Produced by Delphine Lettau & the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net This file
was produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.
THE SPIRIT OF ROME
BY
VERNON LEE.
CONTENTS.
Explanatory and Apologetic
I. First Return to Rome
II. A Pontifical Mass at the Sixtine Chapel
III. Second Return to Rome
IV. Ara Coeli
V. Villa Cæsia
VI. The Pantheon
VII. By the Cemetery
SPRING 1895.
I. Villa Livia
II. Colonna Gallery
III. San Saba
IV. S. Paolo Fuori
V. Pineta Torlonia
SPRING 1897.
I. Return at Midnight
II. Villa Madama
III. From Valmontone to Olevano
IV. From Olevano to Subiaco
V. Acqua Marcia
VI. The Sacra Speco
VII. The Valley of the Anio
VIII. Vicovaro
IX. Tor Pignattara
X. Villa Adriana
XI. S. Lorenzo Fuori
XII. On the Alban Hills
XIII. Maundy Thursday
XIV. Good Friday
XV. Asphodels
XVI. Nettuno
XVII. Torre Astura
SPRING 1899.
I. The Walls
II. Palazzo Cenci
III. Monte Cavo
IV. A River God
V. The Pantheon
VI. Santi Quattro Coronati
VII. Beyond Pont Molle
SPRING 1900.
I. Outside the Gates
II. Latter-Day Rome
III. Santa Balbina
IV. The Catacombs
V. The Rione Monti
VI. Amphoræ
VII. Mass at the Lateran
VIII. Stage Illusion
IX. Santa Maria in Cosmedin
X. Inscriptions
XI. Palazzo Orsini, formerly Savelli
SPRING 1901.
I. Quomodo Sedet
II. Villa Falconieri
III. Porta Latina
SPRING 1902.
I. The Rubbish-Heap
II. The Excavations
III. The Meet
IV.
V. Monte Mario
VI. Via Ostiense
VII. Palace Yards
SPRING 1903.
I. Return to Rome
II. Palm Sunday
III. Mondragone
IV. San Saba
V. A Convent
VI. Colonna Gardens
VII. Palo
VIII. Fiumicino
IX. Via Ardeatina
X. San Teodoro
WINTER 1904.
I. Palo
II. A Walk at Dusk
III. Tusculum
IV. St. Peter's
V. The Crypts
VI. San Stefano
VII. Via Latina
SPRING 1905.
I. Rome again
Postscript
THE SPIRIT OF ROME.
LEAVES FROM A DIARY.
DIS MANIBVS SACRVM.
* * * * *
TO ALL THE FRIENDS
LIVING AND DEAD
REAL AND IMAGINARY
MORTAL AND IMMORTAL
WHO HAVE MADE ROME
WHAT IT IS TO ME.
EXPLANATORY AND APOLOGETIC.
I was brought up in Rome, from the age of twelve to that of seventeen,
but did not return there for many years afterwards. I discovered it
anew for myself, while knowing all its sites and its details;
discovered, that is to say, its meaning to my thoughts and feelings.
Hence, in all my impressions, a mixture of familiarity and of
astonishment; a sense, perhaps answering to the reality, that Rome--it
sounds a platitude--is utterly different from everything else, and
that we are therefore in different relations to it.
Probably for this reason I have found it impossible to use up, in what
I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I
cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the
colour of one mood. And whatever may have happened there to my small
person has left no trace in what I have written. What I meet in Rome
is Rome itself. Rome is alive (only the more so for its occasional air
of death), and one is too busy loving, hating, being harassed or
soothed, and ruminating over its contradictions, to remember much of
the pains and joys which mere mortals have given one in its presence.
A similar reason has prevented all attempt to rewrite or alter these
notes. One cannot sit down and attempt a faithful portrait of Rome; at
least I cannot. And the value of these notes to those who love Rome,
or are capable of loving it, is that they express, in however
stammering a manner, what I said to myself about Rome; or, perhaps, if
the phrase is not presumptuous, what Rome, day after day and year
after year, has said to me.
_Autumn_, 1903.
THE SPIRIT OF ROME.
I.
FIRST RETURN TO ROME.
Strange that in the confusion of impressions, not new mainly, but
oddly revived (the same things transposed by time into new keys), my
most vivid impression should be of something so impersonal, so
unimportant, as an antique sarcophagus serving as base to a mediæval
tomb. Impressions? Scarcely. My mind seems like an old blotting-book,
full of fragments of sentences, of words suggesting something, which
refuses to absorb any more ink.
How I had forgotten them, and how well I know them, these little
details out of the past! the darkish sponge-like holes in the
travertine, the reversed capital on the Trinità dei Monti steps, the
caryatides of the Stanza dell' Incendio, the scowl or smirk of the
Emperors and philosophers at the Capitol: a hundred details. I seem to
have been looking at nothing else these fifteen years, during which
they have all been absolutely forgotten.
The very Campagna to-day, driving out beyond Cecilia Metella, little
as I knew it before, seems quite familiar, leaves no impression. Yes,
the fences tied like that with reeds, overtopped by sprouting elders,
the fat weeds on wall and tomb, the undulations of sere green plain,
the white snow-masses floating, as it were, in the blue of the sky;
the straddling bits of aqueduct, the lumps of masonry. Am I utterly
and for ever spoilt for this? Has it given me so much that it can
never give me any more?--that the sight of Arezzo and its towers
beneath the blueness and the snow of Falterona, the green marshy
valley, with the full Tiber issuing from beneath the last Umbrian
Mountains, seemed so much more poignant than all this. Is it possible
that Rome in three days can give me nothing more vivid and heady than
the thought of that sarcophagus, let into the wall of the Ara Coeli,
its satyrs and cupids and grapes and peacocks surmounted by the mosaic
crosses, the mediæval inscriptions of Dominus Pandulphus Sabelli?
