_Southward-Bound._
“DO NOT go to Rome!” friends at home had implored by letter and word of
mouth, prior to our sailing from the other side. English acquaintances
and friends caught up the cry. In Paris, it swelled into impassioned
adjuration, reiterated in so many forms, and at times so numerous and
unseasonable that we nervously avoided the remotest allusion to the
Eternal City in word. But sleeping and waking thoughts were tormented
by mental repetitions that might, or might not be the whispers of
guardian angels.
“Do not go to Rome! Do not thou or you go to Rome! Do not ye or you go
to Rome!”
Thus ran the changes in the burden of admonition and thought.
Especially, “Do not ye or you go to Rome!”
“Go, if you are bent upon it, me dear!” said a kind English lady. “Your
husband is robust, and it may be as you and he believe, that your
health requires a mild and sedative climate. But do not take your dear
daughters. The air of Rome is deadly to young English and American
girls. Quite a blight, I assure you!”
Said one of our Paris bankers to Caput:—“I can have no conceivable
interest in trying to turn you aside from your projected route, but it
is my duty in the cause of common humanity to warn you that you are
running into the jaws of danger in taking your family to Rome. We have
advices to-day that the corpses of thirteen Americans, most of them
women and children,—all dead within the week—are now lying at Maquay
and Hooker’s in Rome awaiting transportation to America.”
This was appalling. But matters waxed serious in Paris, too. Indian
Summer over, it began to rain. In Scriptural phrase,—“Neither sun nor
stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest”—of mist, sleet and
showers—“lay upon us.” Deprived of what was my very life—(what little
of it remained,) daily exercise in the open air, the cough, insomnia
and other terrors that had driven us into exile, increased upon me
rapidly and alarmingly. Weakening day by day, it was each morning
more difficult to rise and look despairingly from my windows upon the
watery heavens and flooded streets. Sunshine and soft airs were abroad
somewhere upon the earth. Find them we must before it should be useless
to seek them. The leader of the household brigade ordered a movement
along the whole line. Like a brood of swallows, we fled southward.
“Certainly to Florence. Probably to Rome. Should the skies there prove
as ungenial as those of France,—as a last and forlorn hope—to Algiers.”
Such were the terms of command.
We arrived in Florence, the Beautiful, at ten o’clock of a December
night. The _facchini_ and _cocchieri_ at the station stared wildly
when we addressed them in French, became frantic under the volley of
Latin Caput hurled upon them, in the mistaken idea that they would
understand their ancestral tongue. Italian was, as yet, an unknown
realm to us, and our ignominious refuge was in the universal language
of signs. Porters and coachmen were quick in interpretation, much of
their intercourse with their fellow-countrymen being carried on in like
manner. The luggage was identified, piece by piece, and fastened upon
the carriages. The human freight was bestowed within, and as Prima
dropped upon the seat beside me, she lifted her hand in a vow:
“I begin the study of Italian to-morrow!”
It was raining steadily, the streets were ill-lighted, the pavements
wretched; and when a slow drive through tortuous ways brought us to our
desired haven, the house was so full that comfortable accommodations
for so large a party could not be procured. The proprietor kindly
and courteously directed us to a neighboring hotel, which he could
conscientiously recommend, and sent an English-speaking waiter—a
handsome, quick-witted fellow—to escort us thither and “see that we
were not cheated.”
“Babes in the woods—nothing more!” grumbled the high-spirited young
woman at my elbow.
