo's Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in
the minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to
be quite honest with one's self as to the why and wherefore of
one's earlier veneration, one might not get a very distinct or
convincing reply. Do sculptors and painters suffer periods of
slight as authors do? Are Raphael and Michelangelo only
provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and by Donatello and Mino da
Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting limbo? I find I have
said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and unimpressive,
and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two
Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you
enter the church. Is the true, then, better than the ideal, or is
it only my grovelling spirit which prefers it? What I scarcely
venture to say is that those two men evidently lived and still
live, and that Michelangelo's prophet never lived; I scarcely
venture, because I remember with tenderness how certain clear and
sweet spirits used to bow their reason before the Moses as before
a dogma of art which must be implicitly accepted. Do they still
do so, those clear and sweet spirits?
The archaeologist
who was driving my cab that morning had pointed out to me on the
way to this church the tower on which Nero stood fiddling while
Rome was burning. It is a strong, square, mediaeval structure
which will serve the purpose of legend yet many centuries, if
progress does not pull it down; but the fiddle no longer exists,
apparently, and Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted
into my cab, my driver
140
MICHELANGELO'S "MOSES"
IN SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
showed me with his
whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very beautiful
against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said was
the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know
why it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers;
but it was a great satisfaction to have it identified. Very
possibly I had seen both of these memorable towers in my former
Roman sojourn, but I did not remember them, whereas I renewed my
old impressions of San Paolo fuori le Mura in almost every
detail.
That is the most
majestic church in Rome, I think, and I suppose it is, for a cold
splendor, unequalled anywhere. Somehow, from its form and from
the great propriety of its decoration, it far surpasses St.
Peter's. The antic touch of the baroque is scarcely present in
it, for, being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the
fourth-century basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of
sixteenth-century excess. It would be a very bold or a very young
connoisseur who should venture to appraise its merits beyond this
negative valuation; and timid age can affirm no more than that it
came away with its sensibilities unwounded. Tradition and history
combine with the stately architecture, which reverently includes
every possible relic of the original fabric, to render the
immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of
construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with
the body of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the
actual spectacle of that unstinted outlay of riches which has
filled Rome with its multitudes of pious monuments--monuments
mainly ugly, but potent with the imagination even in their
ugliness through the piety of their origin. Where did all that
riches come from?
Out of what
unfathomable opulence, out of what
141
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
pitiable penury, out
of what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of
wealth that released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted
hands of work that spared it from their need. The giving
continues in this latest Christian age as in the earliest, and
Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which its thinkers think no
longer believes.
From San Paolo we
were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our literary
sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and
bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden
slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard
where Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery
held by some shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome
which was largely so jerry-built, and which I would not leave out
of the landscape if I could, for I think their shabbi-ness rather
heightens your sense of the peaceful loveliness to which you come
under the cypresses, among the damp aisles, so thickly studded
with the stones recording the death in exile of the English
strangers lying there far from home. In a faulty perspective of
memory, I had always seen the graves of the two poets side by
side; but the heart of Shelley rests in a prouder part of the
cemetery, where the paths between the finer tombs are carefully
kept; and the dust of Keats lies in an old, plain, almost
neglected corner, well off beyond a dividing trench. It seems an
ungracious chance which has so parted the two poets so
inextricably united in their fame; it is as if here, too, the
world would have its way; but, of course, it is only at the worst
an ungracious chance. Keats, at least, has the companionship of
the painter Severn, the friend on whose "fond breast his parting
soul relied," and who has here followed him into the
dust.
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
A few withered
daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the poet, and
one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the heartbreaking
epitaph which one could not spell for tears.
VIII A FEW
VILLAS
It was but a few
minutes' walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana, and, if you
took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you knew
it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in
Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference
in the easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a
difference began in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory
stretch toward the Casino, where in the simple young times which
are now the old we had hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and
other reading in our heads, to see Titian's Sacred and Profane
Love (it has got another name now) and Canova's Pauline
Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, and all the rest
of the precious gallery. However, if I had any purpose of
visiting the Casino now, I put it aside, and contented myself
with the gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which
might have had less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in
late January as in early June. I did not care so much for a
mounted corporal who was jumping his horse over a two-foot
barrier in the circular path rounding between the Villa Borghese
and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers hung in rows on the
rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have got a place to
see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the fathers
and mothers who had
143
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
brought their
children, and young lovers who had brought each other for the
afternoon's outing, just as the people in Central Park do, and,
no doubt, just as any Sunday crowd must do in the planet Mars, if
the inhabitants are human. There was a vacherie nearby
where not many persons were drinking milk or even coffee; it is
never the notion of the Italians that amusement can be had only
through the purchase of refreshments.
I did not get as far
as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman stay, though we
came again and again to the park (as we should call it, rather
than villa), sometimes to walk, sometimes to drive, and always to
rejoice in its loveliness. It was not now a very guarded, if once
a very studied, loveliness; not quite neglect, but a
forgottenness to which it took kindly, had fallen upon it; the
drives seemed largely left to take care of themselves, the walks
were such as the frequenters chose to make over the grass or
through the woods; the buildings--the aviary, the conservatory,
the dairy, the stables--which formed part of the old pleasance,
stood about, as if in an absent-minded indifference to their
various roles. The weather had grown a little more wintry, or, at
least, autumnal, as the season advanced toward spring, and one
day at the end of February, when we were passing a woody hollow,
the fallen leaves stirred crisply with a sound like that of late
October at home. We had been at some pains and expense to put
home four thousand miles away, but this sound was the sweetest
and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it strangely attuned our
spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities, the broken
arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region glutted
with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had
fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial
144
THE LITTLE STADIUM WITH
ITS GRADINES
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
dilapidation. But
there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little
stadium, with its gra-dines around the sides, and the game of
tennis which some young girls were playing in it. Neither was
there anything ungenuine in the rapture of the boy whom we saw
racing through the dead leaves of that woody hollow in chase of
the wild fancies that fly before boyhood; and I hope that the
charm of the plinths and statues in the careless grounds behind
the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any rate, these
things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now thickly
starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being
original.
When we came last
the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones, which seem a
greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color, like
cheap calico. If it were not for their pretty name I do not see
how people could like them; yet the children that day were
pouncing upon them and pulling them by handfuls; for the Villa
Borghese is now state property and is free to the children of the
people in a measure quite beyond Central Park. They can
apparently pull anything they want, except mushrooms; there are
signs advising people that the state draws the line at
mushrooms.
It was once more a
Sunday, and it was a free day in the Casino. The trodden earth
sent up its homely, kindly smell from many feet on their way to
the galleries, which we found full of people looking greater
intelligence than the frequenters of such places commonly betray.
They might have been such more cultivated sight-seers as could
not afford to come on the paydays, and, if they had not crowded
the room so, one might have been glad as well as proud to be of
their number. They did not really keep one from older
145
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
friends, from the
statues and the pictures which were as familiarly there in 1908
as in 1864. In a world of vicissitudes such things do not change;
the Sacred and Profane Love of Titian, though it had changed its
name, had not changed its nature, and was as divinely serene, as
richly beautiful as before. The Veroneses still glowed from the
walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all the other
pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting one
with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much,
one might, without suspecting it, have always had some little
sense of art. But it was probably only a literary sense of art,
such as moves the observer when he finds himself again in the
presence of Canova's Pauline Borghese. That is there, on the
terms which were those no less of her character than of her time,
in the lasting enjoyment of a publicity which her husband denied
it in his lifetime; but it had no more to say now than it had so
many, many years ago. As, a piece of personal history it is
amusing enough, and as a sermon in stone it preaches whatever
moral you choose to read into it. But as the masterpiece of the
sculptor it testifies to an ideal of his art for which the world
has reason to be grateful. Criticism does not now put Canova on
the height where we once looked up to him; but criticism is a
fickle thing, especially in its final judgments; and one cannot
remember the behavior of the Virtues in some of the baroque
churches without paying homage to the portrait of a lady who,
whatever she was, was not a Virtue, but who yet helped the
sculptor to realize in her statue a Venus of exceptional
propriety. Tame, yes, we may now safely declare Canova to have
been, but sane we must allow; and we must never forget that he
has been the inspiration in modern sculpture of the eternal Greek
truth
146
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of repose from which
the art had so wildly wandered, He, more than any other, stayed
it in the mad career on which Michelangelo, however remotely, had
started it; and we owe it to him that the best marbles now no
longer strut or swagger or bully.
It was by one of
those accidents which are the best fortunes of travel that I
visited the Villa Papa Giulio, when I thought I was merely going
to the Piazza del Popolo, to which one cannot go too often. A
chance look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the
villa was just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I
should be glad to have practised on me every February 17th of my
life. If the villa was farther off than I thought, the way to it
lay for a while through a tramwayed suburban street delightfully
encumbered with wide-horned oxen drawing heavy wagon-loads of
grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with vegetables, and children
and hens and dogs playing their several parts in a perspective
through which one would like to continue indefinitely. But after
awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and
irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you
could ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly
wonders at your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep
you a good five minutes while he parleys with another custodian
before he can bring himself to sell you a ticket and let you into
the beautiful, old, orange-gray cloistered court, where there is
a young architect with the T-square of his calling sketching some
point of it, and a gardener gently hacking off from the parent
stems such palm-leaves as have survived their usefulness. Beyond
is the famous foun-tained court, and a classic temple to the
right, and other structures responsive to the impulses of the
good Pope Julius III., who was never tired of adding to this
pleas-
147
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ure palace of his.
It was his favorite resort, with all his court, from the Vatican,
and his favorite amusement in it was the somewhat academic
diversion of proverbs, which Ranke says sometimes "mingled
blushes with the smiles of his guests."
Lest the reader
should think I have gone direct to Ranke for this knowledge, I
will own that I got it at second-hand out of Hare's Walks in
Rome, where he tells us also that the pope used to come to
his villa every day by water, and that "the richly decorated
barge, filled with venerable ecclesiastics, gliding through the
osier-fringed banks of the Tiber, . . . would make a fine subject
for a picture." No doubt, and if I owned such a picture I would
lose no time in public-spiritedly bestowing it on the first needy
gallery. Our author is, as usual, terribly severe on the Italian
government for some wrong done the villa, I could not well make
out what. But it seems to involve the present disposition of the
Etruscan antiquities in the upper rooms of the casino, where
these, the most precious witnesses of that rather inarticulate
civilization, must in any arrangement exhaust the most instructed
interest. Just when the amateur archaeologist, however, is
sinking under his learning, the custodian opens a window and lets
him look out on a beautiful hill beyond certain gardens, where a
bird is singing angelically. I suppose it is the same bird which
sings all through these papers, and I am sorry I do not know its
name. But we will call it a blackcap: blackcap has a sweet, saucy
sound like its own note, and is the pretty translation of
caponero, a name which the bird might gladly know itself
by.
Villa Papa Giulio is
but a little place compared with something on the scale of the
Villa Pamfili Doria though from its casino it has a charm far
be-
148
CASINO OF THE VILLA
DORIA AND GARDENS
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
yond that. What it
may once have been as to grounds and gardens there is little to
show now, and the Pam-fili Doria itself had not much to show in
gardens, though it had grounds, and to spare. It is, in fact, a
large park, though whether larger than the Villa Borghese I
cannot say. But it has not been taken by the state, and it is so
far off on its hills that it is safe from the overrunning of city
feet. It is safe even from city wheels, unless they are those of
livery carriages, for numbered cabs are not suffered in its proud
precincts. You partake of this pride when you come in your
rubber-tired remise, and have the consolation of being
part of the beautiful exclusiveness. It costs you fifteen francs,
but one must suffer for being patrician, even for a single
afternoon. Outside we had the satisfaction of seeing innumerable
numbered cabs drawn up, and within the villa gates of meeting or
passing the plebeians who had come in them, and were now walking
while we were smoothly rolling in our victoria. The day was
everything we could ask, very warm and bright below the
Janiculum, on which we had mounted, and here on the summit
delicious with cool currents of air. There had been beggars, on
the way up, at every point where our horses must be walked, and
we had paid our way handsomely, so that when we went back they
bowed without asking again; this is a convention at Rome which no
self-respecting beggar will violate; they all touch their hats in
recognition of it.
The beautiful
prospect from a certain curve of the drive after yon have passed
the formal sunken garden, at which you pause, is the greatest
beauty of the Villa Pamfili Doria. You stop to look at it by the
impulse of your coachman, and then you keep on driving round, in
the long ellipse which the road de-
149
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
scribes, through
grassy and woody slopes and levels, watered by a pleasant stream,
and through long aisles of pine and ilex. We thought twice round
was enough, and told the driver so, to his evident surprise and
to our own regret, so far as the long aisle of ilex was
concerned, for I do not suppose there is a more perfect thing of
its kind in the world. The shade under the thick sun-proof
roofing of horizontal boughs was practically as old as night, and
on our second passage of its dim length it had some Capuchin
monks walking down it, who formed the fittest possible human
interest in the perspective. Off on the grass at one side some
Ursuline nuns were sitting with their pupils, laughing and
talking, and one nun was playing ball with the smaller girls, and
mingling with their shouts her own gay, innocent cries of joy as
she romped among them. Nothing could have been prettier, sweeter,
or better suited to the place; all was very simple, and
apparently the whole place was hospitably free to the poor women
who ranged over it, digging chiccory for salad out of the
meadows. The daisies were thick as white clover, and the harsh
purple of the anemones showed everywhere.
The casino is
plainer than the casino of the Villa Borghese, and is not public
like that; its sculptures have been taken to the Doria palace in
the city; and there is no longer any excuse for curiosity even to
try penetrating it. It stands on the left of the road by which
you leave the villa, and to the right on the grassy incline in
full view of the casino was something that puzzled us at first.
It did not seem probable that the gigantic capital letters grown
in box should be spelling the English name Mary, but it proved
that they were, and later it proved that this was the name of the
noble English lady whom the late Prince Pam-
150
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
fill Doria had
married. Whether they marked her grave or merely commemorated
her, it was easy to impute a pathos to the fancy of having them
there, which it might not have been so easy to verify. You cannot
attempt to pass over any ground in Rome without danger of sinking
into historical depths from which it will be hard to extricate
yourself, and it is best to heed one's steps and keep them to the
day's activities. But one could not well visit the Villa Pamfili
Doria without at least wishing to remember that in 1849 Garibaldi
held it for weeks against the whole French army, in his defence
of republican Rome. A votive temple within the villa grounds
commemorates the invaders who fell in this struggle; on a
neighboring height the Italian leader triumphs in the monument
his adoring country has raised to him.
If we are to believe
the censorious Hare, the love of the hero's countrymen went
rather far when the Roman municipality, to please him, tried to
change the course of the Tiber in conformity with a scheme of
his, and so spoiled the beauty of the Farnesina garden Avithout
effecting a too-difficult piece of engineering. The less
passionate Murray says merely that "a large slice of this garden
was cut off to widen the river for the Tiber embankment," and let
us hope that it was no worse. I suppose we must have seen the
villa in its glory when we went, in 1864, to see the Raphael
frescos in the casino there, but in the touching melancholy of
the wasted and neglected grounds we easily accepted the present
as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the weed-grown,
green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden that
remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying
plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been;
and it was of such a charm that we were grate-
151
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
fully content with
it. The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect
repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it
belongs also to everybody else, wounds one's vulgar pride and
inspires envious doubts of the owner's rightful possession. But
when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and
disintegration have begun their work of atonement and
exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning
magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor,
to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this
which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the
present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without
a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.
There was much to
please a somewhat peculiar taste in our visit to the Farnesina.
The gateman, being an Italian official, had not been at the gate
when we arrived, but came running and smiling from his gossip
with the door-keeper of the casino, and this was a good deal in
itself; but the door-keeper, amiably obese, was better still in
her acceptance of the joke with which the hand-mirror for the
easier study of the roof frescos was accepted. "It is more
convenient," she suggested, and at the counter-suggestion, "Yes,
especially for people with short necks," she shook with
gelatinous laughter, and burst into the generous cry, "Oh, how
delightful!" Perhaps this was because she, too, had experienced
the advantage of perusing the frescos in the hand-mirror's
reversal. At any rate, she would not be satisfied till she had
returned a Roland for that easy Oliver. Her chance came in
showing a Rubens in one of the rooms, with the master's usual
assortment of billowy beauties, when she could say--and she ought
to have known--that they had eaten
152
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
too much macaroni.
It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in
Rome.
Do I linger in this
study of simple character because I feel myself unequal to the
ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in that
pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but
I do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the
coloring of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had;
and that what was never meant to be matter of conscious
perception, but only of the vague sense which it is the office of
decoration to impart, had grown less pleasing with the passage of
time. There in the first hall was the story of Cupid and Psyche
in the literal illustration of Apuleius, and there in another
hall was Galatea on her shell with her Nymphs and Tritons and
Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and Phaeton
and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of
my nature, I should own the subjects fallen sillv through the old
age of an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill
with which they are rendered. At the same time, I will say in
self-defence that, if I had a very long summer in which to keep
coming and dwelling long hours in the company of these frescos, I
think I might live back into the spirit which invented the
fables, and enjoy even more the amusing taste that was never
tired of their repetition. Masterly conception and incomparable
execution are there in histories which are the dreams of worlds
almost as extinct as the dead planets whose last rays still reach
us and in whose death-glimmer we can fancy, if we will, a unity
of life with our own not impossible nor improbable. But more than
some such appeal the Raphaels and the Giulio Romanos of the
Farnesina hardly make to the eye untrained in the art
153
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
which created them,
or unversed in the technique by which they will live till the
last line moulders and the last tint fades.
We came out and
stood a long time looking up in the pale afternoon light at the
beautiful face of the tenderly aging but not yet decrepit casino.
It was utterly charming, and it prompted many vagaries which I
might easily have mistaken for ideas. This is perhaps the best of
such experiences, and, after you have been with famous works of
art and have got them well over and done with, it is natural and
it is not unjust that you should wish to make them some return,
if not in kind, then in quantity. You will try to believe that
you have thought about them, and you should not too strictly
inquire as to the fact. It is some such forbearance that accounts
for a good deal of the appreciation and even the criticism of
works of art.
IX DRAMATIC
INCIDENTS
If the joke of the
door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in any sense as
some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being voluntary.
In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember hearing
in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three
months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I
had always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh
and to make laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the
gondoliers were full of jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an
infection of humor seemed to spread from them to all the lower
classes, who were as ready to joke as the
154
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
lower classes of
Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of them. The joking
hahit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena, and at
Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with
bonhomie. But the Romans were preferably serious, at least
with the average American, though, if I had tried them in their
English instead of my Italian, it might have been different. At
times I thought, they felt the weight of being Romans, as it had
descended to them from antiquity, and that the strain of
supporting it had sobered them. In any case, though there was
shouting by night, and some singing of not at all the Neapolitan
quality and still less the Neapolitan quantity, there was no
laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.
Yet one day there
was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which would have
made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman dog. It
was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly man
and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the
tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the
elder seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot
club and the younger to be making wild dashes at him and then
escaping to the skirts of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who
surrounded them. Now and then a cabman drove out of the mellay
very excitedly, and then turned and drove excitedly back into the
thick of it. All the while the dismounted cabmen pressed about
the combatants with their hands on one another's backs and their
heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders. On the very
outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one of those
strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples, with
red-braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those
carabinieres--namely,
155
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
who are soldiers in
war and policemen in times of peace. Any spectator from a foreign
land would have thought it the business of such an officer of the
law to press in and stop the fighting; hut he did not so
interpret his duty. He gingerly touched the shoulders next him
with the tips of his fingers, and now and then lifted himself on
the tips of his toes to look if the fight had stopped of itself
or not.
At last the fat,
elderly man, whom his friends--and all the throng except that one
wicked youth seemed his friends--were caressing in untimely
embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from
them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to
the imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he
frankly put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him
into a cab, where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on
the seat, while the cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth
had vanished in unknown space; but the cara-biniere, attended by
a group of admirers, marched boldly up the middle of the street,
and the crowd, with whatever reluctance, persuaded itself to
disperse, though the cabmen, to the number of ten or twenty,
continued to drive around in concentric circles and irregular
ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray
remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those
who break it as in those who see it broken, and who dread
incurring the vengeance of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of
his family if he is convicted on their testimony. The quarrel had
gone on a full quarter of an hour, but the concierge of the hotel
in front of which it had raged professed to have known nothing of
it, having, he said, been in-doors all the time. A cabman whom we
eliminated from the hysterical company of his fellows and
persuaded to
156
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
drive us away to see
a church attempted to ignore the whole affair when asked about
it. With difficulty he could be made to recollect it, and then he
dismissed it as a trifle. "Oh," he said, "chiacchiere di
donnic-ciuole," which is something like "Clatter of little old
women," a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could believe
him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not
talk about it.
