Then the moment arrived when all abstract reflections were thrust aside
once more by convalescence. I was well again, after having been shut up
for over four months. I still felt the traces of the mercury poisoning,
but I was no longer tied to my bed, and weak though I was, I could walk.
And on the very first day,--it was March 25th--armed with a borrowed
stick (I possessed none, having never used a stick before), and
equipped with a little camp-stool, I took the train to Frascati, where
there was a Madonna Fête.
It was life opening out before me again. All that I saw, witnessed to
its splendour. First, the scenery on the way, the Campagna with its
proud ruins, and the snow-covered Sabine Mountains, the whole
illuminated by a powerful Summer sun; the villas of old Romans, with
fortress-like thick walls, and small windows; then the fertile lava
soil, every inch of which was under vineyard cultivation. At last the
mountains in the neighborhood of Frascati. A convent crowned the
highest point; there, in olden days, the first Italian temple to
Jupiter had stood, and there Hannibal had camped. Underneath, in a
hollow, like an eagle's nest, lay Rocca di Papa. By the roadside,
fruit-trees with violet clusters of blossoms against a background of
stone-pines, cypresses, and olive-groves.
I reached Frascati station. There was no carriage to be had up to the
town, so I was obliged to ascend the hill slowly on foot, a test which
my leg stood most creditably. In the pretty market-place of Frascati,
with its large fountain which, like Acqua Paola, was divided into three
and flung out a tremendous quantity of water, I went into an _osteria_
and asked for roast goat with salad and Frascati wine, then sat down
outside, as it was too close within. Hundreds of people in gay
costumes, with artificial flowers and silver feathers in their
headgear, filled the square in front of me, crowded the space behind
me, laughed and shouted.
The people seemed to be of a grander type, more lively, animated and
exuberant, than at the fair at Fiesole. The women were like Junos or
Venuses, the men, even when clad in abominable rags, looked like
Vulcans, blackened in their forges; they were all of larger proportions
than Northern men and women. A Roman beau, with a riding-whip under his
arm, was making sheep's eyes at a young local beauty, his courtship
accompanied by the whines of the surrounding beggars. A _signora_ from
Albano was lecturing the waiter with the dignity of a queen for having
brought her meat that was beneath all criticism, yes, she even let the
word _porcheria_ escape her. A brown-bearded fellow came out of the inn
with a large bottle of the heavenly Frascati wine, which the landlords
here, even on festival occasions, never mix with water, and gave a
whole family, sitting on donkeys, to drink out of one glass; then he
went to two little ones, who were holding each other round the waist,
sitting on the same donkey; to two youths who were riding another; to a
man and wife, who sat on a third, and all drank, like the horsemen in
Wouwerman's pictures, without dismounting.
I got into an old, local omnibus, pulled by three horses, to drive the
two miles to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair was. But the vehicle was
hardly about to start up-hill when, with rare unanimity, the horses
reared, behaved like mad, and whirled it round four or five times. The
driver, a fellow with one eye and a grey cap with a double red camelia
in it, being drunk, thrashed the horses and shouted, while an old
American lady with ringlets shrieked inside the omnibus, and bawled out
that she had paid a franc beforehand, and now wanted to get out. The
road was thronged with people walking, and there was just as many
riding donkeys, all of them, even the children, already heated with
wine, singing, laughing, and accosting everybody. Many a worthy woman
supported her half-drunk husband with her powerful arm. Many a
substantial _signora_ from Rocca di Papa sat astride her mule, showing
without the least bashfulness her majestic calves.
At Grotta Ferrata, the long, long street presented a human throng of
absolute density without the slightest crush, for no one stuck his
elbows into his neighbour's sides. The eye could only distinguish a
mass of red, yellow and white patches in the sunlight, and in between
them a few donkeys' heads and mules' necks. The patches were the
kerchiefs on the women's heads. Folk stood with whole roast pigs in
front of them on a board, cutting off a piece with a knife for anyone
who was hungry; there were sold, besides, fruits, knives, ornaments,
provisions, and general market wares. One _osteria_, the entrance to
which was hung all over with sausages, onions and vegetables, in
garlands, had five huge archways open to the street. Inside were long
tables, at which people sat, not on benches, but on trestles, round
bars supported by two legs, and ate and drank in the best of good
spirits, and the blackest filth, for the floor was the black, sodden,
trampled earth. Just over the way, arbours had been made from trees, by
intertwining their branches and allowing them to grow into one another;
these were quite full of gay, beautiful girls, amongst them one with
fair hair and brown eyes, who looked like a Tuscan, and from whom it
was difficult to tear one's eyes away.
After having inspected the courtyard of an old monastery, the lovely
pillars of which rejoiced my heart, I sat down a little on one side in
the street where the fair was, on my little camp-stool, which roused
the legitimate curiosity of the peasant girls. They walked round me,
looked at me from behind and before, and examined with grave interest
the construction of my seat. In front of me sat an olive and lemon
seller. Girls bargained with him as best they could in the press,
others stood and looked on. I had an opportunity here of watching their
innate statuesque grace. When they spoke, the right arm kept time with
their speech. When silent, they generally placed one hand on the hip,
bent, but not clenched. There were various types. The little blonde,
blue-eyed girl with the mild Madonna smile, and absolutely straight
nose, and the large-made, pronounced brunette. But the appearance of
them all was such that an artist or a poet could, by a slight
transformation, have portrayed from them whatever type of figure or
special characteristic he required. In my opinion, the form Italian
beauty took, and the reason of the feeling one had in Italy of wading
in beauty, whereas one hardly ever saw anything in the strict sense of
the word beautiful in Copenhagen, and rarely in Paris, was, that this
beauty was the beauty of the significant. All these women looked to be
unoppressed, fullblown, freely developed. All that makes woman ugly in
the North: the cold, the thick, ugly clothes that the peasant women
wear, the doublet of embarrassment and vapidity which they drag about
with them, the strait-waistcoat of Christiansfeldt morality in which
they are confined by the priests, by protestantism, by fashion, by
custom and convention--none of this oppressed, confined or contracted
women here. These young peasant girls looked as if they had never heard
such words as "You must not," or "You shall not," and as here in Italy
there is none of the would-be witty talk, the grinning behind people's
backs, which takes the life out of all intrepidity in the North, no one
thought: "What will people say?" Everyone dressed and deported himself
with complete originality, as he, or rather as she, liked. Hence eyes
were doubly brilliant, blood coursed twice as red, the women's busts
were twice as rounded and full.