REMINISCENCES OF MODERN ROME
Rome’s Seasons—Childhood Memories of a Roman Spring—My Birthday
Festival—A Day in the Country—The Appian Way—Rome’s Great Wall—An
Adventure with the Campagna Steers—Campagna Sheep-Dogs—Early
Morning Street Scenes—The Giardino Colonna—Secluded Italian
Gardens—Inroads of Commercialism—Discovery of a Dream-Garden of the
Renaissance—Song of the Nightingale in the Lost Italian Garden.
It is time to take breath. So far, we have been living over in mind
the joys and sorrows of certain dwellers near the Appian Way, but
every true story, however fair and fine, seems to run like crystal
beads strung on a dark thread. The shadow of possible tragedy is behind
all things human, and even the happiest tales of old leave one with a
little pang at heart for the black hour of death which came to all the
actors in them sooner or later. One turns with relief to the things
that people wrongly call inanimate—the things of Nature, whose life is
so comfortingly different from our own, so rich in vitality that each
declining season is lifted up and carried on in the arms of the next,
as it were, to return in all its vigour and beauty when the moment
arrives.
To dwellers in Rome the “honied core” of all the year comes with the
first days of spring. Looking back on Roman winters, indeed, from my
later experiences of the season in arctic climates, they were, with
few exceptions, one carol of brightness and sunshine; we spoke of
winter for the sake of putting on our furs and lighting a few fires,
but the violets never ceased to bloom in the open, the shady avenues
of the many villas were not too cool for dalliance, and it was only
when the “tramontana,” blowing over the mountains in the north, turned
the air from balm to crystal, that we had a touch of real winter at
all. Nevertheless, the spring, its opening day marked by the arrival
of the first swallows, was intoxicatingly welcome. The first day of
Lent had put a period to most of the social functions and—such is the
levity of youth—had given us girls time to think of a spring frock or
so. Then, on some March morning, the cry would go through the house,
“The swallows have come!” and thenceforward we lived very much in the
open air. From the time when I was very small it had always been the
same, and even now, at my “far world’s end,” and with five decades
between the “now” and the “then,” the memory of those spring days
goes to my head a little. In a snow-bound land of pale suns and wintry
wastes I can shut my eyes and feel again the bath of sunshine, smell
the bitter-sweet of Campagna thyme and daisy, almost hear the larks
at their singing, the soft bleating of the Campagna lambs, the baying
of the white sheep dogs, the faint piping of the solitary shepherd
boy sitting on the low stone fence while his flock nibbled audibly at
the newly sprung grass. That last is one of the prettiest of outdoor
sounds, I think. The world has to be very still to let one hear it at
all, and then the delicate “crsh-crsh” is like the music of a fairy
March accentuated by the regular moving of the light little hoofs over
the turf.
One such morning comes back to me very vividly. I think it was that of
my tenth birthday, and we had all been taken out to “Egeria’s Grotto”
to mark the festa. I wonder if parents know what a real birthday
festivity means to an imaginative child? Mine came in the outburst of
the Roman April, and, as long as we lived in the old Villa Negroni, was
a perfect carnival of flowers. From the time I awoke in the morning,
an air of joyous mystery pervaded the house. Every servant came to
kiss my hand and bring me a fat posy, sent for to the country, of the
strong farmhouse flowers that did not grow in our garden, marigolds
and marguerites, jessamine and “gagia”—the yellow powdery blossoms that
keep their perfume for fifty years, the whole tied up in a setting of
sweet basil and “madre-cara”—I do not know its name in English—a feast
of clean fragrance—“Cento di questi giorni!” (a hundred of these days)
said every one I met on my way to my mother’s room, for the first thing
to do was to rush into her arms and have her tell me how old I was.
Then, with a handkerchief tied over my eyes, I was solemnly taken into
the big red drawing-room where the rest of the household was already
assembled and led to the place where my portrait hung on the wall.