ROME, _February_ 1888.
II.
A PONTIFICAL MASS AT THE SIXTINE CHAPEL.
I never knew so many hours pass so pleasantly as in this tribune,
surrounded by those whispering, elbowing, plunging, veiled women in
black, under the wall painted with Perugino's Charge of St. Peter, and
dadoed with imitation Spanish leather, superb gold and blue scrolls of
Rhodian pomegranate pattern and Della Rovere shields with the
oak-tree.
My first impression is of the magnificence of all these costumes, the
Swiss with their halberts, the Knights of Malta, the Chamberlains like
so many Rubenses or Frans Halses, the Prelates and cardinals, each
with his little train of purple priestlets; particularly of the
perfection in wearing these clothes, something analogous to the
brownish depth of the purple, the carnation vividness of the scarlet,
due to all these centuries of tradition. At the same time, an
impression of the utter disconnectedness of it all, the absence of all
spirit or meaning; this magnificence being as the turning out of a great
rag bag of purple and crimson and gold, of superb artistic things all
out of place, useless, patternless, and almost odious: pageantry,
ritual, complicated Palestrina music, crowded Renaissance frescoes,
that huge Last Judgment, that mass of carefully grouped hideous
nudities, brutal, butcher-like, on its harsh blue ground; that ceiling
packed with superb pictures and figures, symmetrical yet at random,
portentous arm and thighs and shoulders hitting one as it were in the
eye. The papal procession, white robes, gold candlesticks, a wizen old
priest swaying, all pale with sea-sickness, above the crowd, above the
halberts and plumes, between the white ostrich fans, and dabbing about
benedictions to the right and left. The shuffle of the people down
onto their knees, and scuffle again onto their feet, the shrill
reading of the Mass, and endless unfinished cadences, overtopped by
unearthly slightly sickening quaverings of the choir; the ceaseless
moving about of all this mass of black backs, veils, cloaks, outlines
of cheek and ear presenting every now and then among the various kinds
of rusty black; no devotion, no gravity, no quiet anywhere, among
these creatures munching chocolates and adjusting opera-glasses.
M.P.'s voice at my ear, now about Longus and Bonghi's paganism, now
about the odiousness of her neighbour who won't let her climb on her
seat, the dreadful grief of not seeing the Cardinal's tails, the
wonderfulness of Christianity having come out of people like the
Apostles (I having turned out Gethsemane in St. Matthew in the Gospel
which she brought, together with a large supply of chocolate and the
Fioretti di S. Francesco), the ugliness of the women, &c. &c. And
meanwhile the fat pink profile perdu, the _toupé_ of grey hair like
powder of a colossal soprano sways to and fro fatuously over the gold
grating above us.
All this vaguely on for a space of time seeming quite indeterminate.
Little by little, however, a change came over things, or my impression
of them. Is it that one's body being well broken, one's mind becomes
more susceptible of homogeneous impressions? I know not. But the
higher light, the incense, fills the space above all those black
women's heads, over the tapers burning yellow on the carved marble
balustrades with the Rovere arms, with a luminous grey vagueness; the
blue background of the _Last Judgment_ grows into a kind of deep
hyacinthine evening sky, on which twist and writhe like fleshy snakes
the group of demons and damned, the naked Christ thundering with His
empty hand among them; the voices moving up and down, round and round
in endless unended cadences, become strange instruments (all sense of
register and vocal cords departing), unearthly harps and bugles and
double basses, rasping often and groaning like a broken-down organ,
above which warbles the hautboy quaver of the sopranos. And the huge
things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms
and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, and hang uneasily on arches, and
strain themselves wearily on brackets, dreary, magnificent, full of
inexplicable feelings all about nothing: the colossal prophetic
creature in green and white over the altar, on the keystone of the
vault, striking out his arms--to pull it all down or prop it all up?
The very creation of the world becoming the creation of chaos, the
Creator scudding away before Himself as He separates the light from
the darkness. Chaos, chaos, and all these things moving, writhing,
making fearful efforts, in a way living, all about nothing and in
nothing, much like those voices grating and quavering endlessly long.
ROME, _March_ 4, 1888.
III.
SECOND RETURN TO ROME.
I feel very much the grandeur of Rome; not in the sense of the heroic
or tragic; but grandeur in the sense of splendid rhetoric. The great
size of most things, the huge pilasters and columns of churches, the
huge stretches of palace, the profusion of water, the stature of the
people, their great beards and heads of hair, their lazy drawl--all
this tends to the grand, the emphatic. It is not a grandeur of effort
and far-fetchedness like that of Jesuit Spain, still less of
achievement and restrained force like that of Tuscany. It is a
splendid wide-mouthed rhetoric; with a meaning certainly, but with no
restriction of things to mere meaning.
The man who has understood Rome best, in this respect, is Piranesi.
His edifices, always immensely too big, his vegetation, extravagantly
too luxurious, are none too much to render Rome. And those pools of
blackness and immense lakes of ink.
ROME, _February_ 20, 1889.
IV.
ARA COELI.
