English people the P.s. It was Thursday, and we were not admitted into
the garden (though we were very kindly allowed into the loggia)
because the pupils of the Germanic College were having their weekly
recreation, a hundred of them. We saw their gowns, like geraniums or
capsicums, moving between the columns and under the blossoming
orange-trees. And a party of them sat among the fallen pillars and
broken friezes outside the little churches singing--and what?--the
Lorelei in chorus, "Sie kämmt sich mit goldenem Kamme und singt ein
Lied dabei." Oh, friendly romance of Germany, lurking even in the
house of the Lord, and cheek-by-jowl with De Propaganda Fide!
PAL. SCIARRA, _April_ 16.
V.
A CONVENT.
This morning with Antonia at S. Cecilia in Trastevere, having a
special permission from Minister to see the Cavalieri frescoes in the
nuns' choir gallery (like poorer, clumsier, _jowlier_ Duccio;
Byzantine, with antique braided hair and "Greek" features). The
impression of the convent _clausura_--little vestibule, a strongly
grated small window inside it, apparently ending only in darkness; the
"Ruota," behind which a voice spoke mysteriously as through a
telephone, the wooden shelf turning on itself and offering us a
key--key opening (by instructions of mysterious voice) an adjacent
small room: two straw chairs on either side of small table before a
thick black grating; another grating behind that, and a kind of
perforated shutter between. The latter rattled away, a nun's face
uncertainly seen--faded cheeks, immense eyes, white dress, behind the
black double bars; the key restored to the Ruota, and engulfed after
directions from the mysterious voice; another door, sound of keys and
bolts. In all this a predominant and lugubrious impression of keys and
bolts. The little portress, Donna Maria Geltude (for these nuns are
Benedictines, and have the handle to their names), a wizen, very ugly
little woman, in incredibly shabby but spotless dress, white wool
washed threadbare to an appearance of linen, voluminous skirts and
black veil. A glazed cloister (with twelfth-century columns), a few
pictures, seventeenth-century tables and chairs, as in a passage; more
passages similar, with _prie Dieu_ and scant peasant furniture. The
little library, a smallish glass press with nothing but Filotea, Fr.
de Sales, Vite dei Santi, &c. Might they read them? Yes, but only on
asking the Abbess. Terror of nun lest Antonia and I should go on or
into anything not mentioned in our permit--the impression that in this
life all can be done, but done only by permission. "Men allowed to
visit?" Only by permission of Cardinal Segretario di Stato. "Men
working in garden, masons, &c.?" Yes, but always with special
permission; permission and bars!
In all these corridors and stairs not a creature; only at one moment a
door stirred, Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box
hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden,
are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground
floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But
never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order.
The gilt box of the choir, looking down into church; the stalls; the
Abbess's gold-headed crozier stuck into her stall (St. Cecilia with
harp in it), two lecterns with Latin lessons of the day--the day's
martyrology.
_April_ 22.
VI.
COLONNA GARDENS.
With Contessa Z. to-day in Colonna Gardens. Great surprise on finding
them more romantic than from the outside. A terrace, with all Rome,
blond; all manner of unexpected towers and cupolas. The pines of the
Janiculum, staircase fountains, waterless but noisy, the Roman veil of
vegetation everywhere; and great vague walls of spaliered roses and
lemons. In the midst of these terraces and balustrades and crowded
nurseries of flowers, the surprise of finding that that great vague
building I have noticed from below is a ruin, roofless, full of wild
fig, a castle's square keep. Mediæval? antique? the place surely
whence the imaginary Nero watched the burning, and harped!
_April_ 25.
VII.
PALO.
Palo Beach yesterday; motored there by my French friends. I have had
fever some days past, and there was more than mere pleasure and
amusement in sitting on the sand and breathing the clean cloudless
sea-air, instead of the scirocco stuff we had left, alternately
simmering and shivering in Rome. By the way, how little the sea gives
to Rome (except at the Aventine corner sometimes by a violent
libeccio), and how one feels the futility of this tideless
Mediterranean, unable to purify or renovate even a few yards of the
inland! Think of the estuaries of the North! of the cleansing
vivifying tides and draughts which the ocean thrusts into the very
vitals of the countries!
