evening, when I came into my room, the sunset streaming in, the lights
beginning below, it was fantastic and overwhelming. What I said of
this being a unique moment in Roman history--the genius of the city
stripped of all veils, visible everywhere, is especially true about
the view from this window. During my childhood Rome was closed,
uniform, without either the detail or the panoramic efforts which
speak to the imagination; and ten or fifteen years hence the great
gaps will be filled up, and the deep historical viscera, so to speak,
of the city closed and grown together. Now, with the torn-down houses,
the swept-away quarters, one has not only views of hills and river and
bridges, and of gardens and palaces and loggias, hidden once and to be
hidden again, but into the very life of the people: the squalor of
back streets revealed, of yards looked into, of the open places turned
into _immondezzaio_ and play and grazing ground, showing the barbarism
and nakedness of the land--showing one that there is here no tradition
of anything more active, decent or human than this present demolition.
And the _Sventramento_ also reveals the past! From my window, under
that sunset behind the trees and fountains and churches of the
Janiculum, I look down on a sort of mediæval city of the
Trastevere--upon a still stranger, imaginary one made by perspective
and fancy; the old bridge, with its two double _hermes_ leading
between towers, and the long prison-like walls of the inland
buildings, into an imaginary square--an imaginary city with more
towers, more Romanesque belfries. This is a case of the imaginary
place due to perspective, to bird's-eye view, to some reminiscence. (I
trace a resemblance to the arsenal gate at Venice, perhaps also to the
inner town at Castelfranco.) This case is an illustration of how large
a part illusion, even recognised as such, plays in our feeling.
And similarly as regards the _invisible_ view. Here am I, in a house
nesting in the theatre of Marcellus, the little orange and lemon
garden presumably built actually onto those remaining black arches in
which coppersmiths and coopers and saddlers, all the humble trades of
a backward little country town or village, have burrowed: the thought
of Virgil's line with it all. The mangy green grass in front, where
the children fly kites and the inconceivable skeleton horses graze, is
the site of the former Ghetto; and behind its remaining synagogue, the
little belfry, the houses of the Cencis, are down at heel carts and
ragged peasants round the little isolated Ghetto fountain; and on the
other side the Aventine, the bridge of--was it Cocles? a land of
ballad, of popular romance, of tragedy.
_March_ 30.
SPRING 1901.
I.
QUOMODO SEDET....
Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit
to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about
it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny
coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and
Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in
high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half
blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco:
"Questo è Gesu Nazzareno"--as the housekeeper might say, "This is the
present Earl"--also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the
print of _i suoi santissimi piedi_, square little feet, of such a
squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as
the pattern on a pat of butter.
Turning my face, in that tornado of dust, towards Rome, its walls
stretch suddenly before me across the vineyards and fields, broken
walls, of any mediæval city you please, and hiding, it would seem,
emptiness behind them. The desolation of this distant city, with its
foreground of squalid hovels, and ill-favoured wine shop and smithies
where the very inscriptions, "Vino di Marino," or "Ferracocchio," or
"Ova di Giornata," look as if a megalomaniac, escaped from an asylum,
had dipped a brush into a paint-pot and splashed all over; this
foreground of vague tombs, masonry heaven knows what, all flowered
with huge wild mignonette; this other moving background of ragged
peasants and unutterable galled horses; the desolation of this dead
city which I feel behind those mediæval walls comes home to them,
like the sting of the dust whirlpools and roar of the wind. _Quomodo
sedet sola civitas_!
Meanwhile, close to one of those city gates, is a poster announcing
lectures "Sur le costume des Premiers Chrétiens!"
But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us,
bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of
civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Past! At moments
like these I feel that one needs be entirely engrossed either in
making two ends meet (a clerk or shopkeeper, or one of these
haranguing archæologists holding forth under the Arch of Drusus) for
his dinner or in tea parties and "jours," and "sport," to endure the
company of Rome.
I went into the vigna of S. Cesario for the key of the church. It is
the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those
mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico,
seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and
Borgia suppers. And in this church and the neighbouring one the
impression of the inscriptions recording succession of popes and
cardinals, all the magnificent locusts who came swarm after swarm, to
devour this land, leaving the broken remains of their hurried
magnificence, volutes, plaster churches, and, inscriptions!
inscriptions!
