THE ROMAN MENAGE
As in other European towns, the custom in Rome is to live in flats.
The houses are high, of no particular style of architecture, and in
the older portions of the city they overshadow a labyrinth of narrow
streets paved with large uneven slabs of stone. Here are no side walks
for pedestrians who with an indifference born of long practice walk
habitually in the middle of the roadway, moving leisurely to one side
in obedience to the warning cries of the drivers, or patiently waiting
and flattening themselves against the shop doors if two vehicles
desire to pass one another. Long ragged grooves scraped along the
house walls and at street corners by the hubs of heavy cart-wheels,
testify to centuries of clumsy driving.
There have always existed in Rome, however, a certain number of villas
within the walls, and their timbered parks and terraced gardens
ornamented with fountains and statues, have been one of the
characteristic features of the city. Their wealthy owners probably
possessed a sombre palace as well along the Corso, but the villas
were pleasant in the warm weather, and two centuries ago wonderful
Arcadian entertainments were given beneath the shade of their ilex
groves. Some of these villas still exist in their original state or as
public property, many have been crowded out and demolished and their
gardens have been cut up into building plots. The taste for
villa-building is, however, not yet dead, and of late years small
dwellings in a Baroque style have been springing up like mushrooms in
the new quarters, and immense rents are asked for them.
Roman flats or apartments as they are called, vary from magnificent
suites of thirty or forty rooms to a small domain of three or four.
They can be leased even in the most princely of palaces which are so
much too large for the requirements of modern life that their owners
are glad to let what they cannot use.
[Illustration: SEA-HORSE FOUNTAIN IN THE VILLA BORGHESE
The glades of Roman villas offer us some of the rare green effects,
the colouring which prevails being that in picture 27. See page 46.]
The single entrance-gateway, which is locked at night, is under the
charge of a porter whose appearance varies according to the social
standing of his employer from an imposing figure in gold lace and a
cocked hat, to a surly fellow out at heels and elbows who ekes out a
precarious livelihood by cobbling or carpentering while he keeps a
vigilant but no friendly eye upon the incomings and outgoings of the
inhabitants of the wretched tenement under his care. Often, even in
good houses, a single room by the side of the gateway serves the
porter with his wife and family for bedroom, kitchen, living room, and
workshop, and sometimes the same number of human beings are stowed
away at night in a mere hole, windowless and doorless, under the
stairs. Yet this employment is so sought after that a cabinet
minister's portfolio is said to be easier to obtain than a position as
house-porter.
One or more public staircases lead up from the central courtyard.
Before 1870 it was not obligatory to light these, and many a crime has
been committed on a long dark flight, the only witness the dwindling
oil-lamp before an image of the Madonna.
Even now a front door will seldom be opened at once in answer to your
ring; a little shutter is pushed back, and you are first inspected
through a grating. Or you are greeted with a shrill _chi e_, and only
when you have given the reassuring reply, _amici_, "friends," will you
be admitted. A middle-class Italian household is not very approachable
in the morning. Although extremely early risers--no hour seems too
early in Rome for people to be up and about--the house remains _en
deshabille_ till the afternoon. The beds are unmade, the mistress
shuffles about in dressing-gown and slippers, adjuring her
maid-of-all-work in shrill tones; she even goes out to shop unwashed,
in an old skirt and jacket. At first sight all the rooms appear to be
bedrooms which are used indifferently to sit in. Nevertheless one
room, generally the smallest and least attractive, is set aside as the
"reception room." The family never sit in it, and never enter it
except to receive their visitors. It is kept carefully closed and
shuttered, and if you arrive unexpectedly the maid lets in some light
for you with pretty apologies while you wait in the doorway afraid of
falling in the dark over the innumerable objects, what-nots and small
tables, which crowd the room. A jute-covered sofa of the most
uncomfortable pattern, with a strip of carpet before it, is _de
rigueur_, and a visitor would consider herself slighted if she were
not ushered to this post of honour. There are no carpets on any of the
stone floors, and no stoves or fireplaces. If there happens to be a
chimney, it is considered unwholesome and is blocked up. There are no
comfortable sofas and no lounge chairs. If the weather is fine and
warm all is well with such a household. But Rome knows fog, frost, and
snow, and though none last for long, wintry days may succeed each
other and bitter winds blow down upon the city from the snow-capped
Sabine mountains, and then the Romans, forced to stay at home,
uncomplainingly wear their coats and jackets within doors to keep body
and soul together, and sit warming their fingers over little pans of
glowing wood-ash.
