Pietro.
“_Ah! Madonna dei setti dolori!_” Pietro, swearing horribly, fell upon
his knees, clasped his hands, invoked every holy thing he knew.
“_Santa Maria, eccomi vindicato! Ah ladrone! Ah birborne_ (Behold me
vindicated. O thief! O villain)!”
“Caw, Caw!” screamed Checca, pecking at Pietro’s legs. He was at first
ready to wring her neck; then he grew lachrymose and tender.
“_Ah! Ah! Pietro sfortunato! Guardi, Signora mia_, was I not born
unlucky? First I am sent to prison on the false oath of a rascally man.
_Adesso, anche la gazza m’inganna, mi perseguita_, (Now even the jackdaw
deceives me, persecutes me)!”
Plumped down on his knees there in the middle of the studio, poor Pietro
began to cry like a baby. It ended in his getting the ten-franc note as
a _mancia_, and Checca’s being so stuffed with good things that she is
in a state of coma and on the verge of apoplexy. Truth really is
stranger than fiction. I never before had much faith in the Jackdaw of
Rheims.
June 10, 1900.
As we sat at dinner last night a messenger from the Casa Reale was
announced. J. went out to receive him in person. He had brought a letter
from a great personage at court to say that the Queen would come to the
studio the next day to see J.’s decoration for the Boston Public
Library. That was rather short notice for such an honor, but we did all
we could to make the old barrack of a studio fit to receive the dear and
lovely lady. We were up at dawn. Pietro had already turned the hose on
the brick paved floors and stone steps. The first thing in the morning
we were warned by the police that no one, not even our servants, must
know of the visit beforehand, so we gave it out that Lord Curry, the
British Ambassador, was coming to the studio, which was quite true. J.
had called up the Embassy, and Lord Curry had promised, by telephone, to
be on hand.
We telephoned the Signora Villegas asking if she could spare Lorenzo,
who turned up at eleven with, I should think, every flower the Villino
garden contained. The bouquet for the Queen I made myself of flowers
from the terrace, gardenias, passion flowers, and maidenhair fern. We
sent over to the studio from the house the fine old Portuguese leather
armchair in which my mother sat to Villegas for her portraits some rugs,
and the gold screens Isabel and Larz brought us from Japan.
You never saw a more squalid street than the Borgo Sant’ Angelo. I very
much doubt if the Queen had ever entered so queer a door as the little
antique green studio door with the modern Yale lock. The studio is up
two long flights of stairs, with an iron railing, quite like a prison
stair. If we had been given longer notice we could have done more to
make things presentable; but that was a mere detail. The main thing was
that the afternoon was fine, the light perfect. The days here are so
much longer than at home that the hour named, six o’clock, was the very
best in the twenty-four to see the pictures. We had never really
believed that the Queen would come to the studio, though we had heard of
her interest in seeing the work. There is a sort of tradition that the
royal family very rarely come over to the Borgo, out of regard for the
feelings of the Pope. During the day one and another secret service man
in plain clothes arrived in the Borgo on their bicycles, and lounged
about the street corners or in the cafés. At five several _guardie_ in
uniform arrived. We went over to the studio at half-past five in order
to be in time to receive Lord Curry. J. went by the Borgo Nuovo and
stopped at the front of the Palazzo Giraud Torlonia (the studio, you
remember, is in the rear of the palace, with an entrance on the back
street, Borgo Sant’ Angelo) to ask the proud young porter of the
Torlonia to open the studio door, and generally stand by us. The
Haywards, who live on the _piano nobile_, are the swells of the Borgo;
they pay the proud young porter his wages, and they are in close
relation with the Vatican. Fortunately they were out of town and never
knew that we borrowed their porter to open the door to the Queen.
“The _Ambasciatore Inglese_ and other _personnaggi_ of importance are to
visit my studio presently; do me the favor to open the door for them,”
said J.
“_Volontiere, Signore mio, un momento_; I will change my coat and be
with you instantly!”
The nearest way from the front of the Torlonia to the back is by the
Vicolo dell’ Erba, a narrow little alley which runs beside the palace.
