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ROMA BEATA
[Illustration: _Terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci_
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Miss Mabel Norman]
ROMA BEATA
Letters from the Eternal City
BY
MAUD HOWE
AUTHOR OF “A NEWPORT AQUARELLE,” “THE SAN ROSARIO RANCH,”
“MAMMON,” “PHILLIDA,” “LAURA BRIDGMAN,” ETC.
_With Illustrations from Drawings by John Elliott
and from Photographs_
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1909
_Copyright, 1903, 1904_,
BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT & COMPANY.
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY THE CENTURY CO.
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY AMERICA COMPANY.
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY.
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
TO MY SISTER
LAURA E. RICHARDS
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. LOOKING FOR A HOME 1
II. CADENABBIA--WOERISHOVEN--PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP 31
III. A VISIT TO QUEEN MARGARET 50
IV. A PRESENTATION TO LEO THE THIRTEENTH 76
V. IN THE ABRUZZI MOUNTAINS 97
VI. SCANNO 119
VII. VIAREGGIO--LUCCA--RETURN TO ROME 142
VIII. ROMAN CODGERS AND SOLITARIES 163
IX. BLACK MAGIC AND WHITE--WITCH’S NIGHT 187
X. ISCHIA 215
XI. OLD AND NEW ROME--PALESTRINA 239
XII. THE ANNO SANTO 264
XIII. THE QUEEN’S VISIT 292
XIV. STRAWBERRIES OF NEMI 314
XV. THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING 338
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci _Frontispiece_
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Miss Mabel Norman
The Appian Way 30
From a photograph
The Madonna of St. Agostino 72
From a photograph
The Pincian Gate and Wall of Rome 76
From a photograph
Roccaraso 98
From a pencil drawing
Marta, a Vestal of the Abruzzi 107
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Mrs. Whitman
The Tiber, at the Ponte Nomantana 158
From a photograph
A Lost Love 202
From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson
Ischia 216
From a photograph
The Lady K. 250
From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson
Dante 311
From a pastel drawing in the Collection of Mrs. David Kimball
The Palace of the Orsini at Nemi 318
From a photograph
ROMA BEATA
I
LOOKING FOR A HOME
ROME, January 20, 1894.
Rome, which we reached Thursday, is very much changed since I last saw
it; imagine the Fountain of Trevi, all the principal streets, even many
of the smaller ones, gleaming with electric lights!
We at once engaged an apartment bathed with sun in the Piazza di Spagna,
sun from early morning till late afternoon. But when we moved into it,
the day was overcast. The apartment which had been tropical with the sun
when we hired it was arctic without it!
We interviewed our _padrona_ (landlady), an immense woman, and demanded
a fire.
“But, Excellency, it is not good for the health.”
We told her we understood our health better than she, and reminded her
that fires had been promised.
“Excellency, yes, if it makes cold; but to-day it makes an immense heat.
_Diamine!_ this saloon is a furnace.”
The thermometer could not have stood above forty-two degrees, but she
was not to be bullied or cajoled. Then J. went out and bought wood
“unbeknownst” to her and lighted a fire in the parlor grate. All the
smoke poured into the room. The _padrona_ charged with fixed bayonets.
“Gentry, we are ruined! Not is possible to make fire here.”
“Why did you not say so before?”
“Who could figure to himself that gentry so instructed would do a thing
so strange?”
These people are so polite that this was an insult, meant as such, taken
as such. In the end J. prevailed. A small fireplace was unearthed from
behind the wardrobe in our bedroom. He worked like a stoker, but the
badly constructed chimney swallowed all the heat. For three days I was
never warm, save when in bed. Monday we forfeited three months’ rent,
paid in advance, and went, tame and crestfallen, to a _pension_, a
sadder and a wiser pair.
PALAZZO SANTO CROCE, March 10, 1894.
The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again,
in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant
rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his
lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little
suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of
splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found.
We have bought our linen, blankets, _batterie de cuisine_, and other
beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday--am I not my mother’s own
child?--I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see
some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big
Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a
certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round
in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of
the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected
to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had
much tea, more talk, and most _panettone_--half bread, half cake, with
_pignoli_ and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in
the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it
is better.
My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two
francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch
of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our
old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch
twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the
tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse.
Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came
the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with
snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is
there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there
must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another
season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in
midsummer chiefly,--has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau--cheerful
person that, by the way--says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite
color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my
window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is
never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is
hysterical!
Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear
the music. At the _festa_ of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of
the Blind Institution furnished the music--a good band, though not equal
to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed
with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping
yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her
skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time
the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took the heavy youngster,
the mother took the new-born, and, squatting down, calmly suckled it.
The music was marred by the wailing of this and other infants, but no
one seemed to mind. After all, it was the only way the women could have
heard mass; the little ones were too young to be left alone at home.