Ended the morning characteristically at Ara Coeli, one of the churches
here I like best, or rather one of the few I like at all. I find that
the pleasure I derive from churches is mainly due to their being the
most _inhabited_ things in the world: inhabited by generation after
generation, each bringing its something grand or paltry like its
feelings, sometimes things stolen from previous generations like the
rites themselves with their Pagan and Hebrew colour; bringing
something, sticking in something, regardless of crowding (as life is
ever regardless of other life): tombs, pictures, silver hearts and
votive pictures of accidents and illnesses, paper flowers, marbled
woodwork pews, hangings. And each generation also wearing something
away, the bricks and marble discs into unevenness, the columns into
polish, effacing with their tread the egotism of the effigies,
reducing them to that mere film, mere outline of rigid feet,
cushioned head and folded hands which is so pious and pathetic.
Such a church as Ara Coeli--like those of Ravenna--has this character
all the more, that its very pillars are stolen from antique edifices,
and show, in their broken flutings or scarred granite, that the
weather also has felt its feelings about them, that they have shared
in the life not merely of this religion or of that, Pagan or
Christian, but in the life of the winds and rains. Such churches as
this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to
Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you,
not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and
wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of
runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry
discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life
of the present filched out of the past, like the columns of the temple
supporting arches painted with seventeenth-century saints.
The organ was playing to the chanting of the monks; and standing
before the chapel of S. Bernardino, where the Christ in the gold
almond and the worshipping and music-making angels of Pinturicchio
rise out of the blue darkness behind the grating, I felt oddly that
music of the organ. The sonorous rasping of the bass tubes, the
somewhat nasal quaver of the vox humana and the hautboy, was actually
the music made by these beribboned Umbrian angels, those long ages
ago, in the gloom of their blue cloudy sky, with the blessing, newly
arisen Christ in the cherub-spangled gold almond among them.
_Holy Saturday._
V.
VILLA CÆSIA.
Several miles along the Via Nomentana, we came to a strange place,
situate in an oasis in the wilderness, or rather in what is already
the beginning of a new country--the mere mounds of tufo turning into
high slopes, and a few trees (it is odd how they immediately give a
soul to this soulless desert), leafless at present, serpentine along
the greener grass. And there, with the russet of an oakwood behind,
rises a square huddle of buildings, a tall brick watch-tower,
battlemented and corbelled in the midst, and a great bay-tree at each
corner. On the tower, immediately below the battlements, is the
inscription, in huge letters, made, I should think, of white majolica
tiles--VILLA CÆSIA. The lettering, besides being broken, is certainly
not modern, and has a sharpness of outline telling of the Renaissance.
What solitary humanist may have put up that inscription, coming out
from Rome to commune in that wilderness, amid the rustle of the
oakwood and of the laurel-trees, and the screaming of magpies and
owls, with the togaed poets and philosophers of the Past?
VI.
THE PANTHEON.
The back of the Pantheon, and its side, as seen from the steps of the
Minerva, the splendid circle of masonry, and arched courses of
rose-coloured brickwork, lichened and silvered over, broken off,
turned into something almost like a natural cliff of rosy limestone;
and at its foot the capitols of magnificent columns, and fragments of
delicate dolphined frieze.
VII.
BY THE CEMETERY.
I am struck again this time by one of the things which on my first
return after so many years got to mean for my mind Rome. The Aventine,
where it slopes down to the Tiber white with fruit blossom, the trees
growing freely in masonry and weeds, against the moist sky; this
ephemeral exquisiteness seeming to mean more here among the centuries
than in any other place.
I was right, I think, when I wrote the other day that it would be
easier for us to face the thought of danger, death, change, here in
Rome than elsewhere. K. told me she felt it when we met at the
Cemetery at her poor old aunt's grave. To die here might seem, one
would think, more like re-entering into the world's outer existence,
returning, as Epictetus has it, _where one is wanted_. The cypresses
of the graveyard, there under the city walls, among the ruins, do not
seem to unite folk with the terrible unity Death, so much as with the
everlasting life of the centuries.
_March_ 4, 1893.
SPRING 1895.
I.
VILLA LIVIA.
Along the road to Civita Castellana, absolutely deserted. The Tiber
between low, interrupted slopes, some covered with longest most
compact green grass, others of brown, unreal tufo, like crumbled
masonry, or hollowed into Signorelli-looking grottoes, with deep
growths of Judas-tree, broom, and scant asphodels; all green and
brown, of such shapes that one wonders whether they also, like so many
seeming boulders scattered in their neighbourhood, are not in reality
masonry, long destroyed towns.
The Tiber, pale fawn colour, flush, among greenness, receiving
delicate little confluents which have come along under lush foliage;
smooth dark shallow streams, stoneless on sandy bottom; one imagines
each fought about in those first Roman days. The country is a great
pale circular greenness under tender melting sky, with pale distant
mountains all round.
How Rome seems to have been isolated from all life save the life
eternal and unchangeable of grass and water, and cattle and larks; to
have been suspended in a sort of void!
Further along, reed hovels (some propped in aqueduct arches), hovels
also in caves, and squalid osterias, into whose side are built
escutcheoned mediæval capitals. A few mounted drovers trot slowly by.
At Prima Porta, in this wilderness, a hillock of grass, descending
into which you find a small chamber painted all round with a deep
hedge of orchard and woodland plants, pomegranates, apples, arbutus,
small pines and spruce firs, all most lovingly and knowingly given,
with birds nesting and pecking, in brilliant enamel like encaustic on
an enamel blue sky.
Coming home in rain, Rome appears with cupola of St. Peter's and
Vatican gardens so disposed as to seem only a colossal sanctuary in
the wilderness.
_May_ 8.
II.
COLONNA GALLERY.