Later, still
interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the
public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman,
who owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break
through the crowd and arrest the fighters. "They had knives," he
explained, and it seemed a good reason for the cara-biniere's
forbearance, as far as it went; but I thought of the short work
the brute locust of an Irish policeman at home would have made of
the knives. My friend said he had himself gone to one of the
municipal police who was looking on at a pleasant remove and
said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill each other," and
the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of an antique
Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them
kill."
I could not approve
of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to me I had
little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our own
police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere
who left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral
suasion. It was better that the youth should escape, if he did,
without a vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to
blame than the other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in
the honorable manner I saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked
to. It was not dangerous, and the whole affair ended so. Besides,
as I learned, still longer afterward,
157
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
when it was quite
safe for a cabman from the same stand to speak, the combatants
were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna, who had come in
with their market-carts and had become heated with the bad
spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six
glasses of when they visit Rome. "What we call benzine," my
cabman explained. "We Romans," he added from a moral height,
"drink only a glass or two of wine, and we never carry
knives."
He may have been
right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and their
sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other
violent scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling
among our cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one
driver snatched me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad
feeling, if there was really any, quickly passed, and some other
day I fell to the cabman who had been wronged of me. I had not
always the fine sense of being booty which I had one day on
coming out of a church and blundering toward the wrong cab. Then
the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me from the
very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, "E roba mia!"
(He's my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have
chosen, but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen
of Rome. To be sure, they have not a rubber tire among them, and
their dress leaves much to be desired in professional uniformity.
Not one of them looks like a cabman, but many of them in
pict-uresqueness of hats and coats look like brigands. I think
they would each prefer to have a fur-lined overcoat, which the
Roman of any class likes to wear well into the spring; but they
mostly content themselves with an Astrakhan collar, more or less
mangy. For the rest, some of them will point out the objects of
interest
158
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
as you pass, and
they are proud to do so; they are not extortionate, and, if you
overpay them ever so little (which is quite worth while), they
will not stand upon a matter of lawful fare. A two-cent tip
contents them, one of four cents makes them your friends for
life; as for a five-cent tip, I do not know what it does, but I
advise the reader when he goes to Rome to try it and
see.
One fine thing is
that the cabmen are in great superabundance in Rome, and the
number of barrel-ribbed, ewe-necked, and broken-kneed horses is
in no greater proportion than in Paris. Still, the average is
large, though, if you will go to the stand, you may select any
horse you please without offence. It was a cheerful sight,
verging upon gayety, to see every morning the crowd of cabs at
our stand and to hear the drivers' talk, sometimes rising into
protest and mutual upbraiding. But one Thursday morning, the
brightest of the spring, a Sunday silence had fallen on the
place, and a Sabbath solitude deepened to the eye the mystery
that had first addressed itself to the ear. Then, suddenly, we
knew that we were in the presence of that Italian conception of a
general strike which interprets itself as a sciopero. It
is saying very little of that two days' strike to say that it was
far the most impressive experience of our Roman winter; in some
sort it was the most impressive experience of my life, for I
beheld in it a reduced and imperfect image of what labor could do
if it universally chose to do nothing. The dream of William
Morris was that a world which we know is pretty much wrong could
be put right by this simple process. The trouble has always been
to get all sorts of labor to join in the universal strike, but in
the Italian sciopero of four years ago the miracle was
wrought from one end of the peninsula to the other.
159
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
In the Roman strike
of last April a partial miracle of the same nature was
illustratively wrought, with the same alarming effect on the
imagination.
As with the national
strike, the inspiration of the Roman strike came from the
government's violent dealing with a popular manifestation which
only threatened to be mischievous. A stone-mason was killed by
falling from a scaffolding, and his funeral was attended by so
many hundreds, amounting to thousands, of workmen that the police
conceived, not quite unjustifiably, that it was to be made the
occasion of a demonstration, especially as the proposed route of
the procession lay through the Piazza di Venezia, under the
windows of the Austrian Embassy, Austria being always a red rag
to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating through the
reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at the
cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden
to pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the
Piazza Gesu, before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment
of troops to support them. Their wisdom in all this was very
questionable after what followed, for the mourners insisted on
their rights and would go no way but through the Piazza di
Venezia. When the dispute was at its height two wagons laden with
bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed upon them,
broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police. They
had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police
would stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in
their paroxysms of pain the sufferers began firing their
revolvers at the mourners. Four persons were killed, with the
usual proportion of innocent spectators. At night the labor
unions met, and the sciopero was proclaimed as an
expression of the popular indignation;
160
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
but the police had
been left with the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a
defeat I do not know, but a retired English officer, whom I had
no reason to think a radical, said to me that he thought it a
great mistake to have let the police oppose the people with
firearms. Soldiers should alone be used for such work; they alone
knew when to fire and when to stop, and they never acted without
orders. In fact, the troops supporting the police took no part in
the fray, as the workmen's press recognized with patriotic
rejoicing.
The next morning a
signal silence prevailed throughout the city, where not a wheel
stirred or the sound of a hoof broke the hush of the streets. We
had noted already that there were seven Sundays every week in
Rome, as was fit in the capital of the Christian religion, but
this Thursday was of an intenser Sabbath stillness than any first
day of the week that we had yet known. There was the clack of
passing feet in the street under our windows, but we looked out
upon a yawning void where the busy cabs had clustered, and the
cabmen had socially chaffed and quarrelled, and entreated the
stranger in the cabman's superstition that a stranger never knows
when he wants a cab. Now he could have walked all over Rome
without being once invited to drive. Except for here and there a
private carriage, or the coupe evidently of a doctor, the streets
were empty, and the tourists had to join the citizens in their
pedestrian exercise.
The shopkeepers had
been notified to close their places of business on the tacit
condition of having their windows broken for non-compliance, but
in the early forenoon they were still slowly and partially
putting up their shutters. You could get in through the darkened
doors up till noon; after that it was more and more difficult.
But it would be hard to say how
161
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
far and how deep the
sciopero went. In our hotel we knew of it only the second
day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there had been
no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss or
other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our
luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor facchino, or
porter, went to the meeting of the unions in the evening, being
an Italian. Otherwise the strike fell especially on the helpless
and guiltless foreigner, who might be, and very often was, in
sympathy with the strikers. He had to walk to the ruins, the
galleries, the gardens, the churches, if he wanted anything of
them; he could not get a carriage even from a stable.
Between the hotels
and the station the omnibus traffic was suspended. The railroads
being national, push-carts manned by the government employes
carried the baggage to and fro, but if one wanted to arrive or
depart one had to do it on foot. Tragical scenes presented
themselves in relation to this fact. In the afternoon, as I
walked up the street toward the great railroad station, I saw
coming down the middle of it a strange procession of ladies and
gentlemen of every age, gray-haired elders and children of tender
years, mixed with porters and push-carts, footing it into the
region of the fashionable hotels. They were all laden according
to their strength, and people who had never done a stroke of work
in their lives were actually carrying their own hand-bags, rugs,
and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.
It was terrible for
what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if ever that
poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its teeth,
or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked.
What would then become of us others, us ladies and
162
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
gentlemen who had
never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we
be forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in
the comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to
own distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we
be able to flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had
dependents because we had money, or should we realize that we had
always been dependents because of our having money?
These were the
hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the witness,
or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure of
unburdening himself upon the reader. Yet there was something
amusing in the situation; there was a joke--that rarest of all
things in Rome--latent in it, which one suspected only from the
amiable, the all-but-smiling behavior of the strikers. There was
not the slightest disorder during the two days that the strike
lasted. When it was called off at a meeting of the unions on
Saturday night, one of the seven Sundays of the Roman week dawned
upon an activity at the neighboring cab-stand no peacefuller and
not much gayer than the silence and solitude of the mornings
previous. As for the general effect in the city, you would hardly
have known that particular Sunday from those which had gone by
the names of Friday and Saturday. Throughout Italy there is now a
Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous Sabbaths
strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on
that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New
York, when the Family Entrances are religiously
locked.
The Italian state
has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to have
established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has
almost disestablished
163
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the holidays of the
Church, formerly of much more frequent occurrence. This secular
holiday, which every workman has a right to, he may neither give
nor sell to his master. He may not even loaf it away in the place
where he works, lest he should be clandestinely employed. He must
go out of the shop or house or factory or foundry, and spend his
ten hours where he cannot be suspected of employing them in
productive industry for hire. This law has been enacted in
accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in correction
of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the
old-fashioned festa as they once did. Whether the men like
the new holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to
say. Of course, they cannot all take it at once; they must take
it turn about, and they may not find their enforced leisure so
lively as the old voluntary saints' days, when their comrades
were resting, too. As for the masters, one of the employers of
labor, whom I found filling his man's place, would merely say:
"It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves to it." He
did not complain.
X
SEEING ROME AS ROMANS
SEE US
Shortly after our
settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be
seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the
notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the
many different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with
the different churches, and on the way to them I should make
friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would
have the charm
164
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of the unexpected;
no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or
obelisk, statue, "storied urn or animated bust" or mere tablet,
would be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I
should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast
of long after I had forgotten it.
I could not say what
suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have been coining by
chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and realizing
that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was
burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his
sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies,
as well as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the
thrill which the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded,
must impart as mere mystery, and I made haste to come again in
the knowledge of what it was that had moved me so. Naturally I
was not moved in the same measure a second time. It was not that
the environment was, to my mind, unworthy the martyr, though I
found the market at the foot of the statue given over, not to
flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such homely
fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above
all, onions. There was a placidity in the simple scene that
pleased me: I liked the quiet gossiping of the old market-women
over their baskets of vegetables; the confidential fashion in
which a gentle crone came to my elbow and begged of me in
undertone, as if she meant the matter to go no further, was even
nattering. But the solemnity of the face that looked down on the
scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to fasten a
wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of free
thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment
when the society
165
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
calling itself by
Giordano Bruno's name was making an effort for the suppression of
ecclesiastical instruction in the public schools; and on the
anniversary of his martyrdom his effigy had suffered this unmeant
hurt. In all the churches there had been printed appeals to
parents against the agnostic attack on the altar and the home,
and there had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to
express every social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed,
and an observer more anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to
accident might have interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over
Bruno's bronze lips as a new silencing of the heretic.
I certainly did not
construe it so, and, if my notion of serially visiting the
piazzas of Rome was not prompted by my chance glimpse of the
Campo di Fiori, it was certainly not relinquished because of any
mischance in my meditated vision of it. I had merely reflected
that I could not hope to carry out my scheme without greater
expense both in time and money than I could well afford, for,
though cabs in Rome are swift and cheap, yet the piazzas are many
and widely distributed; and I finally decided to indulge myself
in a novelty of adventure verging close upon originality. It had
always seemed to me that the happy strangers mounted on the tiers
of seats that rise from front to back on the motor-chariots for
seeing New York and looking down, even from the lowest place, on
the life of our streets had a peculiar, almost a bird's-eye view
of it which I might well find the means of a fresh impression.
But I never had the courage, for reasons which I have not the
courage to give, though the reader can perhaps imagine them. In
Rome I did not feel that the like reasons held; of all the
unknown, I was one of the most unknown; by me nobody would be put
to the shame of recognizing an acquaintance on the
166
THE CARNIVAL (AS
IT ONCE WAS)
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
benches of the like
chariot, or forced to the cruelty of cutting him in my person.
When once I had fully realized this, it was only a question of
the time when I should yield to the temptation which renewed
itself as often as I saw the stately automobile passing through
the storied streets, with its English legend of "Touring Rome"
inscribed on the back of the rear seat. There remained the
question whether I should go alone or whether I should ask the
countenance of friends in so bold an enterprise. When I suggested
it to some persons of the more courageous sex, they did not wait
to be asked to go with me; they instantly entreated to be allowed
to go; they said they had always wished to see Rome in that way;
and we only waited to be chosen by the raw and blustery afternoon
which made us its own for the occasion.
It was the eve of
the last sad day of such shrunken and faded carnival as is still
left to Rome, and there were signs of it in the straggling groups
of children in holiday costume, and in here and there a pair of
young girls in a cab, safely masked against identification and
venting, in the sense of wild escape, the joyous spirits kept in
restraint all the rest of the year. Already in the Corso, where
our touring-car waited for us at the first corner, a great cafe
was turning itself inside out with a spread of chairs and tables
over the sidewalk, which we found thronged on our return with
spectators far outnumbering the merrymakers of the carnival. Our
car was not nearly so packed, and when we mounted to the benches
we found that the last and highest of them was left to the sole
occupancy of a young man, well enough dressed (his yellow gloves
may have been more than well enough) and well-mannered enough,
who continued enigmatical to the last. There was a German couple
and there were
167
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
some French-speaking
people; the rest of us were bound in the tie of our common
English. The agent of the enterprise accompanied us, an
international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat
the middle-aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when
we made our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in
three languages--successively, of course--concerning the Column
of Marcus Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American
confrere; and from the shudder which the first sound of his voice
must have sent through a less fastidious substance than mine I
perceived that an address by megaphone I could not have borne; to
that extreme of excess even my modernism could not go. As it was,
there was an instant when I could have wished to be on foot, or
even in a cab, with a red Baedeker in my hand; and yet, as the
orator went on, I had to own that he was giving me a better
account of the column than I could have got for myself out of the
guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian accent and
occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and then
in a German which suffered from his knowledge of
English.
He sat down, looking
rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our next stop, at
the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our necessities
in the article of language. He himself spoke such good English
that we could not do otherwise than declare that we could get on
perfectly with an address in French. The German pair, perhaps
from patriotic grudge, denied a working knowledge of the
unfriendly tongue. The solitary on the back seat, being asked in
his turn, graciously answered, "Toutes les langues me sont
egales," and thereafter we suffered with the orator only through
French and German.
168
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
The reply which
decided the matter launched us upon yet wider conjecture
regarding the unknown: was he a retired courier, a concierge out
of place, a professor of languages on his holiday, or merely an
amateur of philological studies? His declared proficiency was
manifested in unexpected measure as we drove away from the Temple
of Neptune on through the narrow street leading to it. Every
motor has its peculiar note, and our car had something like the
scream of a wild animal in pain, such as might have justly
alarmed a stouter spirit than that of the poor little cab-horse
which we encountered at the corner of this street. It reared, it
plunged; when our chauffeur held us in it still backed and filled
so dangerously that the mother and children overflowing the cab
followed the example of the driver in spilling to the ground.
Then our good international, the agent, jumped down and, mounting
to the coachman's seat, took the reins and urged the horse
forward, while its driver pulled it by the bridle. All was of no
effect till the solitary of the back seat rose in his place and
shouted to the frightened creature in choice American: "What d'
you mean, there? Come on! Come on, you fool!" Then, as if it had
been an "impenitent mule" in some far-distant Far-Western
incarnation, this Eoman cab-horse recognized the voice of
authority; it nerved itself against the imaginary danger, and
came steadily forward; our agent regained his place, and we moved
shriekingly on to the next object of interest. It was not quite
the note blown from level tubes of brass in the progress of a
conqueror, but we did not lack the cheers of a disinterested
populace, which at several points impartially applauded our
orator's French and German versions of his not always tacit
Italian.
Our height above the
cheers helped preserve us from
169
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the sense of
anything ironical in them, and there was an advantage in the
outlook from our elevation which the wayfarer in cab or on foot
can only imagine. No such wayfarer can realize the vast scope and
compass of our excursion, which was but one of two excursions
made on alternate afternoons by the Touring-Rome wagons. It
included, perhaps not quite in the following order, after the
Temple of Neptune, such objects of prime importance as the
Palazzo Madama, where Catharine de' Medici once dwelt and where
the Italian Senate now holds its sessions; the Fountain of Trevi,
the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the new Palace of Justice and
the Cavour monument beyond the Tiber, the Castle of Sant' Angelo,
the Vatican and St. Peter's, the Janiculum and the Garibaldi
monument on it, and the stupendous prospect of the city from that
supreme top, the bridge that Horatius held in Macaulay's ballad,
the island in the Tiber formed after the expulsion of the
Tarquins by the river sand and drift catching on the seed-corn
thrown into the stream from the fields consecrated to Mars, the
Temple of Fortune, the once-supposed House of Eienzi, and the
former Temple of Vesta; the Palatine Hill and the Aventine Hill,
the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the Campidoglio, the Theatre
of Marcellus, the worst slum in Rome, where the worst boy in
Rome, flown with Carnival, will try to board your passing car;
back to Piazza Colonna through Piazza Monte Citerio, where the
Italian House of Deputies meets in the plain old palace of the
same name.
The mere mention of
these storied places will kindle in the reader's fancy a fire
which he will feel all the need of if ever he verifies my account
of them in touring Rome on so cold an afternoon as that of our
excursion. The wind rose with our ascent of every ele-
170
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
vation, if it did
not fall with our return to a lower level; on the Janiculum it
blew a blizzard in which the incongruous ilexes and laurels bowed
and writhed, and some groups of almond-trees in their pale bloom
on a distant upland mocked us with a derisive image of spring. At
the foot of the steps to the Campidoglio, where some of our party
dismounted to go up and view the statue of Marcus Aurelius, it
was so cold that nothing but the sense of a strong common
interest prevented those who remained from persuading the
chauffeur to go on without the sight-seers. But we forbore, both
because we knew we were then very near the end of our tour, and
because we felt it would have been cruel to abandon the lady who
had got out of the car only by turning herself sidewise and could
not have made her way home on foot without sufferings which would
justly have brought us to shame. Certain idle particulars will
always cling to the memory which lets so many ennobling facts
slip from it; and I find myself helpless against the recollection
of this poor lady's wearing a thick motoring-veil which no
curiosity could pierce, but which, when she lifted it, revealed a
complexion of heated copper and a gray mustache such as nature
vouchsafes to few women.
The crowd, which
thickened most in the Piazza di Venezia, had grown more and more
carnivalesque in attire and behavior. We had been obliged to
avoid the more densely peopled streets because, as our
international explained, if the car had slowed at any point the
revellers would have joined our excursion of their own initiative
and accompanied us to the end in overwhelming numbers. They
wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to
it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed
that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the
retro-
171
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
spect. But suddenly
a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to
ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see
respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have
hoped it he spread before us tea and bread and butter and tarts
and little cakes, while scores of hungry spectators stood round
and flatteringly envied us. In this happy climax our adventure
showed as a royal progress throughout. We counted up the wonders
of our three hours' course in an absolutely novel light; and we
said that touring Rome was a thing not only not to be despised,
but to be forever proud of.
For myself, I
decided that if I were some poor hurried fellow-countryman of
mine, doing Europe in a month and obliged to scamp Rome with a
couple of days, I would not fail to spend two of them in what I
must always think of as a triumphal chariot. I resolved to take
the second excursion, not the next day perhaps, but certainly the
day after the next, and complete the most compendious impression
of ancient, mediaeval, and modern Rome that one can have; but the
firmest resolution sometimes has not force to hold one to it. The
second excursion remains for a second sojourn, when perhaps I may
be able to solve the question whether I was moved by a fine
instinct of proportion or by mere innate meanness in giving our
orator at parting just two francs in recognition of his
eloquence. No one else, indeed, gave him anything, and he seemed
rather surprised by my tempered munificence. It might have been
mystically adjusted to the number of languages he used in
addressing us; if he had held to three languages I might have
made it three francs; but now I shall never be certain till I
take the second excursion with a company which imperatively
requires English as well as French and Ger-
172
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
man, and with no
solitary in yellow gloves to whom all languages are
alike.
To this end I ought
to have thrown a copper coin into the Fountain of Trevi as we
passed it. You may return to Rome without doing this, but it is
well known that if you do it you are sure to come back. The
Fountain of Trevi is alone worth coming back for, and I could not
see that it poured scanter streams than it formerly poured over
brimming brinks or from the clefts of the artificial rocks that
spread in fine disorder about the feet of its sea-gods and
sea-horses; but they who mourn the old papal rule accuse the
present Italian government of stinting the supply of water. To me
there seemed no stint of water in any of the fountains of Rome.
In some a mere wasteful spilth seems the sole design of the
artist, as in the Fontana Paolina on the Janiculum, where the
cold wash of its deluge seemed to add a piercing chill to our
windy afternoon. The other fountains have each a quaint grace or
absolute charm or pleasing absurdity, whether the waters shower
over groups of more or less irrelevant statuary in their basins
or spout into the air in columns unfurling flags of spray and
keeping the pavement about them green with tender mould. The most
sympathetic is the Fountain of the Triton, who blows the water
through his wreathed horn and on the coldest day seems not to
mind its refluent splash on his mossy back; in fact, he seems
rather to like it.
