THE ART OF SIGNOR TANNI
The first Sunday I was in Rome I began my local career with a visit
to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, that faces the Via Cavour not
far from the Continental Hotel where I was stopping, and afterwards
San Prassede close beside it. After Canterbury, Amiens, Pisa and
St. Peter’s, I confess churches needed to be of great distinction
to interest me much; but this church, not so divinely harmonious,
exteriorly speaking, left me breathless with its incrustations of
marbles, bronzes, carvings, and gold and silver inlay. There is a kind
of beauty, or charm, or at least physical excitation, in contemplating
sheer gorgeousness which I cannot withstand, even when my sense of
proportion and my reason are offended, and this church had that. Many
of the churches in Rome have just this and nothing more. At least,
what else they may have I am blind to. It did not help me any to learn
as I did from Mrs. Barfleur, that it was very old, dating from 352
A. D., and that the blessed Virgin herself had indicated just where
this basilica in her honor was to be built by having a small, private
fall of snow which covered or outlined the exact dimensions of which
the church was to be. I was interested to learn that they had here
five boards of the original manger at Bethlehem inclosed in an urn of
silver and crystal which is exposed in the sacristy on Christmas Eve
and placed over the high altar on Christmas Day, and that here were
the tombs and chapels of Sixtus V and Paul V and Clement VIII of the
Borghese family and, too, a chapel of the Sforza family. Nevertheless
the hodge-podge of history, wealth, illusion and contention, to say
nothing of religious and social discovery, which go to make up a
church of this kind, is a little wearisome, not to say brain-achey,
when contemplated en masse. These churches! Unless you are especially
interested in a pope or a saint or a miracle or a picture or a monument
or an artist--they are nothing save intricate jewel-boxes; nothing more.
For the first five or six days thereafter I went about with a certain
Signor Tanni who was delivering peripatetic lectures at the principal
places of interest in Rome. This is a curious development of the
modern city, for so numerous are the travelers and so great their
interest in the history of Rome that they gladly pay the three to
twelve lire each, which is charged by the various lecturers for their
discussions and near-by trips. There was a Nashville, Tennessee,
chicken-and-egg merchant who, with his wife, was staying at our hotel
and who was making the matter of seeing Rome quite as much of a
business as that of chickens and eggs in Tennessee. He was a man of
medium height, dark, pale, neat, and possessed of that innate courtesy,
reserve, large-minded fairness and lively appreciation--within set
convictions--which is so characteristic of the native, reasonably
successful American. We are such innocent, pure-minded Greeks--most
of us Americans. In the face of such tawdry vulgarity and vileness
as comprises the underworld café life of Paris, or before such a
spectacle of accentuated craft, lust, brutality, and greed as that
presented by the Borgias, a man such as my chicken-merchant friend,
or any other American of his type, of whom there are millions, would
find himself utterly nonplused. It would be so much beyond his ken, or
intention, that I question whether he would see or understand it at
all if it were taking place before his very eyes. There is something so
childlike and pure about the attitude of many strong, able Americans
that I marvel sometimes that they do as well as they do. Perhaps
their very innocence is their salvation. I could not have told this
chicken-merchant and his wife, for instance, anything of the subtleties
of the underworld of Paris and Monte Carlo as I encountered them; and
if I had he would not have believed me, he would have recoiled from
it all as a burned child would recoil from fire. He was as simple and
interesting and practical as a man could be, and yet so thoroughly
efficient that at the age of forty-five he had laid by a competence and
was off on a three years’ tour of the world.
