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 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 coming 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 mattering. 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 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.
[Illustration: 31 THE CARNIVAL (AS IT ONCE WAS)]
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 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 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.
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 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
Rienzi, 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 elevation, 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 retrospect. 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 be 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
German, 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.
[Illustration: 32 THE FOUNTAIN OF TREVI]
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 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 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 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.