The Romans are devoted to their children, although their ways are not
our ways; no woman of the upper class nurses her child, baby carriages
are unknown, and swaddling is still in vogue, at least with the lower
classes. I know a young American lady, married to a Roman, who imported
a perambulator for her first baby. The _balia_ (wet-nurse), a superb cow
of a woman, refused to trundle it, saying she was not strong enough,
although I saw her carry a heavy trunk upstairs on her head while I was
calling at the house! The baby is now a big eighteen-months-old boy;
every day the _balia_ goes out to give him an airing, carrying him in
her arms! Here, leading-strings are facts, not symbols. In Trastavere,
where I went sightseeing yesterday with Helen--peering, as she calls
it,--the best sight we saw was a darling red-haired baby in
leading-strings stumbling along in front of its grandmother. In the
division of labor, the care of the children falls upon the grandmother;
the mother’s time is too valuable; if she is not actually employed in
earning money, there is the heavier work of the household to do. To use
the pet phrase of the boarders, “things are different here from what
they are at home.”
PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, July 10, 1894.
Here we are in a home of our own! One moonlight night J. came in with
the news that he had found the very apartment he had been looking for;
if I didn’t mind, we would go and see it at once. Naturally, I didn’t
“mind.” We took a _botte_ and threaded the network of narrow streets
that lead down to the Tiber. We crossed the river, a huge brown flood,
silver where it swirled about the piers; drove past the Castle of St.
Angelo to the dingy old palace at the junction of the Borgo Nuovo and
the Piazza San Pietro. He would not let me stop to look at anything, but
hurried me through the entrance, along the corridor, past a courtyard
with orange trees and a fountain where the nightingales were singing, up
a high, wide stairway guarded by recumbent statues of terra-cotta
Etruscan ladies, to a rusty old green door. We pulled a bell-rope and
set a bell jangling inside. The door was opened by the _esattore_
(agent), a brisk young man, who carried a three-beaked brass lamp by
whose light we explored the apartment. They hurried me so that I could
only see that the high ceilings were of carved wood, that the windows
were large, and that I liked the shape of the rooms. J. kept saying,
“Wait till you see the terrace.” The terrace, or house-top, is a flat
roof; it covers the whole length and breadth of the apartment, and
belongs exclusively to it. A parapet three feet high runs around it; at
one end is a small room with a second smaller terrace on its roof,
reached by a flight of stone steps; at the other end is a high wall with
a little, open belfry on top. The view is sublime; you look down into
the Square of St. Peter’s with the Egyptian obelisk in the middle,
Bernini’s great colonnades on either side, the Church of St. Peter’s at
the end, with the Vatican, a big, awkward mass of a building, behind it,
and in the foreground the twin fountains sending up their columns of
powdered spray. On the left loomed the Castle of St. Angelo; it was
light enough to see the time by the clock. You can imagine all the
rest,--the city spread out like a map, the dark masses of trees marking
the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, the Campagna, the Sabine and the
Alban hills beyond, Mt. Soracte, our familiar friend, on the left, over
and under all the soft deep notes of the big bell of St. Peter’s
throbbing out the Angelus.
The bargain was struck that very night! But when we went over the next
day J. let the cat out of the bag by saying, “I was afraid if you went
by daylight, and saw what an old ruin it was, you would never consent to
our taking it!”
It did look discouraging. The last tenant, a monsignore, who lived here
thirty years, never allowed the owners to make any repairs; he said he
could not be bothered with workmen. He died a short time ago, leaving a
red rose growing in a wooden half-barrel on the terrace. The owner of
the palace, Signor Mazzocchi, armorer to the Pope, waited till the new
tenant should turn up before making any changes. The palace was built in
1661. It has gone to wrack and ruin, but it is a magnificent old wreck.
It stands on the site of the house the great architect Bramante built
for Raphael, one pier of which is still standing, built into our walls.
It once belonged to a Cardinal Rusticucci, whose arms are cut in stone
over one of the doors; he was of the same family as the gentleman Dante
met in one of the lower circles of the Inferno.
“_Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce, Jacopo Rusticucci fui; e
certo la fiera moglie più ch’altro mi nuoce._”
“And I who am placed on the cross with these was Jacob Rusticucci. It is
certain my proud wife harmed me more than another!”
The palace seems to be called indifferently Rusticucci, Accoramboni, and
Mazzocchi. We hesitated for some time between the three names; finally
the Dantesque name carried the day, and I have had Palazzo Rusticucci
engraved upon our cards. It is considered very plebeian here to have
your address on your cards, but I cling to my American ideas.
The monsignore’s red rose on the terrace looked so lonely that I went
last Wednesday to Rag Fair in the Campo dei Fiori and bought a pink ivy
geranium, some pansies, and a white carnation to keep it company; they
were absurdly cheap; flowers are a necessity here, not a luxury. I also
bought a sack of earth, some flower-pots, and a watering-can. I got up
at dawn the next morning and potted my plants; hard work! When J. came
up at seven o’clock for coffee, there they stood in a row at the end of
the terrace. It was a real surprise; I was very proud, till I found that
he had to do the work all over again, just because I had not put
anything in the bottom of the flower-pots to keep the earth from running
out when they are watered! J. says we must have more, many more, plants.
Sunday he was pottering about all day with the plumber. We are to have
another _quarto_ of water laid on, the pipes carried to the upper
terrace, and a vast Florentine flower-pot--you know the kind,
terra-cotta--for the receiver. Some day we mean to have a marble
sarcophagus in its place. They took the beautiful long zinc bath-tub for
the tank; this was a blow, but Pompilia and Filomena found it _too_
convenient! Every one who has seen it on the upper terrace says, “Do you
take your bath up here?” It is not easy to laugh at this inevitable
joke; I wait for it now from each new visitor, and feel relieved to get
it over.