Mrs. Chicken Merchant was a large woman--very stout, very fair, very
cautious of her thoughts and her conduct, thoroughly sympathetic
and well-meaning. Before leaving her native town, she told me, she
had inaugurated a small library, the funds for which she had helped
collect. Occasionally she was buying engravings of famous historic
buildings, such as the Colosseum and the Temple of Vesta, which would
eventually grace the walls of the library. She and her husband felt
that they were educating themselves; and that they would return better
citizens, more useful to their country, for this exploration of the
ancient world. They had been going each day, morning and afternoon, to
some lecture or ancient ruin; and after I came they would seek me out
of an evening and tell me what they had seen. I took great satisfaction
in this, because I really liked them for their naïve point of view
and their thoroughly kindly and whole-hearted interest in life. It
flattered me to think that I was so acceptable to them and that we
should get along so well together. Frequently they invited me to their
table to dinner. On these occasions my friend would open a bottle of
wine, concerning which he had learned something since he had come
abroad.
It was Mr. and Mrs. Chicken Merchant who gave me a full description of
the different Roman lecturers, their respective merits, their prices,
and what they had to show. They had already been to the Forum, the
Palatine, the Colosseum and the House of Nero, St. Peter’s, the Castle
of St. Angelo, the Appian Way, the Catacombs and the Villa Frascati.
They were just going to the Villa d’Este and to Ostia, the old seaport
at the mouth of the Tiber. They were at great pains to get me to join
the companies of Signor Tanni who, they were convinced, was the best of
them all. “He tells you something. He makes you see it just as it was.
By George! when we were in the Colosseum you could just fairly see the
lions marching out of those doors; and that House of Nero, as he tells
about it, is one of the most wonderful things in the world.”
I decided to join Signor Tanni’s classes at once, and persuaded Mrs.
Barfleur and Mrs. Q. to accompany me at different times. I must say
that in spite of the commonplaceness of the idea my mornings and
afternoons with Signor Tanni and his company of sightseers proved as
delightful as anything else that befell me in Rome. He was a most
interesting person, born and brought up, as I learned, at Tivoli near
the Villa d’Este, where his father controlled a small inn and livery
stable. He was very stocky, very dark, very ruddy, and very active.
Whenever we came to the appointed rendezvous where his lecture was to
begin, he invariably arrived, swinging his coat-tails, glancing smartly
around with his big black eyes, rubbing and striking his hands in a
friendly manner, and giving every evidence of taking a keen interest in
his work. He was always polite and courteous without being officious,
and never for a moment either dull or ponderous. He knew his subject
thoroughly of course; but what was much better, he had an eye for the
dramatic and the spectacular. I shall never forget how in the center of
the Forum Romanum he lifted the cap from the ancient manhole that opens
into the Cloaca Maxima and allowed us to look in upon the walls of
that great sewer that remains as it was built before the dawn of Roman
history. Then he exclaimed dramatically: “The water that Cæsar and the
emperors took their baths in no doubt flowed through here just as the
water of Roman bath-tubs does to-day!”
On the Palatine, when we were looking at the site of the Palace of
Elagabalus, he told how that weird worthy had a certain well, paved
at the bottom with beautiful mosaic, in order that he might leap down
upon it and thus commit suicide, but how he afterwards changed his
mind--which won a humorous smile from some of those present and from
others a blank look of astonishment. In the House of Nero, in one
of those dark underhill chambers, which was once out in the clear
sunlight, but now, because of the lapse of time and the crumbling of
other structures reared above it, is deep under ground, he told how
once, according to an idle legend, Nero had invited some of his friends
to dine and when they were well along in their feast, and somewhat
intoxicated, no doubt, it began to rain rose leaves from the ceiling.
Nothing but delighted cries of approval was heard for this artistic
thought until the rose leaves became an inch thick on the floor and
then two and three, and four and five inches thick, when the guests
tried the doors. They were locked and sealed. Then the shower continued
until the rose leaves were a foot deep, two feet deep, three feet deep,
and the tables were covered. Later the guests had to climb on tables
and chairs to save themselves from their rosy bath; but when they had
climbed this high they could climb no higher, for the walls were smooth
and the room was thirty feet deep. By the time the leaves were ten
feet deep the guests were completely covered; but the shower continued
until the smothering weight of them ended all life.--An ingenious but
improbable story.