He is one of many
tritons, rivers, sea-gods, and aqueous allegories similarly
employed in Rome and similarly indifferent to what flesh and
blood might find the hardship of their calling. I had rashly said
to myself that their respective fountains needed the sun on them
to be just what one could wish, but the
173
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
first gray days
taught me better. Then the thinly clouded sky dropped a softened
light over their glitter and sparkle and gave them a spirituality
as much removed from the suggestion of physical cold as any
diaphanous apparition would suggest. Then they seemed rapt into a
finer beauty than that of earth, though I will not pretend that
they were alike beautiful. No fountain can be quite ugly, but
some fountains can be quite stupid, like, for instance, those
which give its pretty name to the Street of the Four Fountains
and which consist of two extremely plain Virtues and two very
dull old Rivers, diagonally dozing at each other over their urns
in niches of the four converging edifices. They are not quite so
idiotic under their disproportionate foliage as the conventional
Egyptian lions of the Fountain of Moses, with manes like the wigs
of so many lord chancellors, and with thin streams of water
drooling from the tubes between their lips. But these are the
exceptional fountains; there are few sculptured or architectural
designs which the showering or spouting water does not retrieve
from error; and in Rome the water (deliciously potable) is so
abundant that it has force to do almost anything for beauty, even
where, as in the Fontana Paolina, it is merely a torrent tumbling
over a facade. It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona
alone there are three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is
very long, and three fountains are few enough for it, even though
one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one
of the usual rivers--the Nile, I believe--holding his hand before
his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival
architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him.
That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and without
any fountain the Piazza Navona would be
THE FOUNTAIN OF
TREVI
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
charming; it is such
a vast lake of sunshine and is so wide as well as long, and is so
mellowed with such rich browns and golden grays in the noble
edifices.
I do not know, now,
what all the edifices are, but there are churches, more than one,
and palaces, and the reader can find their names in any of the
guidebooks. If I were buying piazzas in Rome I should begin with
the Navona, but there are enough to suit all purses and tastes.
The fountains would be thrown in, I suppose, along with the
churches and palaces; but I really never inquired, and, in fact,
not having carried out my plan of visiting them all, I am in no
position to advise intending purchasers. What I can say is that
if you are in a hurry to inspect, that kind of property, and in
immediate need of a piazza, you cannot do better than take the
wagon for touring Rome. In two days you can visit every piazza
worth having, including the Piazza di Spagna, where there is a
fountain in the form of a marble galley in which you can embark
for any fairyland you like, through the Via del Babuino and the
Piazza del Popolo. Come to think of it, I am not so sure but I
would as soon have the Piazza del Popolo as the Piazza Navona. If
the fountains are not so fine, they are still very fine, and the
Pincian Hill overtops one side of the place, with foliaged drives
and gardened walks descending into it.
Everything of
importance that did not happen elsewhere in Rome seems to have
happened in the Piazza del Popolo, and I may name as a few of its
attractions for investors the facts that it was here Sulla's
funeral pyre was kindled; that Nero was buried on the left side
of it, and out of his tomb grew a huge walnut-tree, the haunt of
demoniacal crows till the Madonna appeared to Paschal II. and
bade him cut it down; that
175
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the arch-heretic
Luther sojourned in the Augustinian convent here while in Rome;
that the dignitaries of Church and State received Christina of
Sweden here when, after her conversion, she visited the city;
that Lucrezia Borgia celebrated her betrothal in one of the
churches; that it used to be a favorite place for executing
brigands, whose wives then became artists' models, and whose
sons, if they were like Cardinal Antonelli, became princes of the
Church. So I learn from Hare in his Walks in Rome, and, if
he enables me to boast the rivalry of the Piazza Navona in no
such array of merits, still I will not deny my love for it.
Certainly it was not a favorite place for executing brigands, but
the miracle which saved St. Agnes from, cruel shame was wrought
in the vaulted chambers under the church of her name there, and
that is something beyond all the wonders of the Piazza del Popolo
for its pathos and for its poetry. But, if the Piazza Navona had
no other claim on me, I should find a peculiar pleasure in the
old custom of stopping the escapes from its fountains and
flooding with water the place I saw flooded with sun, for the
patricians to wade and drive about in during the very hot weather
and eat ices and drink coffee, while the plebeians looked
sumptuously down on them from the galleries built around the
lake.
XI
IN AND ABOUT THE
VATICAN
It would be a very
bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who
should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the
monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations
of
176
COLONNADE AND FOUNTAIN
AT ST. PETER'S
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
special authority in
the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the
situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so;
but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the
explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in
it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope
willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he
came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the
sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but
he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which
would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that
the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope's attitude
as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise
would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the
Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real
enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves
better informed than others.
To the passing or
tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic
aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up
at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows
with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms
where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are
those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary
captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the
papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church
by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope
immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican
gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been
a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the
high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the
sun.
177
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
But otherwise the
severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward
the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and
humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his
three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can,
have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images
in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know
that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their
pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is
said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the
Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as
evident as it is sweet and touching.
Their relation to
him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one
who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The
tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and
sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the
other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know
how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is
divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the
Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are
revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing
of instances in which their political and religious opinions part
fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly
noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is
kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of
the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and
whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the
nobles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret
across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the
cleavage may descend among other classes I cannot venture to
conjecture; I can
178
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
only testify to some
expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier
heretical substance than mine.
One Sunday we went
to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three
deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or
below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial,
mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is
illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares
and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and
fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual
proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might
well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish
Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and
artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two
inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the
church. One of these read: "VV. la Repubblica" (Long live
the Republic), and the other: "M. ai Preti" (Death to the
Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they
expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy,
neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere.
Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of
one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of
the other. I know that with regard to the priests you experience
some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief
satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me,
with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its
cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor
for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it
which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence
by the kindly old
179
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
kiosk woman whom I
liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it
through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the
priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the
nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but
from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It
was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all
that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed
them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused
of.
There can be no
doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the
Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be
almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way
increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in
the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year
not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status
can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and
always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the
monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the
State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through
the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must
always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made
it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French
troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the
papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers
who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is
a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the
lost temporal power. One of the chief avenues is named
Twenty-second September Street because the national troops
entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where
they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the
Cairoli
180
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
brothers, who died
for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor
Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost
sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression
beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one
who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom
of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to
be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest
in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there,
according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has
suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which
theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is
therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is
suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy
fired when it took Rome from the papacy.
Doubtless there are
other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not
throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent
promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it
lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than
Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not
be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the
Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile
to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the
other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or
unfaiths, its prison-house--if we choose so to think of the
Vatican--has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan
Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.
We swarm to its
galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in
every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any
one of our num-
181
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ber who can
sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in
perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger
under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the place,
which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the
race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant,
at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour
before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the
Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their
black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we
help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos
and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot
Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here,
stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is
Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we
imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his
mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater
charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his
Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and
taking the soul with joy.
It is the same crowd
in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have
taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them
under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the
canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School
of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the
Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our
impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning
which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly
unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as
most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we
are dishonest, we pretend to
182
SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN
PALACE
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
have felt and
thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at
second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part,
that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of
the older canvases and in here and there a Titian than in all the
Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.
I was not knowing
his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is
the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered
them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before,
as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and
in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different
rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I
realized as for the first time what a bloody religion ours was.
It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and
beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the
long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and
women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me
to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have been
the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did
not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed
the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but
barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems
slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans
so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that
and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim
the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I
fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If
this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the
wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have
seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly
183
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in the sculpture
galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have
the statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts
with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome
from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between
one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the
heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was
a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did
not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining
and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red
sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened
as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds
in March as in April at New York.
But through all
one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays
enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in his
Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is
sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the
steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In
the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you
wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is
a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your
thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through
sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains
streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer
and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the
out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more
thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious
prejudice against shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very
well may be in Rome, you impart
184
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
your personal heat
to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being
most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark.
Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the
padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but
preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are
quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very
gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the
Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this
cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi
did not suffice to abate.
XII SUPERFICIAL
OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
It had seemed to me
that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to
foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of
patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining
in their landaus and shielding their complexions from the
November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the
period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past,
after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my
second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if
possible. I found the Pincio unexpectedly near; I found the
sunshine; I found the familiar winter warmth which in Southern
climates is so unlike the summer warmth in ours; but the drive
which I had remembered as a long ellipse had narrowed to a little
circle, where one could not have driven round faster than a slow
trot
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
without danger of
vertigo. I did not find that series of apparent principessas or
imaginable marchesas leaning at their lovely lengths in their
landaus. I found in overwhelming majority the numbered victorias,
which pass for cabs in Rome, full of decent tourists, together
with a great variety of people on foot, but not much fashion and
no swells that my snobbish soul could be sure of. There was,
indeed, one fine moment when, at a retired point of the drive, I
saw two private carriages drawn up side by side in their
encounter, with two stout old ladies, whom I decided to be
dowager countesses at the least, partially projected from their
opposing windows and lost in a delightful exchange, as I hoped,
of scandal. But the only other impressive personality was that of
an elderly, obviously American gentleman, in the solitary silk
hat and long frock-coat of the scene. There were other Americans,
but none so formal; the English were in all degrees of
informality down to tan shoes and at least one travelling-cap.
The women's dress, whether they were on foot or in cabs, was not
striking, though more than half of them were foreigners and could
easily have afforded to outdress the Italians, especially the
work people, though these were there in their best.
There was a
band-stand in the space first reached by the promenaders, and
there ought clearly to have been a band, but I was convinced that
there was to be none by a brief colloquy between one of the
cab-drivers (doubtless goaded to it by his fair freight) and the
gentlest of Roman policemen, whose response was given in accents
of hopeful compassion:
CABMAN: "Musica,
no?" (No music?)
POLICEMAN: "Forse
l' avremo oramai" (Perhaps we shall have it
presently.)
We did not have it
at all that Sunday, possibly be-
186
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO FROM
THE PINCIAN HILL
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
cause it was the day
after the assassination of the King of Portugal, and the flags
were at half-mast everywhere. So we went, such of us as liked, to
the parapet overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and commanding one
of those prospects of Rome which are equally incomparable from
every elevation. I, for my part, made the dizzying circuit of the
brief drive on foot in the dark shadows of the roofing ilexes (if
they are ilexes), and then strolled back and forth on the paths
set thick with plinths bearing the heads of the innumerable
national great--the poets, historians, artists, scientists,
politicians, heroes--from the ancient Roman to the modern Italian
times. I particularly looked up the poets of the last hundred
years, because I had written about them in one of my many
forgotten books, till I fancied a growing consciousness in them
at this encounter with an admirer; they, at least, seemed to
remember my book. Then I went off to the cafe overlooking them in
their different alleys, and had tea next a man who was taking
lemon instead of milk in his. Here I was beset with an
impassioned longing to know whether he was a Russian or American,
since the English always take milk in their tea, but I could not
ask, and when I had suffered my question as long as I could in
his presence I escaped from it, if you can call it escaping, to
the more poignant question of what it would be like to come,
Sunday after Sunday, to the Pincio, in the life-long voluntary
exile of some Americans I knew, who meant to spend the rest of
their years under the spell of Rome. I thought, upon the whole,
that it would be a dull, sad fate, for somehow we seem born in a
certain country in order to die in it, and I went home, to come
again other Sundays to the Pincio, but not all the Sundays I
promised myself.
187
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
On one of these
Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the
busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of "I spy" or "Hide
and go whoop," counting who should be "It" in an Italian version
of "Oneary, ory, ickory, an," and then scattering in every
direction behind the plinths and bushes. They were not more
molestive than boys always are in a world which ought to be left
entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any
harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust
here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of
Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture
that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some
mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of
princes that enemy of mankind which he was once reputed to be. At
any rate, I will not attribute the mutilation to the boys of
Rome, whom I saw at other times foregoing so many opportunities
of mischief in the Villa Bor-ghese. One of them even refused
money from me there when I misunderstood his application for
matches and offered him some coppers. He put my tip aside with a
dignified wave of his hand and a proud backward step; and,
indeed, I ought to have seen from the flat, broad cap he wore
that he was a school-boy of civil condition. The Romans are not
nearly so dramatic as the Neapolitans or Venetians or even as the
Tuscans; but once in the same pleasance I saw a controversy
between school-boys which was carried on with an animation full
of beauty and finish. They argued back and forth, not violently,
but vividly, and one whom I admired most enforced his reasons
with charming gesticulations, whirling from his opponents with
quick turns of his body and many a renunciatory retirement, and
then facing about and advancing again
188
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
upon the
unconvinced. I decided that his admirable drama had been studied
from the histrionics of his mother in domestic scenes; and, if I
had been one of those other boys, I should have come over to his
side instantly.
The Roman manners
vary from Roman to Roman, just as our own manners, if we had any,
would vary from New-Yorker to New-Yorker. Zola thinks the whole
population is more or less spoiled with the conceit of Rome's
ancient greatness, and shows it. One could hardly blame them if
this were so; but I did not see any strong proof of it, though I
could have imagined it on occasion. I should say rather that they
had a republican simplicity of manner, and I liked this better in
the shop people and work people than the civility overflowing
into servility which one finds among the like folk, for instance,
in England. I heard complaints from foreigners that the old-time
deference of the lower classes was gone, but I did not miss it.
Once in a cafe, indeed, the waiter spoke to me in Voi
(you) instead of Lei (lordship), but the Neapolitans often
do this, and I took it for a friendly effort to put me at my ease
in a strange tongue with a more accustomed form. We were trying
to come together on the kind of tea I wanted, but we failed, if I
wanted it strong, for I got it very weak and tepid. I thought
another day that it would be stronger if I could get it brought
hotter, but it was not, and so I went no more to a place where I
was liable to be called You instead of Lordship and still get
weak tea. I think this was a mistake of mine and a loss, for at
that cafe I saw some old-fashioned Italian types drinking their
black coffee at afternoon tea-time out of tumblers, and others
calling for pen and ink and writing letters, and ladies sweetly
asking for news-
189
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
papers and reading
them there; and I ought to have continued coming to study
them.
As to my conjectures
of republican quality in the Romans, I had explicit confirmation
from a very intelligent Italian who said of the anomalous social
and political situation in Rome: "We Italians are naturally
republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning
family, we should have the republic. But we feel that we owe
everything, the very existence of the nation, to the house of
Savoy, and we are loyal to it in our gratitude. Especially we are
true to the present king." It is known, of course, that Menotti
Garibaldi continues the republican that his father always was,
but I heard of his saying that, if a republic were established,
Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen the first
president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly from
the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced
from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some
members of the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and
such a noble was reproached because he would not go to thank the
king in recognition of some signal proof of his public spirit and
unselfish patriotism. He owned the generosity of the king's
behavior and his claim upon popular acknowledgment, but he said
that he had taught the young men of his party the duty of
ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to the
doctrine he had preached.
If I venture to
speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the municipal
situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to
authority or to more than such superficial knowledge as the most
incurious visitor to Rome can hardly help having. In the capital
of Christendom, where the head of the Church dwells in
190
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
a tradition of
supremacy hardly less Italian than Christian, the syndic, or
mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a Jew, but an alien Jew, English
by birth and education, a Londoner and an Oxford man. More yet,
he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things anathema to the
Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With reference to
the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is
through the fusion of the political parties which elected him
hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late
Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans,
Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism
or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the
economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in
Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fashioned
revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social
differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the
Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual municipal
government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But
the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of
intelligence, and he is evidently a man of consummate tact. He
has known how to reconcile the warring elements, which made peace
in his election, to one another and to their outside antagonists,
to the Church and to the State, as well as to himself, in the
course he holds over a very rugged way. His opportunities of
downfall are pretty constant, it will be seen, when it is
explained that if a measure with which he is identified fails in
the city council it becomes his duty to resign, like the
prime-minister of England in the like case with Parliament, But
Mr. Nathan, who is as alien in his name as in his race and
religion, and is known orally to the Romans as Signor Nahtahn,
has not yet been obliged to resign. He has felt his way
through
191
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
every difficulty,
and has not yet been identified with any fatally compromising
measure. In such an extremely embarrassing predicament as that
created by the conflict between the labor unions and the police
early in April, and eventuating in the two days' strike, he knew
how to do the wise thing and the right thing. As to the incident,
he held his hand and he held his tongue, but he went to visit the
wounded workmen in the hospital, and he condoled with their
families. He was somewhat blamed for that, but his action kept
for him the confidence of that large body of his supporters who
earn their living with their hands.
It is said that the
common Romans do not willingly earn their living with their
hands; that they like better being idle and, so far as they can,
ornamental. In this they would not differ from the uncommon
Romans, the moneyed, the leisured, the pedigreed classes, who
reproach them for their indolence; but I do not know whether they
are so indolent as all that or not. I heard it said that they no
longer want work, and that when they get it they do not do it
well--a supposed effect of the socialism which is supposed to
have spoiled their manners. I heard it said more intelligently,
as I thought, that they are not easily disciplined, and that they
cannot be successfully associated in the industries requiring
workmen to toil in large bodies together; they will not stand
that. Also I heard it said, as I thought again rather
intelligently, that where work is given them to do after a
certain model, they will conform perfectly for the first three or
four times; then their fatal creativeness comes into play, and
they begin to better their instruction by trying to improve upon
the patterns--that is, they are artists, not artisans. They must
please their fancy in their work or they cannot do it well. From
my own experience I can-
192
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
not say whether this
is generally or only sometimes true, but I can affirm that where
they delayed or erred in their work they took their failure very
amiably. I never saw sweeter patience than that of the Roman
matron who had undertaken a small job of getting spots out of a
garment, and who quite surpassed me in self-control when she
announced, day after appointed day, that the work was not done
yet or not done perfectly; she was politeness itself.
On the other hand,
some young ladies at a fashionable concert which the queen-mother
honored with her presence did not seem very polite. They kept on
their immense hats, as women still do in all public places on the
European continent, and they seized as many chairs as they could
for friends who did not come, and at supreme moments they stood
up on their chairs and spoiled such poor chance of seeing the
queen-mother as the stranger might have had. While the good King
Umberto lived the stranger would have had many other chances, for
it is said that the queen showed herself with him to the people
at the windows of their palace every afternoon; but in her
widowhood she lives retired, though now and then her carriage may
be seen passing through the streets, with four special policemen
on bicycles following it. These waited about the doorway of the
concert-hall that afternoon and formed a very simple, if
effective, guard. In fact, it might be said that in its relations
with the popular life the reigning family could hardly be
simpler. The present king and queen are not so much seen in
public as King Umberto and Queen Margherita were, but it is known
from many words and deeds that King Victor Emmanuel wishes to be
the friend, if not the acquaintance, of his people. When it was
proposed to push the present tunnel, with its walks and drives
and trolley-lines,
193
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
under the Quirinal
Palace and gardens, so as to connect the two principal business
quarters of the city, the king was notified that the noise and
jar of the traffic in it might interfere with his comfort. He
asked if the tunnel would be for the general advantage, and, when
this could not be denied, he gave his consent in words to some
such effect as "That settles it." When the German Emperor last
visited Rome he is said to have had some state question as to
whether he should drive on a certain occasion to the Palatine
with the king's horses or the pope's. He who told the story did
not remember how the question was solved by the emperor, but he
said, "Our king walked."
All this does not
mean republican simplicity in the king; a citizen king is
doubtless a contradiction in terms anywhere out of France, and
even there Louis Philippe found the part difficult. But there is
no doubt that the King of Italy means to be the best sort of
constituional king, and, as he is in every way an uncommon man,
he will probably succeed. One may fancy in him, if one likes,
something of that almost touching anxiety of thoughtful Italians
to be and to do all that they can for Italy, in a patriotism that
seems as enlightened as it is devoted. If I had any criticism to
make of such Italians it would be that they expected, or that
they asked, too much of themselves. To be sure, they have a right
to expect much, for they have done wonders with a country which,
without great natural resources except of heart and brain,
entered bankrupt into its national existence, and has now grown
financially to the dimensions of its vast treasury building, with
a paper currency at par and of equal validity with French and
English money. If the industrial conditions in Italy were so bad
as we compassionate outsiders have been taught to suppose, this
financial
194
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
change is one of the
most important events accomplished in Europe since the great era
of the racial unifications began. No one will pretend that there
have not been great errors of administration in Italy, but
apparently the Italians have known how to learn wisdom from their
folly. There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the
cost of living has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the
burdens are unequally adjusted; many speculators have been
ruined, and much honestly invested money has been lost. But wages
have increased with the prices and rents and taxes, and in a
country where every ounce of coal that drives a wheel of
production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles
manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.
The state has now
taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its
expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that
the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other
national undertakings. These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and
onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of
antiquity. In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the
past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern
dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals. The
Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount
almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had
to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The
yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its
beauty above one's breath) must be planned so huge that the
highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to
support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II.
must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial
Rome, some of which it will partly ob-
195
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
scure. Yet as the
nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will
doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural
enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought
disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed
with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres,
and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should
not be digging the Panama Canal or be trying to keep the New York
streets in repair. We may confide in the ability of the Italians
to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their
own pockets. It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot
criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and
perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with
advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition
of the great things they have accomplished.