We never use it--’t is so evil smelling, badly paved, and generally
poverty stricken--unless we are in a great hurry. J. being pressed for
time naturally took the _vicolo_. He happened to be wearing a red
cravat,--in Italy, especially in Rome, supposed to be the badge of the
anarchists and avoided by the Romans, and, one would fancy, by the
anarchists accordingly. Of course all the _guardie_ of our quarter know
the _pittore Inglese_ by sight, but the extra ones detailed for the day
did not. Hurrying through the _vicolo_, J. ran round the corner into
the Borgo Sant’ Angelo, and into the arms of one of these extraneous
_guardie_, ordered to be on the lookout for suspicious characters. His
eye caught the red cravat.
“_Scusi, Signore_; where might you be going in such a hurry?”
“I am going to No. 125, Borgo Sant’ Angelo.”
“You have business of importance there, or you would not be in so much
haste?”
“Yes; I am late for an appointment.”
“With whom?”
“That is a private matter and one which does not concern----”
At this hectic moment the proud young porter came hurrying along the
_vicolo_, buttoning his gold-laced coat as he ran. He took in the
situation at a glance, and with the exquisite tact of his people went
bail for the _pittore Inglese_ without seeming to do so.
“Is there anything I can do for you in the studio, Signore, before their
excellencies arrive?” he asked.
“You know this gentleman?” demanded the _guardia_ suspiciously.
“Know him! I have known him all my life! It is the gentleman who
occupies the studio in the rear of the palace.”
“A thousand pardons, Signore,” said the _guardia_, with a magnificent
military salute. J. had to thank the porter for not having been detained
as “a suspicious person” during the time of the Queen’s visit to his
studio.
A minute or two before the appointed hour we all went down into the
vestibule. There was an odd hushed feeling in the street: a watering
cart had just passed, the square gray cobble-stones were still wet, the
air moist. Pietro had found time to pull up the weeds and grass from the
pavement (worn into ruts by centuries of cart-wheels) in front of our
door, and to clear away the bits of water-melon rind which the boys of
the Borgo use as roller skates, in a game that I believe is indigenous
to our quarter. Just as the bells of the Castle Sant’ Angelo were
ringing six, we heard the jingling of chains and the sound of tramping
horses. We were all on the sidewalk as the carriage with the scarlet
liveries drew up before the studio. The proud young porter, his hand on
the knob of the studio door, made the most sumptuous bow as the footman
opened the door of the landeau. Lord Curry handed out the Queen,
[Illustration: _Dante_
From a pastel drawing in the Collection of Mrs. David Kimball]
[Illustration: From a Copley Print. Copyright, 1899, by Curtis &
Cameron, Publishers, Boston.]
presented J., then gave her his arm and led her up the dreadful long
stair. Her lady in waiting, the Duchess Massimo, and the gentleman of
the court in attendance, followed, looking aghast and rather scornful at
the queer steps; but the royal lady never flinched; she walked up the
stairway with as gay and light a step as if she were treading the red
carpet of the Quirinale. Once in the studio one lost sight of the royal
personage in the _connoisseur_, the lover and patron of art. It is no
wonder that the artists look upon her as their friend. To her art is one
of the serious concerns of life, one of the matters which it is her duty
as a sovereign, as the mother of her people, to foster by every means in
her power.
She looked at the decoration from every point of view, asked many
questions about its destination. She knew of the Boston Public Library,
and said many pleasant things of it, and of J.’s ceiling for it. She
liked the funny old studio, with its big fireplace, its enormous window,
and explored it with the fresh curiosity of a young girl. She asked what
this and what that picture was, insisted on being shown canvases that
stood with their faces to the wall. J.’s drawing of Dante and the death
mask from which it was made interested her deeply; she is evidently a
student of the divine poet. The portrait of the Duke of Cambridge which
J. made last spring was standing on an easel. She laughed heartily when
she saw it, and said, “It is so exactly like the old man that it makes
me laugh.”
They stayed half an hour. Part of that time the Queen sat in the old
Portuguese leather chair which our own dear mother queen always sat in
when she was with us. As they went away, the Duchess Massimo said to me,
“I assure you the Queen has been much interested and much pleased.”
We all went down to the carriage; the Borgo was one compact mass of
people. We watched the carriage drive away, caught the sweet parting
smile of our lovely visitor, and then went back to the studio to talk it
all over. In a few minutes two of our best friends turned up. They had
come over by chance to have tea at the studio, and had received quite a
sensation at seeing the royal carriage with the scarlet liveries
standing before the shabby old green door and the Borgo crammed with the
Roman populace.