No one, one feels, ever landed (since Æneas and his companions) upon
this shallow strand, save the raiding Saracens and Barbary pirates,
against whom the castle, the martello tower, barely more of Palo, was
built. For there is not even here what represents the life of the
Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the
cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land
really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and
battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. Here, one
understands that a storm would mean mere passive submerging: the water
rising higher, covering the straight narrow beach, the low green
fields, noiselessly, and retreating when so inclined, with neat stacks
of seaweed and samphire left behind. The renovation of Rome, like its
drinking water, has always come from the mountains; the Tiber mouth is
their outlet, not the inlet of the sea. And the mountain clouds change
in shape, stagnate and brood in this low trough; the mountain air
faints, dies, in these fever levels.
The beach of Palo is only a few yards wide: a low natural wall of
corroded tufo, covered with no maritime bent, but ordinary grass; a
line of sea refuse, a band of fine black sparkling sand, and little
waves fringed black with that mournful sand, breaking feebly against
it. A high sky, with a few sailing clouds; and in it, rather than on
the sea, some boats, like toy ducks, on the offing, motionless. We sat
on the sand, digging into its moist warmth, and amused (I at least)
that this glittering beach left no trace on the land; making Carpaccio
St. George Dragons (with inserted eyes of sand flint) out of blistered
drift-wood; and looking about, later, for bits of antique marble and
brick upon the sands. For this lazy sea appears to wash no pebbles of
its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken
off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no
doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into
petal-shaped wedges for the _Opus Alexandrinum_. I don't think we saw
one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely,
precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and
serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white marble,
Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and
shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into a perfect heart, the heart
of a marble Artemis or Amazon. This the lazy Roman sea does, and it is
surely an unusual feat: roll its shingle into vague shapes of symbolic
hearts, hearts of serpentine, of jasper, of various beautiful rose and
lilac breccias, of basalt, and of fine rose brick, all scattered on
the glittering black sand (with funny mourning edges of violet
shells), and in the lip of those little black waves. But far more
beautiful and extraordinary and brilliant (and to me far more
wonderful and odd) was the still uncorrupted little corpse of a
kingfisher: sky-blue breast, greenish turquoise ruff, and glossy dark
back, lying in state, as dead birds do.
_April_ 29.
VIII.
FIUMICINO.
Three days ago, in heavy rain, taken in motor to Fiumicino. Impression
of grass, yellow with buttercups, soused with rain, opening, falling
aside as we swish noiselessly into it, under the moving dark sky.
Magliana: a big farm; one takes a minute in the soaking filthy yard,
among manure and litter, to recognise that this dilapidated,
leprous-looking building is a palace, with mullioned fifteenth-century
windows and coats of arms and inscriptions of Cibo and Riario popes.
From the top of the wide low-stepped staircase (like that, also of the
Cibo's originally, of Pal. Ruffo), wide views of meadows of pale
rumpled grass, yellow here, and there with clover, and a great yellow
Tiber arm unaccountable in this sort of England. This is the place, I
believe, where the quails are shot and netted at this time of year;
and I suppose Leo X. was on some such expedition when he caught his
death here.
Fiumicino, a canal or arm of the Tiber, a yellowish marsh, a big,
uprooted looking martello tower by the beach, and a little pier with a
green boat like a beetle in the rain. The look of Viareggio or Porto
Corsini, of all the little God-forsaken and strangled harbours of this
country. The sacred island, I suppose, on the other side of a bridge
of boats, covered with what seems a scrub of ilex and lentisk.
IX.
VIA ARDEATINA.
Yesterday, again in pelting rain, far along Via Ardeatina (the brutes
have taken away the little river god from off that trough in the
little valley of poplars). The hollows full of foaming yellow streams,
and yellow water gushing everywhere. The great wet green slopes under
the dark low sky, with only sheep and here and there a stump of
masonry, no trees, no hedges, no walls save of rough stones, no
bounding mountains, visible; the whole country transformed into some
northern high-lying moorland. A sort of tiny half-ruined, towered and
walled St. Gimignano, with many olives about it, seems a ghostly
apparition in it all.