There was a breathless second of expectation, then the handkerchief
was whisked off, and I saw a bower of white spirea from which my own
picture smiled down at me, above a little table covered with a white
cloth and smothered in spirea, too. Under the foam of the flowers were
all my presents, done up in my dear mother’s favourite parma violet
tissue-paper and satin ribbons. The next hour was an intoxication. It
always seemed as if all the things I had been longing for for months
were collected there. When everybody had been thanked, I was left alone
for a while to examine and exult in my new possessions; then I had to
be dressed in my best clothes for the real crown of the day, a walk
alone with my adored mother, with my pockets stuffed with pennies so
that I could give something to every beggar we met! In the afternoon
there would be a drive out to some point on the Campagna, with a box
of bon-bons to help us enjoy the view, and in the evening the beloved
godfather, Mr. Hooker, always came to dine and help me cut my birthday
cake, a splendid edifice with my name and the date in pink and white
frosting, wreathed in spirea and surrounded by lighted candles to the
number of the years I had attained.
As I grew a little older I preferred to spend the whole day in the
country, and then the place to make for was the so-called Grotto of
Egeria. There was surely solitude, where it seemed as if no one ever
came but ourselves; the outer world was left a thousand miles behind;
the velvet undulations of the lonely valley were all a carpet of short
thyme over which we rolled like the little kids of the goats that
scampered away at our approach. And, best of all, there was the deep
grotto with the broken statue and the shadowy crystal of its mysterious
spring, its sides and vault one mantle of diamond—sprent maidenhair
fern, its moist air and soft green light—a reflection from sun and
grass outside—making it a place where the most light-hearted child
could not but feel the solemnity of something very ancient and very
spiritual. I used to linger there to dream of Egeria, the more than
mortal, less than spirit maid who revealed the lore of Heaven to the
Sabine Sage. I could picture her pale beauty, as she would sit by the
spring and let Numa tell her of all the perplexities and difficulties
of his rule, and very earnestly did I beg her to appear to me too,
but she never came; how could she, when that had never really been her
home? Then I would leap back to earth with a bound and join my brother
and sisters and the little playmates who always came with us, in a
breathless game which began with a mystic incantation I have never
heard except in those days and in my own family. I should be glad if
any one could enlighten me as to its origin, though I fancy it may have
been an inheritance from some witch ancestress. Thus it ran:
“Intery, Mintery, Cutery, Corn,
Apple Seed and Apple Thorn,
Wire, Brier, Limber, Lock,
Seven Geese in a Flock.
Sit and Sing,
By a Spring!
O, U, T—OUT!”
For every word a head was counted round and round the hand-in-hand
ring, and the unlucky one to whom fell the last one “Out” had to break
away and fly, with all the rest in mad pursuit. Some distant point,
generally the last ilex tree on the far side of the grove, had been
fixed upon as sanctuary; if the fugitive could touch this before being
caught, all was well; if not, he or she was at the orders of the others
for any wild prank they might choose to command—three somersaults down
a steep incline was a favourite one, while the victors looked on and
cheered or derided, as the case might be.
Had our dear governess been of the Faith in those days as she was
later, she could have told us more marvellous and romantic tales
than we had ever heard about our storied playground—the “Triopius
Pagus,”[1] not only of Atticus and Annia Regilla, but of Cecilia and
Valerianus, and Tiburtius, and all the valiant comrades of Urban,
and the immediate successors of his stormy pontificate. As it was,
the classical landmarks were all that the Appian Way held for us,
barring one spot, the “Domine, quo vadis?” of St. Peter, which had an
unexplained fascination for us all. The Appian Way we loved for the
sake of its endless beauties and for the monuments and ruins which
were like a compendium of the history of Rome. A writer that I used to
admire, though time has robbed me of his name, said that the things he
loved best in the world were its high roads; that to look along one of
these and know that it cut its way, in a clean swath, over mountain
and plain, from one end of a continent to the other, was to be free
to travel whithersoever fancy flew, no matter how chained and confined
the body might be. The Appian Way, leading to the favourite seaport of
Brundusium, a distance of rather less than a hundred and fifty miles,
was the true road to Africa, to Palestine, and to all the eastern and
southerly provinces of the huge straggling Empire. It was easier to
sail the sea than to climb and descend the Alps; there are various
records in history of a race, from some spot in the eastern portion of
the Empire, run by accuser and accused, the one by sea and the other by
land, each striving to reach the seat of power in Rome the first; and,
in spite of the capricious storms and calms of the Adriatic, it was
almost invariably the seafarer who won the day.
