MODERN ROME.
Tower of Capitol best Site for studying Topography of
Rome--Resemblance in the Sites of great Cities--Site of
Rome--Campagna di Roma--Its Extent and Boundaries--Ancient
Fertility and Magnificence--Modern Desolation of Campagna--Approach
to Rome from the North--Etruria--Solitariness of this once famous
Highway--First Sight of Rome--The Flaminian Way--The Porta del
Popolo--The Piazza del Popolo--Its Antiquities--Pincian
Hill--General Plan of Rome--The Corso--The Via Ripetta--The Via
Babuina--Population--Disproportionate Numbers of Priests--Variety
of Ecclesiastical Costumes--Dresses of the various Orders--Their
indescribably Filthy Appearance--The ordinary Priest--The Priest's
Face--The Beggars--Want of Arrangement in its Edifices--Rome an
unrivalled Combination of Grandeur and Dirt.
One of my first days in Rome was passed on the top of the tower of the
Capitol. It is incomparably the best spot on which to study the
topography of the Eternal City, with that of the surrounding region.
Here one stands between the living and the dead,--between the city of
the Caesars, which lies entombed on the Seven Hills, with the vine, the
ivy, and the jessamine mantling its grave, and the city of the Popes,
spread out with its cupolas, and towers, and everlasting chimes, on the
low flat plain of the Campus Martius. The world has not such another
ruin,--so vast, colossal, and magnificent,--as Rome. Let us sketch the
features of the scene as they here present themselves.
There would appear to be a law determining the _site_, as well as the
_character_, of great events. It has often been remarked, that there is
a resemblance between all the great battle-fields of the world. One
attribute in especial they all possess, namely, that of vastness;
inspiring the mind of the spectator with an idea of grandeur, to which
the recollection of the carnage of which they were the scene adds a
feeling of melancholy. The Troy and the Marathon of the ancient world
have found their representative in the modern one, in that gloomy
expanse in Flanders where Napoleon witnessed the total defeat of his
arms and the final overthrow of his fortunes. We would make the same
remark regarding great capitals. There is a family likeness in their
sites. The chief cities of the ancient world arose, for the most part,
on extensive plains, nigh some great river; for rivers were the
railroads of early times. I might instance queenly Thebes, which arose
in the great valley of the Nile, with a boundary of fine mountains
encircling the plain on which it stood. Babylon found a seat on the
great plain of Chaldea, on the banks of the Euphrates. Niniveh arose on
the same great plain, on the banks of the Tigris, with the glittering
line of the snowy Kurdistan chain bounding its horizon. To come down to
comparatively modern times, ROME has been equally fortunate with her
predecessors in a site worthy of her greatness and renown. No one needs
to be told that the seat of that city, which for so many ages held the
sceptre of the world, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA.
I need not dwell on the magnificence of that truly imperial plain, to
which nature has given, in a country of hills, dimensions so goodly.
From the foot of the Apennines it runs on and on for upwards of an
hundred miles, till it meets the Neapolitan frontier at Terracina. Its
breadth from the Volscian hills to the sea cannot be less than forty
miles. Towards the head of this great plain lies Rome, than which a
finer site for the capital of a great empire could nowhere have been
found. By nature it is most fertile; its climate is delicious. It is
watered by the Tiber, which is seen winding through it like a thread of
gold. A boundary of glorious hills encloses it on all sides save the
south-west. On the south-east are the gentle Volscians, clothed with
flourishing woods and sparkling with villas. Running up along the plain,
and lying due east of Rome, are the Sabine hills, of a deep azure
colour, with a fine mottling of light and shade upon their sides.
Shutting in the plain on the north, and sweeping round it in a
magnificent bend towards the west, are the craggy and romantic
Apennines. Such was the stage on which sat invincible, eternal Rome.
This plain was traversed, moreover, by thirty-three highways, which
connected the city with every quarter of the habitable globe. Its
surface exhibited the richest cultivation. From side to side it was
covered with gardens and vineyards, in the verdure and blossoms of an
almost perpetual spring; amid which rose the temples of the gods of
Rome, the trophies of her warriors, the tombs and monuments of her
legislators and orators, and the villas and rural retreats of her
senators and merchants. Indeed, this plain would seem, in imperial
times, to have been one vast city, stretching out from the white strand
of the Mediterranean to the summit of the Volscian hills.