_May_ 3.
X.
SAN TEODORO.
This morning, trying to lose time before lunching at Monte Savella, I
was attracted into that little round brick church nearly always
closed, which stands in a circular hole under the Palatine. You go
down a flight of steps into a round paved place: and this, with a
worn-down sacrificial altar, carved with laurel wreaths, was strewn
this morning with ivy leaves and bay. Lifting the big green drapery
which had first attracted me to that church, for it hung outside it,
and pushing the door, there was a shock of surprise; a plunge into
mystery. The round church was empty, dark, but full of the smell of
fresh incense; and in that darkness I was fairly blinded by the
effulgence of the high-altar, tier upon tier of tapers. When I was
able to see, there were three women, black, with red scapulars about
their necks, kneeling; and on either side, in the extreme corners of
the lit-up altar, two figures, or what, after a second, I decided must
be figures, kneeling also. They were on either side of the empty
praying stool in front of the altar, on which lay big gilt books and a
couple of shimmering stoles. Lit up by that blaze of candles, their
whitish folded robes looked almost like fluted marble columns; and as
they knelt they ended off like broken columns, for they were, to all
appearance, headless. Round their middle each had a white rope, about
as thick as a hand, cutting the flutings of the robe; and where the
head disappeared, a white penitent's hood thrown backward. They
remained absolutely motionless, so that after awhile I began almost to
doubt whether I had not interpreted some column or curtain into human
figures. But after about five minutes one of the two--the right-hand
one--moved slightly, just enough to show the thing was living. There
they remained motionless, stooping in their fluted robes and
thrown-back hoods, headless; and I went out, leaving them so, through
the circular yard strewn with ivy and bay all round that worn away
altar. What was it all? I have a vague notion this church is connected
with the Cave of Cacus, or the lair of Romulus' she-wolf.
_May_ 3.
WINTER 1904.
I.
PALO.
Palo again. The little pineta or grove rather of young pines, very
close together and tufty, which open out and close fanlike in long
green avenues, each with its prismatic star of shivering light, as we
race through in the motor. A place where laurel-crowned poets in white
should wander with verse-like monotony upon the soft green turf.
Beyond, a band of lilac sere field, a band of blue sea; and between
the fringe of the compact round pines, the sun setting, its light
shivering diamond-like among the needles.
_February_ 25.
II.
A WALK AT DUSK.
Yesterday went, in a band at dusk, for a melancholy stroll through the
back streets. The Piranesi effect: yards of palaces, Marescotti,
Massimo alle Colonne, the staircase of Palazzo Altieri. These immense
grass-grown yards, with dreary closed windows all round, fountains
alone breaking their silence, look like a bit of provincial life, of
some tiny mountain town, enclosed in Rome. At Monte Giordano (Palazzo
Gabbrielli) it becomes the walled Umbrian town, castellated. In this
gloom, this sadness of icy evening sky between the high roofs, and
after the appalling sadness of a church, squalid, dark, a few people
kneeling, and the sacristan extinguishing the altars after a
Benediction (every grief, one would think, laid down on that floor
only to pick up a weight of the grief of others); after this there was
something sweet and country-like in the splash of the fountains at
Monte Giordano; the water bringing from the free mountains into this
gloomy city; and to me the recollection of a Tuscan villa, of peace
and serenity.
_February_ 27.
III.
TUSCULUM.
To Tusculum to-day with Maria and Du B. This is the place I carried
away in my thoughts and wishes, a mere rapidly passed steep grassy
hill, topped with pines and leafless chestnuts, from that motor drive
last year round by Monte Compatri and Grottaferrata. The steepness and
bareness of that great grass slope was heightened to-day by the
tremendous gales blowing in a cloudless sky; one felt as if it were
that wind which had kept the place so inaccessible, so virgin of trees
and people, nay, had made the grass slippery, and polished the black
basalt slabs of the path. And that wind struggling upwards against it
in the sunshine, with the great rose and lilac sere hills opposite,
the pale blond valley behind, seemed to clear the soul also of all
rank vegetation, of all thoughts and feelings thick and muddy and
leaden; to sweep away all that gets between the reality of things and
oneself.