Starting from the milestone of solid gold, which Rome set up on the
Palatine as the centre of the world and the point from which all
distances were to be measured, the Appian Way ran due south, issuing,
in the early days, from the Capena Gate, which was pulled down and
lost sight of when Aurelian enlarged the city’s precincts and rebuilt
her walls as they stand to-day. Fine walls they were, with their huge
outstanding buttresses at short, regular distances from one another
all the way. The recesses between them were deep enough to shelter a
dozen houses, and were utilised, down to my own time, for the erection
of strong wooden stockades within which riders and pedestrians could
take refuge at the approach of a herd of the fierce Campagna cattle
being driven to market either in Rome or in some town further south.
The Roman oxen look mild and peaceful enough when, nose-ringed and
weighted with the ponderous wooden yoke, they draw the plough or wagon;
but the three-year-old steer, though he is one of the most beautiful
creatures in the world, with his snow-white hide, his startled eyes and
his widely curved, black-tipped, arrow-pointed horns, is a terrifying
customer to meet in his untamed state and with a score or two of his
companions!
It was forbidden of course to drive a herd through the city, but we
often met them in our drives and rides. Once, I remember, riding alone
save for a groom. I was exploring a winding lane, scarcely three feet
wide and cut so deep that even from the saddle I could not see what lay
on either side of it. Mooning along on a gentle little mare, perfectly
happy with my own thoughts, I heard a cry from Tom, the good old
English groom who was temporarily responsible for my safety: “Look out,
Miss! It’s them blooming cattle. Put her at the bank!”
I raised my eyes and saw a forest of horns, like files of spears, the
first pair menacingly lowered, coming round a curve in the lane not
twenty yards ahead of me. How we made the top of the bank I do not
know—the mare quite understood the situation and was as nimble as a
cat—but when we had dropped into the field on the other side we were
both very shaky, and I felt too meek to resent Tom’s curt dictum: “The
high road or the open after this, Miss! Them lanes isn’t safe for the
likes of you!”
He was not my own servant, only an employé of the one English
livery-stable Rome possessed in those days, but if he had seen me grow
up he could not have been more faithful and vigilant for my comfort
and safety. He taught me to ride, and many a delightful scamper
we had together over those ideal stretches of springy turf, but he
never relaxed from his stern contempt of all things not British, and
particularly of Latin equestrianism. I think that and the Englishman’s
incurable homesickness were too much for him, for a year or two later I
heard to my great regret that poor Tom had lost his mind and had had to
be removed to an asylum.
There are other animals, besides oxen, to whom it is well to give a
wide berth on the Campagna—the sheep-dogs. They take their calling
seriously and will let no stranger come within speaking distance
of their flocks. There are two or more to each flock, and when they
scent danger they send up a peculiar howl which summons the guardians
of any others in the vicinity, so that before one knows it one may
find oneself the centre of quite a mob of these formidable creatures,
baying and leaping round one and thirsting for one’s blood. They are
exceedingly handsome, of a pure ivory white, with long silky coats
and well-feathered tails, the head broad at the brow and pointed
at the muzzle in approved sheep-dog style. Brought up at home, they
show great affection for their masters and acquire charming manners,
but as professionals, in the exercise of their duty, they are rather
terrifying. They particularly distrust mounted visitors, and it is more
dangerous to approach them on horseback than on foot. Once, I was out
with Dr. Nevin, the American clergyman, an old cavalry officer and an
enthusiastic rider, who ought to have known every trick of the Campagna
and its beasts, when we stumbled right into a flock of sheep, and the
next moment we were attacked by five or six infuriated sheep-dogs,
barking madly, leaping at our horses’ throats, catching at the skirt of
my riding habit and Dr. Nevin’s long coat in the effort to drag us down
from our saddles. The horses were badly frightened, but managed to kick
quite judiciously, and broke away before either they or we had been
hurt. We had a good run then with the dogs in full pursuit at first;
then they left us alone and returned stolidly to their respective
posts.
