day the same, save that the fun grew wilder and often rougher as the
doom of Ash Wednesday drew near. First when the people had gathered in
their places, high and low, and already thronged the street from side to
side, there was a distant rattle of scabbards and a thunder of hoofs,
and all fell back, crowding and climbing upon one another, to let a
score of cavalrymen trot through, clearing the way for the carriages of
the 'Senator' and Municipality, which drove from end to end of the Corso
with their scarlet and yellow liveries, before any other vehicles were
allowed to pass, or any pelting with 'confetti' began. But on the
instant when they had gone by, the showers began, right, left, upwards,
downwards, like little storms of flowers and snow in the afternoon
sunshine, and the whole air was filled with the laughter and laughing
chatter of twenty thousand men and women and children--such a sound as
could be heard nowhere else in the world. Many have heard a great host
cheer, many have heard the battle-cries of armies, many have heard the
terrible deep yell that goes up from an angry multitude in times of
revolution; but only those who remember the Carnival as it used to be
have heard a whole city laugh, and the memory is worth having, for it is
like no other. The sound used to flow along in great waves, following
the sights that passed, and swelling with them to a peal that was like a
cheer, and ebbing then to a steady, even ripple of enjoyment that never
ceased till it rose again in sheer joy of something new to see. Nothing
can give an idea of the picture in times when Rome was still Roman; no
power of description can call up the crowd that thronged and jammed the
long, narrow street, till the slowly moving carriages and cars seemed to
force their way through the stiffly packed mass of humanity as a strong
vessel ploughs her course up-stream through packed ice in winter. Yet no
one was hurt, and an order reigned which could never have been produced
by any means except the most thorough good temper and the determination
of each individual to do no harm to his neighbour, though all respect of
individuals was as completely gone as in any anarchy of revolution. The
more respectable a man looked who ventured into the press in ordinary
clothes, the more certainly he became at once the general mark for
hail-storms of 'confetti.' No uniform nor distinguishing badge was
respected, excepting those of the squad of cavalrymen who cleared the
way, and the liveries of the Municipality's coaches. Men and women were
travestied and disguised in every conceivable way, as Punch and Judy, as
judges and lawyers with enormous square black caps, black robes and
bands, or in dresses of the eighteenth century, or as Harlequins, or
even as bears and monkeys, singly, or in twos and threes, or in little
companies of fifteen or twenty, all dressed precisely alike and
performing comic evolutions with military exactness. Everyone carried a
capacious pouch, or a fishing-basket, or some receptacle of the kind for
the white 'confetti,' and arms and hands were ceaselessly swung in air,
flinging vast quantities of the snowy stuff at long range and short. At
every corner and in every side street, men sold it out of huge baskets,
by the five, and ten, and twenty pounds, weighing it out with the
ancient steelyard balance. Every balcony was lined with long troughs of
it, constantly replenished by the house servants; every carriage and car
had a full supply. And through all the air the odd, clean odour of the
fresh plaster mingled with the fragrance of the box-leaves and the
perfume of countless flowers. For flowers were thrown, too, in every
way, loose and scattered, or in hard little bunches, the 'mazzetti,'
that almost hurt when they struck the mark, and in beautiful nosegays,
rarely flung at random when a pretty face was within sight at a window.
The cars, often charmingly decorated, were filled with men and women
representing some period of fashion, or some incident in history, or
some allegorical subject, and were sometimes two or three stories high,
and covered all over with garlands of flowers and box and myrtle. In the
intervals between them endless open carriages moved along, lined with
white, filled with white dominos, drawn by horses all protected and
covered with white cotton robes, against the whiter 'confetti'--everyone
fighting mock battles with everyone else, till it seemed impossible that
anything could be left to throw, and the long perspective of the narrow
street grew dim between the high palaces, and misty and purple in the
evening light.
A gun fired somewhere far away as a signal warned the carriages to turn
out, and make way for the race that was to follow. The last moments were
the hottest and the wildest, as flowers, 'confetti,' sugar plums with
comet-like tails, wreaths, garlands, everything, went flying through the
air in a final and reckless profusion, and as the last car rolled away
the laughter and shouting ceased, and all was hushed in the expectation
of the day's last sight. Again, the clatter of hoofs and scabbards, as
the dragoons cleared the way; twenty thousand heads and necks craning to
look northward, as the people pushed back to the side pavements;
silence, and the inevitable yellow dog that haunts all race-courses,
scampering over the white street, scared by the shouts, and catcalls,
and bursts of spasmodic laughter; then a far sound of flying hoofs, a
dead silence, and the quick breathing of suppressed excitement; louder
and louder the hoofs, deader the hush; and then, in the dash of a
second, in the scud of a storm, in a whirlwind of light and colour and
sparkling gold leaf, with straining necks, and flashing eyes, and wide
red nostrils flecked with foam, the racing colts flew by as fleet as
darting lightning, riderless and swift as rock-swallows by the sea.