XIII CASUAL
IMPRESSIONS
The day that we
arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of
the streets, which is never laid by a municipal watering-cart,
though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose
of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome
you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray
days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not
have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the
sunny sixties. He may see through his glasses some things hidden
even from the eyes of the early forties. If he drives out beyond
the Porta Pia, say, some bright afternoon, and notes how the
avenue between the beau-
196
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
tiful old villas is
also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well as
built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away
with him the significant fact that a convenient and
public-spirited trolley-line has the same suburban effect in
Rome, Italy, as in Rome, New York. If he meets some squadrons of
cavalry or some regiments of foot, in that military necessity of
constant movement which the civilian can never understand, he may
make the useful reflection that it is much better to have the
troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise the wisdom
of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring
mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference
between summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question
whether, after all, our one continental weather is better than
the many local weathers of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire
national modesty in owning that there is something more
picturesque in the indications of those azure or silvery tops
than in his morning paper's announcement that there is or is not
a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.
At any rate, I would
not have him note the intimations of such a drive at less worth
than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman sojourn. If
one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with
safety, one will often own to one's self that something merely
incidental to one's purpose, in visiting this memorable place or
that, was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment
of a direct purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the
vicinity, to renew the acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which
I had hastened to make on my first visit to Rome. I had then
found it so far from such a frightfully precipitous height as I
had led myself to expect
197
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
that I came away and
rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years
had moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian
Rock very respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either
the houses at its foot had sunk with their chimneys and
balconies, or the rock had risen, so that one could no longer be
hurled from it with impunity. We looked at it from an arbor of
the lovely little garden which we were let into beyond the top of
the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of hospital. I
think there were probably flowers there, since it was a garden,
but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole space
with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang
divinely.
I am aware of
bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really Rome
would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their
number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded
in the cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent,
which three hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous
Baths of Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what
seems the special preference of the birds for this garden; it is
possibly an idiosyncrasy, something like that of the cats which
make Trajan's Forum their favorite resort. All that I can
positively say is that if I were a bird I would ask nothing
better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and tune my
numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary
monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped
privet and end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants,
rhinoceroses, and their like. I do not pretend to be exact in
their nomination; they may be other animals; but I am sure of
their attention to the birds. I am not quite so sure of the
attention of the antique shapes in
198
THE BATHS OF
DIOCLETIAN
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the rooms of the
Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them
preoccupied with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian
galleries, and scarcely tempered for them by the remote and
solitary brazier over which the custodians take turns in stifling
themselves. They cannot come down into the sun and song of the
garden, to which the American tourist may return from visiting
them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.
They are not so many
or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters in the Vatican
Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them. Neither
should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of
the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so
handy, and so next door, as it were, to the railway station where
he arrives, and to Cook's office where he goes for his letters
next morning, that they are of less merit than other monuments of
imperial Rome. They are not only colossally vast, but they are
singularly noble, as well as so admirably convenient. Because
they are so convenient, the modern Romans have turned their
cavernous immensity to account in the trades and industries, and
have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and plumbers'
shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much
better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult
ruins. In color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though
not so soft to the eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine,
which at any distance great enough to obscure their excavation
have a beauty like that of primitive nature. I do not know but
you see these best from the glazed terrace of that restaurant on
the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised Romans and
visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of fallen
and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All
round
199
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
is a landscape which
I was not able to think of as less than tremendous, with the
whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills about it--a scene
to which you may well give more than a moment from the varied
company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and
Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life
in their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden
draughts of local wine, served ciderwise in generous
jugs.
If your mind is, as
ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the
chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height
over the Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and
the black boats along the shore, with universal Rome melting into
the distance, you must not fail to stop at the old, old Church of
St. Sabina. You will naturally want to see this, not only because
there in the cloister (as the ladies can ascertain at the window
let into the wall for their dangerous eyes to peer through from
the outside) is the successor of the orange-tree transplanted
from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven hundred years ago;
not only because one of the doors of the church, covered with
Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the world,
but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a
bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy
book, with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl
fallen back on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially
in the pale light, whom nothing in the church or its visitors can
distract from his devotions.
It is very, very
cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could, follow you
into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the Knights,
who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and
finally
200
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
rendered a facile
submission to General Bonaparte of the French Republican army in
1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so vigorous as
their last stand; but, without specific reference to the
easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their
last seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may
enjoy the order's privileges, the place will afford another of
those satisfactions which the best of all possible worlds is
always offering its admirers. Even if one were disposed to
moralize the comfortable end of the poor Knights harshly, one
must admit that their view of Rome is one of the unrivalled
views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the key-hole
of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could not
manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique
character of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the
key-hole also commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am
the first, will like to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that
the Church of the Priory stands on the spot where Remus had a
seance with the spiritual authorities and was advised against
building Rome where he proposed, being shown only six vultures as
against twelve that Romulus saw in favor of his chosen site. The
fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of bad luck, but any one may
safely visit it now, after the long time that has
passed.
I do not, however,
advise visiting it above any other place in Rome. What I always
say is, take your chances with any or every time or place; you
cannot fail of some impression which you will always like
recurring to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I
once walked home from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival
masks frolicking about me through the sun-shotten golden dust of
the delicious evening air,
201
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and I had a pleasure
from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as rich as
that I got from the rosy twilight in Avhich I wandered homeward
another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself passing
the Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not
throw my penny into its waters because I knew I could not help
coming back to Rome anyhow. Yet another time I was driving
through a certain piazza where the peasants stand night long
waiting to be hired by the proprietors who come to find them
there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood before me
in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped to
the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers
were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit
the house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes
showing spectrally through their masks and their hands coming
soft and white out of their sleeves and betraying the lily class
that neither toils nor spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to
the poorest and humblest through the only Church that knows how
to unite them in the offering and acceptance of reciprocal
religious duties.
In Rome, as
elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the
worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old
women, but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost
as well dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and
in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide
street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the
last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility
was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good
society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going
from prayer
with their silk hats
in their hands.
202
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
The performance of
ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and the wonder is
that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical than it
actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I cannot
claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded;
sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without
offence, in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who
preached an eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character,
exhausted himself before he exhausted his topic, and sat down
between the successive heads of his discourse and took a good
rest. It was the saint's day, which seemed more generally
observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and his baroque
church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly poor
and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the
preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were
many children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was
one young girl in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up
where others sat, and blotting out the prospect of half the
church with her flaring brim and flaunting feathers. The
worshippers came and went, and while the monk preached and
reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a taper at
the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two other
men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon
as their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been
preaching against time, sat definitely down and left us to the
rapture of the perfected splendor. The high-altar was canopied
and curtained in crimson, fringed with gold, and against this the
candle-flames floated like yellow flowers. Suddenly, amid the
hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed from the organ-loft,
and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and elbowed and
shouldered
203
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
their way through
the crowd to the high-altar, where their intoning, like so
many
"Silver snarling
trumpets 'gan to glide,"
and those
flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing together,
and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.
How much our pale
Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of the drama
which is so large an element in the worship of the South could
not he conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said,
but, if I had said opera, it would have been equally with the
will merely to recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many
have imagined a concert of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as
a spectacle of which the elder Christian worship seems emulous.
Go, therefore, to Rome, dear fellow-Protestant, with any measure
of ignorance short of mine, but leave as much of your prejudice
behind you as you can. You are not more likely to become a
convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may be the safer
for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than you
would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem
exotic in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the
climate, or, at least, could not have had their origin under any
but oriental or meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you
to a truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches
which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender
of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for
their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly
receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of
custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though
it is not quite the same as money,
204
CHURCH OF ST.
JOHN LATERAN AND LATERAN PALACE
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
even in Rome is
worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables
waiting to be recognized as facts again. I, for instance,
committed the potential error of wholly rejecting with scorn the
services of an authorized guide to the Church of St. John Lateran
because he said the tariff was three francs. But after wandering,
the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the huge
temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had
left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures
that ever wrung the remorseful heart.
His poor black
clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his waistcoat would
have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his shoes, if
they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures,
reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar,
and the forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been
shaved for three days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as
good a reason as that his shirt had not been washed for seven. It
was with something like a cry for pardon of my previous brutality
that I now closed with his unabated demand of a three-franc fee,
and we went with him wherever he would, from one holy edifice to
another of those that constitute the church; but I will not ask
the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted into with us,
but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look it all
up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and
believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and
mystery. If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is
doubtless not because the other parts were not equally worthy of
my wonder, but because I would not have even an enemy miss the
music of the singing doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when
they turn upon their hinges, emit a mur-
205
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
mur of grief or a
moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses they once served the
wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard their rich
harmony would he like not having heard the echo in the baptistery
of Pisa, a life-long loss.
Heaven knows how
punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with every
particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years
before the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from
this and that, but even indolence like mine would not spare
itself the sight of the Scala Santa. That was another of the
things which I distinctly remembered from the year 1864, and I
did not find the spectacle of the modern penitents covering the
holy steps different in 1908. Now, as then, there was something
incongruous in their fashions and aspirations, but one could not
doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to climb up
and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that
it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the
sense of that most noble fagade of the church, with its lofty
balustraded entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his
saints look out forever to the Alban hills.
XIV TIVOLI AND
FRASCATI
One of the most
agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if
you will give objects of interest time enough they will present
themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in
your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my
notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but,
206
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
as the days of my
winter passed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to
seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad,
that I began to feel anxious lest I should miss them altogether.
I had, for instance, always had the friendliest curiosity
concerning Tivoli and Frascati as the two most amiable Roman
neighborhoods, and hoped to see both of them in some informal and
casual sort; but they persisted so long in keeping off on their
respective hills that I saw something positive on niy part must
be done. Clearly I must make the advances; and so when, one
morning of mid-March, a friend sent to ask if we would not motor
out to Tivoli with him and his family, I closed eagerly with the
chance of a compromise which would save feeling all round. My
friend has never yet known how he was bringing Tivoli and me
together after a mutual diffidence, but, as he was a poet, I am
sure he will be glad to know now.
Our road across the
Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside the
tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched
rough, if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between
the wide, lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat.
The Campagna is said to be ploughed only once in five years by
the peasants for the proprietors, who have philosophized its
fertility as something that can be better restored by the
activities of nature in that time than by phosphates in less. As
they are mostly Roman patricians, they have always felt able to
wait; but now it is said that northern Italian capital and
enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be cropped
every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the
two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we
had the company of the different aqueducts, but their broken
stretches present-
207
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ly ceased
altogether, and then for other human association we had, besides
the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered
among the grassy humps and hollows. There were more humps than I
had remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the
rounded and turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere
showed their naked masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the
passing centuries. At times a dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop
up from the roadside ditches, followed us a little way with
children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs that barked
for pleasure in their joy. Women with the square linen head-dress
of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each with
his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking
backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a
horse or a mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and
both man and beast are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to
the automobile. Now and then a carter would set his team
slantwise in our course and stay us out of good-humored deviltry,
and when he let us pass would fling some chaff to the fresh-faced
English youngster who was our chauffeur.
"I suppose you don't
always understand what those fellows say," I suggested from my
seat beside him.
"No, sir," he
confessed. "But I give it to 'em back in English," he added,
joyously.
He rather liked
these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp, broken
stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that
there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to
reserve an opinion of the government's motives in the matter with
respect to motors, as if he thought them bad.
The scenery of the
Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a battlemented tomb, of
mighty girth and
208
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
height, as
perdurable in its masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the
distance propped the mountains fainting along the horizon under
their burden of snow. But as we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew
nearer us, and now they were no longer naked, but densely covered
with the gray, interminable stretch of the olive forests. The
olive is the tree which, of all others, is the friend of
civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple, which
is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like
each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives
around Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated
apple-orchards in the world. Where the trees came closest to the
road they seemed to watch our passing, each with its trunk aslant
and its branches akimbo, in a humorous make-believe of being in
some joke with us, like so many gnarled and twisted apple-trees,
used to children's play-fellowship. You felt a racial intimacy
with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal
consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes
around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the
Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests
stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They
looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically
yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, full of mystery and
loneliness.
If Tivoli does not
flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its wine, it is
perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as much on
the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls
enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to
Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose Walks in Rome include
Tivoli, does not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical
works, but he says that if you have 209
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
not strength enough
for all the interests and attractions of Tivoli it will be wise
to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to the Villa
d'Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the
reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a
sight of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls
smokes industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost
as lofty and as ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to
and fro we necessarily passed through the town, which, with its
widish but not straightish chief street, I found as clean as Rome
itself, and looking, after the long tumult of its history,
beginning well back in fable, as peaceable as Montclair, New
Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent two weeks
there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much
more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my
little time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold
classic associations of the region, attracts the stranger and
helps the cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of
Tivoli.
The Villa d'Este is
not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the fancy without
cumbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some neglected
pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in them,
but the forgottenness of the Villa d'Este hospitably allured me
to instant and permament occupation, so that when I heard it
could now be bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars,
nothing but the want of the money kept me from making the
purchase. I indeed recognized certain difficulties in living
there the year round; but who lives anywhere the year round if he
can help it? The casino, standing among the simpler town
buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little
inclement, for all its fresco-
210
STAIRWAY AND FOUNTAIN,
VILLA D'ESTE
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
ing and stuccoing by
the sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the
painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would
shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn
chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as
delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which
its balustrated terrace looked into. From that level you descend
by marble steps which must have some trouble in knowing
themselves from the cascades pouring down the broken steeps
beside them, and com-panionably sharing their seclusion among the
cypresses and ilexes. You are never out of the sight and sound of
the plunging water, which is still trained in falls and
fountains, or left to a pathetic dribble through the tattered
stucco of the neglected grots. It is now a good three centuries
and a half since the Cardinal Ippolito d'.Este had these gardens
laid out and his pleasure-house built overlooking them; and his
gardener did not plan so substantially as his architect. In fact,
you might suppose that the landscapist wrought with an eye to the
loveliness of the ruin it all would soon fall into, and, where he
used stone, used it fragilely, so that it would ultimately
suggest old frayed and broken lace. Clearly he meant some of the
cataracts to face one another, and to have a centre from which
they could all be seen--say the still, dull-green basin which
occupies a large space in the grounds between them. But he must
have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily
misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which
hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of
crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns;
of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper
straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the space
beneath; of fragmentary gods or
211
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
giants half hid in
the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently
done for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might
have been expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If
there was design in the treatment of the propitious ground,
self-shaped to an irregular amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and
the cultiavted tourist of our day may reasonably please himself
with the belief that he is having a better time there than the
academic Roman of the sixteenth century.
Academic it all is,
however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I have so
signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am
going to let a far politer observer celebate the beauties of the
other supreme interest of Tivoli. When Mr. Gray (as the poet
loved to be called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in
May, 1740, the Villa d'Este by no means shared the honors of the
cataracts, and Mr. Gray seems not to have thought it worth
seriously describing in his letter to Mr. West, but mocks the
casino with a playful mention before proceeding to speak fully,
if still playfully, of the great attraction of Tivoli: "Dame
Nature . . . has built here three or four little mountains and
laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain others
behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal into which
she has put a little river of hers called the Anio, . . . which
she has no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles
down a declivity fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to
shatters, and is converted into a shower of rain, where the sun
forms many a bow--red, green, blue, and yellow. . . . By this
time it has divided itself, being crossed and opposed by the
rocks, into four several streams, each of which, in emulation of
the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it does tumble
down,
213
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
but not from an
equally elevated place; so that you have at one view all these
cascades intermixed with groves of olive and little woods, the
mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one (that which
forms the extremity of the half-circle's horns) is seated the
town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the
brink of the precipice, stands the Sibyls' Temple, the remains of
a little rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of
whose beautiful Corinthian pillars are still standing and
entire."
For the reader who
has been on the spot the poet's words will paint a vivid picture
of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the
worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the
local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr.
Gray's point of view. I do not know a more filling moment,
exclusive of the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those
cascades before him and those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray
has mentioned only one of the two, I do not know why, that exist
on this enchanted spot, and that define their sharp, black
shadows as with an inky line just beyond the restaurant tables.
One is round and the other oblong, and the round one has been
called the Sibyls', though now it is getting itself called
Vesta's--the goddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of
Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately
been dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to
enjoy the plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have
been given the Sibyls' Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all
this does not really matter. What really matters is the mighty
chasm which yawns away almost from your feet, where you sit, and
the cataracts, from their brinks, high or low, plunging into it,
and the wavering columns of mist weakly striving
213
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
upward out of it:
the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray mentions, with belts
of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths furrowing and
wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a sheeted
cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the
toil of the washers melts into nmsic, and their chatter, like
that of birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you
sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a
guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs
swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you
recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One Girl," and the smile
of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of
sympathy, and you are no longer at the Caffe Sibylla in Tivoli,
but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some
sixty-cent table d'hote, with wine and music
included.
It was a fortnight
later that we paid our visit to Frascati, not proudly motoring
now, but traversing the Campagna on the roof of a populous
tram-car, which in its lofty narrowness was of the likeness of an
old-fashionable lake propeller. The morning was, like most other
mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often
failed of; but none of us passengers for Frascati doubted its
promise as we gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets
at the little booth in a wall sparely containing the official who
bade us get them in the car. We all did this, whatever our
nation--American, English, German, or Italian--and then we
mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a
generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over our
heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we
could have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if
we would not rather have suffered the chill which our
214
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
swift progress
evoked from the morning's warmth after we left the shelter of the
city streets. We passed through stretches of the ancient
aqueducts consorting on familiar terms with rows of shabby
tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of wide, dusty avenues
of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of market-gardens, and
by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the tables set
close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino had
a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the
peach-trees were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck
into the Campagna we found it of like physiognomy with the
Campagna toward Tivoli.
There was very
little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with those
lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and
cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts' tails
blowing picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more
opposed to our advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to
leave a passenger near one of those suburbs which the tram-lines
are building up round Rome, but on our course building so slowly
that our passengers had to walk rather far from the stations
before they reached home. There were other pedestrians who looked
rather English, especially some ladies making for the gate of a
kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl singing and
a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer Frascati
were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out
to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But
these looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston
trolley-line; and we perversely found our delight in a fine
breadth of brown woods for the very reason of that homelikeness
which gave us pause in the houses. The trees looked American;
there were
215
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
American wood-roads
penetrating the forest's broken and irregular extent; there was
one steep-sided ravine worth any man's American money; and the
dead leaves littered the sylvan paths with an allure to the foot
which it was hard for the head to resist.
Elsewhere the
tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked, after it
left the Campagna's level, with vineyards as measureless as the
olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no
sign of leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on
long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and
netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their
tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following
the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to
leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces
of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our
summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same
instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination,
our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a
cheerful square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables
hospitably spread on the sidewalks before them.
We decided not to
lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our eyes from
feasting, even at eleven o'clock in the morning, on the wonderful
prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more
immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that
thronged about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all
finer than the cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and
younger and stronger; we could have taken the worst of the
equipages that contested our favor and still fared well; but we
chose the best--a glittering victoria and an animal of proud
action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring
216
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of joyous bells; he
had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others;
but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental
vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his
horse's headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us
ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us
from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place
should be cheaper than in a city; because, as he proved, there
were fewer strangers to hire them and they ought logically to be
dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards of time and
money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole day
instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he
only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased
figure.
We supposed that it
was the negotiation which drew and held the attention of all the
leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and our relation
to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that
concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced
him that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and
memorable villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and
drove out through the reluctantly parting spectators, who
remained looking after us as if unable to disperse to their
business or pleasure.
Our driver decided
for us to go first to the Villa Falconieri, which had lately been
bought and presented by a fond subject to the German Emperor, and
by him in turn bestowed on the German Academy at Rome. In the
cold, clean, stony streets of Frascati, as we rattled through
them, there breathed the odor of the great local industry; and
the doorways of many buildings, widening almost in a circle to
admit the burly tuns of wine, testified how generally, how
almost
217
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
universally, the
vintage of that measureless acreage of grapes around the place
employed the inhabitants. But there was little else to impress
the observer in Frascati, and we willingly passed out of the town
in the road climbing the long incline to the Villa Fal-conieri,
with its glimpses, far and near, of woods and gardens. It was a
road so much to our minds that nothing was further from us than
the notion that our horse might not like it so well; but, at the
first distinct rise, he stopped and wheeled round so abruptly,
after first pawing the air, that there could be no doubt where
the popular interest we had lately enjoyed in Frascati had really
originated. Probably our horse's distinguishing trait was known
to everybody in Frascati except his driver. He, at least, showed
the greatest surprise at the horse's behavior, as unprecedented
in their acquaintance, which he owned was brief, for he had
bought him in Rome only the week before. With successive retreats
to level ground he put him again and again at the incline, but as
soon as the horse felt the ground rising under his feet he lifted
them from it and whirled round for another retreat. All this we
witnessed from an advantageotis point at the roadside which we
had taken up at his first show of reluctance; and at last the
driver suggested that we should leave it and go on to the Villa
Falconieri on foot. On our part, we suggested that he should
attempt some other villa which would not involve an objectionable
climb. He then proposed the Villa Mandragone, and the horse
seemed to agree with us. As we drove again through the clean,
cold, stony streets, with the rounded doorways for the
wine-casks, we fancied something clearly ironical in the general
interest renewed by our return. But we tried to look as if we had
merely done the Villa Falconieri with unexampled rapidity, and
pushed on
218
VILLA FALCONIERI,
ENTRANCE, FRASCAT1
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to the Villa
Mandragone, where, under the roof of interlacing ilex toughs, our
horse ought to have been tempted on in a luxurious
unconsciousness of anything like an incline. But he was
apparently an animal which would have felt the difference between
two rose-leaves and one in a flowery path, and just when we were
thinking what a delightful time we were having, and beginning to
feel a gentle question as to who the pathetic little cripple
halting toward us with a color-box and a camp-stool might be, and
whether she painted as well as a kind heart could wish, our horse
stopped with the suddenness which we knew to be definite. The
sensitive creature could not be deceived; he must have reached
rising ground, and we sided with him against our driver, who
would have pretended it was fancy.