She was the mistress of a dozen telling Italian words before she
slept. Our bed-rooms and adjoining _salon_ were spacious, gloomy, and
cheerless to a degree unknown out of Italy. The hotel had been a palace
in the olden times, after the manner of three-fourths of the Italian
houses of entertainment. Walls and floor were of stone, the chill of
the latter striking through the carpets into our feet My chamber, the
largest in the suite, contained two bier-like beds set against the far
wall, bureau, dressing-table, wash-stand, six heavy chairs, and a sofa,
and, between these, a desolate moor of bare carpeting before one could
gain the hearth. This was a full brick in width, bounded in front by a
strip of rug hardly wider—at the back by a triangular hole in the wall,
in which a chambermaid proceeded, upon our entrance, to build a wood
fire. First, a ball of resined shavings was laid upon the bricks; then,
a handful of dried twigs; then, small round sticks; then, diminutive
logs, split and seasoned, and we had a crackling, fizzing, conceited
blaze that swept all the heat with it up the chimney. The Invaluable’s
spirit-lamp upon the side-table had more cheer in it. If set down upon
the pyramid of Cheops, and told we were to camp there overnight, this
feminine Mark Tapley would, in half-an-hour, have made herself and the
rest of us at home; got up “a nice tea;” put Boy to bed and sat down
beside him, knitting in hand, as composedly as in our nursery over the
sea.
Her “comfortable cup of tea” was ready by the time our supper was
brought up—a good supper, hot, and served with praiseworthy alacrity.
We ate it, and drank our tea, and looked at the fire, conscious that we
ought also to feel it, it was such a brisk, fussy little conflagration.
Landlord and servants were solicitous and attentive; hot-water bottles
were tucked in at the foot of each frozen bed, and we sought our
pillows in tolerable spirits.
Mine were at ebb-tide again next morning, as, lying upon the sofa,
mummied in shawls, a _duvet_, covered with satinet and filled with
down, on the top of the heap, yet cold under them all, my eyes wandered
from the impertinent little fire that did not thaw the air twelve
inches beyond the hearth, to the windows so clouded with rain I could
hardly see the grim palace opposite, and I wondered why I was there.
Was the game worth the expensive candle? Why had I not stayed at home
and died like a Christian woman upon a spring-mattress, swathed in
thick blankets, environed by friends and all the appliances conducive
to euthanasia? I had begged the others to go out on a tour of business
and sight-seeing. I should be quite comfortable with my books, and the
thought of loneliness was preposterous. Was I not in Florence? Knowing
this, it would be a delight to lie still and dream. In truth, I was
thoroughly miserable, yet would have died sooner than confess it. I did
not touch one of the books laid upon the table beside me, because, I
said to my moody self, it was too cold and I too languid to put my hand
out from the load of wraps.
There was a tap at the door. It unclosed and shut again softly. An
angel glided over the Siberian desert of carpet—before I could exclaim,
bent down and kissed me.
“Oh!” I sighed, in hysterical rapture. “I did not know you were in
Italy!”
She was staying in the hotel at which we had applied for rooms the
night before, and the handsome interpreter, Carlo, had reported our
arrival to the Americans in the house.
Shall I be more glad to meet her in heaven than I was on that day to
look upon the sweet, womanly face, and hear the cooing voice, whose
American intonations touched my heart to melting? She sat with me all
the forenoon, the room growing warmer each hour. Her party—also a
family one—had now been abroad more than a year. The invalid brother,
her especial charge, was wonderfully better for the travel and change
of climate. He was far more ill than I when they left home. Of course
I would get well! Why not, with such tender nurses and the dear Lord’s
blessing? No! it did not “rain always in Florence;” but the rainy
season had now set in, and “Frederic and I are going to Rome next
week.” I question if she ever named herself, even in thought or prayer,
without the prefix of “Frederic.”
“To Rome!” cried I, eagerly. “_Dare_ you!”
My story of longing, discouragement, dreads—that had darkened into
superstitious presentiments—followed. The day went smoothly enough
after the confession, and the reassurances that it elicited. We secured
smaller and brighter bed-rooms, and almost warmed them by ruinously
dear fires, devouring as they did basketful after basketful of the
Lilliputian logs. It was the business of one _facchino_ to feed the
holes in the walls of the three rooms we inhabited in the day-time.
Other friends called—cordial and lavish of kind offices and offers as
are compatriots when met upon foreign soil. One family—old, old friends
of Caput—had, although now resident in Florence, lived for a year in
Rome, and laughed to scorn our fears of the climate. They rendered us
yet more essential service in suggestions as to clothing, apartments,
and general habits of life in Central Italy. To the adoption of these
we were, I believe, greatly indebted for the unbroken health which was
our portion as a household during our winter in the dear old city.