Talking of the sheep-dog, whom somebody has rightly called “that bundle
of intelligence,” I would note the fact that he has another delightful
quality rather unusual in big dogs—humour. One of the quaintest
incidents I ever saw occurred in a South Devon watering-place where
we used to spend a good deal of our time. As the clock struck twelve,
one fine summer’s day, a large flock of sheep was driven in at the
upper end of the town, through the whole length of which they had to
pass to come out on the Exeter road beyond. One very old sheep-dog
accompanied them, but just as they had passed the schoolhouse, the
doors were opened and a crowd of little children tumbled out into the
street. The dog saw that the sheep could make but few mistakes in the
straight street, so he deliberately turned back and started to drive
the children after them. Running round and round, barking peremptorily,
pushing the stragglers into place, he got some fifty or sixty little
ones into a compact mass, and drove them along in the wake of the
sheep. The children saw the joke and were immensely amused, but not one
dared to drop out till the old dog, visibly laughing too, said good-bye
with a bark and a wag, and bounded away after his own flock.
I have always wondered why the dogs that accompanied the goats, when
they were driven into Rome to be milked in the morning, were not proper
sheep-dogs, but rather mild-tempered mongrels of every imaginable
variety. I suppose the real sheep-dog would consider it beneath his
dignity to look after mere goats, despised creatures belonging to poor
peasants! Nevertheless, their daily visit was one of the pleasures
of my youth—when I was not too sleepy to get up and look out of the
window towards six or seven A.M. Their coming was heralded by the
soft tinkling of two or three bronze bells hung round the necks of
the leaders of the flocks, and then came the quick pattering of the
little hoofs over the pavement of the Piazza SS. Apostoli. They had
their regular points of call, and that was one of them, in the angle
formed by the side of the convent attached to the Church, and the small
steep street which was one of the outlets of the Piazza. There they
would stay for perhaps half an hour, in the warm brown shade, while
the people from all the houses round ran down with mugs and pitchers
which the goatherd, a handsome young contadino, in peaked hat, goatskin
leggings, and scarlet vest, filled with creamy, foaming milk for about
twopence a quart. I was often ordered to drink it, and the tall glass
overflowing with warm ivory froth was such a pretty object that it made
me forget the rather rank flavour of the draught.
Long before the goats came in, however, the silence of the dawn
had been broken by the strange sad cry of the “Acqua Vi” man, who,
announcing his wares in an almost funereal tone, lured the earliest
labourers and artisans, on their way to their work, to begin the day
with a nip of spirits. He was followed by two “calderari,” or tinkers,
who must have had some secret feud, for they came along within a few
minutes of each other every day on the same beat, and even Roman pots
and kettles do not break down every day. One man announced himself in
deep and hollow tones, his long-drawn “Cal-de-raro!” sounding like a
passing-bell; the other was all that was gay and sprightly, and his
cry was like a ripple of laughter, ending on an impossibly high note.
Then there was the tramp cobbler, the seller of roasted melon seeds
(bruscolinaro), the umbrella-mender, and I do not know how many more;
musical, friendly, familiar, the old street cries gave a great charm to
the morning hours.