Like cats, they have a constitutional horror of rain, and will prefer
to remain indoors than risk a wetting in search of some place of
amusement, or to keep an engagement. Every carter, every beggar, every
peasant carries an umbrella; horses and draught oxen are swathed in
flannel and mackintosh in the wet, and the drivers of the little open
cabs cower beneath leathern aprons and enormous umbrellas, under the
dripping edges of which their "fares" creep in and out as best they
can. Brigands only, so it is popularly believed, carry no umbrellas,
and by this you may know them.
The Romans' cheerful acquiescence in what we should consider
considerable hardship is nothing less than admirable. After long
working hours spent in government offices for example, which are for
the most part despoiled monasteries and always bitterly cold, they
return to their homes where creature comforts as we understand them
are unknown, not because they cannot be afforded, but because they are
not desired or missed; and their gaiety or their enjoyment of one
another's society is in nowise diminished because they spend the
evening sitting at a dining-room table on straight-backed chairs.
On the other hand much attention is devoted to the preparation of the
meals. Food is daintily prepared and cooked, well flavoured and
seasoned. Meat and vegetables are generally cooked in oil- or
bacon-fat, and no Roman would look at a dish of food plainly boiled or
roasted. Even the poor are skilful in concocting a savoury dish with
_polenta_ (ground Indian corn) bread and potatoes flavoured with a
dash of onion or tomatoes. All cooking and eating utensils are kept
scrupulously clean, and the dirtiest _contadino_ will wipe out his
glass carefully before he is satisfied as to its fitness for his use.
Romans break their fast with a cup of black coffee and bread without
butter, but it is quite usual for them to eat nothing at all until
twelve or one o'clock. Their midday dinner begins with either soup or
macaroni (_minestra_ or _minestra ascuitta_). If with the soup, then
the meat which has been boiled to make it is served next with
vegetable garnishings. The macaroni is served with butter, cheese,
and tomatoes and there are numberless tasty ways of preparing it.
Half a kilogram (eighteen ounces) is considered the portion for each
person. If the meal begins with macaroni, this dish would be followed
by meat _in umido_, a favourite Roman dressing of tomatoes and onions.
People who live quite simply will never touch stale bread, and it is
no unusual thing for a fresh batch to be delivered at the door three
times a day. Salad, cheese, and eggs done in a variety of ways form
the staple of the Roman's evening meal.
It is a perpetual wonder to the foreigner what elaborate and
excellently cooked dinners can be produced in the unpromising Roman
kitchens. Larders and sculleries are almost unknown. A white marble
sink--marble fills the lowliest offices in Rome--and a tap in a corner
do duty for the latter. The kitchen is often a slip of a room, and the
"range" is little more than a table of brick and tiles fitted with
small holes for holding charcoal, and with a shaft above for carrying
away the unwholesome fumes. Upon these small holes all the cooking is
done; the charcoal is fanned into a glow with a feather fan, and if
there are many pots and saucepans they must take their turn upon the
tiny fires. Scuttles do not exist, and the stock of charcoal for use
is kept on the floor beneath the range.
[Illustration: ORNAMENTAL WATER, VILLA BORGHESE]
Italians of all classes are very fastidious about the cleanliness of
their beds, and in this particular their habits contrast favourably
with the antediluvian practices prevalent in England, for not only is
every article of bedding aired at the window daily, but all the
mattresses are picked to pieces and the wool pulled out and beaten
every year. This process is carried on generally on the flat
house-roofs when the weather is sunny; a mattress-maker with his
assistant, his bench and his combs, coming round to do it for you for
the modest fee of one lira and a half the mattress.
Beyond this the Roman's standard of cleanliness fails altogether.