July 16, 1900.
Saturday evening as we sat at dinner another messenger from the Casa
Reale was announced. He brought a letter from the Countess Villamarina,
the Queen’s maid of honor, to J., in which she begged to send him, in
the name of her “august sovereign,” the accompanying jewel for his wife,
in memory of her visit to the studio. The jewel is a medallion of dark
blue enamel, with M., the Queen’s initial, in diamonds, with a royal
crown above it. On the reverse are the arms of Savoy, the red cross on
the white field, the whole surrounded by a hoop of diamonds hanging from
a bar of diamonds, set as a brooch, and very elegant.
J. says that we cannot afford to stay in the Borgo if we remain in Rome,
we must move to a new quarter. Ever since the Queen’s visit, the
_gobbo_, our favorite cabby, has called him Signor Marchese, and expects
a larger _mancia_ than he can afford to give.
XIV
STRAWBERRIES OF NEMI
LAKE OF NEMI, July 8, 1900.
The _fruttajola_ of the Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina, and the waiter of
the Café di Roma are responsible for our coming to Nemi. I like to
linger chaffering in the _fruttajola’s_ shop (at this season it smells
of strawberries and apricots) not only because she has the best fruit in
Rome but because she has three of the prettiest daughters--the youngest
looks as the Fornarina, the baker’s daughter beloved of Raphael, might
have looked. When the _fruttajola_ was young she must have been even
handsomer than her daughters, though their cheeks seem like duplicates
of the peaches and nectarines they handle so daintily; she has an
intensity of expression, a look of power that none of her girls have.
“You tell me these strawberries are from Nemi,” I said; “how is that
possible? For the past month you have sold me strawberries from Nemi,
always from Nemi! All over Rome I see the strawberries of Nemi
advertised. Is it likely now that a little town like Nemi can supply
such a great city as Rome with strawberries all these many weeks?”
You see I remembered what the Tuscan wine grower said to us about the
wine of Chianti. The _fruttajola_ tossed her handsome head. “Signora,
you have but to see Nemi to understand!” she said, laying on the counter
a little blue paper box she had been making and lining with grape leaves
as she talked and which she now filled with purple figs and yellow
_nespole_. That night, wishing to give our servants “an evening off,” we
dined at the Café di Roma. Of course we had the inevitable dishes of
this season, chicken, hunter’s fashion (braised, with green peppers),
salad of tomato and endive, finishing off with strawberries from Nemi,
and of course the cream was too thin. J. asked Leandro, the waiter who
always serves us, if it was not possible to get better cream. He has
often asked the same question before.
“Signore,” said Leandro, “this cream comes from the dairy next door. We
always order the best for you, and this is what they send us. Why do
you not yourself step in and speak to the proprietor? He will take more
pains for you than for me.” Pricked by memories of Jersey cream which
those ravishing strawberries evoked, J. sought the _padrone_ of the
dairy.
“Is it not possible to have thicker cream than that you send to the
restaurant?” he asked. The man looked surprised. “The Signore desires
thicker cream? Why, of course, it is possible to have the cream as thick
as he wishes, only have a moment’s patience.” As he spoke the _padrone_
took up a fine hair sieve, put into it a lump of some soft white stuff
which he mashed with a big spoon into a paste; this he passed through
the sieve, every now and then letting a few drops fall out of the spoon
to show how thick the cream had become.
“Is that thick enough, Signore?” he finally asked.
“Quite thick enough, thank you,” said poor J. grimly. “Will you do me
the favor of telling me what you use to thicken the cream?”
“But surely! Various things are used; the best is this that you see, the
brains of a young calf nicely boiled.”
When J. came back to the restaurant he said that, on the whole, he
preferred his strawberries with wine and sugar, as the Romans eat them.
The waiter pushed a flask hung on a swivel towards him; J. drowned his
plate in a flood of red Genzano. Isn’t it odd that in Roman restaurants
wine is sold by weight? Leandro weighed the flask before putting it on
the table, and again when he took it off after dinner.
In order to make conversation I said, “Leandro, do you know where these
strawberries really come from?”