_April_ 13.
II.
VILLA FALCONIERI.
Villa Falconieri, Frascati--abandoned, overgrown--the wonderful
outline of huge Mondragone, with its pines against the mountains. All
these villas near each other, and while they open up into the hill and
woods (the lovely delicate rose of the budding chestnuts) are still
almost within hail of the little town across the valley. So different
from the Tuscan villa, even the grandest, say Mte. Gufoni, which is
only the extended _fattoria_, its place chosen by the accident of
agricultural business. This mouldering rococo villa is inhabited in
summer by the Trappists of Tre Fontane, of that Abbey of St. Anastasia
which was the suzerain of all Maremma, great part of Umbria and the
Tuscan islands! At the end of their miserably cultivated little
_orto_, presiding over the few leeks and garlics, on the balustrade
towards Rome of all divinities, who but Hortorum Deus!
Near Grottaferrata in a flat green field, a nun, all in white, was
seated under one of the big olives: a curious biblical figure.
_April_ 26.
III.
PORTA LATINA.
Yesterday with P. D. P. at Porta Latina. He told me an extraordinary
thing. In the blocked-up arch of that suppressed gate, at the end of a
blind alley, an old old couple--a man of ninety and a woman of eighty,
had taken up their abode for months; helped occasionally by the monks
of the neighbouring convent (with pretty rose-garden) of S. Giovanni a
Porta Latina, to whom however permission was refused (the Superior
referring to the Card. Vicar and the Card. Vicar to _his_ Confessor)
to give a roof to the couple because of the woman; also there was a
suspicion that the couple had not been married in church. All this P.
D. had learned when these people were still there, in the arch. But we
found them gone; and the strangest sight instead. In the immense
thickness of the gate a heap of reeds in a corner; and strewn all
about in this artificial grotto, old rusty utensils, a grater, a
strainer, broken pots, papers, rags, half-burnt logs, a straw hat, and
a walking stick! And over a kind of recess, on a plank, a little
shrine, two broken Madonnas picked out of some dust-heap, withered
flowers in a crock, and a sprig of olive, evidently of last Palm
Sunday! Poor little properties, so poor, so wretched that they had
remained unmolested, despised even by the poorest, safe at the end of
that blind road in that closed-up gate of Rome! That two human beings
in our day should have lived there for months, even years (for they
returned after an absence, the monk told us); lived, like some
anchorites of old, in the ruins, in a grotto made by human hands;
with the vineyards all round, and the shrubs and flowers waving from
the broken masonry! Their rags and shreds of paper littered the rank
grass and acanthus by the walled-up gate, where the little
Bramantesque temple stands, built by a French prelate under Julius
II., and inscribed "Au plaisir de Dieu." _Au plaisir de Dieu!_
Over the walls, the great bones of the Baths of Caracalla half hidden
by trees: and, closing the distance, St. Peters. We went into the
little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the
rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum,
and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the
frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi. The grey
Franciscan who showed us round told us that a lady had given five
hundred francs for admission of the old man and woman of the gate at
the Petites Soeurs; but these required the religious marriage. About a
month ago the couple was married and taken off to the Petites Soeurs;
the day after the poor old man died! The old people had desired the
monks to distribute their bedding and rags to the poor, now they
themselves were provided for. And that is how the place came to be
abandoned. The old man told the monks he much preferred the arch to
the damp cellar where a greengrocer of Rome used to make him sleep.
"They had good sides those people," I remarked. "Sfido! bonissimi,"
said the Franciscan; he was from Albi, but had got to speak with a
Roman accent.
While we were there, under the impression of that story, of the
deserted church, the ragged grey monk, and of that whole squalid,
imaginative Roman corner, a little cart drove up with a young man and
two little girls, who went round with us and gathered sprays of
hawthorn off the walls, leaving the pony to graze meanwhile. "No
Romans," said P. D.; and indeed they turned out to be Vicentines, the
young man a student of law taking out his young cousins for a
_scampagnata_. P. D. very characteristically made them write their
names for him in his pocket-book, and bowed to the little girls as if
they were duchesses. More characteristically still, my friend carried
off the old beggar's stick to keep in his study.