The terrace is our poetry, and we have parlous good prose downstairs.
The walls are three feet thick, built to keep out both heat and cold;
the whole house is paved with red, white, and black tiles in geometrical
designs. The old green door opens into a vestibule leading to the
_anticamera_, which has two big windows. The _salotto_ opens from this;
it has a splendid _sei cento_ carved wood ceiling, and pale nile-green
doors with gilt mouldings and handles. The dining-room, square and high,
leads from the _salotto_; beyond is a charming room with a fresco of
Apollo driving the horses of the sun. This will be our guest-room when
we have a guest; it is now my den. On the other side of the _salotto_ is
our yellow bedroom: the nicest room I have ever lived in; it has a
vaulted stone ceiling. Do you remember Tennyson’s poem?
“O darling room, my heart’s delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white,
There is no room so exquisite,
No little room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.”
Well, ours is just like that, only it is not “little” but very large.
These rooms are in the front of the palace, looking down into the Piazza
San Pietro and facing _mezzo giorno_, due south. They all have
fireplaces (J. put them in himself with the aid of Lorenzo), the sun
pours into them, and if one can be warm in Rome, in winter, we shall be.
From the passage outside the kitchen a small stone stairway leads up
past a tiny oratory to the terrace. The oratory is charming in shape,
not quite round, more like an ellipse with two marble seats. The floor
slopes to the middle, where there is a grating to let the rain out, for
it is open to the sky; its dome is a minute replica of the Pantheon’s.
The monsignore must have sat here to read his “hours”; there is nothing
to distract the mind, no sound save the bells of St. Peter’s, nothing to
see but the sky and clouds overhead and the low-flying _rondinelle_
swooping across and across at sunset.
In the _salotto_ (Filomena sometimes calls it the _salottino_, to my
rage) there is a handsome sofa and pair of armchairs, a fine black oak
table, and my Benares tray and stand for tea. The rest of the furniture
is very meek and cane-bottomed. We have in this room a lovely landscape
of the Campagna by Sartorio, a silver-point drawing by Hughes, the
English artist, and a cast from the Alhambra.
July 28, 1894.
Thirty-six degrees centigrade for the last three days! Those clever
children of yours will know how hot that really is. I don’t know, but
people mop their brows a good deal, and say that the heat of this
summer is “unprecedented and incredible.” It troubles me very little;
once or twice only I have felt rather tired by it, and I fancy it is
sharpening up my temper a little; but I eat and sleep like several tops,
only I can’t do much of anything out of doors. Yesterday I went to see
the friendly Countess C., who has a small city garden with shade-trees,
under which we sat and consumed iced wine and cakes, and talked about
the Pope. She is an American and very Black in her politics, though her
husband is a White and fought for Victor Emmanuel.
At the suggestion of Mr. Richard Greenough I have adopted the Roman
scheme of life and divide every day into two. I am up at five, have my
coffee, and read my paper on the terrace. At eight the rooms are
hermetically sealed; outside shutters, windows, and inside blinds are
closed. A melancholy twilight pervades everywhere, except in my den,
where I keep one eye of the house open to read, write, cipher, and catch
fleas by. I go out early, do my errands, make my visits, and try to be
at home by ten; sometimes I am delayed till twelve. Luncheon is at one;
after this the whole household, the whole city, takes its _siesta_.
From two till four Rome sleeps! Down in the piazza the workmen lie at
full length on the pavement, their arms under their heads. Cabmen curl
up inside their cabs, horses sleep between the shafts, even small boys
sleep! At first I would none of it. I only yielded when I found that the
soldiers in the barracks opposite are obliged by the military
regulations to take a daily _siesta_.
“And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?”
Soon after four o’clock the sea-breeze comes up and life begins again.
By five I am ready for tea on the terrace. Sometimes we go instead to
Ronzi and Singer’s for _granite_, a sort of sherbet made of snow from
the mountains flavored with coffee or lemon, very delicious and cooling
to the blood. By this time the streets are filled with people. The Roman
girls look charming in their pretty light summer dresses; pink muslin
seems to be the fashion this season. Dinner gets pushed back later and
later; we really must reform. Last night we did not sit down till
quarter to nine. The nights are divinely cool; we go to the terrace
from the dinner-table, and sit there till bedtime under the friendly
stars.
* * * * *
To-day I have been driving in the Villa Pamfili Doria; for proof accept
this pink petal from the Egyptian lotus in the lake. I never saw them
growing before. They are wonderful; the pads immense, with a green
velvety surface on which the water rolls up into crystal balls; the
flower, when it is closed, large and pointed like a classic flame, does
not lie on the water, as I supposed, but stands erect, some eight or ten
inches above it. My uncle and a few other privileged people are allowed
to drive here even when the villa is closed to the public. We always
meet a modest-looking old couple in a coupé; he is blind and has a long
white beard; she wears a bonnet like a bat and carries a green fan with
which she screens her eyes. Cardinal A., his secretary walking beside
him, two attendants following, is always there, and several other
priests; except for these, an occasional gardener, and the peacocks, we
have the glorious old place all to ourselves. There are deer and Jersey
cows and the lake and the pretty formal garden in front of the house; it
has the feeling of being private property--a gentleman’s place. The
name “Mary,” clipped in box on the hillside in memory of a beloved wife,
an English Princess Doria, gives me the same sort of satisfaction as the
Taj Mahal and the tomb of Cæcilia Metella.