We were in Florence ten days. Nine were repetitions, “to be continued,”
of such weather as we had left in Paris. One was so deliciously
lovely that, had not the next proved stormy, we should have postponed
our departure. We made the most of the sunshine, taking a carriage,
morning and afternoon, for drives in the outskirts of the town and in
the suburbs, which must have given her the name of _bella_. The city
proper is undeniably and irremediably ugly. The streets are crooked
lanes, in which the meeting of two carriages drives foot-passengers
literally to the wall. There are no sidewalks other than the few rows
of cobble-stones slanting down from the houses to the gutter separating
them from the middle of the thoroughfare. The far-famed palaces are
usually built around courtyards, and present to the street walls
sternly blank, or frowning with grated windows. If, at long intervals,
one has snatches through a gateway of fountains and conservatories,
they make the more tedious block after block of lofty edifices that
shut out light from the thread-like street—shed chill with darkness
into these dismal wells. This is the old city in its winter aspect.
Wider and handsome streets border the Arno—a sluggish, turbid creek—and
the modern quarters are laid out generously in boulevards and squares.
We modified our opinions materially the following year, when weather
and physical state were more propitious to favorable judgment. Now,
we were impatient to be gone, intolerant of the praises chanted and
written of _Firenze_ in so many ages and tongues. The happiest moment
of our stay within her gates was when we shook off so much of her mud
as the action could dislodge from our feet and seated ourselves in a
railway carriage for Rome.
It was a long day’s travel, but the most entrancing we had as yet
known. Vallambrosa, Arezzo (the ancient _Arretium_), Cortona;
_Lake Thrasymene!_ The names leaped up at us from the pages of our
guide-books. The places for which they stood lay to the right and left
of the prosaic railway, like scenes in a phantasmagoria. We had, as
was our custom when it could be compassed by fee or argument, secured
a compartment to ourselves. There were no critics to sneer, or marvel
at our raptures and quotations. Boy, ætat four, whose preparation
for the foreign tour had been readings, recitations, and songs from
“Lays of Ancient Rome,” in lieu of Mother Goose and Baby’s Opera, and
whose personal hand-luggage consisted of a very dog-eared copy of the
work, illustrated by stiff engravings from bas-reliefs upon coins and
stones—bore a distinguished part in our talk. He would see “purple
Apennine,” and was disgusted at the commonplace roofs of Cortona that
no longer
“Lifts to heaven
Her diadem of towers.”
At mention of the famous lake, he scrambled down from his seat; made a
rush for the window.
“Papa! is _that_ ‘reedy Thrasymene?’ Where is ‘dark Verbenna?’”
As a reward for remembering his lesson so well, he was lifted to the
paternal knee, and while the train slowly wound along the upper end of
the lake, heard the story of the battle between Hannibal and Flaminius,
upon the weedy banks, B. C. 217; saw the defile in which the brave
consul was entrapped; where, for hours, the slaughter of the snared and
helpless troops went on, until the little river we presently crossed
was foul with running blood. It is Sanguinetto to this day.
The vapors of morning were lazily curling up from the lake; dark
woods crowd down to the edge on one side; hills dressed in gray olive
orchards border another; a bold promontory on the west is capped by an
ancient tower. A monastery occupies one of the three islands that dot
the surface. A light film, like the breath upon a mirror, veiled the
intense blue of the sky—darkened the waters into slaty purple.
A dense fog filled the basin between the hills on the May-day when
Rome’s best consul and general marched into it and to his death.
On we swept, past Perugia, capital of old Umbria, one of the twelve
chiefest Etruscan cities; overcome and subjugated by the Roman power
B. C. 310. It was a battle-field while Antony and Octavius contended
for the mastership of Rome; was devastated by Goth, Ghibelline and
Guelph; captured successively by Savoyard, Austrian, and Piedmontese.