Floors are never washed; they serve to tramp about on in thick boots,
to spit upon, and to receive matches and cigar-ash. Doors, painted
woodwork, walls, are always soiled; if there is a terrace it becomes
at once unsightly and the receptacle for hideous refuse. There is
complete indifference to cleanliness as a first condition of hygiene,
and it is not unusual to find fowls kept in the kitchen of a good
bourgeois house, which take their walks abroad on the balcony and pick
up their living under the table.
Even in the houses of the great, where many servants are kept, there
is often the same Spartan indifference to comfort. Great halls are
kept unwarmed except for a brazier of glowing wood-ash, and
fireplaces, if they exist, are only sparingly used in the
sitting-rooms. Bathrooms are rare, and the habit of the daily bath is
almost unknown in a city which once boasted the finest baths the world
has seen.
If the Roman does not know how to make himself comfortable indoors, no
one knows better how to enjoy himself in the open air. The ragged
loafer suns himself in the public squares, the workman dozes away his
dinner hour at full length under the shelter of a wall; it is in the
streets that a Roman holiday is spent. Parents and children of the
working classes, the father carrying the baby, stroll about happily
for hours, or they walk out beyond the city gates to rest and refresh
themselves at one of the wayside _osterie_. Here they gather round the
rude tables under a shelter of bamboo canes and eat and drink
according to their means. The most forbidding country eating-house can
rise to the requirements of better-class customers, and at a pinch can
furnish a cleanly cooked and quite palatable dish of macaroni or eggs
and vegetable fried in oil for forty or fifty centimes the plate,
which is abundant for two. All day long on _festa_ in warm spring
weather, chairs and benches outside every wine-shop and eating-house
are crowded with a changing throng of holiday makers enjoying
themselves simply and harmlessly; and on such days, at a likely
corner, you may come across a country man or woman in charge of a huge
wild boar roasted whole, stuffed with meat and sage and garlanded with
green, from which a succulent morsel will be cut for you, then and
there should you desire it, for a trifling sum.
[Illustration: VILLAGE STREET AT ANTICOLI, IN THE SABINE HILLS]
Out-of-door pleasures appeal no less to the better classes.
Fashionable Rome drives daily in the afternoon along the Corso and
round the Pincio, the carriages drawing up at intervals near the
bandstand. So dear to the Roman heart is the possession of smart
clothes and a showy carriage and horses, that entire families will
live with parsimony within doors that they may afford these luxuries.
During long afternoon hours men will congregate outside the
Parliament House and along the Corso to meet and chat with their
friends, and chairs and tables with their fashionable occupants block
the pavements outside the cafes and restaurants, obliging the
passer-by to step out into the roadway.
The Roman of the poorer class carries on as much of his domestic life
also as he can in the open air. Chairs, kitchen tables, and wash-tubs
are dragged out into the streets. Food is prepared and eaten, clothes
are washed, and the occupations of sewing, knitting, cobbling, and
carpentering are conducted in the open, subject to a lively attention
to what is going on in the street.
Occasionally a basket attached to a string comes bobbing down from an
upper window accompanied by a shrill message: Would Sor' Annunziata
have the kindness to buy a copy of the _Messagero_ just being cried in
the street? she will find a soldo in the basket. Or would she tell
that good-for-nothing vagabond Mark Antony or Hannibal (the raggedest
urchins always rejoice in some such name), who is playing _morra_
round the corner, to run at once and buy a ha'porth of white beans.
The errand accomplished, the basket is drawn up with its burden, and
then blissful hours of leisure slip by in desultory talk with
neighbours at their doors and windows opposite, chairs tilted back
comfortably against the house wall in the mellow Roman sunlight. In
the quiet piazzas, and in shady nooks by the city gates, humble folk
can be shaved for a small sum by barbers who ply their trade in the
open and pay no shop rent. It is even quite usual in the hot weather
for fashionable coiffeurs to move their client's chair outside the
door and continue shaving operations there without exciting any
comment.
