was Palestrina’s). The service was celebrated in the gorgeous Cappella
del Coro. It must have been some especial _festa_, for the chapel was
even more magnificent than usual, the priests wore extra fine flowered
brocade robes, the air was bluer and heavier with incense, there were
more candles. The slumbrous canons, in purple gowns and gray
squirrel-skin capes, dozed in their fretted stalls. Over their heads, in
the carved and gilded gallery, stood the choristers, two by two, each
pair holding between them a quaint, black-lettered music book; behind
the choir was the organ, in front, the leader, baton in hand. They all
wore white lace-trimmed cottas over black gowns. Their voices, dominated
by the piercing sweetness of the Pope’s angel, a male soprano, filled
the chapel with an almost overpowering melody, that flowed through the
gilded gates and floated out into the distant aisles and transepts of
the great church.
Wandering about after service, we came upon the tomb of Palestrina, in
the transept near the chapel where his _magnificat_ had rung out so
gloriously.
“The Church has a long memory for its saints, sinners, and
master-workmen. If I thought it would remember me, now, I would take the
vows to-morrow,” somebody said in my ear. It was Patsy.
“Jolly to think,” he went on, “of the old boy who led that choir and
composed that music for ’em--he died, you know, in 1594,--lying here
within the smell of the incense, within the sound of his own harmonics.”
Patsy’s only instrument is the guitar.
“I like incense,” he went on; “the Roman populace smells no sweeter than
in the days Shakespeare wrote about them; but the real value of incense,
of course, lies in its being a germ destroyer, a safeguard to the
priest. In the old days, when people did not know so much about health
as they do now, they used to come to church to give thanks for recovery
from smallpox while still in a state to give it to others.”
Here Helen came up. We had scarcely finished asking her news when Mr.
Z---- joined us.
“Looking at the tomb of Palestrina?” he said. “That reminds me, would
you ladies like to go and see the town from which he took his name? It
is an opportunity, the greatest living authority on polygonal walls is
going with us.”
“I never heard of a polygonal wall,” Helen began. (“You’d not give a
hoot to see one,” murmured Patsy.) “But I would go anywhere for a day in
the country this divine weather, provided the company was good.”
“And the luncheon,” Patsy put in.
Mr. Z---- smiled: “I think the ladies may trust me for that,” he said.
Then he gave Helen and me directions for meeting at the station and left
us.
“Z---- is a silly old gloat, but there is no malice in him,” Patsy said.
“His Antonio is the best cook in Rome. It is part of the law of
compensation that the biggest bores always have the best _chefs_.”
We had perfect weather for the trip to Palestrina. All the women, like
Helen, had come for the day’s outing in the country, the men were grimly
intent upon polygonal walls--all but one--Patsy, the uninvited, who
turned up at the station and said he “would go along to have a try at
the _vino di paese_ and to see if the girls of Palestrina were as pretty
as the girls of Præneste.” As we did not feel responsible for him (he is
a relation of the Z----’s) we were thankful to see his handsome face.
Express trains do not stop at Palestrina, so we had to take a local,
which crawled. One does not mind crawling across the Campagna, in sight
of the trees and tombs of the Via Appia, beside the long lines of brown
aqueducts, broken here and there into picturesque groups of arches. As
we approached the Alban hills we found a hazy scarf of pink gauze spread
about their feet and half way up to their knees; on nearer view this
proved to be fruit trees in blossom.
At the dull little station of Monte Compatri Colonna there was a delay.
Patsy, in search of diversion, tried to get out of the carriage. The
door was locked. He put a long leg out of the window and made as if he
would climb out. Excitement among the peasants on the platform.
Everybody talked at once. Four women and three men rushed to the window.
“_Eccellenza_, for charity’s sake, have patience! The door is capable of
being opened!” urged the vendor of _passa tempi_ (salted melon seeds).
An old woman, with a basket of assorted fruits, threw herself
passionately in the breach.
“For the love of the Madonna, _illustrissimo_, have a care, you will do
yourself an injury. The door opens, I assure you it is true. That
_ignorante_ of a guard. Where has he gone? The _capo stazione_ himself
should interest himself in your _signoria_.”
Patsy put out his head and one arm. The vendor of the straw-covered
flasks of red and white wine joined the group.
“This is a serious affair, _amici miei_,” he said. “Signori, restrain
the gentleman! Between ourselves now, is he mad? If so, my brother, who
is of the _carabinieri_, can easily be summoned.”