Durer?? Portrait of a red-haired Colonna with the ruins of Rome behind
him; ruins which, with his violent, wild-man-of-the-woods face, he
looks as if he had made.
III.
SAN SABA.
The lovely floor, the minute pieces of marble forming a
far-more-lovely-than possible faded purple and lilac rug. Also, the
pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And
the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and
twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a
cactus.
Looking down into the deserted church through the window of the
loggia, one half expects to see stoled ghosts in the vagueness below.
Outside and opposite, the immense counterforts of the Palatine, and
its terrace and sparse cypresses.
IV.
S. PAOLO FUORI.
The wonderful loveliness of the double colonnade of polished granite
pillars on the polished pale grey marble floor; fantastic, like
transfigured pools and streams of purest water.
_May_ 9.
V.
PINETA TORLONIA.
Asphodels on the banks. As we come up, the peasants drive into the
stable, one by one, a lot of mares with their foals. Along the road a
drove of great long-horned grey oxen; a bull-calf canters among them.
Between us and St. Peter's is a dell full of scrub ilex; walls also,
full of valerian and that grey myrrh-like weed.
From that little height we face a tremendous black storm, against
which all the Sabine and Alban hills flash in the low sunlight, above
the green Campagna pale like a strip of sea.
_May_ 12.
SPRING 1897.
I.
RETURN AT MIDNIGHT.
Driving from the station at midnight, the immensity of everything,
gigantic proportions of silent palaces and closed churches. Passing in
front of the Quirinal, the colossal Dioscuri with their horses, the
fountain flowing down and spurting upwards between them, white under
the electric light, against the deep blue darkness.
Even the incredible huge vulgarity of modern things, advertisements,
yards long at the street corners under the gas, and immense rows of
jerry-built houses, somehow help to make up the impression of Rome as
a theatre of the ages: a gigantic stage, splendidly impressive to eye
and fancy, where Time has strutted and ranted, and ever will continue.
At night particularly one feels the Piranesi grandeur, but also the
Callot picturesqueness which are secondary qualities of Rome. As a
whole the town belongs mainly to the shabby and magnificent
seventeenth century. Those hundreds of architecturally worthless
Jesuit churches are not, as we are apt stupidly to say, absurd or
meaningless, but quite the contrary; admirably suited to their place
and function among ruins and vagueness. The beggars and loafers, the
inconceivable squalor and lousiness, are also, in this sense, in
their rights.
_March_ 24.
II.
VILLA MADAMA.
The great empty, unfinished, hulk, very grand and with delicate
details, stranded like the ark on Ararat on its hillside of brushwood
and market-garden, seems to sum up, in a shape only a little more
splendid than usual, the story told on all sides. For on all sides
there are great mouldering unfinished villas, barrocco casinos, even
fifteenth-century small palaces, deserted among the fields; and
everywhere monumental gateways leading to nothing. Their story is that
of the unceasing enterprise of pope after pope, and cardinal after
cardinal against the inexorable climate of Rome. Each shortlived
generation of old men, come to Rome too late to learn, already
accustomed to order about and to swagger, refusing to see the ruins
left by its predecessors; insisting on having its way with those
malarious hillocks and riversides; only to die like the rest, leaving
another gaunt enclosure behind.
One of the fascinations of Rome is undoubtedly not its murderous
quality as such, but the character of which that seems a part, the
quality of being a living creature, with unbreakable habits and
unanswerable reasons, making it massacre quite quietly, whatever came
in its way.
Rome, as perhaps only Venice, is an organic city, almost a living
being; its _genius loci_ no allegory, but its own real self.
_March._
III.
FROM VALMONTONE TO OLEVANO.
Valmontone, on the railway line to Naples, to which we bicycled back
from Segni--a savage village on a hill, pigs burrowing and fighting at
its foot--and on its skirt a great stained Palazzo Farnese-like
palace.
Crossing the low hills of the wide valley between the Alban and Sabine
chains, magnificent bare mountains appear seated opposite,
crystalline, almost gemlike; and splendid, almost crepuscular, colours
in the valley even at noon: deep greens and purples, the pointed straw
stacks replacing, as black accents, our Tuscan cypresses. Quantities
of blue and white wind-flowers on the banks, and wine-coloured
anemones under the thick ilex-like olives; and all round the splendid
pale-blue chains of jagged and conical mountains. A population of
tattered people and galled horses; much misery; a sort of more savage
Umbrian landscape, and without Umbrian serenity; deserted, deserted
roads. I am writing from the olive yard above the inn; the rugged
little Olevano hanging, almost sliding, down the hillside opposite,
black houses and yellow-lichened roofs.
OLEVANO, _March_ 28.
IV.
FROM OLEVANO TO SUBIACO.
Yesterday afternoon bicycled and walked from Olevano to Subiaco. A
steep mile and a half up to the very crest of the mountains, and then
down some sharp corners and one or two very precipitous zigzags,
letting myself run down; the first time I have had such a sensation, a
sensation largely of fear, partly of joy: a changing view in front, on
the side--steeps of sere woods, great mountains, like jasper or some
other stone that should be veined amethyst, a smell of freshness,
whiffs of violets, at one point a small green lake deep, deep below
(Stagno di Rojate); yet an annihilation of both space and time. It was
better when Ch. Br. and I dismounted and walked down; the road cut out
of the steep wooded hills; on the shady side trickling with water and
delicious with moss, primroses, and violets among the sere chestnuts.
Here and there a cherry-tree in the valley deep below, like a little
puff of smoke. The sweetness of those mountain woods with the great
bare lilac mountains all round!
