I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had
been talking of the “picturesque” all my life, but that now for a change
I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the
free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns
shining on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of
a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied
background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been
treating it as a foreground, have been suffering St. Peter’s to play
the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming
mistily through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find
the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk
I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the
neighbouring town of L’Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty years, since
the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his
superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At
the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope’s having
built the viaduct--in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there
in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the
Ninth’s beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we
make to vanished powers. An ardent _nero_ then would have had his own
way with me and obtained a frank admission that the Pope was indeed a
father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out
of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the
steep stone-paved road at the bottom of which, in the good old days,
tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their
carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist
might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look
out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into the
verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of quaintness,
as to the best “bit” hereabouts, I should certainly name the way in
which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their
weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you
enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its
pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony
hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that
grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between
their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet
fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at
the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the
eloquence of our imaginary _papalino_. The pillars and arches of
pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and
solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive
air of being one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop
another sigh over the antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to
repudiate. Will those _they_ give their descendants be as good?
At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of
mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo
Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome.
The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some
extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a
great value to this fine old decoration that preparations were going
forward for a local festival and that the village carpenter was hanging
certain mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults.
The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a group
of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded
it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion
that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited
Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer
bear the carpenter’s nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to
fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever
you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken
proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my
walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds
one’s self at last--without fatuity, I hope--feeling sorry for the
solitude of the remaining faithful. It’s as if the churches had been
made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so
irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all modern proportion to
the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste
they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures
on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I
suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who
united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, rises on the
grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose imposing nave
and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But where is the
_taste_ of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for
whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred
clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the
pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions with more
profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees,
tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of
the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between
Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original
is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear
meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at
best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a
structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain,
with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the
central substance has utterly crumbled away.
I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk
constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby
façade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey
forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the
opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting
cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the
shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know,
there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky
blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile
old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask,
and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as
the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the
beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive
iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer
of flowers on a terrace, and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of
a great covered loggia or belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing
or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old
manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over
a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an
impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes,
for which a hundred windows on a facade mean nothing more exclusive than
a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on the European plan. The mouldy
grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous
archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human
intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry
staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks
(there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted
constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark
over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded
gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of
the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with the vivid image
of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well
occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes
them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry “facts of life.”
At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the
Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between
peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose
Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the
prince in especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are
no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a
happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a
battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a
hunch of black bread.
I must confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the
little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an
exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of
the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined
with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted
with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of “costume”
in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the
grass outside the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone
archway thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms.
Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are groaning
serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads
hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their
picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at
which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, a _jour_
vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that
cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such
lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if
he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood
thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and
there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale
a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; there are dozens
more I know no name for--a rich profusion in especial of a beautiful
five-petalled flower whose white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes
certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to
imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its
English brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even
more effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches its
hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles its bark
into strange rugosities from which its first scattered sprouts of yellow
green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the
greatest charm to northern eyes is the cold grey-green ilex, whose clear
crepuscular shade drops against a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not
oppressive. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is
much less funereal, and a landscape in which it is frequent may still
be said to smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in
old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into
vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of
some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at you with a
solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A
humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help
broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many
of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A
stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the
Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of
olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean
seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand.
To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought
to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the
reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of
a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about
bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain
in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I
heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation,
I could only _hope_ it was the nightingale. I have listened for the
nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would
have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have
never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a prelude that came
to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, I generously believe
him a great artist or at least a great genius--a creature who despises
any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the
multitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the
prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it
was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good things
and various others besides that I relished so keenly my visit to the
Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-hour in the wood.
It stands above the town on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild
garden climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy influence.
Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts
you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the
church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may
take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the
grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk.
A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from
cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors,
you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a
moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy
and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his
intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand
entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very foolish
fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of
the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to
my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting me at
so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he’d be most
happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was the
very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no
justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was
only his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination
that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and
out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with
folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the
scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most
precious. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was
cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was
not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There
was support to my idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the
scene was in its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the
deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light
mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--occupies the
crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by
furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round
the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The
sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so
charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though
stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling
lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents.
The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its
deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it
in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature.
Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a
solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion
of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could
easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening
to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood
and beckon me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are
haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen
there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look
across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less
romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised.
The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and
clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care
of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less
charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas
struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the
sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions
that rise from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and
lovelier view of lake and hills and sky.
I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I
started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may be
a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors
save by its keeping in the shade. “Galleries” the roads are prettily
called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead
and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few
miles from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna
framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which
completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it
just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same
incalculable lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom.
But I have seen it at moments--chiefly in the misty twilight--when it
resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the
land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly
surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one’s
very last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however,
which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that
of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare
with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly
odious, for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to
discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies
in a deeper cup, and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody
shores, at least, in the same position, the little high-perched black
town to which it gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the
opposite shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the
Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain
grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a
double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at
Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose gardens overhang the lake; but
he has also a porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his
head at your proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit
countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is
justly to be denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor
who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a
prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered
corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town of
rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the
usual allowance, the common cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks
dismally as if its best families had all fallen into penury together and
lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great
dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken window-panes with
anything better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano
that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained that
there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New
England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher of quaintness on
the face of it inacceptable; but calmly considered it has a measure of
truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted planks, certainly; I vastly
prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb
on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias
glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs
bending over a white paling to brush your cheek.