No one of Signor Tanni’s wide-mouthed company seemed to question
whether this was plausible or not; and one American standing next to me
exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be switched!” My doubting mind set to work to
figure out how I could have overcome this difficulty if I had been in
the room; and in my mind I had all the associated guests busy tramping
down rose leaves in order to make the quantity required as large as
possible. My idea was that I could tire Nero out on this rose-leaf
proposition. The picture of these noble Romans feverishly trampling
down the fall of rose leaves cheered me greatly.
After my first excursion with Signor Tanni I decided to take his
whole course; and followed dutifully along behind him, listening
to his interesting and good-natured disquisitions, during many
delightful mornings and afternoons in the Forum, on the Palatine, in
the Catacombs, on the Appian Way and in the Villas at Frascati and
Tivoli! I shall never forget how clearly and succinctly the crude
early beginnings and characteristics of Christianity came home to me
as I walked in the Catacombs and saw the wretched little graves hidden
away in order that they might not be desecrated, and the underground
churches where converts might worship free from molestation and
persecution.
On the Palatine the fact that almost endless palaces were built one on
top of the other, the old palace leveled by means of the sledge and
the crowbar and the new one erected upon the smoothed-over space,
is easily demonstrated. They find the remains of different ruins in
different layers as they dig down, coming eventually to the early
sanctuaries of the kings and the federated tribes. It is far more
interesting to walk through these old ruins and underground chambers
accompanied by some one who loves them, and who is interested in them,
and who by fees to the state servitors has smoothed the way, so that
the ancient forgotten chambers are properly lighted for you, than
it is to go alone. And to have a friendly human voice expatiating
on the probable arrangement of the ancient culinary department and
how it was all furnished, is worth while. I know that the wonder and
interest of the series of immense, dark rooms which were once the
palace of Nero, and formerly were exposed to the light of day, before
the dust and incrustation of centuries had been heaped upon them, but
which now underlie a hill covered by trees and grass, came upon me
with great force because of these human explanations; and the room in
which, in loneliness and darkness for centuries stood the magnificent
group of Laocoon and the porphyry vase now in the Vatican, until some
adventuring students happened to put a foot through a hole, thrilled
me as though I had come upon them myself. Until one goes in this way
day by day to the site of the Circus Maximus, the Baths of Caracalla,
the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Forum,
the Palatine and the Colosseum, one can have no true conception of
that ancient world. When you realize, by standing on the ground and
contemplating these ancient ruins and their present fragments, that the
rumored immensity of them in their heyday and youth is really true,
you undergo an ecstasy of wonder; or if you are of a morbid turn you
indulge in sad speculations as to the drift of life. I cannot tell you
how the mosaics from the palace of Germanicus on the Palatine affected
me, or how strange I felt when the intricacies of the houses of
Caligula and Tiberius were made clear. To walk through the narrow halls
which they trod, to know truly that they ruled in terror and with the
force of murder, that Caligula waylaid and assaulted and killed, for
his personal entertainment, in these narrow alleys which were then the
only streets, and where torches borne by hand furnished the only light,
is something. A vision of the hugeness and audacity of Hadrian’s villa
which now stretches apparently, one would say, for miles, the vast
majority of its rooms still unexcavated and containing what treasures
Heaven only knows, is one of the strangest of human experiences. I
marveled at this vast series of rooms, envying the power, the subtlety
and the genius which could command it. Truly it is unbelievable--one of
those things which stagger the imagination. One can hardly conceive how
even an emperor of Rome would build so beautifully and so vastly. Rome
is so vast in its suggestion that it is really useless to apostrophize.
That vast empire that stretched from India to the Arctic was surely
fittingly represented here; and while we may rival the force and
subtlety and genius and imagination of these men in our day, we will
not truly outstrip them. Mind was theirs--vast, ardent imagination; and
if they achieved crudely it was because the world was still young and
the implements and materials of life were less understood. They were
the great ones--the Romans. We must still learn from them.