Before reading and writing were made obligatory, public letter-writers
were common, and they still can be met with in Via Tor de' Specchi, in
the shelter of the Salarian gate, and in other quiet places, the group
of anxious clients waiting their turn round the table testifying to
the inefficiency of a compulsory education Act. Girls used to dictate
their love-letters to these scribes, and perhaps still do so, and even
the boys did and do write to San Luigi for his _festa_ on 21st
June--the letters, tied up with blue ribbon, being subsequently
deposited on his altar.
The fashion of open-air washing tanks, once universal, is gradually
passing away. Outside the walls, the women wash their clothes in the
streams and rivers, and inside the city, by the new Ponte Margherita,
one of the old public washing-places may still be seen, protected only
by a roof and surrounded by a crowd of women in bright-coloured cotton
bodices and skirts, washing clothes in the cold turbid water and
scrubbing them vigorously on the stone slabs in order that what is
left of them after this heroic treatment may at least be clean.
Owing to the smallness and darkness of all Roman provision shops, most
of the inspection of wares and all the talking, bargaining, and
quarrelling is perforce done upon the pavement. Many of the Roman
shops still consist of a narrow vault, with no outlet of any sort at
the further end, the whole front being closed with a shutter at
night. In the early morning all the cooks in Rome and all the general
servants are afoot in the streets buying provisions, and they crowd
around the temporary market stalls set up in the small piazzas under
gay umbrellas, filling the air with their noisy disputes. The
curb-stones are occupied by peasant women and their baskets of country
produce, which from this central position they extol to the
passers-by. These women have walked into the city at dawn carrying
their baskets on their heads, and at the gates their poor little
merchandise has been overhauled with no gentle hand by the Customs
officers, every egg and turnip has been counted, and its _octroi_ duty
paid.
It takes the foreign resident some time to grasp the idiosyncrasies of
Roman shops. A linen draper looks at you with kindly pity if you ask
him for ribbons or haberdashery, which can only be obtained at a
mercer's devoted to this trade. A grocer only sells dry goods, the
numerous shops entitled _pizzicherie_ deal exclusively with cheese,
lard, butter, bacon, salted fish, and preserves. Your fishmonger will
only sell fish, your butcher closes most inconveniently between twelve
and five, and will seldom sell mutton and never lamb, which must be
sought at a poulterer's. Macaroni is provided by your baker, or it can
be bought in one of the numerous small shops licensed to sell salt and
tobacco, where you may also obtain postage stamps, soap, tin tacks,
china plates, and mineral waters.
All the transactions of daily life have to be conducted in Rome, as
every householder soon learns, at the cost of a continuous and
exasperating conflict with a class to whom it is second nature to
cheat and deceive, to falsify weights and measures, who have no
standard of honesty in small things, and who will always say what will
please you or themselves rather than what is. The visitor naturally is
their peculiar prey. To exploit him is traditional in Rome. In a town
with no resources of its own, there is the foreigner and his purse to
look to; and he falls an easy victim to people whose language he
imperfectly understands, and who are past-masters of all the deceitful
arts. The seasons are short and a plentiful harvest must be raked in
while they last. Shops in the best quarters will raise the value of
their goods a hundred per cent at the sight of a foreign face. Unless
the legend "fixed prices" appears in the window for the benefit of the
customer, the shopmen will expect you to bargain over every
purchase--to haggle for half an hour over a question of six sous or
ten is indeed the only commercial instinct they possess. They will
generally ask about twice as much as they mean ultimately to accept,
and, to their credit be it said, it is not only for the sake of the
francs more or less, but quite as much for the excitement of the
sport. "I say 200 lire, now it is for you to say something;" or, "The
price is so-and-so, what will you give?" are the preludes to some
really enjoyable quarters of an hour. The foreigner who pays
unquestioningly what he is asked is a poor-spirited creature not worth
fleecing.
