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, 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 my 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 presently
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 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 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.
[Illustration: 38 STAIRWAY AND FOUNTAIN, VILLA D'ESTE]
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 permanent 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 frescoing 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 companionably 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 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 celebrate 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, 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 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 music, 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 Cafe 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 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 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 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.
[Illustration: 39 VILLA FALCONIERI, ENTRANCE, FRASCATI]
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 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 Falconieri, 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 advantageous 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 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 pretty young wife, and who allowed
me to weave a whole realistic 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 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 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.
[Illustration: 40 IN THE GARDENS OF THE VILLA FALCONIERI]
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 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 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
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 and the daily dole
of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing
colder than 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 wait 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.