It was now noon, and
we drove back to the piazza, agreeing upon a less price in
view of the imperfect service rendered, and deciding to collect
our thoughts for a new venture over such luncheon as the best
hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it
gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has
swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a
specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty,
yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which
kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and
invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over
its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled
formed a good soup; there was an admirable pasta and a
creditable, if imperfect, conception of beefsteak; and there was
a caraffe of new Frascati wine, sweet, like new cider. If we
could have asked more, it would not have been more than the young
Italian officer who sat in the other corner with his
219
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
pretty young wife,
and who allowed me to weave a whole realtistic fiction out of
their being at Frascati so out of season.
Just as I was most
satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver alarmed me by
appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The
occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he
said, was his brother, with a horse which, upon the same
authority, was without moral blame or physical blemish. If
anything, it preferred a mountain to a plain country, and could
be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who was almost as
exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled contract of
the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and yet I
had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that
it was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse
tacitly scoffed at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be
glad that I did so, for in the keeping of those good creatures
the rest of our day was an unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon
further acquaintance, that the man paid a hundred dollars for the
horse; his brother had paid a hundred and twenty-five for the
balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it would be
worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the rising
ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own
horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come
from a long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the
next week with two ladies for passengers, who were to pay him
five dollars a day for himself and horse and their joint keep. He
said the ladies, whose names he gave, were from Boston; he balked
at adding Massachusetts, but I am sure the horse would not; and,
if I could have hired them both to carry me about Italy
indefinitely, I would have
220
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
gladly paid them
five dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that
driver was charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who
reflected credit even upon his brother and his brother's horse:
one of those perfect Italian temperaments which endear their
possessors to the head and heart, so that you wonder, at parting,
how you are going to live without them.
We did not excite
such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our
first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again,
we had the applause of the children in streets now growing
familiar, and a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and
blithe matrons of all ages rhythmically washing in the public
laundry, who recognized us in our new equipage. The public
laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian town, and
probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous comment
throughout the day which was now passing only too rapidly for us.
We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our
brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is
perhaps as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri
and the Villa Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in
Frascati. We did, indeed, penetrate the chill interior of the
local cathedral, but as we did not know at the time that we were
sharing it with the memory of the young Stuart pretender Charles
Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose brother, Cardinal York,
placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we were conscious of
no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of course, to have
visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella and the
Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to
the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in
person, and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing
the
221
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
Atlantic for.
Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum
unvisited, just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to
Hadrian's Villa--the two things supremely worthy to be seen in
their respective regions. But, if I had seen only half as much as
I saw at Frascati--the Villa Falconieri, namely--I should feel
forever over-enriched by the experience.
Slowly an ancient
servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the Falconieri
for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united years
and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild
boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild
violets, and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of
the repairs and changes going on near the casino, led us first to
the fish-pond, in the untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and
silently showed us the magnificent view which the top commanded,
if commanded is not too proud a word for a place so pathetic in
its endearing neglect. It had once been the haunt of many a gay
picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and all the faded fashion
of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a wilder escapade
than the grove before the casino invited, with its tables of
moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet, or
more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished
forth the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about
me, who can only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and
cloud-shadowed, swam round the upland in the colors of a tropic
sea.
Our mild boy waited
a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then led down to
the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were some
men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in
terms. "What are they shooting?" "They are shooting larks,
signore." "What a pity!" "But the
222
IN THE GARDENS OF THE
VILLA FALCONIERI
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
larks are leaving
Italy, now, and going north." It was a reason, like many another
that humanity is put to it in giving, and I do not know that I
missed any larks, later, from an English meadow where I saw them
spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their friends had been
shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see those
fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not
very good shots.
The workmen who were
putting the place in repair were lunching near the casino, in a
litter of lumber and other structural material, but the casino
itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we
had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool,
bare, still spaces. If there was a great deal to see, there was
not much to remember, or to remember so much as the satirical
frescos of Pier Leone Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well
as others in them. They are not bitter satires, but, on the
contrary, very charming; and still more charming are the family
portraits frescoed round the principal room. Under one curve of
the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time is shown,
half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the
unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited,
or at least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even
than this most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother,
and daughter are the figures of friends or acquaintances or
kinsfolk: figures not only life-size, but full-length, in panels
of the walls, in the very act of stepping on the floor and coming
forward to greet their host and hostess from the other walls.
They did not visibly move during our stay, but I know they only
waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when there was
a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in the
polite gayeties of their
223
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
period. One could
hardly help looking over one's shoulder to see if they were not
following to that farthermost room called Primavera, which is
painted around and aloft like a very bower of spring, with
foliage and flowers covering the walls and dropping through the
trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of art, which in
Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing playfulness as
in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through the last
you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without
bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.
It was so pathetic
to imagine the place going out of the right Italian keeping that
I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome, elderly
woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded
beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron
should be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling
shadows.
"And the German
Emperor owns it now?"
"Yes, they say he
has bought it."
"And the Germans
will soon be coming?"
"They
say."
She would not commit
herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew very well what
she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish now I
could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how
far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always
guess at these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded
the aged gatekeeper according to the century of service his
generations had rendered those of the frescos.
We were going now to
the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the courage for the rise
of ground where we had failed before, and we entreated our driver
to go round some other way, if he could, and
224
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
descend rather than
ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when we came away
that we passed through that ilex avenue which we had not yet
penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many
foot-passengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of
the scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to
seize its features, or some of them. I did not see whether she
was succeeding so well as in pity she might and as I knew she
did.
In spite of our
triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second attempt, we can
never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri. I forget
what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid, with
three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as
reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace
enclosing a quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less),
with a stately colonnade following as far round as the reader
likes. When he passes through all this magnificence he will come
out on a grassy terrace, with a fountain below it, and below that
again the chromatic ocean of the Cam-pagna (I have said sea often
enough). A weird sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the
place by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the
several corners, with colossal masques carven at the top and the
sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches must
often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion
of these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have
a college there, where only the sons of noble families are
received for education. As we rounded a sunny wall in driving
away, we saw a line of people, old and young of both sexes, but
probably not of noble families, seated with their backs against
the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls a soup which our
driver said was the soup of charity
225
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and the daily dole
of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now
growing colder thaa it had been, and we felt that the poor needed
all the soup, and hot, that they could get.
After a vain visit
to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing, in spite of
the traces of a recent country fair and the historical merits of
a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming to
show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the
tram back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The
roof, which had been so popular and populous in the morning, was
now so little envied that a fat lady descended from it and wedged
herself into a row of the interior where a sylph would have
fitted better but might not have added so much to the warmth. No
one, myself of the number, thought of getting up, though there
were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to stand. This
was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the
conductor ask me to Avait for my change, with all the ensuing
fears that wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In
some things it appears that at Rome the Romans do as the
Americans do, but I wish we were like them in having such a place
as Frascati within easy tram-reach of our cities.
XV
A FEW REMAINING
MOMENTS
In the days of the
earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought elect did not
feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in Hawthorne's
romance of The Marble Faun. We made that our aesthetic
handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the
places
226
THE MARBLE
FAUN
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
mentioned in it,
which were important for being mentioned; though such places as
the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the
Villa Bor-ghese might secondarily have their historical or
artistic interest. In like manner Story's statue of Cleopatra was
to be seen, because it was the "original" of the imaginary
sculptor Kenyon's Cleopatra, and a certain mediaeval tower was
sacred because it was universally identified as the tower where
the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the doves
that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals
where Hilda's tower was, and then stand with them watching the
pigeons which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I
could never forget it, but I must have passed it several times
unnoting in my latest Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a
pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero a contemporary of that earlier
day glanced around the narrow piazza through which we were
passing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling aloft, joyfully
shouted, "Look! There is Hilda's tower!" and if Hilda herself had
waved to us from its battlements we could not have been surer of
it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our citizenship
in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any
material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in
its indestructible integrity.
No one to-day,
probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of Praxiteles
because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight of
it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first
drew me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed,
furry ears, as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really
the Marble Faun of Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of
mine, in
227
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
official and
scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my
satisfaction in the verification of the Faun's ears. Instead of
boasting it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless
Dying Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at
more from below than he has been seen in modern times, and who is
presently to be lifted to something like his antique level. He,
in fact, requires this from the spectator who would feel all his
pathos, as we realized in sitting down and looking a little
upward at him.
In his room and in
the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal bronze and
marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had known
in some anterior life. They were so familiar that I felt no need
to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in
several cases given them new names. I should have known certain
of them by traits which remain in the memory long after names
have dropped out of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic
upper-lip, still looked like the finer sort of Irish-American
politician; Tiberius again surprised me with the sort of racial
sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious personality from his
mother's blood; but the too Ne-ronian head of Nero, which
seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant when
trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby
idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those
imperialities, which of course must have been done in their
lifetimes, was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly
and evil but that the artists were apparently safe in showing
them so. The men might not have minded that, but how had the
sculptors managed to portray the women as they did and live?
Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are a
forgotten
228
MARCUS AURELIUS WITH
OUT-STRETCHED ARM
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
tribe, and no one
can say what became of any given artist after executing the bust
of an empress; his own execution may have immediately followed.
But what is certain is that those ladies are no lovelier in their
looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in their rank
they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the
lower class. The most touching face as well as the most dignified
and beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which
used to be known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as
that of a Roman matron, does not relieve the imperial average of
plainness. The rest could rival the average American society
woman only in the prevailing modernity of their expression;
imperial Rome was very modern, as we all know, and nothing in our
own time could be more up to date than the lives and looks of its
smart people.
The general
impression of the other marbles of the Capitoline Museum remains
a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures,
of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can
be definite about some such delightful presence as that old River
dozing over his fountain in the little cold court you see first
and last as you come and go, it is more than your reader, if he
is as wise as you wish him, can ask of you. I have been wondering
whether he could profitably ask of me some record of my
experiences in the official and scientific company with which I
was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I should have to
offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of objects
printed one upon another and hardly separable in their
succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius,
commanding us with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze
charger which would not obey Michelangelo when he bade it
"Go,"
229
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
not because it was
not lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the
afternoon sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern
from their vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof
of the museum. There would be the sense, rather than the vision,
of the white shoulders of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds
above the dark-green garden spaces on either hand; there would be
the front of the Church of Ara Coeli visible beyond the
insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and filling in the other end
of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and not the Romans
knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which the
mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double
stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their
municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the
Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the
present company would find itself in the carved and gilded
arm-chairs of the conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table
and restoring itself from the fatigues of more and more antique
art in the galleries about. After this there would be the
gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little
fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting
on the wall where the fragments of Sep-timius Severus's marble
map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.
In the palace of the
Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader ignorantly
supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the
dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or
with-otit to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy)
there would be, beyond the chamber where the actual city council
of Rome meets under the presidency
230
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of the mayor, the
great public rooms bannered and memorialled around with heroic
and historic blazons; and last there would be the private room
where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he can
turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic
archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long,
velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the
softly rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.
But, if each of
these bare facts could be parted from the others and
intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who
has never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some
such question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I
hesitate to ask him to go with me on a golden morning of March
and spend it in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could
I should like to pour its yellowness and mellowness round him,
perfumed with a potpourri of associations from the time of
Lucullus down through every mediaeval and modern time to that
very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living somewhere in
these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy which
has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy
people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of
box; the blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues
and reliefs on these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an
aisle of the grove beside the garden into whatever dream awaited
her youth in the leafy dusk; an old American pair gazing after
her from the terrace, with the void of the vanished years aching
in their hearts for the Rome that was once young with them: does
this represent to the reader an appreciable morning in the Villa
Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if he likes. I
cannot do more for him without
231
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
doing less, and yet
I know it is a palette rather than a picture I am giving
him.
All the while I was
there, the guest of the French nation by the payment of fifty
centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of a
place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Eepublic with so
much other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the
magnanimous Third Republic is going to restore it to the people
rightfully its owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the
Villa Medici will remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world,
even in the very capital of it, are without some touch of
abatement. I could not so much as visit the Catacombs of
Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though
incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As
we drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one
of those domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy
alone. Three peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in
controversy which, on his side, the man supported with both hands
flapping wildly at the heads of the women, who alertly dodged and
circled around him in the endeavor to close in upon him. It was
instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that they were his wife
and daughter, and that he was the worse for the vintage of their
home acre, and would be the better for being got into the house
and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts of
the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in
no hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was
about to tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when
suddenly the cab descended into a valley, and when the eager
spectator rose to his former level again the stone wall had risen
with him, and he never knew the end of that passage of real
life,
232
IN THE VILLA
MEDICI
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
It was impossible to
bid the cabman drive back for the close of the scene; the abrupt
conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof of the
charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal
us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery
that for the moment my bitter sense of loss was assuaged, and it
only returns now at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in
this brief scene were some early Christians might have been, and
it must have been the stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving
in the husband and father. He was probably such a vessel of wrath
as, being filled with Bacchus, would have lent itself to the
persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive the emperor's
gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned to
found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of
course, under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach
as many as five levels below the surface. I will not follow the
reader with that kind guide who will cheer his wanderings through
those sunless corridors of death, where many of the sleepers
still lie sealed within their tombs on either hand, and show him
by the smoky taper's light the frescos which adorn the cramped
chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance and ask him
if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know whether
he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance,
putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of
Elijah. Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek
god as good as a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of
the last things to be converted, having a presentiment of the
dark and bloody themes the new religion would give it to deal
with.
The earthy scent of
the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and he will have
two minds about
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
keeping for a
souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wraps in
a bit of newspaper for him; he may prefer the flower which he is
allowed to gather from the tiny garden at the entrance to the
catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are among the
cheer-fulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something sweet
and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady
whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and
martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do
not know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed
the house of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of
unknown surname, where they suffered death for their faith, under
the Passionist church named for them. Twenty-four rooms on the
two stories have been opened, and there are others yet to be
opened; when all are laid bare they will perfectly show what a
Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in the
mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average
Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York
dwelling would differ from that of the average Newport cottage.
The rooms are incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval
palaces of the Roman nobles, and the decoration is sometimes
crudely mixed of pagan and Christian themes and motives; the
artists, like the painters of the Domatilla catacombs, were
probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.
The young Passionist
father who showed us through the church and the house under it
made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch, but he was
worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both,
radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures,
and justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced
electricity which lighted the darkness
234
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
of the underground
rooms and corridors. He told us he had been twenty years a
missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly acquired the
delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow him he
said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the
wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With
all his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain
smiling severity before which the spirit bowed. He had made us
wait half an hour before he came to let us into the church, and
during the hour we were with him there he kept the door locked
against an unlucky lady who arrived just too late to enter with
us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go back with her
singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it would not
have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or
plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable
among many other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when
he suffered from sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left
his list of victims lying about, so that his friend Marcia found
it and, reading her name in it, joined with other friends in his
assassination. The sex has indeed had much restraint to bear from
the Church, but in some respects it has been rendered fearless in
the assertion of its rights. With poor women one of these is the
indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the courage, almost
the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised charity in
coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven past
her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he
dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing
transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and
experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest
sensibilities.
235
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
A chapter much
longer than any I have written here might well be devoted to the
study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of
Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed
with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in
the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of
impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without
sharing their professional zeal, and distinguishing for the
moment in favor of their respective churches above every other.
It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the
Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest
churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for
agreeing with the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were
especially enforced by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I
remember, who would not spare us a single object of interest in
San Gregorio's, which is indeed for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon
race supremely rich in its associations with the conversions of
his ancestors from heathenism.
Being myself of
Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred years older
than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid that
it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church
where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England
St. Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days
of the sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them
kneeling among the people who then thronged the genially
irregular piazza, but as we came up some ecclesiastical students
were playing ball there, their robes tucked into their girdles
for their greater convenience, and we made our way at once into
the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of edifices
enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also the
greatest; and here
236
THE BATHS OF
CARACALLA
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
or in the adjacent
convents a score of miracles were wrought through the heavenly
beauty of his life. Of these miracles, of whose inspiration you
must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel their verity, the
loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the little
chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and
touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every
morning twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared
in the figure of Christ the Lord, as if to own them His
disciples. The chapel which enshrines the table is one of three,
quaint in form and rich in art, standing in the garden called St.
Silvia's, after the mother of St. Gregory. As we came out through
it the westering sun poured the narrow court before the chapel
full of golden light and threw the black shadow of a cypress
across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking to
the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and
swung unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could
almost feel the waft of them across the centuries that parted
their faith and mine.
We had come to St.
Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had set out to
see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning aside
for the Coloseum, had now visited on next to the last of them.
The stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten
or twelve weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of
something like this obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in
overhanging cliffs and precipices, through the cool and bright
April air, against a sky of absolute blue. As if it had been cast
up out of the earth in some convulsive throe of nature, it
floundered over its vast area in shapeless masses which seemed to
have capriciously received the
237
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
effect of human
design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches
flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags,
in the monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of
the cavernous apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its
immensity dwarfed the image of all the other fragments of the
Roman world and set definite bounds to their hugeness in the
mind. It seemed to have been not so much a single edifice as a
whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of the multitudes
that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation which had
enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage to
strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the
sentiment of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine,
and the innocent beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the
orchards around, imparted to it a pathos in which one's mere
brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely adventitious pathos,
and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of
ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for
beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some
English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the
ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and
baths of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid
of.
VII A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
WE left Rome with
such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief
in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick. Afterward,
when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to
listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed,
they stared or simpered, and said, "Oh!" That was not all we
could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while
we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far
as she could on her poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave
way under her, and she fell down, but scrambled up again on the
next stretch of arches, like some fond cripple pursuing a friend
on crutches; when at last our train outran them, and there was no
longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up the vain chase and
turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes and
bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they
pointed.
It was a heaven of
better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white clouds in
it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the
beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The
orchard trees were in bloom--peach and plum, cherry and
pear--whenever you chose to look at them, and all nature seemed
to rejoice in the cessation of the
239
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
two days' strike
which had now enabled us to drive to the station instead of
walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many of
these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers
attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have
recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But
as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the
grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long
before we reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have
paid them anything they asked.
When we emerged from
the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we passed through many fields
of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the grassy waste, but
there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle in
pastures. Now and then we passed a wretched hut which seemed to
be the dwelling of the shepherds we saw tending the flocks, and
here and there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of
straw, whether for man or beast, set within a sort of squalid
court, with a frowzy suggestion of old women and children about
the doors of the cottages. We saw no men, though there must have
been men off at work in the fields with the younger
women.
As we drew near
Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a wind that
seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in 1865
when, after looking at the tossing ships in the harbor, we
decided to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little
steamer we had meant to take. From our pleasant train we now
patronized Civita Vecchia with a recognition of its
picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that then insisted on
itself, though the harbor was as full of shipping as of old.
There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station
buffet,
240
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
where there had been
neither station nor buffet in our young time: but doubtless then
as now there had been the lonely graveyard outside the town, with
its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the last of our
Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to gray
since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward
in the malarial Maremma.
If the Maremma is as
malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There were
stretches of hopeless morass, with wide acreages under water, but
mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then
we ran by a stony old town on a distant summit like the
outcropping of granite or marble, and there were frequent
breadths of woodland, oak and pine and, I dare say, walnut and
chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts to reclaim the Maremma
from its evil air and make it safely habitable, and the farther
we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were. There were
many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as stone;
when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night
after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our
diligence to pass its flood, we were aware, in the evening light,
of a prosperity which, if not excessive for the twoscore years
that had passed, was still very noticeable. I should not quite
say that the brick wall of the city had been scraped and.
scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new, and there was a
pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been, and
people were coming and going who had almost the effect of
commuters; at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes
by trolley. We resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the
inn in the heart of the town where we had spent that "night of
memory and of sighs."