Your last letter clamors for details of our housekeeping. In certain
respects it is idyllic. For comfort I have never known its equal. We
have two women, Filomena, the Umbrian housemaid and waitress, and
Pompilia, my black-browed Tuscan cook (Romans do not make good
servants). These two do the work easily with the help of old Nena, the
fifth wheel to our coach. Helen calls her the footman; she does all our
errands, carries my notes, and when I am hard pressed for time leaves
our cards. Pompilia brings me her accounts every morning, so much for
beef, bread, butter, spaghetti, wine, oil, and salt. I buy my fruit and
groceries myself. So much custom allows. It is more _signorile_,
however, to leave all buying to your servants, but a certain latitude,
of which I have availed myself, is allowed to artists. Store-rooms and
ice-chests are unknown; we live from hand to mouth, buying each day’s
provisions “fresh and fresh.” The butchers shut up shop at eleven in
the morning and do not open again till six in the evening. Business
begins at the shriek of dawn; the first sound I hear in the early gray
is the sharpening of the butcher’s knife in the shop opposite. They keep
the meat in cool “grottos” underground. How they manage without ice is a
mystery!
The Borgo, our quarter,--Leonine City is its best name,--is not
fashionable, and the street-cries are still in full force here. The
earliest is the Acetosa water, “_Fiasche fresche aqua ’Cetosa!_” I hear
it in my dreams, plaintive, melodious. “Flasks of fresh Acetosa water!”
Then comes the rumbling of the cart, the hee-hawing of the donkey, and
the remarks of the man to the donkey. This is what he said to-day: “I
call all the apostles to observe this infamous beast of a donkey: may he
die squashed, this son of a hangman!” I do assure you he is the dearest
donkey, pretty and willing, but rather restive about stopping. The
Acetosa Spring is a mile and a half from the city, out Viale Parioli
way. It has been in use since the days of the Cæsars, perhaps since the
days of the Tarquins. The Romans take a course of _Aqua ’Cetosa_ every
summer; six weeks is the orthodox time; it is “cooling to the blood.” It
costs two cents a flask.
Signor Augusto Rotoli has written out for me the notes of several of the
cries. In the Acetosa score he has indicated the blows of the driver,
the kicks of the donkey, and finally the patter-patter of the poor
little beastie’s hoofs over the rough paving-stones of the Borgo Nuovo:
VENDITORE DELL’ AQUA ACETOSA.
Nel silenzio del mattino, all’ alba, in distanza, e poi piu presso
alla residenza--questo è un effetto molto caratteristico.[1]
[Illustration: Musical notation
Fre-sca, Fre-sca, l’a-qua-Ace-to-sa kaaaaa....
_Dando una bastonata al povera asinella che alza_
tirando calci.
]
At seven o’clock a herd of twenty goats is driven into the piazza by two
dark satyrs with shaggy thighs and flashing eyes, peasants in goat-skin
trousers they are from the Campagna. The children crowding round them in
the piazza, and I looking down from my terrace, watch them as they milk
their yellow-eyed beasts. Goats’ milk, Pompilia says, is good for
consumptives and delicate babies; I have not yet learned whether she
considers it heating or cooling to the blood. We are not allowed to have
_broccoli_, carrots, or mutton at this season because they are heating,
and are obliged to have more rennet than we like because it is cooling!
After the goats are gone the blackberry man comes. I like his cry best
of all, it is in a melancholy minor, “_More, more, chi vuol maniar le
more?--more fate!_” “Moors, moors, who wishes to eat moors?--ripe
moors!” Moors, if you please, because they are black!
IL VENDITORE DI MORE.
[Illustration: Musical notation
E li brugno-li fat-ti e chi ma-gna .... le mo-re ....
]
“Buy a broom” is far prettier in Italian--Romanesque, I should say--than
in English. At first we could not make out the words, the man seemed to
be singing “O! so far away!” The notes, long drawn out, pensive,
fascinating, like a sailor’s chantey, haunted us. “_O! scopare, cacc’
aragni!_” “O brooms, chase the spiders!” The latter are Turks’ heads on
the ends of long sticks, necessary for ceilings twenty feet high like
ours.
LO SCOPARO.
Nella folla del giorno nel frastuono di carrozze e veicoli questo
tono minore è molto rimarchevole.[2]
[Illustration: Musical notation
Lo scopa-ro a-ja-rc, Scac-cia ra-gno ....
]
VENDITORE DI PESCE.
[Illustration: Musical notation
Pe-scevi-vo ... ca-la-ma-ret-ti ....
]
“_Pesce vivo, calamaretti!_” “Live fish, little inkstands!” The
_calamaretti_, small cuttle-fish, are]
called little inkstands because of the black liquid--sepia, isn’t
it?--which they eject when attacked. Fried a golden brown and served
with fresh soles as a garnishing they are too good for common people.