“Do I know? They are from my own town, it may be from our own land! the
proprietor of this restaurant buys oil, fruit, and wine of my uncle, who
lives at Nemi. I myself have a little property at Nemi. The oil the
Signora had of me came from there. Ah! you should see Nemi, you should
eat the strawberries fresh from the vines.”
That settled it; we had been promising ourselves a little Fourth of July
outing somewhere in the country, so the next day we took the train for
Albano and drove over to Nemi, where we are decently settled at the
Trattoria Desanctis.
Nemi is an enchanting little mediæval town perched high above the edge
of the Lake of Nemi called by the ancients the Mirror of Diana. Sitting
in the terraced garden of the old castle of the Orsini, near our inn,
you look down the steep sides of the crater of an extinct volcano, over
three hundred feet, to the lake, a big sparkling sapphire, three miles
in circumference, lying at the bottom of a green enamelled cup. There is
no soil in the world, the landlord says, quite as rich as this volcanic
soil. Every inch of the land is highly cultivated, and here, _here_ on
the sloping sides of the old volcano grow the wild and the tame
strawberries of Nemi. I trust it is not necessary to tell you that the
wild ones are by far the best. We clambered down a steep path jewelled
with wild flowers to the very edge of Diana’s mirror. I dipped my hand
in the clear cold water. It is hard to realize that where this gemlike
lake now sparkles in the sunlight there was once a pit of fire, that the
sides where the pleasant strawberries grow were once coated with a
velvet bloom of sulphur like the crater of Vesuvius. We turned and
looked up the slope; a breeze ruffled the green leaves and exposed the
vines beneath, laden with myriads of strawberries, red as rubies. As the
_fruttajola_ foretold, I now understand how the little town of Nemi
supplies the big city of Rome with strawberries.
[Illustration: _The Palace of the Orsini at Nemi_
From a photograph]
[Illustration]
The lake is more than one hundred feet deep and is drained by an
artificial emissarium--ancient Roman, of course. The peasants say that
the lake has no bottom. As there is a sort of whirlpool in the middle
from the suction of the water into the emissarium, it is considered
unsafe for boating or bathing. There is a story of a mad Englishman who
tried to swim across and was never seen again, his body having been
sucked down into the bowels of the earth--not a bad way of disposing of
it. A few years ago they found the remains of a Roman state barge at the
bottom of the lake. The bronze ornaments and even part of the wooden
walls were intact. The barge was presumably used as a float in some
imperial pageant of old Rome.
At sunset the women and girls who had been busy all day gathering fruit
began to pass by our inn, bearing vast loads of fragrant strawberries on
their heads. The berries are picked into flat wide baskets with handles,
through which a long stick is passed, joining together the ten or twelve
baskets that constitute a load. As each sun-browned wench trudged past,
our eyes were rejoiced with a superb flare of scarlet, and our
noses--ah! nothing in this world has ever tasted so good as the
strawberries of Nemi smell.
Just where the white highroad, following the line of the old crater,
curves and is hidden by a group of dark ilex trees, the women halted
beside the line of gay painted carts waiting to carry the strawberries
to Rome. We discovered the _carretta_ of Leandro’s uncle, a fine affair
painted blue and yellow, with long shafts and a comfortable seat beneath
a red and white striped awning. Oreste, the driver, a shrewd peasant, in
spite of his loutish, grumpy manner, has a certain family resemblance to
his cousin the waiter, but how contact with the world has sharpened
Leandro’s wits, polished his manners! Oreste and Leandro! Don’t you love
the classic names? They linger here in the country and help to bring
back to you Theocritus and the golden age of Magna Grecia.
“At what hour do you start?” J. asked Oreste.
“At ten o’clock.”
“It must be a very long drive; do you not get dreadfully tired? what
time do you reach Rome?”
Oreste answered my remarks in the order they were put.
“The distance is twenty miles; when I am tired I sleep; with luck I
shall reach the gates of Rome by four o’clock in the morning.”
“Who minds the cart while you sleep?”
“Lupetto here;” he patted the dearest little dog on the seat beside him.
Lupetto looks like a young fox, he has the brightest eyes, the smallest
pointed ears, and a soft furry tan coat clipped like a lion’s.
“As long as Lupetto is quiet and I hear this music,” he touched with his
long carter’s whip the string of bells round the horse’s neck, “I doze
in peace. When the bells stop jingling or Lupetto barks I rouse myself
to find out what is the matter.”