A sharp zigzag, a swish over a bridge, where as one rather felt than
saw the full green Anio dashing through rocks; and just at sunset we
came upon Subiaco--rising violet, with its great pointing castle
mound, from the green valley of water and budding poplars into a
purple and fiery sky. Then in the dusk through the little town, where
the bells were ringing.
TIVOLI, _March_ 29.
V.
ACQUA MARCIA.
I sha'n't forget, on the long bleak road from Subiaco to Vicovaro, a
violent dry wind against us, veiling all things in dust, a spring near
Spiagge: a wide runnel of water spirting out of the travertine and
running off into clear rills where the mules drink. The water they
collect up here for the Acqua Marcia, whose aqueducts we see about,
old arches and new; water, cold, infinitely pure, exquisite, one might
say almost fragrant. It was such spirts from the rock, as well as the
sight of pure mountain streams, which taught St. Francis his verse
about Suor Acqua. St. Francis must have wandered in these fastnesses
which (totally unlike the country between Segni and Olevano) are very
Umbrian in character. There is a portrait of him, said to be by a
contemporary monk, on a pilaster of one of the subterranean chapels of
the Sacro Speco above Subiaco: blond, wide-eyed, the cowl drawn over
his head.
TIVOLI, _March_ 29.
VI.
THE SACRO SPECO.
The Sacro Speco was a very charming surprise. The series of little
churches and chapels up and down flights of steps, vaulted and painted
in Gothic style, with shrine lamps here and there, were quite open and
empty. We walked into them, or rather into a crooked vestibule
frescoed by some Umbrian, with no sudden transition from the splendid
grove of ilexes, immense branches like beams overhead, from the great
hillside of bluish-grey tufo, with only a few bitter herbs on it. The
convent of the Sacro Speco is a half-fortified little place into which
we could not penetrate. Only a surly monk, found with difficulty
(another entered the chapels with a great bundle of wall-flowers and
irises), took us into the microscopic garden under the convent
battlements hedged with flowering rosemary, where the roses in which
St. Benedict rolled are grown (May roses, only bright leaves as yet)
literally in the shape of a bed or gridiron, row along row.
Though it is not remote-looking, 'tis a splendid place for a hermit's
thoughts: the blue-grey hillside running down into the green rushing
Anio, the great bare bluish mountains all round, far enough to be
visible, a great sense of air and space, for a valley. No vegetation,
save a few olives and scrub oaks and the bitter herbs and euphorbus.
No scented happy Tuscan things. And deep below, the arches of Nero's
Villa--with demons no doubt galore. Those giottesque chapels hold in
them, all hung with lamps, a small tufo grotto, the one down which, as
in Sodoma's fresco, the angels sent baskets of provisions and the
devils made horns at St. Benedict.
ROME, _March_ 30.
VII.
THE VALLEY OF THE ANIO.
There is a nice Cosmati cloister at S. Scolastica, lower on the hill,
an enormous also fortified-looking monastery, but to which also there
is only a mule path. These places are splendidly _meditative_, but
they do not give me the idea of hermitages in the wilderness like that
ruined Abbey of Sassovivo above Foligno. But the Sacro Speco's little
up and down chapels, a miniature Assisi, empty, yet not abandoned on
this sunburnt rock, are very impressive.
I take great pleasure following the Anio, which we first met coming
out of the narrow gorge round the S. Scolastica hill (the other side
behind Nero's ruins is a hill covered with pale green scrub, beech, or
more likely alder), down below Subiaco. In the ever-widening valley it
is an impetuous stream, but not at all a torrent; pale green filling
up a narrow bed between pale green willows, here and there slackening
into pools with delicate green waving plants: a very unexpected and
(to me) inexplicable sight among those mountains which are more arid
than any Tuscan ones, and from which very few tributary streams seem
to descend. (I can remember crossing only one, full and with waving
weeds also.)
The Anio swirls round a beautiful wooded promontory, ilexes and even a
few cypresses, between Spiagge and Vicovaro, making a little church
into a miniature Tivoli Sibilla. One becomes very fond of such a
stream, and it is a great delight to see it in its triumph at Tivoli
racing headlong into the abyss of the big fall, only a spray cloud
revealing it among the thick green; or breaking out into tiny delicate
fountains--garden fountains, you would think--among the ilexes and
grottoes under the little round Temple; a wonderful mixture of
wildness and art, a place, with its high air, its leaping waters and
glimpses of distant plain, such as one would really wish for a sibyl,
and might imagine for Delphi. An enchanted place with its flight and
twitter of birds above the water. I should like to follow the Anio
into the Tiber.
At sunset, had there been one, we went into the Villa d'Este, entering
through the huge deserted courts and grottoed halls of the colossal
palace, surprised to find the enchanted gardens, the terraces and
cypresses descending on the other side, the grey vague plain and
distant mountains--and always the sound of waters. What a solemn
magnificent place! How strange a contrast from the Benedictine
monastery on its arid rocks, to this huge, solemn, pompous palace,
with its plumed gardens and statued hedges, hanging on a hillside too,
but what a different one!
ROME, _March_ 30.
VIII.
VICOVARO.
There was cultivation all down the valley of the Anio, lots of
blossoming cherry-trees; and the peasant-women in stays, and some men
in knee breeches, looked prosperous. Subiaco seeming a sort of S.
Marcello.
