it only asks the chance. Protract your stay as you will, there remains
at last a sense of awe, almost of incredulity, at being, in the actual
flesh, in precincts so ultra-venerated—in dread, historic Rome. It
is only a somewhat milder form of the feeling that overpowered you
the very first morning of your visit when, after the night’s sleep of
forgetfulness, you read with amazed, half-awake eyes the printed slip
on the bedroom door that affirmed your hotel to be on no less august
an eminence than _one of the seven hills of Rome_. Even when you had
rushed to the window for corroboration and stared out in excited
astonishment on a vast shoulder of dusty, reddish brown ruins with pert
vines greening in its loftiest recesses, and a guidebook insisted that
they were the Baths of Diocletian, a reluctant fear remained that you
might only be, after all, in the pleasant toils of the old, recurrent
dream from which you might shortly and miserably awake.
But if, at three o’clock of a summer afternoon, the particular museum
whose doors are remorselessly closing upon your final, lingering look
chances to be that fortunate one on the Capitoline Hill that houses,
among its array of mellow antiques, the pointed-ear original of
Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun,” you could not do better than make use of the
remainder of the admission ticket and have a survey of Rome from the
airy summit of the campanile in the rear. To effect this, one picks
his way among the imposing remains of the ancient record-house of the
_tabularium_, mounts the long flight of iron steps in a corner of its
colonnade, and soon reaches the top of the tower of the Capitol, with
Rome as utterly at his feet as ever it appeared to the eyes of Alaric
and his Goths.
In tones of soft yellow, gray, and dull orange the roof-masses sweep
northward, eastward, and westward, while to the southward and at
your feet lies heaped the earthy, dusty chaos of ruins that crown
the imperial Palatine, the popular Cælian, and the luckless Aventine
Hills. Parks and villa gardens are blotches of dark foliage; and,
within its white embankment walls, the sacred Tiber, in a twisting
yellow band, rushes swiftly down the face of the city in its mad rush
for Ostia and the sea. Beyond the most distant suburbs extend the
rolling plains of the Campagna like an all-embracing sea, until they
seem to wash in a gentle surf about the Sabine foot-hills, away to the
north, and brim southward to the verge of the Alban Hills beyond the
farthest glimpse of the Aqueduct’s long line of broken arches or the
dimming perspective of that taut thread, the Appian Way. From this
vantage-point the city may hide no surface secrets. It lies below us
like an enormous fan, whose converging point is the round Piazza del
Popolo, a good mile to the north. Like three great fingers, there
extend from that focus the Via Ripetta, the Via Babuino, and, in the
centre and running toward us as straight as a ruler, the popular Corso
carrying the old Flaminian Way right through the heart of modern Rome.
By degrees we come to distinguish familiar churches among the hundreds
of spires, towers, and domes; to pick out, here and there, a mediæval
watchtower; to locate well-known squares; to name an occasional
obelisk; to identify a column; and even to particularize some of the
scores of fountains that give latter-day Rome a pleasant distinction
among modern cities. The ribbed, blue-gray dome of St. Peter’s looms
impressively from out the deep green of the Papal Gardens of the
yellow Vatican; the circular bulk of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo and
the columned Pantheon look as familiar as old friends to us—though
they may not be friends to each other, with the latter, under papal
stress, forced in other days to yield its beautiful bronze tiles to
make saints’ ornaments and cannon for the former; the yellow walls of
the Sant’ Onofrio monastery mark where died Tasso, “King of Bards,”
and where they still show his crucifix and inkstand; and yonder is the
great gray church where Beatrice Cenci lies in her nameless grave. If
we turn and look southward we see strange sun-tricks among the bleak
and shadowy corridors of the vast, half-demolished Colosseum, and
crumbling arches of the emperors warm into a venerable dotage. The
sun-baked wreckage of the Forum expands at our feet in rows of column
stumps, shattered arches, isolated shafts with clinging fragments of
cornice and entablature, yawning earthen doorways and dusty heaps of
cluttered brick and _tufa_,—like a gigantic honeycomb,—while all
about it birds are singing divinely in the shade of the laurels. The
famed Tarpeian Rock, just at hand, has little suggestion of a short
shrift for traitors, with rookeries nestling snugly to its base and a
rose-trellised garden on its commodious summit.