But in proportion to its GRANDEUR then is its DESOLATION now. From the
sea to the mountains it lies silent, waste, unploughed, unsown,--a
houseless, treeless, blackened wilderness. "Where," you exclaim, "are
its highways?" They are blotted out. "Where are its temples, its
palaces, its vineyards?" All swept away. Scarce a heap remains, to tell
of its numerous and magnificent structures. Their very ruins are ruined.
The land looks as if the foot of man had never trodden it, and the hand
of man never cultivated it. Here it rises into melancholy mounds; there
it sinks into hollows and pits: like that plain which God overthrew, it
neither is sown nor beareth. It is inhabited by the fox, haunted by the
brigand, and frequented in spring and autumn by a few herdsmen, clad in
goats'-skins, and living in caves and wigwams, and reminding one, by
their savage appearance, of the satyrs of ancient mythology. It is
silent as a sepulchre. John Bunyan might have painted it for his "Valley
of the Shadow of Death."
I shall suppose that you are approaching Rome from the north. You have
disengaged yourself from the Apennines,--the picturesque Apennines,--in
whose sunny vales the vine still ripens, and on whose sides the olive
still lingers. You are advancing along a high plateau which rises here
and there into conical mounts, on which sits some ancient and renowned
city, dwindled now into a poor village, whose inhabitants are
husbandmen, and who move about oppressed by the languor that weighs upon
this whole land. Beneath your feet are subterranean chambers, in which
mailed warriors sleep,--for it is the ancient land of Etruria over which
your track lies. Before the wolf suckled Romulus, this soil had
nourished a race of heroes. The road, so filled in former times by a
never-failing concourse of legions going forth to battle or returning in
triumph,--of consuls and legates bearing the high behests of the senate
to the subject provinces,--and of ambassadors and princes coming to sue
for peace, or to lay their tributary gifts at the feet of Rome,--is now
solitary and untrodden, save by the traveller from a far country, or the
cowled and corded pilgrim whose vow brings him to the shrine of the
apostles. Stacks of mouldering brickwork attract the eye by the
wayside,--the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its
prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which
are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at
all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence
the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is
chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on
the milestones; but you cannot persuade yourself that Rome you shall
find in the heart of a desert like this. You have gained the brow of a
low hill; you have passed the summit, and got half-way down the
declivity; when suddenly a vision bursts on your sight that rivets you
to the spot. There is the Tiber rolling its yellow floods at your feet;
and there, spread out in funereal gloom between the mountains and the
sea, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA. The spectacle is sublime, despite its
desolation. There is but one object in the vast expanse, but that is
truly a majestic one. Alone, on the silent plain, judgment-stricken and
sackcloth-clad, occupying the same spot where she "glorified herself and
lived deliciously," and said in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no
widow, and shall see no sorrow," is ROME.
You are to cross the Tiber. Already your steps are on the Pons Milvius,
where Christianity triumphed over Paganism in the person of Constantine,
and over the parapet of which Maxentius, in his flight, flung the
seven-branched golden candlestick, which Titus brought from the temple
of Jerusalem. The Flaminian way, which you are now to traverse, runs
straight to the gate of Rome. In front is the long line of the city
walls, within which you can descry the proud dome of St Peter's, the
huge rotundity of St Angelo, or "Hadrian's Mole," and a host of inferior
cupolas and towers, which in any other city would suffice to give a
character to the place, but are here thrown into the shade by the two
unrivalled structures I have named. You are not less than two miles from
the gate; yet such are the purity and transparency of an Italian sky,
that every stone almost in the old wall,--every scar which the hand of
time or the ravages of war have made in it,--is visible. As you advance,
Monte Mario rises on the right, with a temple on its crest, and rows of
pine-trees and cypresses on its sides. On the left, at a goodly
distance, are seen the purple hills of Frascati and Albano, with their
delicate chequering of light and shadow, and the Tiber, appearing to
burst like a river of gold from their azure bosom. The beauty of these
objects is much heightened by the blackness of the plain around.