At one time, in a certain warm spring and summer, I was taken with
a passion for early rising, and with my mountain-born maid, Adelina,
used to be out and away long before the sun was up, walking for miles
outside one of the gates and enjoying every minute of the divine
morning freshness. The infancy of the day is a very wonderful thing
anywhere, but most of all in my own Romagna, where the glow of the
later hours and the riotous colours of sunset have a ripeness which
blends but too well with the ancientness of the buildings and the
gilded tumble of the ruins that are, and always will be, Campagna’s
landmarks. But at dawn it is all young, bland, mysteriously dewy
and immaculate, tint blending into tint, and shadow shaded through
a hundred indefinable modulations of unborn blue and hinted violet
and cloud grey, that will be plain gold later in the day. One of
my favourite haunts at that hour was the “Giardino Colonna” which
stretches up in a series of terraces from behind the palace just across
the square from the Odescalchi, to end on the Quirinal in Piazza di
Monto Cavallo. On the lower level the gardens can only be approached
from the house, with which they are connected by a series of little
ornamental bridges thrown across a deep and narrow intervening street
utilised as a mews for the palace, but on the hill an imposing iron
gateway, topped by the gilt crown and column which are the arms of
the “Lustrissima Casa Colonna,” gives access to a paradise of trees
and flowers and fountains which is the more delightful because so
unexpected in the very heart of the city.
Italian gardens, though generally planned to give one imposing
spectacle of some kind, with great wealth of statues and marble
balustrades and elaborate formations or quiet stretches of water, are
rich in small sequestered courts of flowers and greenery; the people
who seem to have cared least for privacy in their houses took pains to
make many solitudes in their gardens. Doubtless the desire for shade
from summer heats had much to do with the intricate—apartments, one
might almost call them—which diversify the villas and cut off spot
after spot in an absolute seclusion of high box walls and over-arching
trees, entered only by one small opening somewhere in the otherwise
impenetrable hedge. And, incidentally, the screened shelter thus
afforded has fostered the growth and all-winter blooming of more
delicate flowers and shrubs than could have survived the sudden attacks
of the “tramontana,” in the open. The “Giardino Colonna” was full of
charming surprises of the kind one remembers gratefully in the more
arid stretches of life. One particular morning there remains very
clearly imprinted on my memory, a morning of June, when I was running
about with my small half-brother and sister, feeling very much their
age. I had lost sight of them for a moment, and in seeking for them
broke into an enclosure I had not seen before. Two or three tiny
terraces, bordered with old bas-reliefs, lay just touched by the first
rays of the sun; a delicate mimosa tree, very feathery and fragile,
stood within reach of the spray of a fountain that sent a shaft of
diamonds high into the air; all around was a tangle of Banksia roses
and white lilies, and an ancient sarcophagus of honey-coloured marble
on the top terrace, overflowing with ferns, looked like a golden casket
in the low sunbeams. Every branch and leaf and petal was pearled with
dew and spray, and the fragrance of the flowers in that miraculous
freshness of the morning was almost too sweet for mortal senses to
hear.
It is so funny to see some of our brilliant decadents in art and
literature trying to embody their ideas of the “_joie de vivre_” in
pictures of wild debauch, in mad dances of painted girls and drunken
youths, in reproductions of the entertainments invented to stimulate
the senses of the old Romans and Egyptians—people already half dead
with satiety and incapable of experiencing a single thrill of healthy
pleasure. Five minutes of existence, given a young heart in a young
body, on a summer dawn amid the flowers, outtops their crude imaginings
of the joy of life as completely as the rising sunbeams outshine our
poor artificial lights.
I have been afraid to ask after the “Giardino Colonna” of late years.
So many other Roman gardens have been destroyed by the beauty-haters
who rule the city that I am always expecting to be told that it exists
no longer. The great process of destruction has not been confined to
Rome alone. Only the other day I learnt from a correspondent that the
lovely Villa Doria at Pegli has been swept away to “make room” (in our
half-depopulated Italy!) for a German soap factory! To the vultures of
commerce nothing is sacred. All that is ancient and beautiful is an
insult to the industrial nobodies, with their sordid past and their
ignoble future. The more perfect a spot is the more it arouses their
desire to destroy it and annihilate even its memory by using its site
for the basest ends. After all, everybody feels more at home in a
background suited to his complexion!