Then, if it were the last night of Carnival, as the purple air grew
brown in the dusk, myriads of those wax tapers first used in Saturn's
temple of old lit up the street like magic and the last game of all
began, for every man and woman and child strove to put out another's
candle, and the long, laughing cry, 'No taper! No taper! Senza moccolo!'
went ringing up to the darkling sky. Long canes with cloths or damp
sponges or extinguishers fixed to them started up from nowhere, down
from everywhere, from window and balcony to the street below, and from
the street to the low balconies above. Put out at every instant, the
little candles were instantly relighted, till they were consumed down to
the hand; and as they burned low, another cry went up, 'Carnival is
dead! Carnival is dead!' But he was not really dead till midnight, when
the last play of the season had been acted in the playhouses, the last
dance danced, the last feast eaten amid song and laughter, and the
solemn Patarina of the Capitol tolled out the midnight warning like a
funeral knell. That was the end.
The riderless race was at least four hundred years old when it was given
up. The horses were always called Barberi, with the accent on the first
syllable, and there has been much discussion about the origin of the
name. Some say that it meant horses from Barbary, but then it should be
pronounced Barberi, accented on the penultimate. Others think it stood
for Barbari--barbarian, that is, unridden. The Romans never misplace an
accent, and rarely mistake the proper quantity of a syllable long or
short. For my own part, though no scholar has as yet suggested it, I
believe that the common people, always fond of easy witticisms and
catchwords, coined the appellation, with an eye to the meaning of both
the other derivations, out of Barbo, the family name of Pope Paul the
Second, who first instituted the Carnival races, and set the winning
post under the balcony of the huge Palazzo di Venezia, which he had
built beside the Church of Saint Mark, to the honour and glory of his
native city.
He made men run foot-races, too: men, youths and boys, of all ages; and
the poor Jews, in heavy cloth garments, were first fed and stuffed with
cakes and then made to run, too. The jests of the Middle Age were savage
compared with the roughest play of later times.
The pictures of old Rome are fading fast. I can remember, when a little
boy, seeing the great Carnival of 1859, when the Prince of Wales was in
Rome, and the masks which had been forbidden since the revolution were
allowed again in his honour; and before the flower throwing began, I saw
Liszt, the pianist, not yet in orders, but dressed in a close-fitting
and very fashionable grey frock-coat, with a grey high hat, young then,
tall, athletic and erect; he came out suddenly from a doorway, looked to
the right and left in evident fear of being made a mark for 'confetti,'
crossed the street hurriedly and disappeared--not at all the
silver-haired, priestly figure the world knew so well in later days. And
by and by the Prince of Wales came by in a simple open carriage, a thin
young man in a black coat, with a pale, face and a quiet smile, looking
all about him with an almost boyish interest, and bowing to the right
and left.
Then in deep contrast of sadness, out of the past years comes a great
funeral by night, down the Corso; hundreds of brown, white-bearded
friars, two and two with huge wax candles, singing the ancient chant of
the penitential psalms; hundreds of hooded lay brethren of the
Confraternities, some in black, some in white, with round holes for
their eyes that flashed through, now and then, in the yellow glare of
the flaming tapers; hundreds of little street boys beside them in the
shadow, holding up big horns of grocers' paper to catch the dripping
wax; and then, among priests in cotta and stole, the open bier carried
on men's shoulders, and on it the peaceful figure of a dead girl,
white-robed, blossom crowned, delicate as a frozen flower in the cold
winter air. She had died of an innocent love, they said, and she was
borne in through the gates of the Santi Apostoli to her rest in the
solemn darkness. Nor has anyone been buried in that way since then.