We now enter Rome. The square in which we find ourselves,--the Porta del
Popolo,--is worthy of Rome. It is a clean, neatly-paved quadrangular
area, of an hundred and fifty by an hundred yards in extent, edged on
all sides by noble mansions. Fronting you as you enter the gate are the
domes of two fine churches, in one of which Luther preached when he was
in Rome. Between them the Corso is seen shooting out in a long narrow
line of lofty facades, traversing the entire length of the city from
north to south. On the right is the house of Mr Cass, the United States'
consul, behind which rises a series of hanging gardens. There was dug
the grave of Nero; but the ashes of the man before whom the world
trembled cannot now be found. On the left rises the terraced slope of
the Pincian hill, with its galleries, its statues, its stately
cypresses, and its noble carriage-drive. On the opposite declivity are
the gardens of Sallust, looking down on the _campus sceleratus_, where
the unfaithful vestal-virgins were burned.
In the middle of the spacious area is a fine fountain, whose waters are
received into a spacious basin, guarded by marble lions. And there,
too, stands the obelisk of Rhamses I., severe and solemn, a stranger,
like ourselves, from a far land. This is the same which that monarch
erected before the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, the ON of Scripture,
and which Augustus transported to Rome. It is a single block of red
granite, graven from top to bottom with hieroglyphics, which it is quite
possible the eyes of Moses may have scanned. When that column was hewn,
not a stone had been laid on the Capitol, and the site of Rome was a
mere marsh; yet here it stands, with its mysterious scroll still unread.
Speak, stranger, and tell us, with thy deep Coptic voice, the secrets of
four thousand years ago. Say, wouldst thou not like to revisit thy
native Nile, and spend thine age beside the tombs of the Pharaohs, the
companions of thy youth, and amidst the congenial silence of the sands
of Egypt?
The traveller who would enjoy the finest view of the modern city must
ascend the Pincian hill. In the basin beneath him he beholds spread out
a flat expanse of red-tiled roofs, traversed by the long line of the
Corso, and bristling with the tops of innumerable domes, columns, and
obelisks. Some thirty or forty cupolas give an air of grandeur to the
otherwise uninteresting mass of red; and conspicuous amongst these, over
against the spectator, is the princely dome of St Peter's, and the huge
bulk of the Castle of St Angelo. The Tiber is seen creeping sluggishly
at the base of the Janiculum, the sides of which are thinly dotted with
villas and gardens, while its summit is surmounted by a long stretch of
the old wall.
Standing in the Piazza del Popolo, the person is in a good position for
comprehending the arrangement of modern Rome. Here three streets have
their rise, which, running off in diverging lines, like spokes from the
nave of a wheel, traverse the city, and form, with the cross streets
which connect them, the osteology of the Eternal City. This at least is
the arrangement which obtains till you reach the region lying around the
Capitol, which is an inextricable network of lanes, courts, and streets.
The centre one of the three streets we have indicated is the Corso. It
is a good mile in length, and runs straight south, extending from the
Flaminian gate to almost the foot of the Capitol. To an English eye it
is wanting in breadth, though the most spacious street in Rome. It is
but indifferently kept in point of cleanliness, though the most
fashionable promenade of the Romans. Here only you find anything
resembling a flag-pavement: all the other streets are causewayed from
side to side with small sharp pieces of lava, which pain the foot at
every step. The shops are small and dark, resembling those of our third
and fourth-rate towns, and exhibiting in their wares a superabundance of
cameos, mosaics, Etruscan vases, and statuary,--these being almost the
sole native manufacture of Rome. It is adorned with several truly noble
palaces, and with the colonnades and porticos of a great number of
churches. It was the boast of the Romans that the Pope could say mass in
a different church every day of the year. This, we believe, is true,
there being more than three hundred and sixty churches in that city, but
not one copy of the Bible that is accessible by the people.