One should contrive to have impressions like these sufficiently often
in life: this is the excitement which is helpful; the heartbeating,
the breathlessness, the pain even, which brace and make us widely
sensitive. Brother Wind--why did St. Francis not invoke him?--played
with us roughly and healthfully, telling us, in the hurtling against
houses, the rustling, soughing among trees, and the whistling in our
own hair and ears, of the greatness of the universe's life and the
greatness of our own.
On the crest, under the thin fringe of bare trees, with the plain of
Rome, the snow of the Apennines on one side, the violet woods of Monte
Laziale on the other, the surprise of suddenly coming on a rude stone
cottage, with headless statues of athletes and togaed Romans built
into its rough walls. And in a hollow under delicate leafless
chestnuts that wonderful little theatre, cut out of black volcanic
stone, as if the representation were to be storm and full moon, making
and unmaking of mountains and countries, and the whole of history....
Beginning to come down, and just above that little theatre, as we
turned, we saw, beyond the dark ridge of Castel Gandolfo, cupolaed and
towered, a narrow belt of light, more brilliant than that of the sky:
the light upon the sea.
_March_ 7.
IV.
ST. PETER'S.
The greatness of the place had taken me, and quite unexpectedly, at
once: the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold, the little
encampment of yellow lights ever so far off close to the ground at the
Confession; and, above all, the spaciousness, the vast airiness and
emptiness, which seemed in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a
quality of the place. I had come to see, if I could, Pollaiolo's tomb
in the Chapel of the Sacrament. I found the grating closed; and
kneeling before it, a foreign northern-looking man, with grizzled,
curly hair and beard, and a torn fustian coat and immense nailed
shoes. He was muttering prayers, kissing his rosary or medal at
intervals, and slightly prostrating himself. But what struck me, and
apparently others (for people approached and stared), was his
extraordinary intentness and fervour. He was certainly conscious of no
one and nothing save whatever his eyes were fixed upon--either the
sacrament or the altar behind that railing, or merely some vision of
his own. And he seemed not only different from everyone else, but
separate, isolated from that vast place which made all the rest of us
so small, such tiny details of itself. He was no detail, but an
independent reality--he and his prayer, his belief, his nailed shoes:
all come who knows how far in what loneliness! I got the sacristan to
open, and went in to see the tomb--a mad masquerade thing, everything
in wrong relief and showing the wrong side, the very virtues or
sciences flat on their backs, so that you could not see them. And in
the middle, presenting his stark bronze feet, the brown,
mummied-looking, wicked pope, with great nose under his tiara. An
insane thing--more so than any Bernini monument, I thought. Perhaps it
was the presence of that man praying away outside which affected me to
think this. There he was, as little likely to move away, apparently,
as the bronze pope stretched out, soles protruded, among the absurd
allegories. I went also to see the Pietà, and then stayed a long while
walking up and down; but still the man was kneeling there, and might
be kneeling, doubtless, till now or till doomsday, if the vergers had
not, in closing the doors, turned him out.
_March_ 8.
V.
THE CRYPTS.
Yesterday the Grotte Vaticane, the Crypts of St. Peter's, a horrible
disappointment, and on the whole absurd impression. That of being
conducted (down a little staircase carpeted with stair cloth) through
the basement of a colossal hotel, with all the electric light turned
on at midday--a basement with lumber-rooms full of rather tawdry
antiquities giving off its corridors, and other antiquities (as we see
them in Italian inns) crammed against walls and into corners.