The umbrella mender is a bit of a poet, he makes his cry rhyme.
“_Ombrellare. Chi ha ombrelle per raccomodare?_” “The umbrella man. Who
has umbrellas to mend?”
“_O ricotta, ricotta!_” When I hear this I run to the window, wave my
handkerchief, and the _ricotta_ man brings up a fresh goat’s-milk cheese
in a green wicker basket; it is a sort of spiritualized cottage cheese.
When quite new, eaten with _maritozzi_ warm from the bakery downstairs,
it makes a better luncheon than I can get at the Café di Roma.
“_Alice!_” (pronounced a-lee-chee) “anchovies,” is a strident cry which
we hear at intervals all day. Anchovies are a staple food with the lower
classes. At home I only remember them as an appetizer at some brutally
long dinner parties. The people eat anchovies with bread or with
macaroni; they are cheap, strong of flavor, and a little of them goes a
long way. We have them with _crostine_ and _provatura_ for luncheon
sometimes. _Provatura_ is cheese made of buffalo’s milk. Little crusts
of bread with alternate layers of _provatura_ and anchovies skewered
together like chickens’ livers and toasted make a pleasant dish.
One cry I do not like, “_aqua vita!_” short and sharp in the early
morning, as soon as the newsboys begin to shout “_Don Quichotte_”
“_Popolo Romano_,” “_Corriere_,” this cry comes like an antiphony.
“_Aqua vita!_” “Water of life?” Water of death! brandy.
We sent all the way to the English bakery in Via Babuino for our bread
till the day I met Count Luigi Primoli in the baker’s shop on the ground
floor of our palace; he was tucking a brown paper parcel into his
pocket. There had been a function at the Vatican. He had been to pay his
respects to Leo XIII., and on his way home had stopped to buy what he
told me were the best _maritozzi_ in Rome. The baker is an important
person; he owns his shop and four caged nightingales, which sing
divinely. We now buy our bread, flour, macaroni, and oil from him, and
he changes all the neat fifty-franc notes we get from the banker’s; he
can always be trusted to give honest money.
I soon found out that in all domestic affairs I must learn Italian
methods; it was useless to try and teach Pompilia and Filomena our ways.
After the tussle over the washing I gave it up. Set tubs, wash-boards,
wringing-machines? Nothing of that sort. On Sunday evening the clothes
are put in a large copper vessel, a basket-work cover is laid on top,
over which a layer of wood-ashes is spread. Boiling water is then poured
on slowly, percolating a little at a time through the clothes, which are
bleached by the lye of the ashes; this is the _bucato_. When they have
stood long enough in this witch’s cauldron the clothes are carried down
to the basement and washed with cold water in the vast stone fountains
of the palace, which we have the right to use one day in the week. The
women employ a stiff brush and the queerest green soap to scrub the
linen; if we have any table-cloths left at the end of six months, we
shall be lucky. The American clothes-pins and line I sent for are neatly
displayed in the kitchen as curiosities. We “hang out” on an iron
clothes-line to which the linen is tied by small pieces of twine, as it
was in the days of the Empress Faustina. We are no better than our
mothers! The clothes are sent out to a _stiratrice_ to be ironed.
Our cooking fuel costs us one dollar a week. Saturday morning the
_carbonaro_ arrives, carrying on his back a huge sack of charcoal, for
which I pay five francs. I am told it is ten cents too much, but one
must pay something for being “_forestieri_.” The cooking is done over
four little square holes filled with charcoal, set in a table of blue
and white tiles; a big hood overhead carries off the fumes; quite the
prettiest kitchen range I ever saw! The charcoal is kindled by means of
paper, little fagots, and a turkey-feather fan plied by old Nena. I like
my kitchen, it is full of such queer, nice pots and pans; a row of
deceitful copper saucepans hang along the wall, always bright, never
used, but brushed over with white of egg, which acts like a varnish to
protect the polish; a big white marble mortar, a long copper kettle for
the fish, and the green and yellow bowls and mixing dishes are my
favorite utensils. I foresee that the old brass _scaldino_ J. picked up
at the junk shop will some day serve as an ornament to the front hall at
home. We have a brace of warming-pans and the queerest metal box for
live charcoal. When you want a warm bath you fill your tub with cold
water, put hot coals in this box, screw it up tight, and put it into the
water, which it finally heats. Prehistoric? Fortunately, we prefer our
baths cold! Pompilia begged some slips from our geraniums, planted them
in empty kerosene cans, and now the kitchen window is bright with
flowers. Everything grows so quickly here that it is easier to have
plants than not.
August 16, 1894.