“I prefer Siena to Lowell,” said my friend; “but I prefer Farmington to
such a thing as this.” In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature
Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the
size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but
foul ones. Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled
precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty
miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New
England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in
one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of
a fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve
nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when Italy
was either not shabby or could at least “carry off” her shabbiness. For
what follies are they doing penance? Through what melancholy stages have
their fortunes ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the shady
side of the long blank street and watch the hot sun glare upon the
dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors.
I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a
cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I
had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch
which I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty
apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at
the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared
that it was all queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is
worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its
lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a
dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is
an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on the only
freshness they find in these dusky human hives--the blooming seam, as
one may call it, of strong wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls
to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It
consorted generally with the bravery of its name; but the only object
I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which
rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its
face setting forth that Massimo d’ Azeglio had dwelt there. The story
of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his delightful
_Ricordi_. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you
may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that
the modern Passionist convent occupying this admirable site was erected
by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins
of an immemorial temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish
race. For me I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent
all but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have
been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava
pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden
through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of
Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It rises
on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, as we have seen, of the
Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, that of early Alba
Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so
dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a
meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel
crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and it
has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and
queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious
interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who
accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal.
But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which
adjoins the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations
an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and
lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was
bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap
and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every
now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of
monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal
umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with
water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone
seats where you may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour
and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare that the best
mission of such a country in the world has been simply to produce, in
the way of prospect and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild
here as a dream the whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild
as one’s thoughts of another life. Such a session wasn’t surely an
experience of the irritable flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a
summer’s day, of something immortally expressed by a man of genius.
{Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.}
From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities
to Frascati, a rival centre of _villeggiatura_, the road following the
hillside for a long morning’s walk and passing through alternations
of denser and clearer shade--the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the
brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you
continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of
the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the
north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it.
The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an
eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and
twisted cordon; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for
the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is
indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of
the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a
rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert
to my first impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the
Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by
a peasants’ fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this
spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all
the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and
measured, in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the
half-hour’s interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road
winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives and through
a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women’s
fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was
covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only
creatures not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful
little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to
themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible
beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under
every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of
dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which
the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There
is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd,
and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class
car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much
smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little
village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside and
nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old fortified
abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining
a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was glad
to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and
divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is
a thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging
foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive
round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church
and a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves
as the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses
the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain
great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow
from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady
trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under
them a grand guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old
style that I was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The
banquet was far less substantial of course, but it had a note as of
immemorial manners that couldn’t fail to suggest romantic analogies to a
pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a feast of reason close
at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescoes of
Domenichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to
say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight
of the peasants swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than
the masterpieces--Murray calls them so--of the famous Bolognese. It
amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which
I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety
trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes
to make it too Italian. Murray’s attractive statement on this point was,
like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day.
Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single
crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort,
dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones
in calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had
honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of grease. The
men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and
pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings,
may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the
woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found
a delightful nook--a queer little terrace before a more retired and
tranquil drinking-shop--where I called for a bottle of wine to help me
to guess why I “drew the line” at Domenichino.
This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of
the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it,
picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown
cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through whose
narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond touched up old
earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow that it held but a
single small table, placed lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter
than to place one’s bottle on the polished parapet. Here you seemed
by the time you had emptied it to be swinging forward into
immensity--hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with
a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which
Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could
count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don’t know
that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it
was perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more
than ever mediocrity. And yet I don’t think it was one’s bottle of wine,
either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was the sense of
the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive in his ever
having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging a dead
horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray
assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner
that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in the
world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such
institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with
such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport
of destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting
painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of
his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from
inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his
fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every
academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons
or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the
drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up
to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian
Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: “This great
picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must _never_ paint;
to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the
providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge--an artist whose
development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the
great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here
and there an excellent model--he was devoted, conscientious, observant,
industrious; but now that we’ve seen pretty well what can simply be
learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his
imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its
efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and
that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the
second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances
a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a
composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be
born; yet they’re really but the hundred mouths through which you may
hear the unhappy thing murmur ‘I’m dead!’ It’s by the simplest thing it
has that a picture lives--by its temper. Look at all the great talents,
Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain
nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true.” This
is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined _might_ say;
and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one
on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel
at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man’s effort to dream
beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold
impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such
pace and so strangely diverged. It was absurd--that was the truth--to
be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to
treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked
back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa
Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a
genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to
watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy
rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old
hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it.
The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves
incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the
trees you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like
furthermore to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly
impressive hereabouts, of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the
midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and
it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter’s,
looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness
of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn; there
was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine
Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near.
The place been for some time lost to private uses, since it figures
fantastically in a novel of George Sand--_La Daniella_--and now, in
quite another way, as a Jesuit college for boys. The afternoon was
perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful
golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little
collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their
heels. We all know--I make the point for my antithesis--the monstrous
practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe
I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and
receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, the
avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere
of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of “mere character,” shameless
incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should
pause.