[Illustration: SAN LORENZO IN LUCINA]
In the days of Paul the Second, what might be called living Rome, taken
in the direction of the Corso, began at the Arch of Marcus Aurelius,
long attributed to Domitian, which stood at the corner of the small
square called after San Lorenzo in Lucina. Beyond that point, northwards
and eastwards, the city was a mere desert, and on the west side the
dwelling-houses fell away towards the Mausoleum of Augustus, the
fortress of the Colonna. The arch itself used to be called the Arch of
Portugal, because a Portuguese Cardinal, Giovanni da Costa, lived in the
Fiano palace at the corner of the Corso. No one would suppose that very
modern-looking building, with its smooth front and conventional
balconies, to be six hundred years old, the ancient habitation of all
the successive Cardinals of Saint Lawrence. Its only other interest,
perhaps, lies in the fact that it formed part of the great estates
bestowed by Sixtus the Fifth on his nephews, and was nevertheless sold
over their children's heads for debt, fifty-five years after his death.
The swineherd's race was prodigal, excepting the 'Great Friar' himself,
and, like the Prodigal Son, it was not long before the Peretti were
reduced to eating the husks.
It was natural that the palaces of the Renascence should rise along the
only straight street of any length in what was then the inhabited part
of the city, and that the great old Roman Barons, the Colonna, the
Orsini, the Caetani, should continue to live in their strongholds, where
they had always dwelt. The Caetani, indeed, once bought from a
Florentine banker what is now the Ruspoli palace, and Sciarra Colonna
had lived far down the Corso; but with these two exceptions, the
princely habitations between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di
Venezia are almost all the property of families once thought foreigners
in Rome. The greatest, the most magnificent private dwelling in the
world is the Doria Pamfili palace, as the Doria themselves were the most
famous, and became the most powerful of those many nobles who, in the
course of centuries, settled in the capital and became Romans, not only
in name but in fact--Doria, Borghese, Rospigliosi, Pallavicini and
others of less enduring fame or reputation, who came in the train or
alliance of a Pope, and remained in virtue of accumulated riches and
acquired honour.
Two hundred and fifty years have passed since a council of learned
doctors and casuists decided for Pope Innocent the Tenth the precise
limit of his just power to enrich his nephews and relations, the
Pamfili, by an alliance with whom the original Doria of Genoa added
another name to their own, and inherited the vast estates. But nearly
four hundred years before Innocent, the Doria had been high admirals and
almost despots of Genoa. For they were a race of seamen from the first,
in a republic where seamanship was the first essential to distinction.
Albert Doria overcame the Pisans off Meloria in 1284, slaying five
thousand, and taking eleven thousand prisoners. Conrad, his son, was
'Captain of the Genoese Freedom,' and 'Captain of the People.' Lamba
Doria vanquished the Venetians under the brave Andrea Dandolo, and
Paganino Doria conquered them again under another Andrea Dandolo; and
then an Andrea Doria took service with the Pope, and became the greatest
sailor in Europe, the hero of a hundred sea-fights, at one time the ally
of Francis the First of France, and the most dangerous opponent of
Gonzalvo da Cordova, then high admiral of the Empire under Charles the
Fifth, a destroyer of pirates, by turns the idol, the enemy and the
despot of his own city, Genoa, and altogether such a type of a
soldier-sailor of fortune as the world has not seen before or since. And
there were others after him, notably Gian Andrea Doria, remembered by
the great victory over the Turks at Lepanto, whence he brought home
those gorgeous Eastern spoils of tapestry and embroideries which hang in
the Doria palace today.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DORIA PAMFILI]
The history of the palace itself is not without interest, for it shows
how property, which was not in the possession of the original Barons,
sometimes passed from hand to hand, changing names with each new owner,
in the rise and fall of fortunes in those times. The first building
seems to have belonged to the Chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, which
somehow ceded it to Cardinal Santorio, who spent an immense sum in
rebuilding, extending and beautifying it. When it was almost finished,
Julius the Second came to see it, and after expressing the highest
admiration for the work, observed that such a habitation was less
fitting for a prince of the church than for a secular duke--meaning, by
the latter, his own nephew, Francesco della Rovere, then Duke of Urbino;
and the unfortunate Santorio, who had succeeded in preserving his
possessions under the domination of the Borgia, was forced to offer the
most splendid palace in Rome as a gift to the person designated by his
master. He died of a broken heart within the year. A hundred years
later, the Florentine Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement the Eighth, bought
it from the Dukes of Urbino for twelve thousand measures of grain,
furnished them for the purpose by their uncle, and finally, when it had
fallen in inheritance to Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, Innocent the Tenth
married her to his nephew, Camillo Pamfili, from whom, by the fusion of
the two families, it at last came into the hands of the Doria-Pamfili.