Patsy by this time had got one shoulder out and was frantically waving
an arm and a leg. That was too much for the immemorial beggar with the
head and beard of Jove, who for forty years has sat upon that platform
and begged. He laid down his tray of matches and hurried off on one leg
and a crutch to the office of the _capo stazione_. Meanwhile, the guard
came out of the restaurant furtively wiping his moustache. He rushed at
the carriage with his key. Only one person on the platform had
maintained his equilibrium,--the waiter from the restaurant, a man of
the world, continued to walk calmly up and down the platform, offering
his atrocious chiccory brew--he called it coffee--to the other
passengers. He rather superciliously let us alone.
The guard hurried to the window. “I asked the signori before I allowed
myself to attend to my duties at Colonna if any of the illustrious ones
desired to descend. You yourself, excellency, assured me you desired
nothing!” He fitted the key to the door as he spoke.
“Behold, did I not speak the truth?” said the fruit seller; “am I not
right? the door opens.”
Patsy leaned comfortably back in the corner and lighted a cigarette. The
_capo stazione_ arrived, hastily buttoning his gold-laced coat. He
looked daggers at the guard.
“What is wrong? If there has been any inattention it shall be reported.
How is this? One of the travellers obliged to get out of the window,
and now that the door is open nobody alights?”
“That gentleman,” said Patsy, nodding towards Mr. Z----, “wished to see
if he could climb out of the window. Do not trouble yourselves, he is
not mad, merely an original. So sorry you should have been disturbed.”
The _capo_ bowed politely to Patsy, fixed poor Z---- with a freezing
stare, and returned with olympian dignity to that stuffy seat of
authority, his office. The Jove-like beggar, leaning on his crutch, in
his curiosity to see us forgot to beg.
“_Un fiasco di vino!_” said the wine seller, thrusting a flask into the
carriage.
“_Portugalli!_” shrilled the old fruit woman.
“_Caffè due soldi la tazza_ (Coffee two cents a cup)!” cried the waiter.
“_Pronti_ (Ready)!” roared the guard.
“_Taratara!_” screamed the station master’s horn.
“_Partenza!_” and that was the last we saw of Monte Compatri Colonna.
Between Colonna and Palestrina Patsy allowed us to enjoy the view,
really well worth seeing. We had enchanting glimpses of the Alban,
Sabine, and Volscian mountains; the valleys between blazed with
wild-flowers. At the station the party divided, Mr. Z----, the expert
on polygonal walls, and the rest going in the stage, Patsy, Helen, and
ourselves crowding into a _botte_.
“The trouble with those fellows is,” said Patsy, “that they know too
much of one thing and too little of anything else. You’d be talked to
death and sick of the subject if I had not come along to save your
lives.”
“I _should_ like to know what we have come to see,” I feebly protested.
“Nonsense,” said Helen, “they have crammed it all out of books, you can
cram a great deal better afterwards. It takes the edge off to read too
much about a thing before you see it. Don’t read the guide-book till you
have seen the thing and got your own impression neat.”
The road from the station leads up a sharp incline, winding through the
steep and dirty streets of Palestrina, a hillside town, which stands
upon the ruins of the Colonna’s mediæval stronghold, which again stands
upon the ancient town of Præneste, extolled by the Latin poets. That
Præneste, with its magnificent Temple of Fortune, the resort of the
fashionable Romans of the days of Mæcenas, seems modern compared to the
ancient Præneste, whose ruins are found beneath it, and whose _arx_ was
the spot chosen for the picnic luncheon. It was a stiff climb. We left
the carriage at Castel San Pietro and scrambled to the summit where that
magnificent and indomitable race--Castellane calls them the
_Italiotti_--built their citadel. Here we saw the ruins of the polygonal
(we used to call them cyclopean) walls. Astonishing structures, making
the walls of the three later periods--the latest, exquisite brick-work
of the Empire--seem by comparison like the work of children! The huge
rocks are fitted together without cement of any sort, and in some places
the walls look as solid as the day they were built, long before Rome
was! To make room for our table-cloth, an old shepherd obligingly drove
his sheep a little lower down the mountain. He was knitting stockings
for one of his grandchildren; he has four to bring up. Their mother is
dead, their father--he went years ago to Buenos Ayres--has ceased to
write or to send them money.
A pretty girl spinning with a distaff asked shyly if she could help us.
Patsy sent her for water while he set the table.