But we searched the
horizon round for the point on the
241
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
highway where our
diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and
softly rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant
taking a bath, but, so far from finding it, we could not even
find the highway. We began to have our doubts of what we had
always believed had happened, and remained as snugly as we could
in our compartment, where, to tell the truth, we were not very
snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the Italian
government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it,
and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our
rugs and cushions; but, if we had known what we were coming to in
Leghorn, we should have thought ourselves very
enviable.
I do not know
exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the hotel
where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least
one of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a
hundred miles as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus,
through long, straight streets, after ten o'clock at night. The
streets and houses were mostly dark, as houses of good habits
should be at that hour, but, after passing through a wide, lonely
piazza, we struck into a street longer and straighter than the
others, and drew up at our hotel door opposite an hilarious cafe,
where there seemed a general rejoicing of some sort. We were
unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it without
knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up
often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of
our one porcelain stove and leave us to perish of
cold.
In Leghorn the good
Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this sweeping
verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good as
another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter
in
242
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
Rome had taught us
to think obsolete; now we found that it was only obsolescent. We
had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this was well,
for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its
frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible
warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with
electricity, and having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper,
we were carried to our apartment. We had our landlord's company
at supper, and had learned from him that the most eminent of
American financiers, who shall not otherwise be identified here,
was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn, of letting him know
that he was bringing a party of friends, and commanding of him a
banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a millionaire of
that princely quality. After that we were not so much surprised
as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited by
our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two
scaldini, which were bristling before her where she knelt
when we opened the door upon her. She apologized, but still she
carried away the coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of
our stove as best we could. It was not a large stove, and it
seemed to feel its inadequacy to the office of taking the chill
off that vast, dim room, where it cowered, dark and low upon the
floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of its pipe lost in space
before it reached the lowermost goddess in the allegory frescoed
on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain stove, that
might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that
imparted no more cheer than warmth.
We rebuilt our fire,
after many repeated demands for kindling, which had apparently to
be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could get it,
and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by
the
243
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
noisy gayeties of
the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the thin
film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the
consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood
into the despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for
us that we had thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us
in straps, instead of abandoning them with our other baggage in
the station till next day! But, even with these heaping the hotel
blankets and com-forters, we shivered, and a superannuated odor
that had lurked in the recesses of those rooms, to which the sun
or wind had never pierced, grew with the growing cold, and
haunted the night like something palpable as well as
sensible--the materialization of smells dead and buried there
long ago. It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed
its beams in that naughty air; it would not even light the page
which at one time was opened in the vain hope that the author
would help the benumbing cold to bring torpor if not slumber to
the weary brain.
It is really
impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was somehow
managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for
the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make
Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and
in the winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every
modern comfort for the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all
that and more, and only for the fear that I should seem to join
it in advertising its merits I should like to celebrate it by
name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I did, all my readers
would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no room for me,
who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of
luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public
rooms of the
244
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
ground floor, but
there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and there were
fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the sea,
to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of
sun as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That
which diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator,
register and hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent
intelligence, which imagined us, and which would not then let us
go. We had become not only agnostic as respected the possibility
of warmth in Leghorn, we were open sceptics, aggressive infidels.
But the landlord himself followed us from one room to another,
lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making us feel the
warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by
palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and
coaxing our unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son
in English, and, if I do not say that these amiable people were
worthy all the prosperity which was not then apparent in their
establishment, may I never be comfortably lodged or fed again.
Our daily return for what we got was a poor twelve francs each;
but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing us with such
sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those gentle
people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would
not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we
were never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with
the run of a reading-room where there were the latest papers and
periodicals from London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we
were served the best luncheons and dinners we ate in
Europe.
The place had the
true out-of-season charm. There were two stately dining-rooms
besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant spaces
where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from
which
245
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
a magnificent
stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift waited our
orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so lonely
and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking
beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying
and fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst
believe in their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the
environment flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and
other evergreens, and with flower-beds where the annuals were
beginning to show the gardener's designs in their sprouting
seeds. Beyond these ample villa bounds a tram-car murmured to and
from the well-removed city, and beyond its track lay a line of
open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing establishments,
as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring masonry instead
of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.
This festive
preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which Leghorn
enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the
season glisten and twitter and flutter with the vivid national
life. The preparation includes a delightful drive by the
seashore, with groves and gardens, to the city gate and
indefinitely beyond it, which we one day followed as far as an
old fort, where a little hotel had nestled with every promise of
simple comfort. There was a neighboring village of no very
exciting interest, and I do not know that the Italian Naval
Academy, which we passed on the way, was very exciting, though
with its villa grounds it had a pleasing rural effect. Hard by
our hotel, in a piazza that seemed to have nothing to do but
surround it, was the colossal bust of an Italian admiral, or the
like, which had not the impressivenesa of a colossal full-length
figure, but which rendered the original with the faithful realism
of the Genoese
246
PIAZZA VICTOR EMANUEL,
LEGHORN
A WEEK AT
LEGHOKN
Campo Santo
sculpture. In compensation there was, toward the city, near the
ship-yards where the great Italian battle-ships are built, the
statue of their builder--a man who looked it--standing at large
ease, with one hand in his pantaloons pocket, and not apparently
conscious of the passer's gaze. Beyond the ship-yard, in which a
battle-ship was then receiving the last touches, was a statue for
which I could not claim an equal unconsciousness. In fact, it
challenged the public attention and even homage as it extended
the baton of command and triumphed over the four Moorish or
Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained to
the several corners of the monument and owned themselves
galley-slaves. The Medi-cean grand-duke who lords it over them,
and who erected this monument in honor of himself for the
victories his admirals had gained in sweeping the pirates from
the seas, is a very proud presence, and is certainly worthy of
the admiration which his bronze requires from the spectator. I
instantly suspected this monument of being the chief sculpture of
Leghorn, and I did not wonder that a valet de place was
lying in wait for me there to make me observe that from a certain
point I could get all four of the galley-slaves' noses in
perspective at once. Upon experiment I did not find that I could
do this, but I imputed my failure to want of merit in myself and
not the monument, and I willingly paid half a franc for the
suggestion; if all one's failures cost so little, one could save
money. I was going then to view at close quarters the port of
Leghorn, which is famous for its mole and lighthouse and
quarantine, the first of their kind in their time. The old port,
with the fortifications, was the work of a natural son of Queen
Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, whose noble origin was so
constantly recog-
247
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
nized by the Tuscan
grand-dukes that he came at last to be accepted as Lord Dudley by
the English. From his day, if not from his work, the prosperity
of Leghorn began, and the English have always had a great part in
it. Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of great
British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they
declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and
the trade with America has always been such that American
merchants and captains have fully shared in the commerce directly
or indirectly. Both the old and the new port were a scene of
pleasant activity the pleasant afternoon when I visited them, and
were full of varied sail as well as many steamers, loading or
unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports, east and west, and
the Hanse-atic cities and the far coasts of Norway.
Any seaport is
charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian port has
always a prime pictur-esqueness. Its sailors are the most ancient
mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of
them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any
nascent Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do
not deny that there was one. Leghorn is still in her lusty youth,
being not much older than our Boston in the prosperity which has
not failed her since the Medici divined her importance toward the
close of the sixteenth century, and fortified her harbor till she
was one of the strongest places on the Mediterranean. With a hazy
general consciousness of her modernity in mind, I had imagined
her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised to read, in a
rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook called
Su e Giu per Livorno (or Up and Down Leghorn), that
the place was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years
before Christ. The author
248
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
records this with a
smile, and then, by a leap over some forty centuries, he finds
firm footing in the fact that the great Countess Matilde, then
much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan neighbors
everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This seems
to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to
ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans,
confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt
and embellished the port. A century after, Charles of Anjou
demolished it, and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then,
in the last years of the thirteenth century, the Florentines,
Lucchese, and Genoese devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and
left Leghorn only one poor little church. Well throughout the
fourteenth century there were wars between these republics, and
Leghorn suffered the consequences, being, as our author says,
"according to custom, assailed, taken, wasted, and destroyed."
But before that century was out she seems to have flourished up
again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning
from Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long
exile to the Eternal City.
The Genoese now sold
Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to France for
twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole city.
But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and
strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite
time now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and
that, having passed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have
been ceded without a blow to Charles VIII. of France. But in a
year she was once more in the hold of Florence and helping that
republic fight her enemies the Pisans, and her other
enemies under the
Emperor Maximilian of Germany.
249
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
More fortifying,
embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429 Michelangelo
came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine
republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had
suffered. The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de'
Medici, who came in master at Florence, took Leghorn into the
favor which his family continued to show her to the end. The
first Cosimo greatly improved her harbor, dug canals, and built
forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a pleasure to Charles V.,
place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn, and the Spaniards
remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the sixteenth
century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with the
four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to
get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had
been constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was
now time for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652
they were defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five
years later the grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long
after a violent earthquake shook down many buildings and killed
many women and children; but the authorities did what they could
to secure the city in future by declaring the day a perpetual
fast, and forbidding masking and dancing on it.
No disaster worth
recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the Rights of
Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the place
the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs.
The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand
English troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it
and sacked the churches and imposed another fine nearly as great
as the first. After the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars,
they seem to
250
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
have come back again
and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained
five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio
Giaschi, invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying
war-vessels, and a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808
Napoleon gave all Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister
Elisa, but when in 1814 he was deposed, Leghorn was restored to
the Tuscan grand-dukes and garrisoned for them by German troops,
an earthquake having profited by the general disorder meantime to
pay it another visit. The grand-duke now being driven out of
Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn, which fell a prey
to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel appared there in
1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a telegraphic line
to Pisa was opened.
In 1848 the
revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at
Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the
grand-duke, and elected among its representatives F. D.
Guerrazzi, once famous as the first of Italian novelists and a
man of generous mind and heart, who duly suffered arrest and
imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored by the Austrians.
He was sentenced to fifteen years' prison with hard labor, but
later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return and
take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led
the movement against making peace with Austria unless all her
Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873,
and is remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a
whole, but singularly interesting in certain details.
I have omitted from
this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest, such as
visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have
got in all the plagues
251
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and earthquakes.
Perhaps I have the more willingly suppressed a few war-like
facts, in the interest of the superstition I had cherished that
Leghorn was without a history, or that it had no more history
than, most American cities of equal date with its commercial
importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the Medici
to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races,
settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in
great numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you
had as well strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn. Greeks,
Turks, Armenians were protected equally with English and Dutch,
and infidel and heretic were alike free in their worship. It was
the great prison of the galley-slaves, who were chiefly the
pirates and corsairs taken on the high seas by the duke's ships.
These captives not only served as models for the Moors at the
base of his monument, but they must have been very useful in the
different public works which he and his successors carried out.
Now they and their like are gone, and though the Greeks, the
Armenians, the English, and the Scotch still have their churches,
I do not suppose there is a mosque in all Leghorn.
I do not speak very
confidently, because my researches in that sort were not
exhaustive. I indeed visited the cathedral, not wholly because
Inigo Jones had something to do in planning it, but because I had
formed the habit of visiting churches in Rome, and I mechanically
went into one wherever I saw it. Generally speaking, I think that
they were rather bare in painting or sculpture, but they were
such churches as in America one would go a long way to see and
think one's self well rewarded by their objects of interest. I do
not know what defence to offer for not having visited the
galleries of the Museo Civico, where by
252
THE CANAL AT
LEGHORN
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
actual count in the
guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art,
though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say: probably
one out of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much
resort to the churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly
through its pleasant streets and squares, and by the shores of
the canals which once gave it the name of New Venice, and which
still invite the smaller shipping up among its houses in right
Venetian fashion. The streets of Leghorn are not so straight as
they are long, but many are very straight, and the others are
curved rather than crooked. The longest and straight-est were
streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where
each family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind,
and a respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our
towns. From the force of the mid-April sun in these streets I
realized what they might be in summer, and, if I lived in
Leghorn, I would rather live on the sea-front, in one of the
comfortable, square, stone villas which border it. But everywhere
Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and convenient, with
lively shops and cafes and trams and open spaces, and statues and
monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat radical
politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every
other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a
Victor Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as
always, and a Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his
poncho and his round, flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a
Cavour, and, above all, there is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as
to the seated figure, but most interesting, most touching in two
of the bas-reliefs below. One represents him proclaiming the
provisional government at Florence in 1849, after the expulsion
of the grand-
253
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
duke, where the fact
is studied, with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all
its incidents and the costumes of the thronging spectators. The
sculptor has hesitated at no top-hat or open umbrella; there are
barefooted boys and bareheaded young girls, as well as bearded
elders; if my memory serves, the scene is not without a dog or
two. But it is the other relief which is so simply and so deeply
affecting--the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a
rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest
work, The Siege of Florence, and with him standing a
little way from it. In spite of the small space and the almost
vacant stage, the scene is full of most moving drama, and records
a whole Italian epoch, now happily past forever.
These are modern
sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the monument
of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In another
piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember
rightly, face each other over its oblong--classic motives, with
the figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive
from the mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are
several theatres, and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there
should be in a city where the sweet old playwright sojourned for
a time and has placed the action of his famous comedy, "La
Locandiera." But I was told that the local theatres were not so
much frequented by polite people, especially for opera, as the
theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its society than
its old-time vassal by the sea, and attracts the fashion of
Leghorn during the season.
As Pisa has ceased
to be the colony of literary English it once was, in the time of
Byron and Hunt and Shelley, to name no others, so Leghorn has
ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has
still
254
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
a great deal of
commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by
resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers
in the style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities
of both colonies are united in the author of a charming book who
fills the post of British consul at Leghorn. His Tuscan
Towns must not be confused with another book called Tuscan
Cities, though, if the traveller chooses to carry both with
him about Tuscany, I will not say that he could do better. In
Tuscan Cities there is nothing about Leghorn, I believe,
but in Tuscan Towns there is a specially delightful
chapter about the place, its people, language, and customs which
I can commend to the reader as the best corrective of the errors
I must have been constantly falling into here.
It was in company no
less enviable than this author's that I revisited the port on a
gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first time
visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time
of the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the
rule of the Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the
Medicean grand-dukes amplified them in almost the proportions I
saw. The brutal first duke of their line, Alessandro de' Medici,
who some say was no Medici, but the bastard of a negro and a
washerwoman, stamped his creed in the inscription below his
adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one Law, one Lord," and it
was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked Cosimo I.
killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a
manner the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if
it was a fact, that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his
brother Giovanni. I
should like to
pretend that the tragedy had wrought
255
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in my
unconsciousness to the effect of the pensive gloom which the old
fortress cast over me, but perhaps I had better not. There are
some gray Sunday afternoons of a depressing effect on the spirit
which requires no positive or palpable reason.
In any case it was a
relief to go from the shadow of the past there through the
pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British
cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own
nation are taking their long rest. No one is now buried there,
and the place, in the gradual diminution of the English colony at
Leghorn, has fallen into a lovely and appealing neglect if not
oblivion. Oblivion quite covers its origin, but it is almost as
old as Protestantism itself, and, if the ground for it was the
gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as well as Jews in
the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not be
strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once
Greek and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling
congregation has no care of it, and there is no fund to keep it
so much as free from weeds and brambles and the insidious ivy
rending its monuments asunder. The afternoon of our visit it was
in the sole charge of a large, gray cat, which, after feasting
upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on a sunny bed of
catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose windows some
young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we wandered
about among the "tall cypresses, myrtles, pines,
eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly
roses, a jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises,
violets, and other loveliest of wild flowers." On the forgotten
tombs were the touching epitaphs of those who had died in exile,
and whose monuments are sometimes here while their ashes lie in
Florence or Rome, or wher-
256
A WEEK AT
LEGHORN
ever else they
chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on
the graves of "William Magee Seton, merchant of New York," who
died at Pisa in 1803, and "Henry De Butts, a citizen of
Baltimore, N. America," who died at Sarzana; with "James M.
Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines, Citizen of the United States of
America," who died at Leghorn in 1802; and "Thomas Gamble, Late
Captain in the Navy of the United States of America," who died at
Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other Americans whose
tombs I did not see. The memorials of the English were likewise
here, whether they died at Leghorn or not; but most of them seem
to have ended their lives in that place, where there were once so
many English residents, whether for their health or their profit.
The youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to
find the air specific for their maladies, and doubtless this
would account also for the disproportionate number of noble
ladies who rest here, with their hatchments and their coronets
and robes of state carven on the stones above them. Among others
one reads the titles of Lady Catharine Burgess born Beauclerk;
Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and daughter of
the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of James
Murray, . . . and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his
Spouse," with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and
naval officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that
strenuous spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English
fiction of his time than any other novelist of his time, and
second only to Richardson in the wide influence of his literary
method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who here ended his long fight
with consumption and the indifference of his country to his
claims upon her official
17
25?
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
recognition. After
many years of narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where
he spent his later life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of
literary ambition, a consulate, perhaps the very post that my
companion, a hundred and fifty years later, was worthily holding.
The truest monument to his stay in Italy is the book of Italian
travel that he wrote, and the best effect is that sort of
peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented in
Humphrey Clinker, and which has survived the epistolary
form into our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over
his grave, with the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui
Liburni animam efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable
with what wrath he would have disputed the record, if it is true,
according to all the other authorities, that he exhaled his
spirit two years earlier, and how he would have had it out with
those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had the error
perpetuated above his helpless dust.
It was not easy to
quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish which I have
here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom the
blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from
nature now cleiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their
very memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only
enough to save their names from entire oblivion, and with the
hope of this I have named some of their names. It might not be
too much even for the United Kingdom and the United States,
though both very poor nations, to join in contributing the sum
necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English duke, or some
millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay alone; I
cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund
for the care of the tomb of Smollett.
VIII OVER AT
PISA
IF the half-hour
between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely
transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty
minutes which might so much better have been given to either
place. But with the constant line of mountains enclosing the
landscape on the right, in all its variety of tillage,
pasture-land, vineyard, and orchard, and the unchanging level
which had once been the bed of the sea, we were gainers in sort
beyond the gift of those cities. We had the company, great part
of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen even between
Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the light
beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there
grouped in classic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and
threes. We had the canal that of old time made Pisa a port of the
Mediterranean, with Leghorn for her servant on the shore (or, if
it was not this canal, it was another as straight and long), with
a peasant walking beside it, under a light-green umbrella, in the
showers which threatened our start but spared our arrival. We had
then the city, with its domes and towers, grown full height out
of the plain through which the Arno curves in the stateliest
crescent of all its course.
The day had turned
finer than any other day I can now think of in my whole life, and
I was once more
259
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in Pisa without the
care for its history or art or even novelty which had corroded my
mind in former visits. I had been there twice before--once in
1864, when I had done its wonders with all the wonder they
merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived its memories on the
scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No distinct light
from that learning vexed my present vision, but an agreeable mist
of association, nothing certain, nothing tangible remaining, but
only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I could
possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain
cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with
his dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at
something above the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate
to serve me well, and to part with me friends at the close of the
day for a franc more than the excess agreed upon. It costs so
small a sum to corrupt the common carrier in Italy that I hold it
wrong to fail of any chance, and this driver had not only a horse
of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a beautiful Tuscan, and he
had his Pisa at his fingers' ends.
We were of one mind
about driving without delay to the famous group which is without
rival on the earth, though there may be associated edifices in
the red planet Mars that surpass the Cathedral, the Leaning
Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius
it was imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they
sit, just beyond the city streets, I do not know, but it was
inspiration beyond any effect of mere taste, and it commanded my
worship as much the last as the first time. The meadow still
swims round them and breaks in a foam of daisies at their feet;
for I take it that it is always mid-April there, and that the
grass is as green and the sun as
260
THE CATHEDRAL,
BAPTISTERY, AND LEANING TOWER, PISA
OVER AT PISA
yellow on it as the
afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the
light on them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it
is a wonder they do not swing loose from their foundations and
soar away into the celestial blue. For travellers in our willing
mood there was, of course, the predestined cicerone waiting for
us at the door of the cathedral, who would fix no price for the
pleasure he was born to do us, yet still consented to take more
than twice that he ought to have had at parting. But he was worth
the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though he was not
without the fault of his calling and would have cumbered us with
instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived
that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands
in my pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to
point without fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the
things worthiest noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them
before, the unforgettable, forgotten Andrea del Sartos,
especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you recognize the
well-known features of the painter's wife, but with a gentler
look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he
happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in
her least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other
masters, there is a most noble So-doma, which the great Napoleon
carried away to Paris and which the greater French people
afterward restored. At every step in the beautiful temple you may
well pause, for it abounds in pictures and sculptures, the least
of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond the proudest
effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo,
Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna--the names came back
to me out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while
our
261
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
guide repeated them,
in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or architecture,
with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of Giotto, of
all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three
hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the
pillars, faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former
visits to the church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze
lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now
revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its
oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the
pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer
needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last visit I took
Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from the
printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her
objects of interest. If they came in my way, I looked at them,
but I did not put myself much about for them. I rested mostly in
the twilight of old associations, trusting to the guidance of our
cicerone, whom, in some form or under some name, the reader will
find waiting for him at the cathedral door as we did. But I have
since recurred to the record of my second visit in 1883, with
amazement at the exact knowledge of events shown there, which
became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It appears that I
was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any other
author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of
different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present
cannot parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a
needy crone in the cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five
centimes which I meant for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did
nothing to light the gloom into which this error plunged my
spirit.