Victor Emmanuel II, in the regal cool of bronze, gazes over his
colossal charger in the gigantic monument on the Capitoline slopes
below us and beholds the hills studded with the pretty white villas
of his grandson’s prosperous subjects, and the Quarter of the Fields
carpeted with the neat stucco homes of the poor that used to languish
in the vile slums of the old Ghetto. Had he read Zola’s “Rome” he might
even be justified in frowning at so defamatory a description of so
pleasant a section. But apparently he prefers to watch the afternoon
glow on the gleaming domes and towers and myrtle-set villas of the
Trastevere, where the powerful and violent descendants of the ancient
Romans still dwell; and to take amused note of Garibaldi over there
twisting around on his big bronze horse to keep a wary eye on St.
Peter’s.
It taxes the credulity of the visitor to comprehend that yonder is
the renowned Janiculum, down whose slopes Lars Porsena led his troops
to contend with Horatius Cocles and his intrepid companions as they
“held the bridge”—only a hundred yards from where we are standing.
And, indeed, imagination is quite unequal to the tasks set it on
all this historic ground. Even if we succeed in carrying ourselves
back through the periods of the popes, the emperors, the republic,
the kings, and possibly the shepherds, what is to become of us when
confronted with the statement of Ampère that there were really “nine
Romes before Rome.” It is quite enough to undertake the reconstruction
of ancient Rome to the mind’s eye, such as authentic history describes
it, considering how repeatedly its conquerors sacked it, and how both
Nero and Robert Guisecard burned it; and that the Romans themselves, as
Lanciani insists, have done more harm to it than all invading hosts put
together. “What the Barbarians did not do,” ran the famous pasquinade,
“the Barberini did.” It is, really, asking too much of the man who is
risking “a touch of sun” to see the city from the sweltering top of
the Capitol Tower, to expect him to be communing with himself in terms
of _travertine_ and _peperino_ and reassembling antiquities as an
agreeable pastime. He will probably content himself with a hasty glance
around, and a little irreverent levity over the task of Ascanius, son
of “the pious Æneas,” in building a city on the scraggy ridge of
distant Alba Longa, or the scramble the Roman bachelors must have had
when they scampered down the neighboring Quirinal Hill with their arms
full of their Sabine allies’ wives. As he trudges down the tower steps
and catches periodic glimpses of that ancient Latium that is now the
Campagna, he ought to devote a moment to self-congratulation that the
pestilence no longer stalks there by night and noon-day, or that the
evil _campagnards_ of Andersen’s “Improvisatore” no more terrorize with
impunity, or wild beasts imperil the wayfarer; but rather that these
latter themselves flee, especially the foxes, what time the red-coated
gentlemen of the English Hunt round on them among the shattered tombs
of the Appian Way.
And yet, if the visitor is a sentimentalist, no Italian sun is going to
rob him of his reverie: he will be hearing the cries of the Christian
martyrs at a Colosseum matinée, and beholding the pride and beauty of
ancient Rome loitering along the palace-lined streets on their way to
the afternoon diversions at the Baths of Caracalla. And the Forum will
bustle with the state business of the world, Cicero will mount the
rostrum, and a train of Vestal Virgins pass demurely along the Sacra
Via. He will attend the mournful wails of priests at worship in the
temples of Jupiter and Saturn, and thrill to see a detachment of the
Prætorian Guard dash into the Forum and acclaim some new military hero
as emperor. But this should be sufficient to startle him back to the
Rome of to-day, and as he looks anxiously over to the northwestern
walls, beyond which once stood that infamous camp, he will doubtless
rejoice devoutly that the sober and law-abiding soldiery that drills
there now is something so very different from the uncontrollable
“Frankenstein” that the Cæsars devised to their own undoing. It is,
in consequence, with hearty complacence that he will turn his back on
even the aristocratic treasure-heap of the lordly Palatine, conscious
that if the cry were raised to-day, “Why is the Forum crowded, what
means this stir in Rome?” the reply would be forthcoming, “Tourists and
picture-card sellers and peddlers of cameo pins.”