“We could not have her handling the food, you know,” he said; “but she
is so decorative that we want to look at her while we eat and drink.
Antonio has outdone himself (he knew I was coming), this ham really has
been boiled in _vino di Montefiascone_, as I suggested. The girls of
Palestrina _are_ as handsome as the girls of Præneste.” Armida, our
girl, had come back, a dripping _conca_ poised on her head.
“How do you know so much about the girls of Præneste?” I asked.
“Go to the Kircheriano Museum and look at the Ficoronian Cista and you
will know as much as I do,” Patsy confessed. “It was found near here in
the necropolis. It is a green bronze toilet casket, with the most
corking pictures from the story of the Argonauts engraved upon it you
ever saw! Pollux has just licked Amycus, you know, for interfering with
the Greeks preempting the spring of water, and tied him up to a tree, as
he deserved. Then you have the Greeks drinking out of the spring. In the
harbor lies the good ship Argo; on shore you see Jason and Hercules, one
of the Argonauts in the attitude of boxing, a fat old Silenus mimicking
him. Female beauty is represented by Athena and Niké, who seem to be
offering a victor’s crown to the lucky Pollux. It’s up to date, I can
tell you. The girls are no prettier than Armida there; but find me the
man who can ‘do’ her like the fellow who engraved that Cista, and I will
pay him to make her portrait!”
“How long ago was the casket made?” Helen asked.
“If you must have a date, 700 B.C. is as good as another. Heigh ho! The
world’s grown lazy! All this talk about modern energy makes me tired!
Where’s the energy in any race on earth to-day to build an _arx_ like
this? to live on the top of a steep hill like this? to trundle itself
and its chattels up and down? Our civilization compared to Præneste’s is
barbarism by every standard I know.”
“You don’t know much,” said Helen. “_I_ know you have waited too long
for your luncheon. Your views will improve directly.”
As we ate our luncheon, Armida awkwardly weaving a garland of oak leaves
after a pattern Patsy made her, watched us with shy, hungry eyes. She
and I exchanged glances (not a word was spoken) which said,--
“Signora, I have rarely tasted white bread--never such a _pasticcio_ as
the _signorino_ is giving to the shepherd’s dog!”
“_Figlia mia_, all that remains of the feast shall be for you and the
shepherd; you will divide with him?”
“_Stia sicura_ (Rest assured)!” said Armida’s honest eyes.
There was wine in an amphora--how had Patsy managed it?--he poured the
first glass on the ground in libation.
Looking at Armida and raising his glass, “_Alle belle ragaze di
Palestrina!_” he said. The shepherd’s dog sniffed the spilt wine
scornfully.
“_Tutti gli Inglesi sono matti!_ (The English are all mad)!” muttered
the shepherd.
PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, 1899.
June in Italy is heaven. The weather is delicious. Life is pleasant and
calm. J. has found a small American ice-chest, the only one in Rome; we
are as proud as peacocks about it; Pompilia shows it off as if it were
the great kohinoor. It is an economy in ice, which has only lately been
introduced, and is fabulously dear. Nena fetches a tiny slab of
artificial ice every afternoon, it is wrapped in thick felt, put into
the American ice-chest, where it keeps the milk and wine cool. Green
nuts are part of the
[Illustration: _The Lady K._
From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson]
[Illustration: Copyright, 1900, by John Elliott. From a Copley Print.
Copyright, 1901, by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston.]
summer bill of fare, fresh filberts in their jackets, green almonds and
English walnuts as much nicer fresh than dried as fresh figs are better
than dry, or grapes than raisins.
Ignazio, our gardener, handsome, sympathetic, with a timid laugh, a
hesitating manner, a real passion for his calling, was recommended to us
as knowing more about roses than any man in Rome. The burthen of caring
for our beloved flowers had become too great. The improvement since the
expert took hold and properly grafted our roses is astonishing. Ignazio
has to be restrained from quite ruining us. To him the natural order
would be to spend the greater part of one’s income upon one’s flowers--I
am not so sure he is not right! For weeks he has been talking about a
new rare flower--just the thing for the terrace--whose name he could not
remember. When I asked him he took off his old cap, rubbed his head in a
puzzled way, and complained that the English names were “too difficult.”
I caught his enthusiasm, ordered some of these rare exotics, though the
price was high. To-day arrived six fine specimens of the wild American
purple aster, which overruns the fields and roadsides at home!