It appears to have
jaundiced my view of the whole
262
OVER AT PISA
cathedral, which I
did not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908
I thought it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so
newly from the ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as
I had felt before, that the whole group of sacred edifices at
Pisa was too suggestive of decorative pastry and confectionery.
No more than at the second view of it did I now attempt the
ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged this duty for life
when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon me, I was not
willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I could
keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the
other way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer;
but I gladly followed our cicerone across the daisied green from
the cathedral to the baptistery, where I found the famous echo
waiting to welcome me back, and greet me with its angelic
sweetness, when the custodian who has it in charge appealed to
it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened and coarsened
in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who shouted
out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did
not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of
it were a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have
availed to silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we
were aware of an interesting group of people by the font near the
lovely Lombardic pulpit of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by
their dress--a young father and mother and a little girl or two,
and then a gentle, elderly woman, with a baby in her arms, at
which she looked proudly down. They were in their simple best,
and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I ventured some
propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old woman
made them thank me, I thought I could not
263
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
be mistaken and I
ventured further: "You are the grandmother?"
"Yes, signer," she
answered; and then we had some talk about the age and the beauty
of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises loud
enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed
to hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to
stand apart until the grandmother spoke to me again.
I did not
understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.
"She wishes you to
be godfather to the child."
I had never yet been
a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought grave
responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent
circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse
without wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did
not know until a sudden inspiration came to my rescue.
"Tell them," I said,
"and be careful to make them understand, that I am very grateful
and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I suppose I
cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child."
He explained, and
they received my thanks and regrets with smiling acquiescence;
and just then a very stout little old priest (who has baptized
nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the
baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained,
somehow, disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a
godchild behind me there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have
sent him from time to time some little remembrance of this remote
America, and, perhaps, when he grew up and came to Pisa, and
learned the art of the statuary, to have had from him a Leaning
Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was
264
OVEK AT PISA
taking it for
granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is always
that chance.
If I had been alone,
I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo Santo, from
mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now with me
clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their
light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the
cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and
explicit reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even
some such powerful glasses as would have pierced through the
faded and wasted pictures and shown them at least as I had first
seen them. They were then in such reasonable disrepair as one
might expect after three or four centuries, but in the last
thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not only the
colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the
colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I
have read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is
the same, and until a parasite for the germ is found the loss
must go on, and the work of Giotto, of Be-nozzo Gozzoli, of
Memmi, must perish with that of the Orgagnas, which may indeed
go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles, allegories--they are all
hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years until they shall
vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify in
art.
In some things the
ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain
loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other
pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer
so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the
Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell
of Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and
the world are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins
are as terrifying to
265
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
the gay lords and
ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they were, though
doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than they
would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste
of the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by
Benozzo Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after
realizing the loss one is only a little heartened by the gayety
of certain grieving widows, sitting in marble for monuments to
their husbands at several points under the arcades. What cheer
they might have brought us was impaired by the sight of the
sarcopha-guses and the other antiques against the walls, which
inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things
abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon
us. More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary
unkindness; she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had
moments of the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were
poignant. But she had moments of her own when Rome could not
rival her--such, for instance, as that when she invited us from
the perishing frescos of her Campo Santo to turn our eyes on the
flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters surrounded, and
where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought from
Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so
sweetly and safely.
The afternoon
sunlight was prolonging the day there as well as it could, and we
should have liked to linger with it as late as it would, but
there were other places in Pisa calling us, and we must go. We
found our driver, and his black-eyed boy beside him on the box,
waiting for us at the cathedral door, and we seem to have left it
pretty much to them where we should go. They decided us, if we
really left it to them, mainly for the outside of things, so that
we might see as much
266
OVER AT PISA
of Pisa as possible;
hut it appears to have been their notion that we ought to visit,
at least, the inside of the Church of the Knights of St. Stephen.
I do not know whether I protested or not that I had abundantly
seen this already, but, at any rate, I am now glad that they took
us there. As every traveller will pretend to remember, the main
business of the knights was to fight the Barbary pirates, and the
main business of their church is now to serve as a repository of
the prows of the galleys and the flags which they took in their
battles with the infidels. There are other monuments of their
valor, but by all odds the flags will be the most interesting to
the American visitor, because of the start that many of them will
give him by their resemblance to our own banner, with their
red-and-white stripes, which the eye follows in vivid expectation
of finding the blue field of stars in the upper left-hand corner.
It never does find this, and that is the sufficient reason for
holding to the theory that our flag was copied from the armorial
bearings of the Washington family, and not taken from the
standard of those paynim corsairs; but there is poignant instant
when one trembles.
We viewed, of
course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site of the
Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count
Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the
buildings of Pisa's famous university, which we afterward fancied
rather pervaded the city with the young and ardent life of its
students. It is no great architectural presence, but there are
churches and palaces to make up for that. Everywhere you chance
on them in the narrow streets and the ample piazzas, but the
palaces follow mostly the stately curve of the Arno, where some
of them have condescended to the office of hotels, and where, I
believe, one might live in economy and com-
267
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
fort; or, at any
rate, I should like to try. It would get rather warm there in
May, and July and August are not to be thought of, but all the
other year it would be divine, with such a prospect as can hardly
be matched anywhere else. Pisa used once to be the resort of many
seeking health or warmth, and for mere climate it ought again to
come into favor. Probably there is reasonably accessible society
there, and, as the Livornese believe, there is at least excellent
opera. The time might grow long, but ought not to be very heavy,
and there is a cafe, at the very finest point of the curve, where
you can get an excellent cup of tea. Whether this attests the
resort or sojourn of many English, or the growth of the tea-habit
among the Pisans, I cannot say, but that cafe is very charming,
with students standing about in it and admiring the ladies who
come in to buy pastry, and who do not suppose there is any one
there to look at them. I am sure that the handsome mother with
the pretty daughter who lingered so long over their choice of
little cakes could not have imagined any one was looking, or she
would at once have taken macaroons and hurried away: at that cafe
they have macaroons almost three inches across, and
delicious.
The whole keeping
was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the lengthening
shadows from the other shore, but we were to drive down the Arno
into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with
the foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that
we could, even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting
morsel. But it was all joy, and I should like, at this moment, to
be starting on that enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to
imagine the lovely scenery for himself; almost any of my many
backgrounds will serve; but I will supply him with a piece of
statistics such as does not fall in everybody's
268
PISA, "WITH ALMOST ANY
OF MY BACKGROUNDS'
OVER AT PISA
way. We noted the
great number of anglers who lined the opposite bank, with no
appearance of catching anything, and I asked our driver if they
never happened to get a bite. "Not in the daytime," he explained,
compassionately, "but as soon as the evening comes they get all
the fish they want."
I could pour out on
the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they would be at
second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again almost as
prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness,
when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We
ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls
from their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or
disrepair noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as
Rome, with streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you
never missed the rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But
Pisa had a great air of resting, of taking life easily after a
tumultuous existence in the long past which she had put behind
her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was always fighting foreign
foes without her walls or domestic factions within, now the
Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find her, now
the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now
Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with
these republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars
as battles in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during
the five or ten or fifteen years, which was no better than a
truce. When she fell under the Medici, together with her enemy
Florence, she shared the death-quiet the tyrants brought that
prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean strength probably
which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left them to
continue republics down to the nineteenth
269
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
century. She was at
one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another
the liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of
trouble as long as she possessed independence or the shadow of
it. In the safe hold of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and
draws long, deep breaths, which you may almost hear as you pass;
and I hope the prospect of increasing prosperity will not tempt
her to work too hard. It does not look as if it would.
We were getting a
little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one cannot be in
Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not wish to
go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and
would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo
was born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the
river, and in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself
afford to live only a few doors from it. As if they had expected
him to pass about this time, his wife and his five children were
sitting at his door and playing before it. He proudly pointed
them out with his whip, and one of the little ones followed on
foot far enough to levy tribute. They were sufficiently comely
children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was both
black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of
the mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child
of his first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten
them, but we made our romance to the effect that the boy, to
whose beautiful eyes we now imputed a lurking sadness, was not
happy with his step-mother, and that he took refuge from her on
the box with his father. They seemed very good comrades; the boy
had shared with his father the small cakes we had given him at
the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his hapless lot, I
gave him half a
270
OVER AT PISA
franc. By that time
his father was radiant from the small extortion I had suffered
him to practice with me, and he bade the boy thank me, which he
did so charmingly that I almost, but not quite, gave him another
half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not. Pisa was worth
it.
IX
BACK AT
GENOA
THERE is an old
saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her step-sister
republic, "If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa," which
may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there
on our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa,
as apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended
I decided that they would have thought twice before plundering
Pisa if they had been forced to make their forays by means of the
present railroad connection between the two cities. At least
there would have been but one of the many wars of murder and
rapine between the republics, and that would have been the first.
After a single experience of the eighty tunnels on that line,
with the perpetually recurring necessity of putting down and
putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated the
invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old
saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it
was, the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys
and enjoy the fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in
the dark and gasping for breath as they came into the light,
while their train ran in and out under the serried peaks that
form the Mediterranean shore. I myself wished to take a galley
from Leghorn, or even a small
272
BACK AT
GENOA
steamer, but I was
overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took
the Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.
The Italian
government had providently arranged that the car we changed into
should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an
unexpected shower, and that it should be provided with steps so
high and steep, with Italian ladies standing all over them and
sticking their umbrellas into the faces of American citizens
trying to get in after them, that it was a feat of something like
mountain-climbing to reach the corridor, and then of daring-do to
secure a compartment. Though a collectivist, with a firm belief
in the government ownership of railroads everywhere, I might have
been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had not
always reflected that the state there had just come into
possession of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of
management and outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon
reform and repair. I venture to suggest now, however, that its
prime duty is to have platforms level with the car-doors, as they
are in England, and not to let Italian ladies stand in the
doorways with their umbrellas. I do not insist that it shall
impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young French people
in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove those
mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying
cultivated Americans can run along the open shore the whole way
to Genoa. Pending this, it should provide strong and watchful
employees to lower and raise the windows at the mouth of each of
the eighty tunnels in every car. I do not demand that it shall
change the site of the station in Genoa so that it shall not
always be the city's whole length away from the hotel you have
chosen, but I think this would be a desirable im-
18 273
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
provement,
especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a
peculiarly cold, disagreeable rain.
That rain was very
disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels, we had
fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape,
that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in
the blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at
our hotel that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the
day had been so hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold
and wet. It was fitfully put on and off during the chilly week
that ensued, though in our fifth-story garden, to which we
sometimes resorted, there was a mildness in the air that was
absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing; any hotel
would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the
good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The
corridors crashed and clattered all day long and well into the
night with the gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists,
who seemed, indeed, to fill the whole city with their clamor.
They were given a long table to themselves, and when they were
set at it and began to ply their knives and tongues the din was
deafening. That would not have been so bad if they had not been
so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young girl or two, to
be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the plainest
of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful, with
a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself
to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and
upward to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue,
blue eyes protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of
what she would be when the bud of her spring should be the
full-blown cabbage-rose of her summer.
274
BACK AT
GENOA
I dare say those
people were not typical of their civilization. Probably modern
enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans
who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts
these rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them
out on the Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent
Anglo-Saxons. The first night there was an Englishman at dinner,
but he vanished after breakfast; the next day an Italian officer
was at lunch, but he came no more; we were the only Americans,
and now we had the sole society of those German tourists. Perhaps
it was national vanity, but I could not at the moment think of an
equal number of our fellow-citizens of any condition who would
not have been less molestively happy. One forgot what one was
eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten upon
by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must
have made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to
visit; Genoa is very noisy, and they could not be heard above the
trams and omnibuses, and in the streets they could not be seen at
table; when I ventured to note to a sacristan, here and there,
that there seemed to be a great many Germans in town, the fact
apparently roused nothing of the old-time Italian antipathy for
the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been cultivated and
interesting people; and that blooming maiden may really have been
the Blue Flower of Romance that she looked before she began to
dine.
We were entering
upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our first, and I
was glad to find there were so many things I had left unseen or
had forgotten. First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I
went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram
following the bed of a torrential river which was
275
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
now dry except in
the pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as
always in Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of
art; their husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their
fiances, were at work with them, not, indeed, washing the
linen, hut spreading to dry it in snowy spaces over the clean
gravel. On either bank of the stream newly finished or partly
finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity of the
city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be
too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its
convenience to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon
our train was carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed
to be intending to spend the day there. Some had wreaths and
flowers, and were clearly sorrowing friends of the dead; others,
with their guide-books, were as plainly mere sight-seers, and
these were Italians as well as strangers, gratifying what seems
the universal passion for cemeteries. In our own villages the
graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young people and
the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint of
English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts
took them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this
was often the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble
aesthetic instincts found their first expression in the attempt
to dignify or beautify the homes of the dead. Each mourner
grieved in marble as fitly as he knew how, and, if there was
sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the effect was of a
collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it was
touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not
otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo
Santo at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you
find of one quality with the Campo Santo
276
WASHING IN THE RIVER,
GENOA
BACK AT
GENOA
at Genoa. It makes
you the helpless confidant of family pride, of bruised and
lacerated love, of fond aspiration, of religious longing, of
striving faith, of foolish vanity and vulgar pretence, but, if
the traveller would read the local civilization aright, he cannot
do better than go to study it there.
My third experience
of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in quantity from
the first and second. There seemed more of the things, better and
worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which rendered
the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with allegory
and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank.
The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles
where the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall,
like the dead in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground
enclosed by the cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are
all dominated by a colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of
very significant effect. It is as if no presence less mighty and
impressive could centre in itself the multitudinous passions,
wills, and hopes expressed in those incongruous monuments and
reduce them to that unity of meaning which one cannot deny
them.
The Campo Santo of
Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the long
succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the
Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of
brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except
Milan, you are aware of the North--its strenu-ousness, its
enterprise, its restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself.
Columbus came with the gift of a New World in his hand, and, in
the fulness of time, Mazzini came with the gift of a Newer World
in his hand: the realization of Christ in the ideal of
277
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
duties without which the old ideal of rights is heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years; under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802, when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte, she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever since the unification. I believe that now she is of
278
REALISTIC GROUP IN THE
CAMPO SANTO
BACK AT
GENOA
rather radical
opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his
shelves a last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history
which I have profited by so little, said that the Genoese had
been disappointed in the Socialists, lately in power, and were
now voting Clerical by a large majority.
The fact may have
been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the Clericals are
in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy did I
see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow,
noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and
wheels beats to the topmost stories of the palaces towering
overhead in their stony grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures
dating after the Gothic period there is want of sensibility; the
art of the Renaissance was not moulded here in the moods of a
refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in Venice tempered it
to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of a
commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of
the city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish
to be called proud because of these palaces alone. It is
imaginable that she would like the stranger to remember the
magnificence with which she rewarded the patriotism of her
greatest citizen after Columbus and Mazzini: that mighty admiral,
Andrea Doria, who freed this country first from the rule of
Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who swept the
Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles on
ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was
eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who
outlived exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of
ninety-four, after he had refused the sovereignty of the country
he had served so long; who was the Washington of his day, and was
equally statesman
279
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and soldier, and,
above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in that old
palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had
called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old,
old man, very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as
I have noted before. The cat seems to have just passed some
ironical reflection on the vanity of human things and to be
studying him for the effect. Both appear indifferent to the
spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you must not for all
that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set round with
the palaces of the Doria family--the palace which his grateful
country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and
the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.
I do not remember
any equal space in all Europe which, through a very little
knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded
by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a
later, and then environed with the stately homes of the race,
where they could be domesticated in the honor and reverence of
their countrymen because of the goodness and greatness of the
loftiest of their line. It is such a place as one may revere and
yet possess one's soul in self-respect, very much as one may
revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the piazza, is full
of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not only for
its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony
which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the
wall here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria
which, when the French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots
threw out of the ducal palace and broke in the street
below.
We were some time in
finding our way into the magnificent hall of the Great Council
where this statue once stood, with the statues of many other
Genoese
280
BACK AT
GENOA
heroes and
statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth all our trouble.
Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent, like so
much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the
trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I
should not think it too much. There in the great hall are the
monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their
country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do
not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other
leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the
state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust;
and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing
is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses
or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the
benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to
reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To
the American who views them and remembers that we have now so
much money that some of us do not know what to do with it, they
will suggest that our millionaires have an unrivalled opportunity
of immortality in the same sort. There is hardly a town of ten
thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who
could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty,
or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a
new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the
dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would
give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing
to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of
casting in metal or carving in stone.
The time was in
Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a great many
people did not know what
281
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to do with their
money. There were sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it,
either they or their wives or daughters, in dress; apparently
they could not even wear Genoa velvet, which had to be sold
abroad for the corruption of the outside world; and this is said
to be the reason why there were so many palaces built in Genoa in
the days of the republic. People who did not wish to figure in
that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often
ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in
the wide and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout
family built or rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but
by far the greater number put up palaces, where, after the
house-warming, they dwelt in a cold and economical seclusion.
Some of their palaces are now devoted to public uses; they are
galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to be seen, or they
are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or science;
but part are still in the keeping of the families that
contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in
which they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the
palaces hold aloof from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to
the level of the gardens behind them. Huge, heavy they are,
according to the local ideal, and always wanting the delicacy of
Venetian architecture, where something in the native genius
tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio, and where
Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and the
Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being
Roman.
The grandeur of
those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but perhaps,
if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his
humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy
port, up the chasmal alleys of little shops into the
tiny
282
BACK AT
GENOA
piazzas, no bigger
than a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and
packed with busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often
like the perspective in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does
not break in music as it does in Naples, and the chill lingering
in the sunless depths of those chasms is the cold of a winter
that begins earlier and a spring that loiters later than the
genial seasons of the South.
X
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
A FEW years ago an
Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same villa at San
Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was so dull
at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because
you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of
the different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice
little English church. He did not seem to think there was
anything out of the way in his grouping of these advantages, but
he did not strongly urge them upon us, and we restricted
ourselves in turn to our tacit reflections on the indifference of
the English to a point of morals on which the American conscience
is apt to suffer more or less anguish if it offends. So far as I
know they do not think it wrong to take money won at any game;
but possibly their depravity in this matter rather comforted us
than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of our
own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did
not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice
little church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money
at the tables of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et
Quarante, in the Casino. What we really wished to do was to look
on in the spiritual security of saints while the sinners of both
sexes lost and gained to the
284
EDEN AFTER THE
EALL
equal hurt of their
souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in the
gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined
gambler falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we
thought we might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier
drew in the last remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited
the other Messieurs and Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we
might even have been willing to see something hysterical on the
part of the Mesdames if fate frowned upon them, or something
scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our motives were not the
worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I suppose they were
the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were
mixed.
We found it rather
long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so much because
of the distance as because of the delays of our train, which,
having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we
reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame
and failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of
our journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our
innocence of tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs
officers, and to wash down a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the
restaurant, we had an hour and forty minutes at Ventimiglia,
which I partly spent in vain attempts to buy the poverty of the
inspector so far as to prevail with him not to delay the
examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in
order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our
long leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Li-gurian
tribe of the Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption
of Ventimiglia. It is a charming old town, far more charming than
the stranger who never has time to walk into it from the station
can imagine,
285
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
and there is a
palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with
the shops and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes
of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening
those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I
could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a
ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no
force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I
should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have
liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less reason; it
seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old
walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine
bridge spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning,
the perfectly dry bed of a river.
I wished to ask what
the name of the river was, but out of all the files of people
coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he
excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a
stranger in those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but
go back to the station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who
still remained proof against me. What added to the hardship of
the situation was that it was Italy at one end of the station and
France at the other, and in one extremity it was an hour earlier
than it was at the other, by the time of Central Europe at the
east and by the time of Paris at the west, so that I do not know
but we were two hours and forty minutes at Ventimiglia instead of
one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little could be
employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could give
something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and
suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right,
but we could not give much.
286
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
The weather had
turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts, and the
invalid of the party, without whom no American party is perfectly
national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous when
the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it
began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the
inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes,
one trunk serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively
held up a piece of five francs in recognition of his kindness.
But he slowly shook his head, whether in regret or whether in
stern refusal I shall never know. He was an Italian, but in the
employment of the French republic, and I have not been able since
to credit with certainty his incorruptibility to his native or
his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in deciding
either way.