The second street,--that on the right,--is the Via Ripetta, which leads
off in the direction of St Peter's and the Vatican. It takes one nigh
the tomb of Augustus, now converted into a hippodrome; the Pantheon,
whose pristine beauty remains undefaced after twenty centuries; the
Collegio Romano; and, towards the foot of the Capitol, the Ghetto,--a
series of mean streets, occupied by the Jews. The third street,--that on
the left,--is the Via Babuino. It traverses the more aristocratic
quarter of Rome,--if we can use such a phrase in reference to a city
whose nobles are lodging-house keepers, and live--
"Garreted
In their ancestral palace,"--
running on by the Piazza di Spagna, which the English so much frequent,
to the Quirinal, the Pope's summer palace, and the form of Trajan, whose
column, after the many copies which have been made of it, still stands
unrivalled and unapproached in beauty.
"And though the passions of man's fretful race
Have never ceased to eddy round its base,
Not injured more by touch of meddling hands
Than a lone obelisk 'mid Nubian sands."
On the Corso there is considerable bustle. The little buying and selling
that is done in Rome is transacted here. Half the population that one
sees in the Corso are priests and French soldiers. The population of
Rome is not much above an hundred thousand; its ecclesiastical persons,
however, are close on six thousand. Let us imagine, if we can, the state
of things were the ecclesiastics of all denominations in Scotland to be
doubled, and the whole body to be collected into one city of the size of
Edinburgh! Such is the state of Rome. The great majority of these men
have no duty to do, beyond the dreary and monotonous task of the daily
lesson in the breviary. They have no sermons to write and preach; they
do not visit the sick; they have no books or newspapers; they have no
family duties to perform. With the exception of the Jesuits, who are
much employed in the confessional, the whole fraternity of regulars and
seculars, white, black, brown, and gray, live on the best, and literally
do nothing. But, of course, six thousand heads cannot be idle. The
amount of mischief that must be continually brewing in Rome,--the wars
that shake convents,--the gossip and scandal that pollute society,--the
intrigues that destroy families,--may be more easily imagined than told.
Were the secret history of that city for but one short week to be
written, what an astounding document it would be! and what a curious
commentary on that mark of a "true Church," _unity_! Well were it for
the world were the plots hatched in Rome felt only within its walls.
On the streets of the Eternal City you meet, of course, every variety of
ecclesiastical costume. The eye is at first bewildered with the motley
show of gowns, cloaks, cowls, scapulars, and veils; of cords, crosses,
shaven heads, and naked feet,--provoking the reflection what a vast deal
of curious gear it takes to teach Christianity! There you have the long
black robe and shovel hat of the secular priest; the tight-fitting frock
and little three-cornered bonnet of the Jesuit; the shorn head and black
woollen garment of the Benedictine;--there is the Dominican, with his
black cloak thrown over his white gown, and his shaven head stuck into a
slouching cowl;--there is the Franciscan, with his half-shod feet, his
three-knotted cord, and his coarse brown cloak, with its numerous
pouches bulging with the victuals he has been begging for;--there is the
Capuchin, with his bushy beard, his sandaled feet, his patched cloak,
and his funnel-shaped cowl, reminding one of Harlequin's cap;--there is
the Carmelite, with shaven head begirt with hairy continuous crown,
loose flowing robe, and broad scapular;--there is the red gown of the
German student, and the wallet of the begging friar. This last has been
out all morning begging for the poor, and is now returning with
replenished wallet to his convent on the Capitol, where dwell monks now,
as geese aforetime. After dining on the contents of his well-filled
sack, with a slight addition from the vineyards of the Capitol, he will
scatter the crumbs among the crowd of beggars which may be seen at this
hour climbing the convent stairs.
But however these various orders may differ in the colour of their
cloaks or the shape of their tonsure, there is one point in which they
all agree,--that is, dirt. They are indescribably filthy. Clean water
and soap would seem to be banished the convents, as indulgences of the
flesh which cannot be cherished without deadly peril to the soul, and
which are to be shunned like heresy itself. They smell like goats; and
one trembles to come within the droppings of their cloak, lest he should
carry away a few little _souvenirs_, which the "holy man" might be glad
to part with. A fat, stalwart, bacchant, boorish race they are, giving
signs of anything but fasting and flagellation; and I know of nothing
that would so dissipate the romance which invests monks and nuns in the
eyes of some, like bringing a ship-load of them over to this country,
and letting their admirers see and smell them.