The _parroco_ (parish priest) has called. Filomena came all of a flutter
to summon me. The visit has raised us in our servants’ eyes; they have
never before lived with pagans or Protestants. I like the _parroco_. He
is a fine man of forty-five, evidently a peasant, but possessing that
assured, courteous manner the priests all have; it is wonderful, the
bearing and polish the Church gives them. The _parroco_ was rather
disturbed at being offered a cup of tea at five in the afternoon,--it
was stupid of me to have it brought in; the Anglo-Saxon association of
eating and drinking with sociability is hard to get rid of,--but he made
a long visit and gave me good advice about the local charities. The
gnawing poverty all about us is the drop of gall in our honeypot. Our
door is literally besieged by our poor neighbors and by begging monks
and nuns. At the _parroco’s_ suggestion we now divide what we can afford
to give between the benevolent society which looks after the sick and
old, the Trinitarian order of monks, and the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Besides these a man calls on Saturday morning from the “Holy Family” and
carries away a big bag filled with _robaccio_,--trash,--things that at
home would go into the ash-barrel.
General Booth must have got his idea of the Household Brigade from some
such institution, and I am learning new lessons in economy every day!
Nothing is wasted here, not the tiniest scrap of food nor the most
disreputable cast-off garment. My servants watch for my old shoes; three
pairs of eyes are fastened on them daily. You know how much more
precious old shoes are than new,--especially Appleton’s, which come all
the way from Boston? Well, yesterday I was shamed into giving away my
most cherished old boots and am wearing to-day a horrid stiff new pair.
Every night a bundle is smuggled out of the house full of odds and ends
of food which support a certain poor family whose grandmother has
attached herself to us. Her perquisites are the old newspapers, empty
bottles, stale cake and bread, sour milk, the very orange and lemon
peels, and the leavings from the servants’ table. I am so thankful there
is enough to fill the poor old blue market handkerchief, but it would
never do for me to show knowledge of its existence; that would spoil the
sport.
You ask about the comparative expense of life here. People who would be
called well off at home are rich in Rome; people we should consider poor
can live here with much comfort and some luxury. For instance, cabs cost
sixteen cents a course for two people, or forty cents an hour. I pay my
seamstress fifty cents a day, and my cook seven dollars a month; a
clever young Italian doctor, modern, up-to-date, well educated, is quite
satisfied with a dollar a visit. Good hotels (not the two or three most
extravagant) charge twelve francs (about two dollars and forty cents) a
day. Meat, chicken, eggs, fish, fruit, and vegetables are cheap; but all
imported groceries are horribly dear by reason of the fifty per cent.
duty they must pay. Coffee costs fifty cents a pound, sugar twenty,
American kerosene oil is sold in five-gallon cans for three
dollars--fancy! we pay more for petroleum than for olive oil or for
wine. Postage stamps, salt, and tobacco--all government monopolies--are
sold only at tobacconists’. Milk is not cheap; the best in Rome comes
from Prince Doria’s herd of Jerseys. Unfortunately, we are not on his
milkman’s route; our milk comes from the Villa Ada, which belongs to an
American lady, a daughter of Rogers, the sculptor. It is very good milk,
quite different from that we get at a pinch from the _vaccaria_ round
the corner, where in a dark, dreadful dungeon stable pale cows, with
long untrimmed hoofs, pass their melancholy lives. Pompilia is in
despair because we will drink our milk unboiled; when I saw the prisoner
cows I understood why. Italy is a poor country, and poor people can live
comfortably here. Rents, service, and food are all cheap; it may be a
paltry reason for abandoning one’s country that one can get more pork
for one’s shilling elsewhere, but it is a potent reason. Here in Rome
prices are all scaled to the different pockets. I pay less at the same
shops for the same things than my rich friends pay, but some things
even the rich cannot secure; certain conveniences--rapid transit, steam
heat, “rapid delivery,” express service--cannot be purchased, and, what
is really serious, good schooling is not to be had at any price, so few
Americans with children to educate settle in Rome. But for men and women
there is no school like Rome. Willy nilly, I learn something every time
I go out of doors, whether it be to the Appian Way, the Via Sacra, the
Forum, or to the Corso. The yellow Tiber, the fountains, the
nightingales of the Villa Medici, the ilex trees of the Borghese, seem
to whisper the secrets of the city with the mighty past, the mother and
law-giver of nations.
[Illustration: _The Appian Way_
From a photograph]
II
CADENABBIA--WOERISHOVEN--PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP
CADENABBIA, LAKE OF COMO, August 29, 1894.
I fear the vagabond instinct is the strongest one I have, for I was glad
to leave Rome a week ago--to leave _my_ Rome, think of it! with its
galleries all to myself, and its churches, and no tourists; still, the
fleas had become too vicious, and all the “lame ducks” were upon
me--shabby gentlemen attached to the Vatican, seedy artists with
portfolios of unsold sketches, decayed gentlewomen professing Dante and
lacking pupils--for the foreign colony, by which they live, has
dissolved, and we were the last Anglo-Saxons left in town except some
young secretaries of the British Embassy.
Unless one has seen the Sistine Chapel at noon on a blazing August day
one has not really seen it. The figure of Adam receiving the touch of
Life from the Creator is, for me, the highest expression of the art of
painting. The hours I spent across the way at the Vatican and St.
Peter’s made up for any small inconveniences of the heat I may have
suffered. If one is to pass a summer in a city instead of in your green
Maine woods, many-fountained Rome is the city of all others! There are
no mosquitoes,--literally, we have neither a bar nor a netting in the
house--the nights are cool, the citizens are too poor to go away in any
appreciable number, so there is none of that desolate feeling which
makes London a Desert of Sahara in August, and Paris worse. But the heat
of the last week of August drove us to the Italian lake country, and
here we are at Cadenabbia--from _Ca’ di Nabbia_, house of Nabby, an old
woman who once lived in a little hut, or _ca’_, on the shore. It is one
of the most beautiful places on earth.