What I am certain
of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the French
company's railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian
carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with
unwillingness that I own the corporation's greater care for our
comfort. If we had been in the paternal care of the
administration of the gambling-house. at Monte Carlo, we could
not have been more tenderly or cleanly cushioned about, or borne
away on softer springs; and very possibly a measure of wickedness
in the means is a condition of comfort in the end to which we are
so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not yet so
sternly collectivist as I could wish. It was not quite dark when
we arrived at Monte Carlo and began to experience, in the
beautiful keeping of the place, how admirably a gambling-house
can manage the affairs of a principality when it pays all the
taxes. There were many two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure
outside the station, and the horses
287
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
were all so robust
and handsome that we were not put to our usual painful endeavor
in seeking the best and getting the worst. All those stately
equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the hill
to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in
Frascati could hardly have suspected it.
In our easy ascent
we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind their walls
among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms; of
the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference
of prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended
roadways, and the walks that followed them up hill and down, and
crossed to little parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops
and hotels, clustering about the great gambling-house, the centre
of the common prosperity and animation. The air had softened with
the setting sun, and the weather which had at Leghorn and Genoa
delayed through two weeks of rain and cold, seemed to confess the
control of the Casino administration, as everything else does at
Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which we eargerly
trusted.
It was of course
warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was kindling
on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking
over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below,
and to the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the
heights beyond. Nothing by day or by night could be more
exquisite than the little harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape,
and now, at our first sight of it, set round with electric
lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some sporty Titan, or
perhaps of Hercules Mon-oecus himself, who is said to have
founded Monaco. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged
themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the
shores,
288
MONACO
EDEN AFTER THE
PALL
and that there were
only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the Prince of
Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I did
not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable. There must have
been other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there
were some workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the
impression; but I am certain of the festive air of disoccupation
pervading the port from the adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and
Monaco, which its wicked suburb has cleansed in corrupting, and
rendered attractive by the example of its elegant leisure. There
remains from both places, and from Condamine in the plain between
them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There seemed to
be no more creative business in one place than another, but I do
not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of
perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the
commerce of the shops, and the building up of more and more
villas and hotels, on every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten
in the sun, and let their gardens hang over the verges of the
cliffs. On the northeast, the mountains rise into magnificent
steeps whose names would say nothing to the reader, except that
of Turbia, which he will recall as the classic Tropaea of
Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul. But
we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the
help of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such
convenient elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of
one of those luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte
Carlo.
One such point was
undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks of
Marseilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to
Hercules Mono3cus. The Grimaldi family which gave
Genoa
289
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
many doges, came
early into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those
days, but whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the
fourteenth century, does not distinctly appear, though it seems
certain that one of the Grimaldi princes served against the
English under Philip of Valois, and was wounded at Crecy. In 1524
a successor went over to the empire under Charles V. Still later
the principality returned to the sovereignty of France, and in
1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it was given
back to the Grimaldi in 1814.
The Grimaldi on the
whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only lacked
largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies.
They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the
people killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for
insulting their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy,
and in the very late times following their restoration by the
Congress of Vienna, the reigning prince confiscated the property
of the churches for his own behoof, and took into his hands the
whole trade of the principality. He alone bought and ground the
grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to his people at an
extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa and fed it
to his subjects at the same rate as good. When they murmured and
threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule
them with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not
bad enough. Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality
bordering on comic opera: travellers had to give up their
provisions at the frontier and eat the official bread of Monaco;
ships entering the port were confiscated if they had brought more
loaves than sufficed them for their voyage thither; no man might
cut his own wood without leave of the police, or
290
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
prune his trees, or
till his land, or irrigate it; the birth and death of every
animal must be publicly registered, with the payment of a given
tax, and nobody could go out after ten at night without carrying
a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco
passed under French protection again, and now it is subject to
conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the
beginning of this new order of things the great M. Blanc was
expelled from Hombourg, and the Prince of Monaco rented to him
the-gambling privilege of Monte Carlo.
Then the modern
splendor of the place began. The entire population of the three
towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above fifteen
thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants
depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood.
I should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were
hotels, or pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished
apartments, and if one could be content to live in the atmosphere
of the Casino, which is not meteorologically lurid, I do not know
where one could live in greater comfort. It is said that
everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for instance, but such
things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear. The rates at
the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when reduced
to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the
hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal
of money at the tables which in America you would spend in board
and lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very
reasonably, and as the morals of all the inhabitants are
scrupulously cared for by the administration of the Casino, and
no one living in the principality is allowed to frequent the
gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic service is good and
cheap. If
291
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
I may speak from our
experience at our very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one
waiter sufficing for ten or twelve guests, with leisure for much
friendly conversation in the office, between the breakfasts
served in our rooms and the excellent dinners at the small tables
in the salon. If you liked, he would speak French or Italian,
though he spoke English as well as any one, and he was of that
excellent Piedmontese race which has been the saving salt of the
whole peninsula. As for the food, it was far beyond that of our
cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided
for us at the rate we paid.
The cost of dress
varies, according to the taste of and the purse, everywhere.
White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies one
saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the
Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may
have been a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers
in the pretty beds and parterres so fancifully designed by the
gardeners of the administration, or it may have been a token of
the helpless submission to which the windows of the milliners and
modistes reduced all comers of the dressful sex. Many of the men
with the women, or without them, were also in white serge, but
they seemed more variably attired; there was a prevailing
suggestion of yachting or au-tomobiling in their dress, though
doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot.
Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in
the centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an
automobile of some newest type being raffled for in the interest
of that chiefest of the Christian virtues which makes its most
successful appeals in the vicinity of games of chance. Some one
must have won the machine and carried a party of his
friends
292
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
away, and
triumphantly turned turtle with it over the first of the
precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More than the tables
within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it was only by
the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to get
away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without,
however guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place.
It was at the Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were
really some good pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given
a small brass disk. On going out I attempted to restore this to
the door-keeper, but he went back with me to a certain piece of
mechanism, where he instructed me to put the disk into a slot.
Then the disk ran its course, and a small brass ball came out at
the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and showed me that it
was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might have been
full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have
implanted in me a lust of gambling I should never have overcome.
Monte Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant
with flowers in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the
Casino, and there was an agreeable park where one might sit. On
every other side there were costly hotels and costly restaurants,
including that of the unexampled, the insurpassable Giro, where
one saw people eating and drinking at the windows whenever one
passed, by day or night. Beyond the Casino seaward were the
beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic growths,
where people might come out and kill themselves when they had
nothing left to lose but their lives; and against the dark green
of their fronds the temple of fortune lifted a frosted-cake-like
front of long extent. I do not know just what type of
architecture it is of, but it distinctly suggests the art of the
pastry cook when he has triumphed in some edifice
293
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
crowning the centre
of the table at a great public dinner. What mars the pleasing
effect most is a detail which enforces this suggestion, for the
region of the Casino is thickly frequented by a species of black
doves, and when these gather in close lines of black dots along
the eaves, they have exactly the effect of flies clustering on
the sugary surfaces of the cake. At intervals are bronze statues
of what seem a sort of adolescent cherubs, but which have, I do
not know why, a peculiarly devilish appearance. No doubt they are
harmless enough; but certainly they do nothing to keep the flies
off the cake.
In fine, as an
edifice the Casino disappoints, and if one is not pressingly
curious about the interior, one rather lingers on the terrace
overlooking the sea, and the lines of the railroad following the
shore, and the panorama of the several towns. It is charming to
sit there, and if it is in the afternoon, you may see an artist
there painting water-colors of the scenery. Even if he were not
painting, you could not help knowing him for an artist, because
he wears a black velvet jacket and knickerbockers, and a soft
slouch hat, and has a curled black mustache and pointed beard;
there is no mistaking him; and at a given moment, after he has
been working long enough, he puts above his sketch the sign, "For
Sale," as artists always do, and then, if you want a masterpiece,
you go down a few steps from where you are sitting and buy it.
But I never did that any more than I took tickets for the charity
automobile, though there is no telling what I might not have done
if I had broken the bank when at last I went into the
Casino.
It seems to open
about eleven o'clock in the morning, for gamblers are
hard-working, impatient people, and do not want to lose time. A
broad stretch of red
294
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
carpet is laid down
the steps from the portal and they begin to go in at once, and
people keep going in until I know not what hour at night. But I
think mid-afternoon is the best hour to see them, and it is then
that I will invite the reader to accompany me, instructing him to
turn to the left on entering, and get his gratis billet of
admission to the rooms from the polite officials there in charge,
who will ask for his card, and inquire his country and city, but
will not insist upon his street and his number in it. This form
is apparently to make sure that you are not a resident of the
principality, and that if you suffer in your morals from your
visit to the Casino you shall not be a source of local corruption
thereafter. They bow you away, first audibly pronouncing your
name with polyglottic accuracy, and then you are free to wander
where you like. But probably you will want to go at once from the
large, nobly colonnaded reception-hall or atrium, into that
series of salons where wickeder visitors than yourself are
already closely seated at the oblong tables, and standing one or
two deep round them. The salons of the series are four, and the
tables in each are from two to five, according to the demands of
the season; some are Trente et Quarante-tables, and some, by far
the greater number, are Roulette-tables. Roulette seems the
simpler game, and the more popular; I formed the notion that
there was a sort of aristocratic quality in Trente et Quarante,
and that the players of that game were of higher rank and longer
purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion. All that
I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the seaward
views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew
when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by
several French painters of note, and the whole interior is
designed by the famous
295
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
architect Gamier, to
as little effect of beauty as could well be. It is as if these
French artists had worked in the German taste, rather than their
own, and in any case they have achieved in their several
allegories and impersonations something uniformly heavy and dull.
One might fancy that the mood of the players at the tables had
imparted itself to the figures in the panels, but very likely
this is not so, for the players had apparently parted with none
of their unpleasing dulness. They were in about equal number men
and women, and they partook equally of a look of hard repression.
The repression may not have been wholly from within; a little
away from each table hovered, with an air of detachment, certain
plain and quiet men, who, for all their apparent inattention, may
have been agents of the Administration vigilant to subdue the
slightest show of drama in the players. I myself saw no drama,
unless I may call so the attitude of a certain tall, handsome
young man, who stood at the corner of one of the tables, and,
with nervously working jaws, staked his money at each invitation
of the croupiers. I did not know whether he won or lost, and I
could not decide from their faces which of the other men or women
were winning or losing. I had supposed that I might see
distinguished faces, distinguished figures, but I saw none. The
players were of the average of the spectators in dress and
carriage, but in the heavy atmosphere of the rooms, which was
very hot and very bad, they all alike looked dull. At a
psychological moment it suddenly came to me in their presence,
that if there was such a place as hell, it must be very dull,
like that, and that the finest misery of perdition must be the
stupid dulness of it. For some unascertained reason, but probably
from a mistaken purpose of ornament, there hung over the
centre
29G
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
of each table,
almost down to the level of the players' heads, lengths of
large-linked chains, and it was imaginable, though not very
probable, that if any of the lost souls rose violently up, or
made an unseemly outcry, or other rebellious demonstration, those
plain, quiet men, the agents of the Administration, would fling
themselves upon him or her, and bind them with those chains, and
cast them into such outer darkness as could be symbolized by the
shade of the terrace trees. The thing was improbable, as I say,
but not impossible, if there is truth in Swedenborg's relation
that the hells are vigilantly policed, and from time to time put
in order by angels detailed for that office. To be sure the
plain, quiet men did not look like angels, and the Administration
of which they were agents, could not, except in its love of
order, be likened to any celestial authority.
Commonly in the
afternoon there is music in the great atrium from which the
gambling-rooms open, and then there is a pleasant movement of
people up and down. They are kept in motion perhaps by their
preference, somewhat, but also largely by the want of seats. If
you can secure one of these you may amuse yourself very well by
looking on at the fashion and beauty of those who have not
secured any. Here you will see much more distinction than in the
gambling-rooms; the air is better, and if you choose to fancy
this the limbo of that inferno, it will not be by a violent
strain. In the crowd will be many pretty young girls, in proper
chaperonage, and dressed in the latest effects of Paris; if they
happen to be wearing the mob-cap hats of the moment it is your
greater gain; they could not be so charming in anything else, or
look more innocent, or more consciously innocent. You could only
hope, however, such were the malign associations of the
place,
297
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
that their chaperons
would not neglect them for the gaming-tables beyond, but you
could not be sure, if the chaperons were all like that old
English lady one evening at the opera in the Casino, who came in
charge of her niece, or possibly some friend's daughter. She
remained dutifully enough beside the girl through the first act
of the stupid musical comedy, and even through the ensuing
ballet, and when a flaunting female, in a hat of cart-wheel
circumference, came in and shut out the whole stage from the
hapless stranger behind, this good old lady authorized her charge
to ask him to take the seat next them where he could see
something of the action if he wished. But at the end of the
ballet, she rose, and bidding the girl wait her return, she
vanished in the direction of the gaming-rooms. She may merely
have gone to look on at a spectacle which, dulness for dulness,
was no worse than that of the musical comedy, and I have no proof
that she risked her money there. The girl sat through the next
act, and then in a sudden fine alarm, like that of a bird which,
from no visible cause, starts from its perch, she took flight,
and I hope she found her aunt, or her mother's friend, quietly
sleeping on one of those seats in the atrium. It was one of those
tacit, eventless dramas which in travel are always offering
themselves to your witness. They begin in silence, and go quietly
on to their unfinish, and leave you steeped in an interest which
is life-long, whereas a story whose end you know soon perishes
from your mind. Art has not yet learned the supreme lesson of
life, which is never a tale that is told within the knowledge of
the living.
Nowhere, I think, is
the "sweet security of streets" felt more than in Monte Carlo.
Whether the control of that good Administration of the Casino
reaches to the policing of the place in other respects or not,
I
298
EDEN AFTEE THE
FALL
cannot say, but one
walks home at night from the theatre of the Casino with the same
sense of safety that one enjoys under that paternal roof. At
eleven o'clock all Monte Carlo sleeps the sleep of the innocent
and the just in the dwellings of the citizens and permanent
residents; though it cannot be denied that there appear to be
late suppers in the hotels and restaurants surrounding the
Casino, which the iniquitous may be giving to the guilty. Away
from the flare of their bold lights the town reposes in a
demi-dark, and presents to the more strenuous fancy the effect of
a mezzotint study of itself; by day it is a group of
wash-drawings near to, and farther off, of water-colors, very
richly and broadly treated. I could not insist too much upon this
notion with the reader who has never been there, or has not
received picture postal-cards from sojourning correspondents.
These would afford him a portrait of the chief features and
characteristics of the place not too highly flattered, for in
fact it would be impossible for even a picture postal-card to
exaggerate its beauty. They will besides convey one of the few
convincing proofs that in spite of the Blanc Casino and the
French Republic the Prince of Monaco is still a reigning
sovereign, for the postage-stamps bear the tastefully printed
head of that potentate. If the visitor requires other proofs he
may take a landau at the station in Monaco, and drive up over the
heights of the capital into the piazza before the prince's
palace. When the prince is not at home he can readily get leave
to visit the palace for twenty minutes, but on my unlucky day the
prince was doubly at home, for he was sick as well as in
residence. I satisfied myself as well as I could, and I am very
easy to satisfy, with my drive through the pleasant town, which
is entirely Italian in effect, with its people standing about or
looking out of their windows
299
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
in their Sunday
leisure, and quite Roman in the cleanliness of its streets. I
took due pleasure in the unfinished exterior of the Oceanographic
Museum and the newly finished interior of the Monaco Cathedral.
The cathedral, which is so new as to make one rejoice that most
other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness, but is very
handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the tombs
of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done
over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its
kind in the world, already contains somewhere in its raw
inaccessible recesses the collections made by Prince Albert in
his many cruises, and is of a palatiality worthy of a sovereign
with a tenant so generous and prompt in its rent as the
Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.
This fact, namely,
that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all came out of
the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my landau
made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and
we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland
near the museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible
Piedmontese who did not make me pay much above the tariff, and
who had pity on my poor French after awhile, and consented to
speak Italian with me. In the sort of French glare over the whole
local civilization of the principality, everybody will wish to
seem Erench, but after you break through the surface, the natives
will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as anybody in the
peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois, but
with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better
than his, and also much better than their own French. I think
they prefer you in their racial parlance after you have shown
some knowl-
300
THE CASINO, MONTE
CARLO
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
edge of it, and two
kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I
was trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more
volubly kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command.
That station is really not hard to find when once you know where
it is, and at three o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the
precipitous incline of the alp on whose summit Augustus divided
Italy from Gaul, and left the stupendous trophy which one sees
there in ruins to-day.
I should like to
render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by pretending
that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I
really noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard
seemed to grow less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even
this was partly fancy; as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself
to partake of their deceit; for they are the most shameless
fakers, as regards climate, in nature. It is, for instance,
perfectly true that they are in bloom along the Riviera all
winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the
Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a
degree of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and
brings tears into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their
loveliness. They are like women; they look so fragile and
delicate that you think they cannot stand anything, but they can
stand pretty much everything, or at least everything they wish
to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we cowered round
our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers smiled
from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their
sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention
to the details of the scenery through which my funicular was
passing than
301
ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND
OTHERS
to the stupendous
prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded. If words
could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I recall
them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of
color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility.
Nothing less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart
any notion of it, and even that must fail where it should most
abound, namely, in the delicacy of that ineffable
majesty.
We climbed and
climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of the
mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a
stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under
the cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin
behind it. Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel,
much shoved and shouldered by automobiles bearing the company
which seems proper to those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at
the many little tables set about for tea, and the glory of the
matchless outlook. While one could yet have the ruin mostly to
one's self, it seemed the most favorable moment to visit the
crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments strewed the
slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress into
which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority,
but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both
trophy and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the
imperialists in the first half of the eighteenth century. The
destruction was incomplete, though probably sufficient for the
purpose, but as a ruin, nothing could be more admirable. There
seems to be at present something like a restoration going on; it
has not gone very far, however; it has developed some fragments
of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman brick-work; a few
spaces about the
303
EDEN AFTER THE
FALL
base of the tower
are cleared; but the rehabilitation will probably never proceed
to such an extreme that you may not sit down on some carven
remnant of the past, and closing your eyes to the surrounding
glory of alp and sea find yourself again on the Palatine or amid
the memorials of the Forum.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Roman Holidays and Others, by W. D. Howells *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS *** This file should be named whrom10h.htm or whrom10h.zip Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, whrom11h.htm VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, whrom10ah.htm Produced by Eric Eldred Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections, even years after the official publication date. Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement. The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment and editing by those who wish to do so. Most people start at our Web sites at: http://gutenberg.net or http://promo.net/pg These Web sites include award-winning information about Project Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!). Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement can get to them as follows, and just download by date. This is also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter. http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03 Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90 Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want, as it appears in our Newsletters. Information about Project Gutenberg (one page) We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. Our projected audience is one hundred million readers. If the value per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2 million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text files per month: 1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+ We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002 If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end. The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks! This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers, which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users. Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated): eBooks Year Month 1 1971 July 10 1991 January 100 1994 January 1000 1997 August 1500 1998 October 2000 1999 December 2500 2000 December 3000 2001 November 4000 2001 October/November 6000 2002 December* 9000 2003 November* 10000 2004 January* The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium. We need your donations more than ever! As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones that have responded. As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states. Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state. In answer to various questions we have received on this: We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally request donations in all 50 states. If your state is not listed and you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have, just ask. While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to donate. International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are ways. Donations by check or money order may be sent to: Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation PMB 113 1739 University Ave. Oxford, MS 38655-4109 Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment method other than by check or money order. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-622154. Donations are tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law. As fund-raising requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states. We need your donations more than ever! You can get up to date donation information online at: http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html *** If you can't reach Project Gutenberg, you can always email directly to: Michael S. Hart hart@pobox.com Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message. We would prefer to send you information by email. **The Legal Small Print** (Three Pages) ***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START*** Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers. They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to. *BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request. ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project"). Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark. Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market any commercial products without permission. To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment. LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below, [1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that time to the person you received it from. If you received it on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement copy. If you received it electronically, such person may choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to receive it electronically. THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have other legal rights. INDEMNITY You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation, and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this eBook, [2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook, or [3] any Defect. DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm" You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this "Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg, or: [1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the eBook or this "small print!" statement. You may however, if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, including any form resulting from conversion by word processing or hypertext software, but only so long as *EITHER*: [*] The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and does *not* contain characters other than those intended by the author of the work, although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may be used to convey punctuation intended by the author, and additional characters may be used to indicate hypertext links; OR [*] The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the program that displays the eBook (as is the case, for instance, with most word processors); OR [*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form). [2] Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this "Small Print!" statement. [3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the gross profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to let us know your plans and to work out the details. WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO? Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine readable form. The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time, public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses. Money should be paid to the: "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at: hart@pobox.com [Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only when distributed free of all fees. Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by Michael S. Hart. Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be they hardware or software or any other related product without express permission.] *END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*