Even the ordinary priest appears but little superior to the monk in the
qualities we have named. Dirty in person, slovenly in dress, and wearing
all over a careless, fearless, bullying air, he looks very little the
gentleman, and, if possible, less the clergyman. But in Rome he can
afford to despise appearances. Is he not a priest, and is not Rome his
own? Accordingly, he plants his foot firmly, as if he felt, like Antaeus,
that he touches his native earth; he sweeps the crowd around with a
full, scornful, defiant eye; and should Roman dare to measure glances
with him, that brow of brass would frown him into the dust. In Rome the
"priest's face" attains its completest development. That face has not
its like among all the faces of the world. It is the same in all
countries, and can be known under every disguise,--a soldier's uniform
or a porter's blouse. At Maynooth you may see it in all stages of
growth; but at Rome it is perfected; and when perfected, there is an
entire blotting out of all the kindly emotions and human sympathies, and
there meets the eye something that is at once below and above the face
of man. If we could imagine the scorn, pride, and bold bad daring of one
of Milton's fallen angels, grafted on a groundwork of animal appetites,
we should have a picture something like the priest's face.
The priests will not be offended should the beggars come next in our
notice of the Eternal City. The beggars of Rome are almost an
institution of themselves; and, though not chartered, like the friars,
their numbers and their ancient standing have established their rights.
What is it that strikes you on first entering the "Holy City?" Is it its
noble monuments,--its fine palaces,--its august temples? No; it is its
flocks of beggars. You cannot halt a moment, but a little colony gathers
round you. Every church has its beggar, and sometimes a whole dozen. If
you wish to ascertain the hours of any ceremony in a church, you are
directed to ask its beggar, as here you would the beadle. Every square,
every column, every obelisk, every fountain, has its little colony of
beggars, who have a prescriptive right to levy alms of all who come to
see these objects. We shall afterwards advert to the proof thence
arising as to the influence of the system of which this city is the
seat.
Rome, though it surpasses all the cities of the earth in the number,
beauty, and splendour of its public monuments, is imposing only in
parts. It presents no effective _tout ensemble_. Some of its noblest
edifices are huddled into corners, and lost amid a crowd of mean
buildings. The Pantheon rises in the fish-market. The Navonna Mercato,
which has the finest fountain in Italy, is a rag-fair. The church of
the Lateran is approached through narrow rural lanes. The splendid
edifice of St Paul's stands outside the walls, in the midst of swamps
and marshes so unwholesome, that there is not a house near it. The
meanest streets of Rome are those that lie around St Peter's and the
Vatican. The Corso is in good part a line of noble palaces; but in other
parts of the city you pass through whole streets, consisting of large
massive structures, once comfortable mansions, but now squalid, filthy,
and unfurnished hovels, resembling the worst dens of our great cities.
It cannot fail to strike one, too, as somewhat anomalous, that there
should be such a vast deal of ruins and rubbish in the _Eternal_ City.
And as regards its sanitary condition, there may be a great deal of
holiness in Rome, but there is very little cleanliness in it. When a
shower falls, and the odour of the garbage with which the streets are
littered is exhaled, the smell is insufferable. One had better not
describe the spectacles that one sees every day on the marble stairs of
the churches. The words of Archenholtz in the end of last century are
still applicable:--"Filth," says he, "infects all the great places of
Rome except that of St. Peter's; nor would this be excepted from the
general rule, but that it lies at greater distance from the dwellings.
It is incredible to what a pitch filthiness is carried in Rome. As
palaces and houses are mostly open, their entrance is usually rendered
unsufferable, being made the receptacle of the most disgustful wants."
In fine, Rome is the most extraordinary combination of grandeur and
ruin, magnificence and dirt, glory and decay, which the world ever saw.
We must distinguish, however: the grandeur has come down to the Popes
from their predecessors,--the filth and ruin are their own.