Romans still reckon up their rent or their wages in the old papal
currency of a _scudo_ (five francs), and food is cried about the
streets at so much the _paolo_ (half a franc). Half a _paolo_ (or
_giulio_) the _grosso_, two _paoli_ the _papetto_, three _paoli_ a
_testone_, and the halfpenny or _baioccho_ are still the familiar
names which come most easily to the tongue. The difference between the
old weights and the new, the papal scales and the decimal system of
united Italy, is a fruitful source of gain to the tradesman. He
clings, partly from sentiment and partly from self-interest, to the
old unit of weight, the pound of twelve ounces, and as it appears
nowhere on the official scales, he reckons it at one-third of the
kilogram (330 grams) or, if you do not watch him carefully, at 300
grams, thus profiting from 1/100 to 1/10 on every kilo (1000 grams)
sold. Similarly the Roman measure for firewood is a tightly packed
cart-load, but the wood-seller is an adept at making a cart look full
when it is not, and your only resource is to buy wood by the weight.
Even then, if you desire to receive the quantity you order and pay
for, you must not only see it weighed but you must keep an eye upon it
on its journey to your house, or it will become beautifully less for
the benefit of the carter. The charcoal for kitchen use you buy in a
measured sack of a given weight. The first time you bestow your custom
you are delighted with quality and quantity, but with each order the
sack shrinks in size, and when you expostulate the coal-seller will
answer you unblushing that if you insist upon having the coal weighed
he cannot supply it at the price!
There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each
morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system
to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant
illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept
there is no alternative. The _donna di servizio_ or maid-of-all-work
goes out each morning to spend an enjoyable half-hour or more, meeting
her friends and making shrill bargains at the shop doors. An Italian's
servant will buy a halfpenny worth of bacon-fat or lard or preserved
tomato, and as such small quantities cannot be weighed she receives a
spoonful of lard or a dab of butter wrapped up in a leaf, and the
whole is tied up and carried home in a brilliant cotton handkerchief.
The man-cook will not condescend to one of these shopping
handkerchiefs. He will carry a few parcels, but he generally returns,
a small boy in his wake bearing a basket on his head wherein all his
purchases are displayed. The prevalent custom in Rome is for the
servant to give the least possible price for all she buys, and to
charge her mistress a higher one, the balance going into her own
pocket. Servants of unimpeachable honesty in every other respect will
succumb to this temptation. If serving foreigners, they can often
double their wages, and so well is the practice recognised that the
mistress who is too watchful to permit it is spoken of as giving only
a _mesata secca_, a dry wage.
[Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI
Built in 1549 for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Alfonso II., Duke
of Ferrara. It passed thence to the heir of this family, the Duke of
Modena. See pages 172, 174.]
Rome used to be one of the cheapest of European cities to live in;
rents were low and food was cheap; meat was three sous the pound,
and when it rose to four the Romans were indignant. Heavy taxation
under the Italian Government has now changed all this. Beef is
seventeen sous the pound, and rents have been almost doubled in the
past twenty years. Wages are still very moderate. A woman servant gets
from eighteen to thirty francs a month, a man thirty to sixty. If an
English mistress engages an Italian servant, even if he or she is said
to know their work, she must begin from the rudiments and even then
there comes a point beyond which instruction fails to produce any
result. The refinements of English service are looked upon as so many
curious rites without meaning, and our standard of cleanliness and our
fastidiousness are a perpetual source of wonder.
The pride of the Roman prevents her, as a rule, from undertaking
domestic service. When she does, she makes the roughest and worst of
maids. The natural instinct of every ordinary Italian servant is to
throw all refuse out of the window, as she still does in the towns of
the campagna, or where her kitchen window gives upon an unfrequented
courtyard, and the rest of her service is in keeping with this
standard, the restrictions laid upon her by the demands of
civilisation being the very thinnest veneer.
She will never clean a floor on her own initiative, and very seldom on
yours, and is quite capable of giving you notice should you expect it.
Nevertheless if you can bring yourself to compromise with your own
standard and put up with some of hers, you will find her on the whole
a genial creature to deal with. She is blessed with abundant leisure,
and has always time to carry on protracted conversations and even
flirtations out of the kitchen window. No event in the street or in
the courtyard beneath escapes her attention, yet she manages to do the
housework, cook the meals, wait at table, clean the boots, iron and
mend the clothes, and buy the provisions. She will, moreover, think
nothing of sleeping in a mere cupboard without air or light, only fit
to store boxes in, or in one of the passages on a sofa-bed which is
folded up in the daytime, such plans being quite usual in a Roman
household.
