ROME
3 P.M. TO 4 P.M.
Likethe lizards in the dusty Forum ruins, emerging from dusky retreats to warm and blink in the sun and then flash back into some sheltered refuge, so visitors at Rome issue from dim closing museums at three o’clock in the afternoon and gaze around in a stupid, dazed fashion on a sky of cloudless deep blue and on placid streets and squares that seem fairly to quiver in a golden haze of strong sunshine. After the cool interiors the sultry heat seems doubly oppressive, and there is something of the nature of a mild struggle before reality succeeds in summoning them back from that vague state of disassociation, that condition of all-mind-and-no-body, produced by an intense and protracted study of all those wonderful things that great museums contain. To this confused condition of mind there is generally added a further disquieting element in the shape of a blank misgiving as to how the intervening hour can be tolerably passed before joining the four o’clock promenaders in the Pincian Gardens to see Roman Fashion at its ante-prandial rites. And yet were strangers merely to remain receptive and allow their extraordinary surroundingsto assert themselves and supply the diversion with which they are dynamically charged, this is an hour that might well prove to be one of the most delightful of the whole twenty-four in Rome.
For the masterful spell of the Eternal City is still world-conquering; it only asks the chance. Protract your stay as you will, there remains at last a sense of awe, almost of incredulity, at being, in the actual flesh, in precincts so ultra-venerated—in dread, historic Rome. It is only a somewhat milder form of the feeling that overpowered you the very first morning of your visit when, after the night’s sleep of forgetfulness, you read with amazed, half-awake eyes the printed slip on the bedroom door that affirmed your hotel to be on no less august an eminence thanone of the seven hills of Rome. Even when you had rushed to the window for corroboration and stared out in excited astonishment on a vast shoulder of dusty, reddish brown ruins with pert vines greening in its loftiest recesses, and a guidebook insisted that they were the Baths of Diocletian, a reluctant fear remained that you might only be, after all, in the pleasant toils of the old, recurrent dream from which you might shortly and miserably awake.
But if, at three o’clock of a summer afternoon, the particular museum whose doors are remorselessly closing upon your final, lingering look chances to be that fortunate one on the Capitoline Hill that houses, among its array of mellow antiques, the pointed-ear original ofHawthorne’s “Marble Faun,” you could not do better than make use of the remainder of the admission ticket and have a survey of Rome from the airy summit of the campanile in the rear. To effect this, one picks his way among the imposing remains of the ancient record-house of thetabularium, mounts the long flight of iron steps in a corner of its colonnade, and soon reaches the top of the tower of the Capitol, with Rome as utterly at his feet as ever it appeared to the eyes of Alaric and his Goths.
In tones of soft yellow, gray, and dull orange the roof-masses sweep northward, eastward, and westward, while to the southward and at your feet lies heaped the earthy, dusty chaos of ruins that crown the imperial Palatine, the popular Cælian, and the luckless Aventine Hills. Parks and villa gardens are blotches of dark foliage; and, within its white embankment walls, the sacred Tiber, in a twisting yellow band, rushes swiftly down the face of the city in its mad rush for Ostia and the sea. Beyond the most distant suburbs extend the rolling plains of the Campagna like an all-embracing sea, until they seem to wash in a gentle surf about the Sabine foot-hills, away to the north, and brim southward to the verge of the Alban Hills beyond the farthest glimpse of the Aqueduct’s long line of broken arches or the dimming perspective of that taut thread, the Appian Way. From this vantage-point the city may hide no surface secrets. It lies below us like an enormous fan, whoseconverging point is the round Piazza del Popolo, a good mile to the north. Like three great fingers, there extend from that focus the Via Ripetta, the Via Babuino, and, in the centre and running toward us as straight as a ruler, the popular Corso carrying the old Flaminian Way right through the heart of modern Rome. By degrees we come to distinguish familiar churches among the hundreds of spires, towers, and domes; to pick out, here and there, a mediæval watchtower; to locate well-known squares; to name an occasional obelisk; to identify a column; and even to particularize some of the scores of fountains that give latter-day Rome a pleasant distinction among modern cities. The ribbed, blue-gray dome of St. Peter’s looms impressively from out the deep green of the Papal Gardens of the yellow Vatican; the circular bulk of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo and the columned Pantheon look as familiar as old friends to us—though they may not be friends to each other, with the latter, under papal stress, forced in other days to yield its beautiful bronze tiles to make saints’ ornaments and cannon for the former; the yellow walls of the Sant’ Onofrio monastery mark where died Tasso, “King of Bards,” and where they still show his crucifix and inkstand; and yonder is the great gray church where Beatrice Cenci lies in her nameless grave. If we turn and look southward we see strange sun-tricks among the bleak and shadowy corridors of the vast, half-demolished Colosseum, andcrumbling arches of the emperors warm into a venerable dotage. The sun-baked wreckage of the Forum expands at our feet in rows of column stumps, shattered arches, isolated shafts with clinging fragments of cornice and entablature, yawning earthen doorways and dusty heaps of cluttered brick andtufa,—like a gigantic honeycomb,—while all about it birds are singing divinely in the shade of the laurels. The famed Tarpeian Rock, just at hand, has little suggestion of a short shrift for traitors, with rookeries nestling snugly to its base and a rose-trellised garden on its commodious summit.