Vicovaro is a delightful village above the Anio, with a fine palace of
the Bolognettis, a good many houses with handsome carved windows and
lintels as in Umbria, a nice circular church with fourteenth-century
elaborate statued porch, and a very charming temple portico. Here
also the people looked well-to-do and civilised, on the whole like
Umbrians; whereas on the Olevano side, even on Sunday, they were in
rags and miserably stolid. The little caffè where we eat was lined
with political caricatures.
Places like Vicovaro and still more the many apparently inaccessible
other villages incredibly high up--Cantalupo, Castel Madama, S. Vito,
&c., each with its distinguishing _palazzone_--makes one understand
_what Rome is made of_--the feudal, savage mountains whence, even like
its drinking water which splashes in Bernini fountains, this sixteenth
and seventeenth century Rome has descended. _For Rome is not an Urban
City_; and underneath all the Bernini palaces, we must imagine things
like Palazzo Capranica, with the few mullioned and Gothic windows
picked in its fortress-like walls. How I seem to feel what Rome is
made of--its strange living components in the past!
At Subiaco the streets were strewn, as for a procession, with shredded
petals of violets. All kinds of violets grow on those hills, some
reddish and as big as pansies; and as we swished past, instead of the
dry scent of myrrh and mint of our Tuscan hills, there came a moist
smell of violets from the hedgerows.
ROME, _March_ 31.
IX.
TOR PIGNATTARA.
Drove to-day with Maria outside Porta Maggiore, little changed since
my childhood. Stormy sunshine, the mountains blue, with patches of
violet, like dark rainbow splendours, flashing out with white towns;
cherry blossoms among the reeds, vague gardens with statues and bits
of relief stuck about. Finally the circular domed tomb of Empress
Helena, with a tiny church, a bit of orphanage built into it, and all
round the priest's well-kept garden and orphans' vegetable garden. A
sound of harmonium and girls' hymn issuing out of the ruin, on which
grow against the sky great tufts of fennel, of stuff like London pride
and of budding lentisk. This _is_ Rome!
_March_ 31.
X.
VILLA ADRIANA.
We crossed the Anio twice--first at Ponte Mammolo, where it is
Tiber-coloured, and it tugs at the willows; then before it has been
polluted by the sulphur water of the Acque Albule (though the sulphur
blue water is itself lovely) at a magnificent tower under Tivoli, like
Cecilia Metella. An Anio green, rushing flush as at Subiaco, among
poplars and willows, fields of sprouting reeds.
Villa Adriana: you see it from a distance at the foot of the Tivoli
hills--sloping olive woods and domes of pines. What a place! The
Armida gardens for a Faust-Rinaldo. Antiquity like a _belle au bois
dormant_ in the groves of colossal ilexes, the rows of immense
cypresses, above all, enclosed in the magic of those thick old
silver-coloured huge unpruned olives, of the high flowering grasses.
These vestiges of porticoes and domes and grottoes are not in the
least beautiful architecturally; and every statue, every bit of frieze
has been ruthlessly removed, only the broken slabs of marble, of
wainscot and a few broken mosaics remaining--'tis the only garden near
Rome with not _one_ statue in it! But somehow the divine vegetation,
the divine view of near blue mountains and blue plain seem to
transform all this brick and cement into something beautiful and
precious, to turn the few remaining columns and stalked broken
capitals (all the rest, vases, baths, floors, marbles, gone to the
Vatican) into something exquisite. Perhaps 'tis the very absence of
statues which makes one think what statues must have stood there, and
feel as if they were still present. Anyhow this quite accidental
place, this vanished palace covered over by the olive groves, the box
hedges, cypress avenues and pastures of little trumpery farm
villas--is far more beautiful and wonderful than any of the art-made
Roman gardens, and is, so to speak, their _original_--much as those
Tivoli falls seem the prototype of all the Roman fountains.
It began to rain as we were there, and thundered through the great
halls. Then as it cleared over the mountains, the plain green, vague!
was blotted with black rain, a threatening yellow sky above.
_April_ 10.
XI.
S. LORENZO FUORI.
The fine _ambones_; the very peculiar and beautiful galleries,
with delicate columns, like a triforium on either side of choir
for women; the choir with splendid episcopal seat and pale cipolin
benches--Tadema like--for priests all round.
We must imagine classic antiquity full of this wonderful blond colour
of marbles; arrangements of palest lilac, green, rosy yellow, and a
white shimmer. Colours such as we see on water at sunset, ineffable.
_April_ 10.
XII.
ON THE ALBAN HILLS.
The big olives, pruned square, but of full dense foliage, not
smoke-like, but the colour of old dark silver; the vineyards of pale
criss-cross blond canes on violet ground. The railway goes round Lake
Albano, reflecting blue stormy sky and white cloud balls; a gash when
the current alters shows marvellous hyacinth blue. A fringe of budding
little trees and of great pale asphodels; the smell of them and of
freshness.
Beautiful circular church, cupola silvery, ribbed outside, at Ariccia,
opposite Palazzo Chigi; a great grim palace, stained grey with damp
and time, flanked by four sorts of towers; windows scarce. This solemn
type of sixteenth-century _White Devil of Italy_ palace or villa
recurs in this neighbourhood; places to keep their secrets; some
apparently on the very border of the Campagna, where vines and olives
end. Wonderful woods full of flowers between Albano and Genzano.
The little round Lake of Nemi disappointed me.
Bicycling to Marino, Lake Albano seen from above, waters reflecting
black storm, sere oakwoods of Rocca di Papa stormy purple too, and
round the highest Latin peak, which looks like an altar slab, a great
inky storm, water, hills, sky, all threatening inky green and violet;
and against them, on the hill ridge of stones, the delicate pale pink
chandeliers of the asphodels.