Signor Giacomo Boni, the architect in charge of the public buildings of
ancient Rome, has a rival terrace on the roof of his house: we went to
see his Japanese lilies the other day. Fancy, he has a cherry tree with
ripe cherries on it, a peach tree with peaches, a tame starling in a
cage, and quite the most wonderful collection of plants and flowers I
ever saw in so small a space. Signor Boni has planted on the Palatine,
in the Forum, and in the Baths of Caracalla, the flowers and shrubs
mentioned in the classics as growing in those places. The good work is
beginning to tell already; now there are roses and fleur-de-lis growing
in the Forum. The vandalism which stripped the Colosseum of its glorious
robe of flowered green and exposed its gaunt skeleton to view, is at an
end, but the havoc it wrought is irreparable--at least in my lifetime.
Fancy, there were five hundred different varieties of wild-flowers
growing on that splendid old ruin. Many of these are unknown in other
parts of Europe and are supposed to have sprung from seeds that were
mixed in the various kinds of fodder imported from Africa to feed the
wild beasts which fought in the old blood-soaked arena.
PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, August 3, 1899.
It was too hot for sleep last night, a rare thing in Rome. At half-past
four this morning, when I went out on the terrace to water the plants,
the smooth red tiles were still warm to bare feet. The Piazza of St.
Peter’s was a sea of fog, out of which loomed the lantern of Angelo’s
dome; no other part of the great church was visible. A white mist from
the Tiber rose like a wall between us and Mt. Soracte; the river and the
mountain Horace loved are still the dearest things in the wide view of
the Roman landscape. When the plants had been watered it was half-past
five, just the right time for bicycling, so we set out. At this hour few
people are about, save the drivers of the heavy wains of hay--drawn by
big, soft-eyed gray oxen with magnificent branching horns. These wagons
of fragrant hay are not allowed in the streets after eight o’clock in
the morning. Though the Forum was reached before six, Signor Boni and
his aids were already hard at work. Swarms of men, like so many busy
ants, were passing to and from the excavations, wheeling barrows full of
earth, returning a little later with empty barrows.
“Where do you put the rubbish that you take out?” I asked. The _capo_
smiled indulgently. “Every particle of the earth of the Forum is
sacred,” he said. “We skim it off carefully in layers, keeping each
layer quite separate from the others. Then we sift it layer by layer,
sort whatever it contains, examine each bit of broken glass, metal,
pottery, and, where it is possible, piece the fragments together.”
In a sacrificial layer, composed chiefly of the ashes and bones of
victims offered at the altars of the gods, the _capo_ lately found the
jaw bones of several large dogs. These did not properly belong here,
among the bones of beeves, sheep, and goats, the regulation sacrificial
animals. The layer in which they were found proved to be of the time of
Marcellus. Now, what were the bones of these big dogs doing there?
One dark night--it was in the days of Marcellus--the Goths descended for
the first time upon Rome, the citadel came within an ace of being
taken--would have been, but for the cackling of the silly geese which
roused the sleeping guards. The silly geese became sacred geese, and the
faithless watch-dogs, who had failed to bark and give the alarm, were
slaughtered at the altar,--and that is how the big canine jaw bones turn
up to-day in the sacrificial layer of Marcellus! The _capo’s_ dreamy
blue eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, glowed with an inner light as he
unfolded this theory. Imagination, you see, is as important to the
successful archæologist as it is to any other discoverer. He must have
other things as well--a thorough knowledge of the classics, for
instance. Did not Mme. Schlieman learn the whole of Homer by heart, to
aid her husband in his search for the tomb of Agamemnon?
If in reading Tacitus or Livy the _capo_ finds mention of a missing
building or statue, he goes and looks for it in the place where
according to the historians it ought to be--and where, nine times out of
ten, he finds it! While he talked to us his eyes never left the skilful
hands of a workman patiently matching together pieces of brown
terra-cotta from a large pile of shards.
“If we could only make up one complete tile!” he sighed.
We were in the temporary museum where the latest “finds” of the Forum
are kept. The man at the next table was putting together a really
beautiful vessel of dark-blue glass. It might have been the Myrrhene
goblet of Petronius!
“The tiles are so ugly, so monotonous--why should you care? I could
understand, now, if a piece of that enchanting blue glass were missing!”
I said.
“The cup is only a cup,--beautiful if you will,--but what does it teach
us? nothing new. If we could find a whole tile, now, it would fix the
date of a building we are in doubt about.”