_April_ 26.
SPRING 1902.
I.
THE RUBBISH-HEAP.
Yesterday wandered in Trastevere and about Piazza Mattei and Montanara
and back by 'bus; again this morning tramm'd to Lateran in showers.
The squalor of this Rome and of its people! The absence of all trace
of any decent past, ancient barbarism as down at heel and unkempt as
any modern slum! The starved galled horses, broken harness, unmended
clothes and wide-mouthed sluttishness under the mound on which stand
the Cenci's houses, a foul mound of demolition and rag-pickers, only a
stone's-throw from the brand-new shop streets, the Lungo Tevere, the
magnificence of palaces like the Mattei, Caetani, &c. If Rome
undoubtedly gives the soul peace by its assurance that the present is
as nothing in the centuries, it also depresses one, in other moods,
with the feeling that all history is but a vast rubbish-heap and sink;
that nothing matters, nothing comes out of all the ages save rags and
brutishness. There is a great value for our souls in any place which
tells us, by however slight indications, of a past of self-respect,
activity and beauty; and I long for Tuscany.
_February_ 25.
II.
THE EXCAVATIONS.
In the Forum this morning with Css. B. and the excavator Boni. In the
Director's shed a "Campionario," literally pattern sheets of the
various strata of excavation: bits of crock, stone, tile, iron, little
earthenware spoons for putting sacrificial salt in the fire, even what
looked like a set of false teeth. Time represented thus in space. And
similarly with the excavations themselves: century under century, each
also represented by little more than foot-prints, bases of gone
columns, foundations of rough edifices. Among these neatly-dug-out
layers of nothingness, these tidy heaps of chips with so few things,
stand out the few old column- and temple-ends which Piranesi already
drew.
I felt very keenly that the past is only a creation of the present.
Boni, a very interesting and ardent mind, poetical and mystical,
showed us things not really of this earth, not really laid bare by the
spade, but existing in realms of fantastic speculation, shaped by
argument, faultlessly cast in logical moulds. Too faultlessly
methought, for looking at the mere heaps of architectural rubbish, let
alone the earth, the various vegetations which have accumulated upon
it, I had a sense of the infinite intricacy of all reality, and of the
partiality and insufficiency of the paths which our reason (or our
fancy in the garb of reason) cuts into it. Rituals and laws whose
meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ago, races
whose very mien and aspect (often their language) can only be
speculated on: all this reappears, takes precision and certainty. But
is not this a mere creation, like that of art or of systematic
metaphysics? What struck me as the only certainty among these
admirable cogent arguments was that the once tank of Juturna, round
whose double springs Rome must have arisen to drink and worship, this
sacred and healing water where the Dioscuri watered their steeds after
Lake Regillus, has been fouled by human privies so deeply that years
of dredging and pumping will be required to restore its purity. Of how
many things is not this tank a symbol as cogent as any which our
archæologist ascribed to those old symbol-mongers of his discourse!
With us was a man who took no interest in all these matters; none in
the significance of rituals, symbols, or the laws of racial growth and
decadence. _He_ wanted to be shown the place where Cæsar had fallen;
he was a survivor of the old school of historical interest. Very out
of date and droll; but is not this old-fashioned interest in
half-imaginary dramatic figures as legitimate as our playing with
races, rituals, the laws, the metaphysical essence of the past?
_February_ 27.
III.
THE MEET.
The meet the other day, at Maglianella, beyond Porta S. Pancrazio.
Desolate, rolling country, pale green wide dells, where streams should
be, but are not; roads excavated in the brown volcanic rock, here and
there fringed with a few cork-trees; the approach, very much, to
Toscanella. But raced along by carriages, bicycles and motor-cars, and
leading to a luncheon tent, a car full of hounds, school of cavalry
officers, and the redcoats preparing to start. The cloud banks sat
on the horizon as on the sea; the sky very pale and blue, moist, with
song of larks descending from it. And as the horses cantered along the
soft grass, the scent of last year's mint and fennel rose from
stubble-fields, and the rank, fresh smell of crushed succulent
asphodels.