Donatello and Mino bas-reliefs become sham by their surroundings,
apocryphal Byzantine mosaics, second-rate pictures. Even empty
sarcophagi and desecrated tombs just as at Riettis or Della Torres at
Venice, and with seventeenth-century gilding and painting obbligato
overhead. And then into wider corridors, whitewashed, always with that
glare of electricity from the low roof; corridors where you expect
automatic trucks of coals, or dinner lifts; and where the vague
whitewashed cubes of masonry against the walls suggest new-fangled
washing or heating apparatus. And instead! they are the resting-place
of the Stuarts, only labels telling us so, or of mediæval popes. And
that vague arched thing with wooden cover, painted to imitate
porphyry, is the tomb of the Emperor Otho; and there, as we go on, it
grows upon one that the carved and mitred figures tucked away under
arches are not warehoused for sale to forestiere, but lying on the
sarcophagus, over the bones or the _praecordia_ of Boniface VIII. of
Roveres and Borgias.
Waiting at the head of that staircase for the beadle, faint strains of
music come from very far. In St. Peter's a great choral service like
this one going on in the left-hand chapel, becomes a detail lost as in
the life of a whole city.
_March_ 17.
VI.
SAN STEFANO.
San Stefano Rotondo on that rainy afternoon, the extraordinary
grandeur of this circular church filled with diffuse white light.
Architecturally one of the most beautiful Roman churches, certainly,
with its circle of columns surrounding the great central well, where
two colossal pillars carry the triumphal arch, carry a great blank
windowed wall above it, immensely high up. Those columns, that wall,
pearly white, of carved and broken marble against pure chalky
brilliancy of whitewash, seem in a way the presiding divinities of
this great circular sanctuary in the church's centre; or is it the
white light, the solemn pure emptiness among them? An immanent
presence, greater certainly than could be any gigantic statue.
_March_ 18.
VII.
VIA LATINA.
Afterwards, in fitful rain, we went to the Tombs and the little
roofless basilica near them in the Via Latina; and walked up and down,
a melancholy little party enough, grubbing up marbles and picking them
out of the rubbish heap among the quickening grass. The delicate grey
sky kept dissolving in short showers; the corn and ploughed purple
earth (_that compost!_) were drenched and fragrant with new life; and
the air was full of the twitter of invisible larks. But in this warm
soft renewal there was, for us, only the mood of lost things and
imminent partings; and the song of the peasants in the field hard by
told not, as it should, of their mountains, but of this sad, wet
landscape traversed by endless lines of ruins. Suddenly in the clouds,
a solid dark spot appeared; the top, the altar slab of Mons Latialis.
And little by little the clouds slipped lower, the whole mountain
range of hills stepped forth from the vapours, with its great peaceful
life and strength.
_March_ 18.
SPRING 1905.
I.
ROME AGAIN.
Yesterday, after D. Laura's, took Du B. that walk through the Ghetto,
along the Tiber quays by the island; a stormy, wet day. Rome again! As
we stood by the worn Januses of the bridge and looked into the
swirling water, thinking of how that Terme Apollo had lain there, the
Tiber, like Marsyas, flaying one fair flank of the god; I felt Rome
and its unchanging meaning grip me again, and liberate me from the
frettings of my own past and present.
We went in to see some people who are furnishing an apartment in
Palazzo Orsini. A very Roman impression this: the central court of
that fortified palace built into the theatre of Marcellus; lemons
spaliered and rows of Tangerine trees, with little Moorish-looking
fountains between; only the sky above, only the sound of the bubbling
fountains.
You look out of a window and behold, close by, the unspeakable
rag-fair of that foul quarter, with its yells and cries rising up and
stench of cheap cooking. We saw some small Renaissance closets, still
with their ceilings and fire-places, where tradition says a last
Savelli was stabbed. A feudal fortress this, and, like those of the
hills round Rome which these ruins mimic, raising its gardens and
pompous rooms above the squalor of the mediæval village. Immediately
below, the corridors of the theatre; below that, the shops, where
pack-saddles, ploughs, scythes, wooden pails--the things of a
village--are for sale in the midst of those black arches. And then the
dining-room, library, bath-rooms of excellent New Englanders crowning
it all; and in the chapel, their telephone! "Take care," I said, "the
message will come some day--not across space, but across time. _Con
chi parlo?_" Well, say, _The White Devil of Italy!_
In that Campitelli quarter, the constant blind turnings behind the
great giant palaces; places for cut-throats, for the sudden onslaught
of bravos.