The Italian man-servant is the most domestic of beings and is on the
whole the most teachable and efficient; but he also is accustomed to
lay a table by placing a knife, fork, and spoon in a bunch before each
person, adding a glass, and _voila tout_, and a higher ideal than this
is a severe tax on memory and intelligence. "He certainly knew how to
lay a cloth when he left me," an American lady said of her man-servant
who had been with her nine years, "but perhaps he has forgotten"; and
he certainly had, though he had only been out of her situation a year.
A so-called finished servant, who had been years in a prince's
establishment, thought nothing of receiving a basket of linen from the
French laundress and depositing it on our dining-room table pending
further instructions, and our disapproval only grieved without
enlightening him. And no instruction will impress upon an Italian the
impropriety of announcing English callers by a description rather
than attempting to pronounce their foreign names: "The gentleman from
the hotel," or "The young lady who married that old man!" But their
charming manners and easy grace disarm criticism and win forgiveness
for many shortcomings.
In military households the master's orderly is often turned into a
domestic drudge. Yet such situations are eagerly sought by young
soldiers, for though they receive no extra pay they are excused
military duty after the first ten months of their enrolment, and they
compound their rations for a weekly government allowance. It is no
uncommon thing to see a young man in uniform doing the whole work of
an officer's house, cooking, cleaning, marketing, waiting at table,
taking the children to school, wheeling the perambulator, and even
doing the family washing and ironing.
A measure of magnificence and pomp still obtains in the great Roman
households, but it is combined with a simplicity of life and an
informality of relation between employer and employed which rob it of
its stiffness. The servants of a great house are not a caste apart,
they are part of the family establishment. Their masters give them the
familiar _tu_, and they are treated with far more intimacy and
friendliness than is ever the case with us. In return the servants
identify themselves with their employers' concerns, and take the
greatest interest in all their doings, an interest no doubt fostered
by the utter indifference to privacy existing in most households,
where conversations on all subjects are carried on with widely open
doors regardless of listeners.
Servants and others of the same class will generally abide by an
agreement clearly made, though foreigners are always advised to have
even the conditions of service in black and white, and it is never
safe to trust to precedent or to general rules in one's dealings with
them. They are quite unfettered by the existing laws and unwritten
obligations which make up their English counterpart's code of
respectability, and they will be faithful to you only so long as their
interest does not clash with yours. Instances to the contrary are
rare. An Italian servant is quite capable of giving you instant notice
for a mere whim, and departing the same day without the slightest
compunction for the inconvenience he causes.
Woe to the foreigner who seeks redress for conduct of this kind, or
who is involved in any dispute however righteous his cause. Such cases
are brought up in the district courts before magistrates who are
appointed to act in each division of the city as conciliators (save
the mark!). No solicitor of any standing likes to appear in these
courts, they are beneath the dignity of his position, and he will only
do so as a favour. An attorney of an inferior order, who is as often
as not a layman masquerading as such, can be hired on the spot like a
porter to see you through. Your opponent will certainly engage the
services of one of these individuals, and when the case comes on to
your no small amazement he will rise and make a fluent speech in
favour of his client having little or no reference to the events as
they occurred. If considered needful, he will also call several
false witnesses who will swear entire falsehoods with perfect
_sangfroid_. When your solicitor attempts to state your case the
attorney on the other side interrupts him with indignant denials, and
the conciliator joins in with the most injudicial display of temper.
The comedy ends by all three talking at once in loud excited voices,
without listening to one another, and the conciliator announces the
close of the sitting. He then proceeds to give his verdict which is
invariably in favour of the servant, and his socialistic tendencies in
this particular are assisted by his not having paid the least
attention to the evidence before him.
[Illustration: IN VILLA BORGHESE
A priest and one of the Austrian Seminarists, whose red dress has
bestowed on them the popular nickname of "_boiled prawns_," are here
seen conversing in the shade of the villa; the spring sunshine
glints through the trees.]