Victor EmmanuelII, in the regal cool of bronze, gazes over his colossal charger in the gigantic monument on the Capitoline slopes below us and beholds the hills studded with the pretty white villas of his grandson’s prosperous subjects, and the Quarter of the Fields carpeted with the neat stucco homes of the poor that used to languish in the vile slums of the old Ghetto. Had he read Zola’s “Rome” he might even be justified in frowning at so defamatory a description of so pleasant a section. But apparently he prefers to watch the afternoon glow on the gleaming domes and towers and myrtle-set villas of the Trastevere, where the powerful and violent descendants of the ancient Romans still dwell; and to take amused note of Garibaldi over there twisting around on his big bronze horse to keep a wary eye on St. Peter’s.
It taxes the credulity of the visitor to comprehend that yonder is the renowned Janiculum, down whose slopes Lars Porsena led his troops to contend with Horatius Cocles and his intrepid companions as they “held the bridge”—only a hundred yards from where we are standing. And, indeed, imagination is quite unequal to the tasks set it on all this historic ground. Even if we succeed in carrying ourselves back through the periods of the popes, the emperors, the republic, the kings, and possibly the shepherds, what is to become of us when confronted with the statement of Ampère that there were really “nine Romes before Rome.” It is quite enough to undertake the reconstruction of ancient Rome to the mind’s eye, such as authentic history describes it, considering how repeatedly its conquerors sacked it, and how both Nero and Robert Guisecard burned it; and that the Romans themselves, as Lanciani insists, have done more harm to it than all invading hosts put together. “What the Barbarians did not do,” ran the famous pasquinade, “the Barberini did.” It is, really, asking too much of the man who is risking “a touch of sun” to see the city from the sweltering top of the Capitol Tower, to expect him to be communing with himself in terms oftravertineandpeperinoand reassembling antiquities as an agreeable pastime. He will probably content himself with a hasty glance around, and a little irreverent levity over the task of Ascanius, son of “the pious Æneas,” in buildinga city on the scraggy ridge of distant Alba Longa, or the scramble the Roman bachelors must have had when they scampered down the neighboring Quirinal Hill with their arms full of their Sabine allies’ wives. As he trudges down the tower steps and catches periodic glimpses of that ancient Latium that is now the Campagna, he ought to devote a moment to self-congratulation that the pestilence no longer stalks there by night and noon-day, or that the evilcampagnardsof Andersen’s “Improvisatore” no more terrorize with impunity, or wild beasts imperil the wayfarer; but rather that these latter themselves flee, especially the foxes, what time the red-coated gentlemen of the English Hunt round on them among the shattered tombs of the Appian Way.
And yet, if the visitor is a sentimentalist, no Italian sun is going to rob him of his reverie: he will be hearing the cries of the Christian martyrs at a Colosseum matinée, and beholding the pride and beauty of ancient Rome loitering along the palace-lined streets on their way to the afternoon diversions at the Baths of Caracalla. And the Forum will bustle with the state business of the world, Cicero will mount the rostrum, and a train of Vestal Virgins pass demurely along the Sacra Via. He will attend the mournful wails of priests at worship in the temples of Jupiter and Saturn, and thrill to see a detachment of the Prætorian Guard dash into the Forum and acclaim some new military hero as emperor. But this should be sufficient to startle him back to theRome of to-day, and as he looks anxiously over to the northwestern walls, beyond which once stood that infamous camp, he will doubtless rejoice devoutly that the sober and law-abiding soldiery that drills there now is something so very different from the uncontrollable “Frankenstein” that the Cæsars devised to their own undoing. It is, in consequence, with hearty complacence that he will turn his back on even the aristocratic treasure-heap of the lordly Palatine, conscious that if the cry were raised to-day, “Why is the Forum crowded, what means this stir in Rome?” the reply would be forthcoming, “Tourists and picture-card sellers and peddlers of cameo pins.”
Parenthetically, it may be observed that, although pathos and bathos rub elbows in the foregoing reflections, still incongruities come very near to being the rule in latter-day Rome. What is to be said of obelisks of the Pharaohs with Christian crosses on their tops? Of the column of Trajan with St. Peter at its summit, and at its base those twentieth-century cats that visitors feed with fish bought from stands at hand for the purpose? Of St. Paul on the column of Marcus Aurelius, and the sign of an American life insurance company across the street? Of a modern playhouse in the mausoleum of Augustus where the emperors were buried? Of the present use of King Tarquin’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, just as good as it was twenty-five hundred years ago? Of electric lights whereCincinnatus had his cabbage-farm? Of a Jewish cemetery above the circus of Tarquin? Of steam-heated flats in the gardens of Sallust? Of modern houses at the Tarpeian Rock, and the Baths of Agrippa? Of street cars with the name of Diocletian? Of automobiles on the Flaminian Way? Of tennis courts beside the burial-place of a Cæsar? Of motor-cycles around the tomb of the Scipios? Of an annual Derby down the Appian Way? Of railroad trains beside the old Servian Wall? Of telephone booths on the banks of Father Tiber? Modernism is, indeed, with us, as his Holiness laments!