On the other side the slopes of vineyards and pale blue campagna and
faint shining sea line, blond under a clear sky. Lovely woods of oak
near Marino, through which, alas! we swished down hill. A whole flock
of sheep, newly raddled, and faunlike shepherds lying in the shade
opposite.
In Villa Torlonia at Albano, a pond, surrounded by masks (whence water
spouted), deep green water, broken by fountain, green deep ilex groves
round; every stone picked out with delicate green moss. And at the end
of the vistas the campagna in green, purple blue modelling of evening,
hillocks and farms and aqueducts, hay and straw stacks vaguely
visible. And beyond the white shiny sea. The storm has disappeared,
leaving only a few clouds veiling the Subiaco mountains which we see.
How different in memory from these Latin Hills! All up the hill great
terraced gardens, piled-up villas: Aldobrandini, Falconieri,
Lancillotti.
ROME, _April_ 13.
XIII.
MAUNDY THURSDAY.
Yesterday, Giovedi Santo evening, the washing of the high-altar of St.
Peter's. A sudden impression of the magnificence of this church, its
vastness filled with dusk, a few wax tapers scattered along the nave;
in the far distance a lit-up altar throwing its light up into the
vault of an aisle, showing the shimmer of golden coffering; the crowd
circling unseen.
Then the ceremony of washing the high-altar: all the canons, priests
and choir-boys mounted onto its dais; and, as they passed, wiped the
great slab with a brush of white shavings dipped in oil and wine; then
walked round the church in solemn procession, tiny choir-boys first,
purple canons, and, lastly, a tall cardinal with scarlet cap, all with
their white mops; a penetrating sweet smell of wine and oil filling
the place, and seeming to waken paganism. As they turned again towards
the high-altar, its huge twisted gilded columns glimmering in the
light of the tapers, lights appeared in the Veronica balcony; priests
moved to and fro with a great gold cross in that distant lit-up gloom;
the canons fell on their knees, great purple poppies. There was the
noise of a rattle; more lights in that balcony, and another gold
shining thing was displayed; the Veronica this time, with (as you
guessed) the outline of a bearded face.
It was twilight outside; and St. Peter's, its colonnade, St. Angelo's,
the Tiber, looked colossal.
MAUNDY THURSDAY.
XIV.
GOOD FRIDAY.
It was overcast yesterday, and the sun set as we approached this
place, the train passing through woods of myrtle and lentisk scrub.
Suddenly we came upon green fields lying against the skyline, and full
of asphodels--a pale golden-rosy sunset under mists, a pinkish full
moon rising in the misty blue opposite; and against this pale, serene
sky, the hundreds of asphodels, each distinct like a candlestick,
rising out of the green. I never saw such a vision of the Elysian
fields.
Here at Anzio we found a Gesù Morto procession winding with a band,
and a red-and-white confraternity, through the little fishing town. At
one moment the great black erect Madonna appeared among the
torch-light against the deep blue sky, the misty blue moonlit sea.
Much less fine than such processions are in Tuscany; but impressive.
The little boats, with folded lateen sails, near the pier had coloured
lanterns slung from the mast to the bowsprit. The sea broke like
ruffled silk.
ANZIO, _April_ 17.
XV.
ASPHODELS.
Like Johnson and his wall-fruit, I have never had as many asphodels to
look at as I wanted. Ever since I saw them first, rushing by train
through the Maremma, nay ever since I saw them in a photograph of a
Sicilian temple, nay perhaps, secretly, since hearing their name, I
have felt a longing for them, and a secret sense that I was never
going to be shown as many as I want. Here I have. Yesterday morning
bicycling inland, along a rising road along which alternate green
pastures and sea, and woods of dense myrtle and lentisk scrub
overtopped by ilexes and cork-trees, _there were asphodels enough_:
deep plantations, little fields, like those of cultivated narcissus,
compact masses of their pale salmon and grey shot colours and
greyish-green leaves, or fringes, each flower distinct against field
or sky, on the ledges of rock and the high earth banks. The flowers
are rarely perfect when you pick them, some of the starry blossoms
having withered and left an untidy fringe instead; but at a distance
this half-decay gives them a singular distinction, makes the light
fall on the very tips, the silvery buds, sinking the stretching out
branches and picking out the pale rose colour with grey. The beauty of
the plant is in the candlestick thrust of the branches. The flower has
a faint oniony smell, but fresh like box hedge.
ANZIO, EASTER DAY.
XVI.
NETTUNO.
Nettuno, a little castellated town on the rocks; battlemented walls
and towers, a house with fortified windows, a sixteenth-century
fortress, very beautiful. All manner of vines, weeds and lilac flowers
growing in the walls. Men in boots and breeches and brigand hats
about, women with outside stays. In the evening a flock of goats being
milked. Strings of mules, literally strings, beasts tied together.
Last evening we bicycled beyond Nettuno on the way to Torre Astura,
which you see bounding this semicircular gulf, vague great mountains
behind. The Cape of Circe, which looks (and surely must have been) an
island, came out faint towards evening, a great cliff ending in
something like a castle, apparently in the middle of the sea,
mysterious. We got, skirting the sea, to a large heath--a heath, black
sandy soil, of budding bracken, grass and asphodels; immense,
inexpressibly solemn and fresh; a little wood of cork-trees in the
distance, a broken Roman ruin, blue Apennines half hidden in clouds. A
few shepherds were going home, looking immense on the flatness, and
goats and horses. Song of larks, and suddenly an unexpected booming of
surf. Following the sound inexplicably loud, across the deeper black
sandy soil, we got to the sea. Most strange against it, a fringe of
marshy grass, of bulrushes! Far off the tower of Astura, and the faint
Cape of Circe among mists. It began to rain.