Parenthetically, it may be observed that, although pathos and bathos
rub elbows in the foregoing reflections, still incongruities come
very near to being the rule in latter-day Rome. What is to be said
of obelisks of the Pharaohs with Christian crosses on their tops? Of
the column of Trajan with St. Peter at its summit, and at its base
those twentieth-century cats that visitors feed with fish bought
from stands at hand for the purpose? Of St. Paul on the column of
Marcus Aurelius, and the sign of an American life insurance company
across the street? Of a modern playhouse in the mausoleum of Augustus
where the emperors were buried? Of the present use of King Tarquin’s
great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, just as good as it was twenty-five
hundred years ago? Of electric lights where Cincinnatus had his
cabbage-farm? Of a Jewish cemetery above the circus of Tarquin? Of
steam-heated flats in the gardens of Sallust? Of modern houses at the
Tarpeian Rock, and the Baths of Agrippa? Of street cars with the name
of Diocletian? Of automobiles on the Flaminian Way? Of tennis courts
beside the burial-place of a Cæsar? Of motor-cycles around the tomb of
the Scipios? Of an annual Derby down the Appian Way? Of railroad trains
beside the old Servian Wall? Of telephone booths on the banks of Father
Tiber? Modernism is, indeed, with us, as his Holiness laments!
The sultry, torrid hour that lies between three o’clock and four of
a summer afternoon usually sees Rome rubbing her eyes, fresh from
her siesta, that ancient midday nap that Varro declared he could
not live without; and you may be sure the final rub would be one of
vast amusement if she were to see you walking on the sunny side of
the street, where, by the terms of her immemorial observation, only
dogs and foreigners go. The heat is intense on these lava pavements;
one keeps religiously to the shade. But Roman society is not rubbing
its eyes,—at least, not in town,—for _tout le monde_ is passing
the annual _villeggiatura_ at its villa in the hills or by the sea,
economizing for the fashionable expenditure of the winter, and,
incidentally, obliging the people who stay in town with that much more
of elbow room on the Corso and other popular promenades. All of which
helps a little in making the stroll from the Capitoline Hill to the
Pincian Gardens rather more comfortable than moving around the hot-room
of a Turkish bath.
As we pick our way down the Capitoline slope, pass Marcus Aurelius on
his fat bronze steed, and “bend our steps,” as the old novels used
to say, toward the tramway-haunted uproar of the Piazza di Venezia,
the rabble rout of the slum district on the left affords a lively
conception of the element that goes farthest to make Rome howl. Having
been told that this old Ghetto had been swept and garnished, one is
properly indignant at finding the air redolent of garlic and everybody
under conviction that the chief end of man is to amass macaroni and
enjoy it forever. You gaze askance on a universal costume of filth and
rags, and hurry along through it, protesting that, while you would
not invoke the precedent of Pope Paul IV’s sixteenth-century method
of putting gates across the streets, and locking the people in and
making the men wear yellow hats and the women yellow veils, as he did
with the Jews, still some expedient ought to be hit upon for making
the district look a little less like a camp of Falstaff recruits. “A
frowzy-headed laborer,” say you, “shouldering a basket of charcoal, may
seem attractive in Mr. Storey’s ‘Roba di Roma,’ but in real life one
likes to think men can afford shirts, and not have to wear rags over
their shoulders after the manner of a herald’s tabard.” You pause a
moment to watch the disappearance of a yard of macaroni down some red
gullet, and George Augustus Sala’s description of the banquet of the
seven wagoners rushes to mind: “Upon this vast mess they fell tooth
and nail. The simile is, perchance, not strictly correct. Teeth may be
_de trop_. You should never bite or chew macaroni, but swallow each
pipe whole, grease and all, as though it were so much flattery. But
their nails they did use, seeing that they ate the macaroni with their
fingers. What wondrous twistings and turnings-back of their heads, what
play of the muscles of their throats, what straining of their eyeballs
and vasty openings of their jaws, did I study as they swallowed their
food.”