I am writing before breakfast. Outside my window is the Lake of Como
with its mountains. On one side there is deep purple shadow, the other
palpitates with light. Soon we shall have coffee and green figs in the
_pergola_ below, under the canopy of grape-leaves. Cadenabbia is all
villas and hotels; behind, half way up the hill, is the village of
Griente, to reach which we climb steep streets of steps paved with round
cobbles. Griente is all gray stone, with delicious arches spanning the
narrow ways. The syndic’s house stands apart; his fat wife and pretty
daughter seem always to be sitting sewing before the door. The _padre_,
a dear old man, showed us his garden and called our attention to the
trellis he had contrived for his grapes. We must taste his wine, made
from these Muscats--made, I warrant, by his own hands. We did taste it
and found it excellent.
“_Sapete, Signori_,” he said, “_un goccettino di vino e’ buona per lo
stomaco_ (Know, Signors, that a little drop of wine is good for the
stomach).” St. Paul was of his way of thinking.
J. has been seized with a fury of sketching; he goes every day to
Griente and draws and draws! The old women and the children make much of
him. Yesterday he heard one boy say to another, “It must be very hard to
paint and smoke a pipe at the same time.”
“_Ma ché!_” said the other, “he only does it for bravado!”
The other day he frescoed a lad’s nose with vermilion like a Cherokee
brave’s; since then all the boys in the district torment him for the
ends of his pastels.
This is one of the prosperous provinces of Italy. The town of Como has
silk manufactories, where the best Italian silk stockings are made and
the nicest of the piece silks. There is a feeling of comparative _bien
être_ in all classes which adds much to one’s own comfort. The flood of
travellers that pours through here brings a certain prosperity, though I
incline to think it a specious one. Everybody asks, “What would Italy do
without the tourists?” Perhaps if the people were not so busy making
silly knicknacks to sell to tourists, they would pay more attention to
cultivating their land. Improved agricultural methods are what Italy
needs above all else; she has the finest soil and climate in Europe; she
could supply half the continent with fruit, oil, and wine if she had a
little more common sense! I have seen oranges and lemons rotting under
the trees at Sorrento, and in Calabria I have seen grapes used to enrich
the soil! This is not because the Italians are “lazy”--“lazy Italians!”
there never was a more unjust reproach borne by any people--the Italian
peasants are the hardest-worked people I know. They tug and toil just to
put bread in their mouths; they almost never taste meat. Last Sunday
afternoon at the railroad station in Rome the floor and platform were
covered with sleeping peasants waiting for the train to take them to
their work. Each man carried round his neck seven loaves of coarse bread
strung on a piece of rope, his week’s rations,--dry bread, with a
“finger” of wine to moisten it if he is lucky! It is evident that they
are willing to work, and yet Italy is miserably poor! Somebody is
blundering somewhere, I am too rank an outsider to know who. Some
foreign writers lay every ill Italy endures to the heavy taxes the
government has imposed. I am not so sure that what Italy has got in the
last quarter century is not worth the price she has paid for it. There
are abuses, steals, a bureaucracy, and a prodigious megalomania (swelled
head), but the people are learning to read and write!
That reminds me of what I heard Sir William Vernon Harcourt say at a
luncheon in Rome. Some one asked where he was staying. “I am stopping at
the Hotel Royal opposite to the Ministry of Finance,” he said. “Strange
that Italy should have the largest finance building in the world and the
smallest finances!” The folly of putting up these mammoth public
buildings, these dreadful monuments to Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi,
Cavour, and the other great men who brought about the _Risorgimento_, is
appalling; but Italy is realizing her mistakes; she is learning at an
astonishing rate.
WOERISHOVEN, BAVARIA, September 20, 1894.
I have been banished by bronchitis from the Eden, Cadenabbia, and have
come to Father Kneipp’s Water-Cure, near Munich, although it is a little
late in the season to take the “cure.” It is _de rigueur_ before seeing
Father Kneipp to consult a regular practitioner, who pronounces whether
or no you are a fit subject; people with weak hearts are not allowed to
take the cure. I paid a small sum, became a member of the Kneipp Verein,
received a blank-book--in which the _medico_ wrote out a diagnosis--and
a ticket stating the hour of my appointment with “the _Pfarrer_,” as
Father Kneipp is called. I arrived a little before time at an immense
barrack of a place like the waiting-room at a railroad station. The door
to the consulting-room was guarded by two functionaries who read aloud
our numbers as our turn came, looking carefully at the tickets before
letting any one enter.
“_Einundzwanzig!_” (twenty-one), and I passed into the long room and
stood before Father Kneipp, like a prisoner at the bar. He is one of the
most powerful-looking men I have ever seen; his eyes pierced me through
and through. I handed him the book with the diagnosis. He read it,
grunted, ruminated, bored me with a second auger glance, then dictated
my course of treatment to one of his secretaries, a callow _cherico_ who
sat beside him at a long table with three or four other men.