_February_ 27.
IV.
The cabman who, yesterday evening, took me to Palazzo Gabbrielli
instead of Palazzo Orsini, excused himself saying that priests even
blunder at the altar--"anche li preti sbajano all' altare." Very
Roman!
V.
MONTE MARIO.
With E. de V. on Monte Mario. The weather has cleared; slight
tramontana, pure sky, with white storm- or snow-clouds collected like
rolled-up curtains, everywhere on the horizon. Great green slopes of
grass appear as far as one could see, here and there a little valley
full of ilex scrub; in the mist of the distance conical shepherds'
huts, with smoke wreath. We sat on a piece of turf, cut in by horses'
hoofs, by a stack of faggots; song of lark and bleating of sheep. But
for the road, the carriage, it might have been in the Maremma for
utter loneliness and freshness. Turning round a few yards further,
carriages and motor-cars, and all Rome, with its unfinished new
quarters nearest, stretched under us.
_March_ 3.
VI.
VIA OSTIENSE.
Day before yesterday with dear Paso along Via Ostiense. Perhaps the
most solemn of all those solemn Roman roads, with the solemnity and
desolation of the great brimful brown Tiber, between barren banks of
mud, added to the solemnity of the empty green country. It is the
refusal of vegetation in great part which makes this country strange
and solemn. Such vegetation as there is, the asphodels and rare
blackthorn along the road, the stumpy oaks or cork-trees or the bends
of the river, gaining an importance, a significance out of all
proportion; and the thinnest little distant spinny, looking like a
mysterious consecrated wood. We got to the top of a hill, and there,
far off against the grey flatness, was the lavender line of the sea.
It was a brilliant day of freshly fallen distant snow; the air keen
and windless, with a feel of the sea as we went towards it.
VII.
PALACE YARDS.
Yesterday P. D. P. took me to see a former Marescotti palace in the
Via della Pigna. A very quiet aristocratic part of Rome, of narrow
streets between high palaces, and little untraversed squares. The
gloominess of the outside succeeded by the sunlight, the spaciousness
of a vast courtyard, on to which look sixteenth-, seventeenth-,
eighteenth-century windows, closed by the back of a church with its
clock-tower, so that, as Pierino says, it might almost be the piazza
of a provincial town. A campanile, fountain, piazza, almost a _sun_,
all to oneself. One wonders with what these palaces could ever have
been filled by the original owners.
We then went into another palace yard; and there was a shop with three
young men working at a huge sawdust doll, with porcelain sandalled
feet. I thought it was a doll for displaying surgical apparatus, but
it turned out to be a female saint, whose head we were shown,
life-size, properly expressive with rolling eyes and a little halo.
_March_ 6.
SPRING 1903.
I.
RETURN TO ROME.
That I should feel it most on return here; find I have returned
without _her_, travelled without her, that she is not there to tell;
the sense of utter loneliness, of the letter one would write, the
greeting one would give--and which no creature now wants!
Yesterday morning, feeling ill and very sad, Rome came for half-hour
with its odd consolation. I sat on the balcony of the corner room,
very high up, in the sunshine. Cabs, with their absurd Roman canter,
crossing the diaper of the little square, circling, as I remember them
doing in my childhood, round the unwilling fare. A soldier rode
across, dismounted, took his beast by the bridle to the cattle-trough
in the palace wall opposite; a bit of campagna intruded into town. And
motor-cars snorted and bells rang. High up on the same level with me
was the hidden real Rome--all that you do not guess while walking in
the streets below. Colonna gardens with bridges over the way, and
green-clipped hedges and reddening Judas-trees under the big pines,
and a row of marble Emperors turning their backs; and, further, the
Quirinal with tip of obelisk, and plaster trumpet-blowing Fame; and a
palm-tree, its head rising out of I know not what hidden yard, in
front of a terrace of drying rags. And at every vista end, pines of
the Pincian, Villa Doria, &c.; and domes; and the pale blond roofs
with the telephone wires like gossamer stretched over them. Sunshine;
distant noise and incessant bells. Rome in a fashion consoling; but
how empty!