And now we begin to have the usual experience of Roman mendicancy.
Truly, there is no beggar like your Roman beggar. He has raised his
profession to both an art and a nuisance. Appeals to charity take every
form and phase. Evidences of anatomical disaster are utilized to excite
pity at so much per sigh. Tales of misery and misfortune ring all the
changes of fervency and fancy. Their whines are both groveling and
dramatic. “Niente!” they moan, as with woe-begone faces and pathetic
twists of their necks they sidle up with stiff gestures of weary and
hopeless expressiveness; “Illustrissimo! Eccellenza! Per amor di Dio!”
You could not bluff them, though you were armored in all the calloused
nonchalance of the average ambulance surgeon; and your doom is sealed
if you undertake to bandy repartee, for their invective is as searching
as a satire of Juvenal. Whether you give or not, their volubility
and frankness continue unabated; for you are savagely cursed if you
decline, and if you acquiesce are blessed strictly in proportion to
the gratuity. Indubitably, in the social scheme of the beggar we be
brethren all and should each aid the other—after the philosophy of the
Italian, saying, “One hand washes the other, and both the face.” The
Roman, understanding them, passes coolly by; but the foreigner, who is
their special prey, gives up in desperation, on the principle of the
local proverb, “We are in the ballroom and we must dance.”
Parenthetically, again, they say the authorities are helpless to curb
this universal Roman nuisance. It is an institution. These beggars
come of all classes—from the Capuchin and Franciscan lay brothers
who go about in brown robes, rope girdles, and sandals and present a
basket for food, to the dirty urchins of the Appian Way who stop your
carriage with their acrobatic proficiency and then howl for _soldi_ in
the name of all the saints. Many a beggar here is a bank depositor;
and any of them who can retain the monopoly of the door of a popular
church may confidently look forward to affluence. Very likely they are
better business men, in their way, than many who drop coins into their
pathetic, swindling hands. _À chacun son métier._
It would extend a Brooklynite to negotiate the crossing of the Piazza
di Venezia. It is the grand gathering-place of tramcars, busses,
cabs, carts, bicycles, and every other form of conveyance. You will
certainly find a “Seeing Rome” automobile, with the lecturer pointing
out the castellated old Palazzo di Venezia and telling his people that
it was built of stone from the Colosseum, and has been the seat of
the Austrian embassy to the Curia for over a hundred years. So far as
traffic is concerned, this is the heart of Rome. Nothing less than a
whirlpool could be expected in a spot that is the confluence of such
full streams of life as the Corso and the Via Nazionale. One admires
its broad, busy sweep, and the dignity of the solid old gray buildings
that rim it. No mid-afternoon heat lessens the bustle and activity that
rages here; even the experienced natives can be found in large numbers,
jostling their way across it, and visitors pass through in droves to
reach the Cenci Palace or to see the spot where Paul dwelt for two
years “in his own hired house.”
If you stopped, as I did, at one of the hotels near the Baths of
Diocletian, the Via Nazionale will have a friendly suggestion of the
nearest way home. With thoughts of that temporary home the recollection
often comes to me of the mildly stimulating delight I once found in
getting lost by night in this city of superior chance encounters.