The Doria palace is almost two-thirds of the size of Saint Peter's, and
within the ground plan of Saint Peter's the Colosseum could stand. It
used to be said that a thousand persons lived under the roof outside of
the gallery and the private apartments, which alone surpass in extent
the majority of royal residences. Without some such comparison mere
words can convey nothing to a mind unaccustomed to such size and space,
and when the idea is grasped, one asks, naturally enough, how the people
lived who built such houses--the people whose heirs, far reduced in
splendour, if not in fortune, are driven to let four-fifths of their
family mansion, because they find it impossible to occupy more rooms
than suffice the Emperor of Germany or the Queen of England. One often
hears foreign visitors, ignorant of the real size of palaces in Rome,
observe, with contempt, that the Roman princes 'let their palaces.' It
would be more reasonable to inquire what use could be made of such
buildings, if they were not let, or how any family could be expected to
inhabit a thousand rooms, and, ultimately, for what purpose such
monstrous residences were ever built at all.
The first thing that suggests itself in answer to the latter question as
the cause of such boundless extravagance is the inherited giantism of
the Latins, to which reference has been more than once made in these
pages, and to which the existence of many of the principal buildings in
Rome must be ascribed. Next, we may consider that at one time or
another, each of the greater Roman palaces has been, in all essentials,
the court of a pope or of a reigning feudal prince. Lastly, it must be
remembered that each palace was the seat of management of all its
owner's estates, and that such administration in those times required a
number of scribes and an amount of labour altogether out of proportion
with the income derived from the land.
At first sight the study of Italian life in the Middle Age does not seem
very difficult, because it is so interesting. But when one has read the
old chronicles that have survived, and the histories of those times, one
is amazed to see how much we are told about people and their actions,
and how very little about the way in which people lived. It is easier to
learn the habits of the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the ancient Romans,
or the Assyrians, than to get at the daily life of an Italian family
between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, from such books as we
have. There are two reasons for this. One is the scarcity of literature,
excepting historical chronicles, until the time of Boccaccio and the
Italian storytellers. The other is the fact that what we call the Middle
Age was an age of transition from barbarism to the civilization of the
Renascence, and the Renascence was reached by sweeping away all the
barbarous things that had gone before it.
One must have lived a lifetime in Italy to be able to call up a fairly
vivid picture of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. One
must have actually seen the grand old castles and gloomy monasteries,
and feudal villages of Calabria and Sicily, where all things are least
changed from what they were, and one should understand something of the
nature of the Italian people, where the original people have survived;
one must try also to realize the violence of those passions which are
ugly excrescences on Italian character even now, and which were once the
main movers of that character.
There are extant many inventories of lordly residences of earlier times
in Italy, for the inventory was taken every time the property changed
hands by inheritance or sale. Everyone of these inventories begins at
the main gate of the stronghold, and the first item is 'Rope for giving
the cord.' Now 'to give the cord' was a torture, and all feudal lords
had the right to inflict it. The victim's hands were tied behind his
back, the rope was made fast to his bound wrists, and he was hoisted
some twenty feet or so to the heavy iron ring which is fixed in the
middle of the arch of every old Italian castle gateway; he was then
allowed to drop suddenly till his feet, to which heavy weights were
sometimes attached, were a few inches from the ground, so that the
strain of his whole weight fell upon his arms, twisted them backwards,
and generally dislocated them at the shoulders. And this was usually
done three times, and sometimes twenty times, in succession, to the same
prisoner, either as a punishment or by way of examination, to extract a
confession of the truth. As the rope of torture was permanently rove
through the pulley over the front door, it must have been impossible not
to see it and remember what it meant every time one went in or out. And
such quick reminders of danger and torture, and sudden, painful death,
give the pitch and key of daily existence in the Middle Age. Every man's
life was in his hand until it was in his enemy's. Every man might be
forced, at a moment's notice, to defend not only his honour, and his
belongings, and his life, but his women and children, too,--not against
public enemies only, but far more often against private spite and
personal hatred. Nowadays, when most men only stake their money on their
convictions, it is hard to realize how men reasoned who staked their
lives at every turn; or to guess, for instance, at what women felt whose
husbands and sons, going out for a stroll of an afternoon, in the
streets of Rome, might as likely as not be brought home dead of a dozen
sword-wounds before evening. A husband, a father, was stabbed in the
dark by treachery; try and imagine the daily and year-long sensations of
the widowed mother, bringing up her only son deliberately to kill her
husband's murderer; teaching him to look upon vengeance as the first,
most real and most honourable aim of life, from the time he was old
enough to speak, to the time when he should be strong enough to kill.