It is better known to this age than by all these events as the home of
Perugino, the master of Raphael, and father of the new departure from
the ancient school of painting. The view became, each moment, more
novel because more Italian. The roads were scantily shaded by pollarded
trees—mostly mulberry—from whose branches depended long festoons of
vines, linking them together, without a break, for miles. Farms were
separated by the same graceful lines of demarcation. Other fences were
rare. We did not see “a piece of bad road,” or a mud-hole, in Italy.
The road and bridge-builders of the world bequeathed to their posterity
one legacy that has never worn out, which bids fair to last while the
globe swings through space. As far as the eye could reach along the
many country highways we crossed that day, the broad, smooth sweep
commanded our wondering admiration. The grade from crown to sides is so
nicely calculated that rain-water neither gathers in pools in the road,
nor gullies the bed in running off. Vehicles are not compelled, by
barbarous “turnpiking,” to keep the middle of the track, thus cutting
deep ruts other wheels must follow. It is unusual, in driving, to
strike a pebble as large as an egg.
The travellers upon these millennial thoroughfares were not numerous.
Peasants on foot drove herds of queer black swine, small and gaunt,
in comparison with our obese porkers—vicious-looking creatures, with
pointed snouts and long legs. Women, returning from or going to market,
had baskets of green stuff strapped upon their backs, and often
children in their arms; bare-legged men in conical hats and sheepskin
coats, trudged through clouds of white dust, raised by clumsy carts,
to which were attached the cream-colored oxen of the Campagna. Great,
patient beasts they are, the handsomest of their race, with incredibly
long horns symmetrically fashioned and curved. These horns are sold
everywhere in Italy as a charm against “the evil eye”—the dread of all
classes.
About the middle of the afternoon we descended into the valley of the
Tiber—the cleft peak of Soracte (Horace’s Soracte!) visible from afar
like a rent cloud. We crossed a bridge built by Augustus; halted for
a minute at the Sabine town that gave Numa Pompilius to Rome; watched,
with increasing delight, the Sabine and Alban Mountains grow into
shape and distinctness; gazed oftenest and longest—as who does not?—at
the Dome, faint, for a while, as a bubble blown into the haze of the
horizon—more strongly and nobly defined as we neared our goal; crossed
the Anio, upon which Romulus and Remus had been set adrift; made a wide
_détour_ that, apparently, took us away from, not toward the city, and
showed us the long reaches of the aqueducts, black and high, “striding
across the Campagna,” in the settling mists of evening. Then ensued an
odd jumble of ruins and modern, unfinished buildings, an alternation,
as incongruous, of strait and spacious streets, and we steamed slowly
into the station. It is near the Baths of Diocletian, and looks like a
very audacious interloper by daylight.
It was dusk when our effects were collected, and they and ourselves
jolting over miserable pavements toward our hotel in the guardianship
of a friend who had kindly met us at the station. By the time we had
reached the quarters he had engaged for us; had waited some minutes
in a reception-room in the _rez-de-chaussée_ that felt and smelt like
a newly-dug grave; had ascended two flights of obdurate stone stairs,
cruelly mortifying to feet cramped and tender with long sitting and
the hot-water footstools of the railway carriage; had sat for half
an hour, shawled and hatted, in chambers more raw and earthy of odor
than had been the waiting-room, watching the contest betwixt flame
and smoke in the disused chimneys, we discovered and admitted that
we were tired to death. Furthermore, that the sensation of wishing
oneself really and comfortably deceased, upon attaining this degree of
physical depression, is the same in a city almost thirty centuries
old, and in a hunter’s camp in the Adirondacks. Even Caput looked
vexed, and wondered audibly and repeatedly why fires were not ready in
rooms that were positively engaged and ordered to be made comfortable
twenty-four hours ago; and the Invaluable, depositing Boy, swathed in
railway rugs, upon one of the high, single beds, lest his feet should
freeze upon “the murdersome cold floors,” “guessed these Eyetalians
aren’t much, if any of fire-makers.” Thereupon, she went down upon her
knees to coax into being the smothering blaze, dying upon a cold hearth
under unskilfully-laid fuel. The carpet in the _salon_ we had likewise
bespoken was not put down until the afternoon of the following day. The
fires in all the bed-rooms smoked. By eight o’clock we extinguished
the last spark and went to bed. In time, we took these dampers and
reactions as a part of a hard day’s work; gained faith in our ability
to live until next morning. Being unseasoned at this period, the first
night in Rome was torture while we endured it, humiliating in the
retrospect.