It seemed, on the first occasion, as though I had scarcely turned
the corner into the Via Cavour before a delicious conviction of
unfamiliarity with my surroundings assured me I was pursuing a course
that was certain, sooner or later, to lead to artistic discovery
or adventure. Nothing was easier than getting lost, for I was newly
arrived; and yet localities and objects of consequence were not without
significance, for, like every one else, I had a vivid idea of the
landmarks of the famous city. And first of all, I discovered I was
passing the infamous spot where “the impious Tullia” drove her chariot
across the bleeding body of her royal father; whence I hastened on,
with furtive glances. Next, after some speculation I identified an
enormous church to be none other than the famous Santa Maria Maggiore,
whose ceilings, I had read, were crusted with the first gold brought
from the New World, and to whose high altar the popes used to come by
torchlight for New Year’s mass. I thrilled at the incredible reflection
that the street cars crossing that corner would be passing, a moment
later, the site of the gardens of Mæcenas where Horace and Virgil
had mused and read their verses. A few blocks farther on I came to a
halt before the house of Lucrezia Borgia; and I tried to fancy the
circumstances of the night of their quiet family supper there, before
the children took leave of their mother with false words of affection
and Cæsar hurried to gather his bravos and overtook Francesco, and,
muffled in a cloak, sat his horse in easy unconcern while his brother
was done to death and thrown into the Tiber. For relief I turned
across the street to the church of St. Peter-in-Chains, and imagined
how Michael Angelo’s vigorous Moses might be appearing in the dark of
the side aisle, and thought of the master striking the completed work
with his mallet and crying out, “Now, speak!” On I rambled, through a
block or two of darkened shops and gloomy houses, and suddenly a great
open space yawned before me and I was staring at rows of column stumps,
mellowed and battered, and among them a tall, ghostly shaft of marble
with a spiral band of half-mutilated reliefs winding away up to the
summit, where was the dusky outline of a sculptured form. It was the
old school-geography picture come to life! There was I in the heart
of an unfamiliar city, alone, by night, with this vast relic of the
ancients. It was like Stanley finding Livingstone in Africa. I felt I
had honestly discovered it and that it ought to be mine. It was the
Forum of Trajan!
It will seem a violent transition to jump from midnight to
mid-afternoon, but the plunge must be taken. The normal state of
the Corso at three-thirty of a summer afternoon is one of leisurely
activity. The crowds are lethargic, slow-moving, inclined to curiosity.
An interesting social comedy is proceeding, with foreign ladies playing
sight-seeing rôles, clutching their red Baedekers and Hare’s “Walks
in Rome.” Jostling groups of them gather before the beguiling shop
windows, and occasionally one enters and possesses herself of a Roman
pearl or cameo, or perhaps a mosaic or copy of an antique bronze.
Business people pass along in their habitually distrait manner, and
priests beyond number brighten the scene with habits of every hue.
There is little enough of room in the middle of the street and scarcely
any on the sidewalks. Like all Roman thoroughfares, the Corso is clean
and distinguished. Long perspectives of gayly awninged shops extend
toward the Piazza del Popolo, agreeably broken here and there by the
interposition of mellow old palace fronts and richly sculptured baroque
façades; and there is frequent opportunity for passing glimpses into
cool courtyards attractive with foliage and fountains.
Visitors keep forsaking the Corso at every turning to make inspiring
discoveries in the tangled mesh of side streets. We are at liberty
to suspect those who go to the west, of sentimental designs on the
star under the dome of a neighboring church that marks the spot where
Julius Cæsar was assassinated in Pompey’s Senate House; or, perhaps,
of an intention to visit the sombre statue of Giordano Bruno in the
Field of Flowers, and reflect upon what a constant rebuke it must be to
the church that burned him there, three centuries ago, for persisting
in his “modernism” to the outrageous extremity of defending the
astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and like heresies of the hour.
Afternoon walks in Rome should be frequently interrupted, not only
to escape the floods of sunshine, but to find out occasionally what
is behind the mellow garden walls over whose tops glistening, green
foliage droops enticingly down with hints of cool and restful
retreats. Such an opportunity presents itself here in the rare Colonna
Gardens, just around the corner of the great Colonna Palace where
earlier in the day the Titians and Tintorettos ravish the artistic.
Spacious, elegant Rome has nothing more charming and exquisite than
such gardens as these. Art and antiquity are everywhere in restful
profusion—“storied urn and animated bust.” It is even said that
sculptures are to be found almost anywhere underground for the mere
pains of exhuming. One rests with infinite satisfaction in the deep
shade of eucalyptus, cypress, ilex, and laurel, to the sweet singing
of multitudes of birds. There are roses and oranges in bloom, and tall
hedges of clipped box, and musical little cascades tumble down from
terrace to terrace and drip over mossy marble steps. In this particular
garden come thoughts of Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, who so
often strolled along these very paths and communed in their serene and
beautiful friendship. Theirs was a faith that brought its own reward.