I found out afterwards that they were young doctors studying his
methods. Father Kneipp spoke to me rather sharply, going directly to the
point. Never mind what he said, I deserved it, I shall not forget it,
and, like Dr. Johnson, “I think to mend!” “Come again in a fortnight,”
he said suddenly. The consultation was over and I was ushered out. I had
not reached the door when “_Zweiundzwanzig_,” a crippled boy, a far more
interesting case than mine, came in.
Father Kneipp dislikes women, ladies especially, me in particular,
because no one had warned me not to wear gloves, a veil, and a good
bonnet. If I had put an old shawl over my head and looked generally
forlorn, he would have been kinder. Isn’t that dear? His benevolence is
of the aggressive type; he grudges time spent on rich people,--is only
reconciled to them, in fact, because they offer up gifts in return for
health, and in this way a great sanitarium has grown up where the prince
is nearly as well treated as the peasant--but it is the peasant folk,
his own people, that the _Pfarrer_ loves! This is the only truly
democratic community I have ever lived in,--a pure democracy governed by
a benevolent despot! The despot is past seventy years old; he has an
aldermanic figure, a rough peasant head, and extraordinary bristling
white eyebrows, standing out a good two inches from his pent-house
brows. His coloring is like an old English country squire’s,--brick-red
skin, bright blue eyes, and silver hair. He is a prelate; so his rusty
black cassock is piped with purple silk, and he wears a tiny purple
skull-cap. His two inseparables were with him, a long black cigar and a
white Spitz dog....
* * * * *
The fortnight is almost up, the cough gone, the vitality come. Yesterday
I went to hear one of the Father’s health talks in the big, open hall,
free to all. Good, practical common sense was what he gave us, nothing
new or startling,--just the wholesome advice of a very wise old man.
Enthusiasm and common sense are his weapons. After it was over we waited
to see him come out. A group of bores hung on to him; one sentimentalist
caught his hand and tried to kiss it, which so enraged the _Pfarrer_
that he gave the fellow a slap!
Such people! If you could only hear them testify to their cures, like
lepers and the halt in the Bible! Tell Anagnos that two blind men say
they have been cured here this summer. The applications were general,
not local, save bathing the eyes in warm straw water. Sounds simple,
doesn’t it? One had been blind four years, the other longer. Atrophy of
the nerves of the eye was the trouble in both cases. The younger man was
going away in despair after a few weeks’ treatment. He drove to the
station, got into the train; _suddenly he saw something moving_, cars
going in the other direction! He got out again, returned to Woerishoven,
persevered with the treatment, and now sees!
A South African couple sit at my table; they have come all the way from
Cape Town. For seventeen long years the husband suffered with nervous
dyspepsia, whatever that may be. One summer at Woerishoven has cured
him. Does this sound like Paine’s Celery Compound? I learn as much from
the other patients as in any other way. Herr Schnell, a German New
Yorker,--a hardware man,--and his wife are my best friends. She first
spoke to me at table.
“Dot caffee is not good for _Ihnen_. _Sie müssen Wasser trinken_.”
“I am here for my throat,” I told her; “I only need hardening; besides,
Father Kneipp drinks coffee.”
“Dot _Pfarrer_ is not _krank_--sick, how you say?”
My dear, she actually sent the coffee away, and forbade the _kellner_
ever to bring it to me again! The Schnells and I patronize the same
fruit-stand, and we walk up and down after meals together, eating grapes
out of brown paper bags. A certain forlorn Pole at our table interests
me; he is called Count Chopski, or some such name. His nerves are
shattered by too much cigarette smoking. Frau Schnell and I came upon
him in the wood the other day, sitting behind a big tree smoking. Frau
Schnell marched up to him, took the cigarette out of his hand, and gave
him a scolding for smoking on the sly. He began to cry!
I am at the best hotel, which is of a simplicity! Big people and little
people all sit down to the half-past-twelve dinner; only royalties
(there are always some of them here) are allowed to keep any state. At
the table next mine a bishop and a ballet-dancer sit side by side; it is
an open joke to all of us, except the bishop, who doesn’t know, and
nobody will tell him,--I call that nice feeling. In all my life I have
never met with such simple kindliness as there is here; it’s a sort of
Kingdom-come place, where everybody feels responsible for everybody
else. Nothing of the am-I-my-brother’s-keeper feeling here! Of course,
it is all _Pfarrer_ Kneipp; the whole atmosphere of place and people is
the expression of a great, ardent heart which beats for sick humanity,
which rages against all shams and cruelties. His spirit is like my
father’s, the atmosphere here more like that of the old Institution for
the Blind in his day than anything I have ever known.
When Sebastian Kneipp was a young student preparing for the priesthood
(he was the son of a poor weaver) his health broke down so completely
that he was obliged to give up his studies. One day in a convent library
he stumbled on a copy of Preissnitz’s book on water-cure. Impressed by
the theory, he persuaded a fellow-student in the same predicament as
himself to join him in putting it into practice. It was midwinter. The
two lads broke the ice from a neighboring stream in which they took
their baths. Heroic treatment, but it saved them; both soon regained
their health. Kneipp finished his course of study, took orders, returned
to his native village of Woerishoven as parish priest, and has remained
here ever since.