It rained from dawn to sundown of the next day. Not with melancholy
persistency, as in Florence, as if the weather were put out by contract
and time no object, but in passionate, fitful showers, making rivers of
the streets, separated by intervals of sobbing and moaning winds and
angry spits of rain-drops. We stayed in-doors, and, under compulsion,
rested. The fires burned better as the chimneys warmed to their work;
we unpacked a trunk or two; wrote letters and watched, amused and
curious, the proceedings of two men and two women who took eight hours
to stretch and tack down the carpet in our _salon_. Each time one of us
peeped, or sauntered in to note and report progress, all four of the
work-people intermitted their ceaseless jargon to nod and smile, and
say “_Domane!_” Young travelled in Italy before he wrote “To-morrow,
and to-morrow, and to-morrow!”
Our morrow was brilliantly clear, and freshness like the dewy breath
of early Spring was in the air. Our first visit was, of course, to
our bankers, and while Caput went in to inquire for letters (and to
learn, I may add, that the story of the thirteen American corpses was
unsupported by the presence, then or during the entire season, of a
single one), we lay back among the carriage-cushions, feeling that we
drank in the sunshine at every pore—enjoying as children or Italians
might the various and delightful features of the scene.
The sunlight—clarified of all vaporous grossness by the departed
tempest—in color, the purest amber; in touch and play beneficent as
fairy balm, was everywhere. Upon the worn stones paving the Piazza di
Spagna, and upon the Bernini fountain (one of them), the Barcaccia,
at the foot of the Spanish Steps,—a boat, commemorating the mimic
naval battles held here by Domitian, when the Piazza was a theatre
enclosing an artificial lake. Upon beggars lolling along the tawny-gray
Steps, and contadini—boys, women, and girls—in fantastic costume,
attitudinizing to catch the eye of a chance artist. Upon the column,
with the Virgin’s statue on top, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and David
at the base, rusty tears, from unsuspected iron veins, oozing out
of the sides,—decreed by Pius IX. in honor of his pet dogma of the
Immaculate Conception. Upon the big, dingy College of the Propaganda,
founded in 1622, Barberini bees in bas-relief conspicuous among the
architectural ornaments. More of Bernini’s work. Urban VIII., his
patron, being a Barberini. Upon the Trinita di Monti at the top of the
Spanish Staircase, where the nuns sing like imprisoned canaries—as
sweetly and as monotonously—on Sabbath afternoons, and all the world
goes to hear them. Upon the glittering windows of shops and hotels
fronting the Piazza—the centre of English and American colonies in
Rome. Upon the white teeth and brown faces of boys—some beautiful as
cherubs—who held up great trays of violets for us to buy, and wedded
forever our memories of the Piazza and this morning with violet scent.
Upon the wrinkles and rags of old women—some hideous as hags—who piped
entreaties that we would “_per l’amore di Dio_” make a selection from
their stock of Venetian beads, Naples lava trinkets, and Sorrento
wood-work. Upon the portly figure and bland countenance of Mr. Hooker,
coming out to welcome us to the city which has given him a home for
thirty years, and which he has made home-like to so many of his
country-people. Lastly, and to our fancy most brightly, upon the faces
of my Florence angel of mercy and her family party, alighting from
their carriage at the door of the bank, and hurrying up to exchange
greetings with us.
This was our real coming to Rome! Not the damp and despondency of the
thirty-six hours lying just behind us; dreariness and doubts never
renewed in the five fleet-footed months during which we lingered and
_lived_ within her storied gates.