Everything was earnest then. One should remember that most of the
stories told by Boccaccio, Sacchetti and Bandello--the stories from
which Shakespeare got his Italian plays, his Romeo and Juliet, his
Merchant of Venice--were not inventions, but were founded on the truth.
Everyone has read about Caesar Borgia, his murders, his treacheries and
his end, and he is held up to us as a type of monstrous wickedness. But
a learned Frenchman, Emile Gebhart, has recently written a rather
convincing treatise, to show that Caesar Borgia was not a monster at all,
nor even much of an exception to the general rule among the Italian
despots of his day, and his day was civilized compared with that of
Rienzi, of Boniface the Eighth, of Sciarra Colonna.
In order to understand anything about the real life of the Middle Age,
one should begin at the beginning; one should see the dwellings, the
castles, and the palaces with their furniture and arrangements, one
should realize the stern necessities as well as the few luxuries of that
time. And one should make acquaintance with the people themselves, from
the grey-haired old baron, the head of the house, down to the scullery
man and the cellarer's boy and the stable lads. And then, knowing
something of the people and their homes, one might begin to learn
something about their household occupations, their tremendously tragic
interests and their few and simple amusements.
[Illustration: PORTA SAN LORENZO]
The first thing that strikes one about the dwellings is the enormous
strength of those that remain. The main idea, in those days, when a man
built a house, was to fortify himself and his belongings against attacks
from the outside, and every other consideration was secondary to that.
That is true not only of the Barons' castles in the country and of their
fortified palaces in town,--which were castles, too, for that
matter,--but of the dwellings of all classes of people who could afford
to live independently, that is, who were not serfs and retainers of the
rich. We talk of fire-proof buildings nowadays, which are mere shells of
iron and brick and stone that shrivel up like writing-paper in a great
fire. The only really fire-proof buildings were those of the Middle Age,
which consisted of nothing but stone and mortar throughout, stone walls,
stone vaults, stone floors, and often stone tables and stone seats. I
once visited the ancient castle of Muro, in the Basilicata, one of the
southern provinces in Italy, where Queen Joanna the First paid her life
for her sins at last, and died under the feather pillow that was forced
down upon her face by two Hungarian soldiers. It is as wild and lonely a
place as you will meet with in Europe, and yet the great castle has
never been a ruin, nor at any time uninhabited, since it was built in
the eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower
part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet
thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each
narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the
deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should
call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are
laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight feet
thick--comparatively flimsy for such a place! Nine-tenths of it was
built for strength--the small remainder for comfort; there is not a
single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within
the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved space, barely big
enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the
crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding
steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that
echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea
caves to the tramp of armed men. And so it was in the cities, too. In
Rome, bits of the old strongholds survive still. There were more of them
thirty years ago. Even the more modern palaces of the late Renascence
are built in such a way that they must have afforded a safe refuge
against everything except artillery. The strong iron-studded doors and
the heavily grated windows of the ground floor would stand a siege from
the street. The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief
dwelling of the Orsini, is built in the midst of the city like a great
fortification, with escarpments and buttresses and loop-holes; and at
the main gate there is still a portcullis which sinks into the ground by
a system of chains and balance weights and is kept in working order even
now.
In the Middle Age, each town palace had one or more towers, tall, square
and solid, which were used as lookouts and as a refuge in case the rest
of the palace should be taken by an enemy. The general principle of all
mediaeval towers was that they were entered through a small window at a
great height above the ground, by means of a jointed wooden ladder. Once
inside, the people drew the ladder up after them and took it in with
them, in separate pieces. When that was done, they were comparatively
safe, before the age of gunpowder. There were no windows to break, it
was impossible to get in, and the besieged party could easily keep
anyone from scaling the tower, by pouring boiling oil or melted lead
from above, or with stones and missiles, so that as long as provisions
and water held out, the besiegers could do nothing. As for water, the
great rainwater cistern was always in the foundations of the tower
itself, immediately under the prison, which got neither light nor air
excepting from a hole in the floor above. Walls from fifteen to twenty
feet thick could not be battered down with any engines then in
existence. Altogether, the tower was a safe place in times of danger. It
is said that at one time there were over four hundred of these in Rome,
belonging to the nobles, great and small.