_April_ 3.
II.
PALM SUNDAY.
This morning I know not what ceremony in the Portico of SS. Apostoli:
a little procession, some monks, a priest in purple, and a few
draggle-tailed people before the closed door, chanting at intervals,
till the door opened and they entered, their silver cross in its
purple bag ahead, and their little branches of olive. The fine carved
Roman eagle in its magnificent garland of oak-leaves, presiding, very
fierce and contemptuous, over this little scene. When one effaces the
notion of habit, how very odd to see a company of nineteenth-century
people, battered and galled by life like old cab-horses, stationing in
a portico singing verses and holding branches of olive! There is
something refreshing, something of the fields and hills, of leisure
and childishness, in the proceeding, if only the poor creatures
realised it. But to most of them, I take it, the bearing of a silver
cross, of an olive branch, is in reality as utilitarian (though
utilitarian in regard to another world) as holding the tail of a
saucepan or rattling a money-box. For how many, one wonders, is that
door, opening to the cross and the olive branches, the door of an
inner temple, of a place swept and garnished in the pious fancy? alas!
alas!
I went on, on foot, past the Capitol, through the Montanara region,
with a growing sense, which I have had ever since return here, of the
squalor, the lousiness, the dust-heap, the unblushing _immondezzaio_
quality of Rome and its inhabitants. Everything ragged, filthy,
listless; the very cauliflowers they were selling looking all stalk,
fit for that refuse midden which symbolises the city. By the Temple of
Vesta a lot of carts were drawn up, with galled horses and ragged
crouching peasants--that sort of impression which Piranesi gives.
A school of little girls, conducted by a nun, was filing out of S.
Maria in Cosmedin, and I helped up the leathern curtain for them to
pass. Tatters, squalor, with that abundant animal strength and beauty
of these people; one feels they have been eating and drinking, and
befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves
and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all
through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a
ditch full of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the
canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind
those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion,
makes the fine aristocratic, swept and garnished quality of that
Byzantine architecture more delicate and dainty still. The church was
finished restoring two years ago, but the population of that low part
of Rome, the Piazza Montanara St. Giles, has already given it the
squalor of ages. I cannot say how deeply, though vaguely, I felt the
meaningless tragic triviality of these successive generations of
reality, in the face of that solemn, meaningful abstraction which we
call history, which we call humanity, the centuries, Rome.
The great holes through which, as through earthquake rents, the
innermost life of Rome has become visible in the last thirty years,
are beginning to close up. In that sort of rag-fair, witch-burning
ground limited only by the island and the belfries of Trastevere which
I used to look down upon from Palazzo Orsini, the Jews are building a
colossal synagogue. One does not grudge it them, after their Holy
Cross Days! But that strange simultaneous vision of the centuries
(like that of their life which drowning folk are said to have) is
ending with the death agony of old Rome.
_April_ 4.
III.
MONDRAGONE.
The white peacocks apparently all gone; but two superb green ones,
their tails outspread, glittering on the grass under the olives just
below the villa terrace. Near the terrace, where a lot of olive wood
was being chopped on a stump of fine fluted column, a bay-tree of the
girth of a good-sized oak, bearing pale yellow leaves and blossom, as
of beaten metal, the golden bough of the Sibyl. Hard by another
bay-tree, a ramping python, rearing up a head of bright green leaves.
The loveliness of the chestnut woods on the hill behind, not yet in
leaf, but rosy with rising sap; big round olives also, dark silver in
front. The same colours and same wonderful rounded dimpled volcanic
lie of the land as round Villa Lante at Viterbo. We walked, the Carlo
R.'s little governess and I, along round above Mondragone and down by
Villa Falconieri; the three children on donkeys in front, Gabriella's
boys and their cousins. The pleasantness of the children's voices, of
their bear-fighting in the train coming back. A splendid day of sun,
wind, of dove's-wing distant Campagna view.
_April_ 14.
IV.
SAN SABA.