I spoke in another book[2] of some forgotten villas that my sister and
I discovered in the vicinity of Rome. One of these has, I have reason
to believe, escaped the notice of the modern vandal, and I have no
intention of revealing to him its name or location. Lying far out of
the city, in a depression of the Campagna, it is invisible till one is
close upon it, and we had passed near it hundreds of times before an
accident revealed its existence to us. The very road to it is unmarked
on the guide-book maps, and even from the road little is to be seen
through the iron gate in the high brick wall save a formal court
overgrown with grass, and a long low house, of graceful architecture,
but much defaced by time and weather. Something of a mournful dignity
in its aspect attracted us, and my sister suggested that we should
alight from the carriage and see if we could get in. After ringing
many times at the iron gate, we saw an alarmed contadino regarding us
suspiciously from a corner of the house, evidently uncertain as to our
character and motives. We lost no time in explanations, but promised
him a lira if he would open the gate, whereupon he took courage, came
and examined us more closely, and, seeing only two young girls with a
private carriage and a respectable family coachman smiling in amusement
at our enthusiasm, the guardian of the place relented and let us in.
Then we realised what we had found. That which we had taken for the
front of the house was only its back, turned, Moorish fashion, to the
public road. Its front, all balconies and arches and tall old windows,
looked towards the southeast, and from the first terrace, with its
supporting colonnade, the ground sloped away in ever-widening spaces of
wild greenery intersected with thick avenues of ilex trees that twisted
away and lost themselves in dells beyond our view. The house really
stood high, and was placed just where an opening in the undulations
beyond gave a wide view of the Campagna stretching away to Tivoli and
the Sabine Hills; but a moment after stepping down from that first
terrace the outside world vanished and we found ourselves in one of
the dream-gardens of the Renaissance, where it seemed as if no foot had
trod for the last hundred years. The ilexes, all untrimmed, had united
in dense roofs over the grass-grown avenues; the syringa had everywhere
so interwoven itself with the high box hedges that these were now three
and four feet thick and all abloom in their impenetrable interstices
with white stars of sweetest perfume, mingling with the white cups of
morning glories, unearthly pure and scentless, like the love prayers of
a little nun.
In ecstatic silence we went on and on, catching glimpses, through the
rare openings in the green walls on either hand, of broad enclosures
all a riot of flowers and grasses in the afternoon sun. It must have
been at least a hundred years since the sun had struck through the
many-tiered roof over our heads to touch the brown soil, bedded down
with the leaves and acorns of a hundred autumns, under our feet. The
shade that never could be shadow seemed painted in—a viewless veil
of clear grey-brown, broken to an oval of gold where an archway in
the hedge let in the westering sun. I had gathered a handful of ilex
acorns, those delicate gems of polished grey-green set each in its
fretted cup of colder grey—when a turn in the avenue brought us to
a standstill before a statue on a pedestal—a young god in very old,
dappled marble, his arms stretched out, his head thrown back, as if
calling despairingly after some vanished worshipper. The deep greenery
rose in an arch above him, the green walls shrank back to make a niche;
the clear, colourless light touched his face and limbs almost to life
as we looked at him—and then his appeal was answered. From some unseen
point close to us there burst forth such a torrent of heart-broken
song as can only come from the throat of an Italian nightingale in the
solitude of a lost Italian garden. The silver notes went soaring to
heaven and fell back in a rain of music like audible tears. Then, from
far away, a sister Philomel took up the strain, another and another
broke in and linked it on, till all the air was a delirium of music,
wild and sweet and thrilling—going up from the little brown throats,
without money and without price.
The nightingales’ hour had come, and we, poor human intruders, crept
away silently and left the lost garden to them.