“Have you ever been robbed?”
“That sometimes happens with a load of wine, but with fruit, no.
Everybody knows that I never carry money and that I have a good knife!”
he drew the knife from his boot and ran his thumb along the blade,
testing the sharpness of the edge.
The moon, a golden sickle, hung low in the sky, the big soft stars
seemed nearer to the earth than usual. Lupetto gave an impatient little
bark, the horse stirred uneasily, jingling his bells. The last basket of
strawberries had been loaded on the cart; it was clearly time to be
off. Oreste gathered up his reins and whistled to his horse.
“_Felice notte_ (A happy night).” He grunted the pretty greeting to us
over his shoulder awkwardly. After watching Oreste with his two best
friends, his horse and his dog, start on the long night journey to Rome,
we went back to the castle garden, where our landlord treated us to
anecdotes touching that interesting family, the Orsini.
Everything comes to him who knows how to wait! Ever since we first went
to live at the Palazzo Rusticucci I have longed to climb to the top of
Monte Cavo, the highest of the Alban hills. From our terrace you can see
the front of the old Passionist monastery on its summit glinting white
in the sun. Yesterday the long waiting came to an end and I have seen my
Carcassonne! We reached the summit after a two hours’ walk up the old
Via Triumphalis--the steep paved way along which the Roman generals once
passed to celebrate the military triumphs at the temple of Jupiter
Latiaris, which stood at the top of Monte Cavo. It is a wonderful road;
in some places the old basalt pavement is as good as on the day when it
was laid, some time “before the year one”! Truly a glorious walk, with
sudden splendid vistas over plain and mountains, and cool odorous groves
where we found the wild heartsease, sensitive ethereal flowers, poor
relations of our fat, stall-fed purple and gold terrace pansies. A good
bath of nature, such as we had climbing the flanks of Monte Cavo, makes
man and all his works--even the higher cultivation of flowers--seem a
vain thing. We passed the vast crater of another extinct volcano called
the Camp of Hannibal, who according to local tradition once bivouacked
here. In a few days the garrison will come from Rome for its annual
summer camping out, and Beppino, our fascinating young friend with the
burning brown eyes, will pitch his tent possibly on the very spot where
Hannibal slept.
The temple of Jupiter is gone; its ruins were destroyed by Cardinal
York, one of the last of the Stuarts, in 1777, when he built the
monastery. Was not that trying of him? and so inappropriate too, for
whatever their faults may have been the Stuarts have always been
protectors of the arts. Half of the monastery is now a government
meteorological station, the other half an inn, which concerned us more.
We ordered supper and while waiting for it moused about in the old
garden till we found the little that remains of the temple, a few
fragments of the foundation and some pieces of marble roughly built into
the garden wall. “_Sic transit gloria mundi_,” the temple is gone, the
monastery too; meanwhile remain eggs in black butter for hungry
travellers, and the imperishable beauty of the view. The wise old monks
always chose the most magnificent sites for their monasteries. Good air
and a fine outlook were what they held to be essential; they found the
ideal site, and somehow screwed up the real to fit it. Do you know a
better rule for building one’s house? I do not.
How do you suppose it felt after having been grilled alive on the stones
of Rome for a month, to borrow a shawl from the landlady, in order to
sit out after sunset and enjoy the wonderful prospect? Below, at the
foot of Monte Cavo, lay the lakes of Albano and Nemi, darkly blue where
they were not silver, and far, far off, a pale blue bubble on the
horizon, gleamed the dome of St. Peter’s. If we could have borrowed a
spyglass from the meteorological bureau, I am sure we could have made
out the white columns of our terrace in the shadow of the great dome.
When it grew too cold to sit out, the landlady showed us to a pair of
tiny stone cells. In the watches of the night I knocked on the thick
wall that separated us, “for company,” as some lonely Passionist monk
may have rapped a greeting to a brother in the dark winter nights of
long ago. In spite of the odor of sanctity (stronger here than I have
ever known it), hardness of bed, flabbiness of pillow, in spite of the
keen chill before dawn, that one cool night in the old Passionist
monastery will remain a delicious memory when the hot pavements of a
Roman July are forgotten!
Early the next morning we made the descent by a short cut, a steep path
that brought us out on the highway not far from Nemi.