ANZIO, _Easter_.
XVII.
TORRE ASTURA.
Yesterday evening bicycled farther in the direction of Torre Astura,
which seemed quite near in its solitude. The dunes were covered with
thick bushes of lentisk, myrtle and similar shrubs; every step bruised
some scented thing. Along the sands, black, hard and full of coloured
shells, was a strip of bulrushes. The sea, which is tame and messy in
the artificial bay formed by the pier of Anzio, was fresh and rushing;
the wind swept the brown dark sand like smoke along the ground.
Monte Circeo was quite distinct, blue and white its summit an
overhanging rock, no castle. Inland stretched the fields of asphodels
and the deep woods.
We found in the morning a lane or road gone to ruin, running high up
from Anzio to Nettuno, and entirely under splendid overarching ilexes;
a sunk lane, with here and there a glimpse of blue sea among the
evergreen branches.
ANZIO, _April_ 19.
SPRING 1899.
I.
THE WALLS.
Drove from Porta Angelica to Porta Portese; an immense round,
possible, conceivable, only in Rome. I see for the first time the
_outside_ of the Vatican, galleries and gardens, realising the sort of
fortified town it is, a Rome within Rome. And a fortified one: that
long passage (Hall of the Ariadne) between the Belvedere and the
Rotunda has battlements (oddly enough, Ghibelline); there are towers
and counterforts I cannot identify; and then the immense buttressed
walls, with their green vegetation, and slabs and coats of arms of
Medicis, Roveres; with the clipped ilexes of the gardens, the pines
and bays overtopping, on and on. And in a gap, suddenly, and close
enough to take one's breath away, the immensity of St. Peter's and the
Cupola.
And that this town, which is the Vatican and St. Peter's, these
centres of so much life, should, as a fact, look on one side straight
onto forsaken roads, and the most desolate of countries! Such a thing
is impossible except in Rome; and even in Rome I never suspected it.
Continuing outside the walls, we come to the little church of San
Pancrazio, on an empty road hedged with reed-tied dry thorns: the
little porched doorway leading into an atrium which is an olive
garden, big old trees set orderly, and a pillar with the cross;
outside at least, a solemn little basilica, making one think of
Ravenna.
We drove, apparently for miles, up and down, round and round, between
two immediately successive gates, San Pancrazio and Portese. Green
slopes, dry vineyards with almond blossom among the criss-cross canes,
brakes of reeds; here and there rows of little triumphal bay-trees in
flower over the walls; great overhanging ornamental gateways, leading
to nothing; and, at long intervals, mouldering little villas and
_trattorie_, with mulberry-trees clipped into umbrellas. Rome totally
disappeared, hidden, heaven knows where, in this country of which
there seems an unlimited amount: always more green slopes, more dry
vineyards, more distant Campagna. And yet, seemingly close by, the
great bells of St. Peter's ring out the thanksgiving service for the
Pope.
Antonia said, "Shall we go for a minute into St. Peter's? It will be
all lit up."
And, in that endless emptiness, the words sounded absurd. St. Peter's?
Rome? Where?
_March_ 13.
II.
PALAZZO CENCI.
This morning, rambling along the unfinished Tiber quays, and the
half pulled-down houses of the old Jewish quarter, attracted a
little, perhaps, by the name "Vicolo dei Cenci," I let myself be
importuned by a red-haired woman into entering the Casa di Beatrice
Cenci, a dreary, squalid palace, given over to plasterers among the
dust-heaps.
And afterwards, beguiled further up flights and flights of black
stairs into someone's filthy little kitchen, I was made to look down,
through a mysterious window, into the closed church of the Cencis.
Looking down, always a curious impression, into a dark, musty place
and onto vague somethings which are, they tell me, the tombs of the
Cencis.
A grim and sordid impression altogether; and heaven knows how
sickening a story. Yet what power of popular romance, of great poetry,
has enveloped it all! A story one would be ashamed to read through in
a cheap newspaper ... and yet!...
_March_ 24.
III.
MONTE CAVO.
Yesterday, with Maria, Antonia, and the poet Pascarella, to Rocca di
Papa, lunching in a piece of the woods which M. has bought.
The grass of the campagna, beyond the aqueducts, is powdered with
daisies like a cake with sugar. Further, where the slopes begin, the
exquisite brilliant pink of the peach blossom is on the palest yellow
criss-cross of reeds in the dry vineyards.
I am struck once more by the majestic air of that opening square of
Frascati, expanding upwards into terraces, lawns, and ilexes, all
flanked by pinnacled and voluted buildings, Villa Aldobrandini, or
whatever it is.
We drive up through the sere chestnut woods, where wind-flowers and
blue squills come up everywhere among the russet leaves. Suddenly, in
the faint light, above a clearing, the stacked white trunks, the lilac
sereness of the trees; and high up, shimmering and misty, the rock of
Rocca di Papa with its piled-up houses.
Then through the woods again, on foot, up a path first deep in dry
leaves, then paved with hard volcanic flags; chestnut woods, but no
longer cut for charcoal (the smoke of its burning rises from below),
but in clumps, straight slender boles rising from immense roots.
Chestnuts so unlike those of our Apennines that, when, higher up, they
are exchanged for beeches, it is only by picking up the fallen dry
leaves that we could tell the difference. And beyond, descending
towards Nemi, the woods reveal themselves for alder only by their
catkins.