Scientific methods, you see; even in Rome we cannot escape them! Then we
went and looked at the spot where the Jewish citizens of Rome piously
burned the body of Julius Cæsar, and at what remains of the house where
Cæsar lived, a corner of the dining-room, with the white mosaic
pavement, and a piece of wall painted with a decoration of fruit,
flowers, green trees, and a pointed bamboo trellis, in the same style as
the Villa Livia, built by the widow of Augustus, who, perhaps, had
admired Aunt Calpurnia’s dining-room, and when her time came to build
imitated it!
In the house of the Vestal Virgins we saw some fine pavements lately
uncovered. Vesta is by far the most interesting of the Roman
divinities. Is there a shrine to her at Radcliffe? There should be; we
owe Rome the “higher education,” as we owe her the law we live by, the
army we conquer by. Close to the Temple of Vesta we saw the place where
earthquakes were foretold by the simplest contrivance. On a white marble
platform finely adjusted weights were placed so as to oscillate with the
first, otherwise imperceptible, tremors of the earth; in this way the
knowing ones were enabled to foretell the earthquakes to the populace.
Not far from here is the point where lightning once struck, making a
hole ever after held sacred. It was turned into a sacred well, wherein
jewels, cups, and other precious offerings were thrown by the devout or
the superstitious. Both these shrines are very near the Temple of Vesta.
Was it by chance that the fanes of the three things primitive man fears
most, fire, earthquake, and lightning, should be so near together? The
_capo_ thinks not.
“Now come and see the Republican well I have just found,” he said,
leading the way to a deep pit in the form of an _amphora_, with smooth
rounded sides lined with cement.
“Notice the work they did in the days of the Republic; it is far better
than the work of the Empire. See this cement, as perfect as the day it
was laid.”
“What did you find in this well?” we asked.
“Come and see. Here are a great number of styluses--the Roman pens used
for writing on wax tablets” (do you suppose some poor devil of a
literary man threw them in in a moment of despair?) “and the entire
contents of a Republican butcher’s shop. See, there is the great
cleaver, these are the knives--even the wooden handles are intact. These
round stones are the weights, here is the thigh bone of the last ox
slaughtered before the shop came to grief, and here--take it carefully,
it is of terra-cotta--is the butcher’s lamp. Do you make out the design?
It is in the shape of an inflated oxhide.”
I never saw the like of that lamp! Of all the precious things the _capo_
has unearthed, I most covet the Republican butcher’s squat little
earthenware lamp with the neck of the skin pursed together to hold the
wick.
“Now come and look at the true Via Sacra; you see it lies several feet
below the road we used to call the Sacred Way. Do you observe how much
finer this early pavement is than the later paving? But wait, I shall
show you better yet,--the earlier the work, the better the
workmanship.”
As we stood on the large squares of smooth gray stone, a cloud veiled
the hot August sun, a shadow crossed the pavement. Might it not have
been just here that Horace tacked to avoid meeting that bore Crispinus?
When midsummer comes and everybody goes away, and there remains only
Rome, ourselves, and the mighty ghosts,--these grow so real that I
wonder if I dreamed the tea-party-picnicking Rome of winter and spring.
“Here is the Basilica Emilia. We should not have been able to excavate
this if it had not been for Mr. St. Clair Baddeley, who raised the money
in England to buy the land and indemnify the owners of the houses we
were obliged to pull down. Look at these two delightful bas-reliefs;
have you ever seen such a treatment of the acanthus?”
The reliefs are the most florid--one might almost say
“baroque”--acanthus designs I have ever seen. In one the flower in the
centre of the “curly cue” ends in a prancing horse; the other terminates
in some apochryphal beast, like a dragon.
“Wait, wait till I make a copy of this adorable white and green
pavement,” I cried. It was a geometrical design in Emilia’s Basilica. A
design that I have never seen either in Egypt or Greece.
“For that you will not need me,” said the _capo_; “it is growing late
and hot; now for the Lapis Niger!” Like a child he had kept the best of
the feast for the last. As we went, I picked up a small piece of
iridescent glass, opal, rose, and pearl, a bit of heaven’s rainbow dug
from the “sacred earth.”
“What might this have been?” I asked.
“That we shall see, perhaps part of a tear bottle, perhaps a fragment of
the vessel in which the vestals daily brought lustral water for the
altars from the Fountain of Egeria!” Was he laughing at me?