The sultry, torrid hour that lies between three o’clock and four of a summer afternoon usually sees Rome rubbing her eyes, fresh from her siesta, that ancient midday nap that Varro declared he could not live without; and you may be sure the final rub would be one of vast amusement if she were to see you walking on the sunny side of the street, where, by the terms of her immemorial observation, only dogs and foreigners go. The heat is intense on these lava pavements; one keeps religiously to the shade. But Roman society is not rubbing its eyes,—at least, not in town,—fortout le mondeis passing the annualvilleggiaturaat its villa in the hills or by the sea, economizing for the fashionable expenditure of the winter, and, incidentally, obliging the people who stay in town with that much more of elbow room on the Corso and other popular promenades. All of which helps a little in making the stroll from the CapitolineHill to the Pincian Gardens rather more comfortable than moving around the hot-room of a Turkish bath.
As we pick our way down the Capitoline slope, pass Marcus Aurelius on his fat bronze steed, and “bend our steps,” as the old novels used to say, toward the tramway-haunted uproar of the Piazza di Venezia, the rabble rout of the slum district on the left affords a lively conception of the element that goes farthest to make Rome howl. Having been told that this old Ghetto had been swept and garnished, one is properly indignant at finding the air redolent of garlic and everybody under conviction that the chief end of man is to amass macaroni and enjoy it forever. You gaze askance on a universal costume of filth and rags, and hurry along through it, protesting that, while you would not invoke the precedent of Pope PaulIV’s sixteenth-century method of putting gates across the streets, and locking the people in and making the men wear yellow hats and the women yellow veils, as he did with the Jews, still some expedient ought to be hit upon for making the district look a little less like a camp of Falstaff recruits. “A frowzy-headed laborer,” say you, “shouldering a basket of charcoal, may seem attractive in Mr. Storey’s ‘Roba di Roma,’ but in real life one likes to think men can afford shirts, and not have to wear rags over their shoulders after the manner of a herald’s tabard.” You pause a moment to watch the disappearance of a yard of macaroni down some red gullet, and George AugustusSala’s description of the banquet of the seven wagoners rushes to mind: “Upon this vast mess they fell tooth and nail. The simile is, perchance, not strictly correct. Teeth may bede trop. You should never bite or chew macaroni, but swallow each pipe whole, grease and all, as though it were so much flattery. But their nails they did use, seeing that they ate the macaroni with their fingers. What wondrous twistings and turnings-back of their heads, what play of the muscles of their throats, what straining of their eyeballs and vasty openings of their jaws, did I study as they swallowed their food.”
And now we begin to have the usual experience of Roman mendicancy. Truly, there is no beggar like your Roman beggar. He has raised his profession to both an art and a nuisance. Appeals to charity take every form and phase. Evidences of anatomical disaster are utilized to excite pity at so much per sigh. Tales of misery and misfortune ring all the changes of fervency and fancy. Their whines are both groveling and dramatic. “Niente!” they moan, as with woe-begone faces and pathetic twists of their necks they sidle up with stiff gestures of weary and hopeless expressiveness; “Illustrissimo! Eccellenza! Per amor di Dio!” You could not bluff them, though you were armored in all the calloused nonchalance of the average ambulance surgeon; and your doom is sealed if you undertake to bandy repartee, for their invective is as searching as a satire of Juvenal. Whether you give or not, their volubilityand frankness continue unabated; for you are savagely cursed if you decline, and if you acquiesce are blessed strictly in proportion to the gratuity. Indubitably, in the social scheme of the beggar we be brethren all and should each aid the other—after the philosophy of the Italian, saying, “One hand washes the other, and both the face.” The Roman, understanding them, passes coolly by; but the foreigner, who is their special prey, gives up in desperation, on the principle of the local proverb, “We are in the ballroom and we must dance.”
Parenthetically, again, they say the authorities are helpless to curb this universal Roman nuisance. It is an institution. These beggars come of all classes—from the Capuchin and Franciscan lay brothers who go about in brown robes, rope girdles, and sandals and present a basket for food, to the dirty urchins of the Appian Way who stop your carriage with their acrobatic proficiency and then howl forsoldiin the name of all the saints. Many a beggar here is a bank depositor; and any of them who can retain the monopoly of the door of a popular church may confidently look forward to affluence. Very likely they are better business men, in their way, than many who drop coins into their pathetic, swindling hands.À chacun son métier.
It would extend a Brooklynite to negotiate the crossing of the Piazza di Venezia. It is the grand gathering-place of tramcars, busses, cabs, carts, bicycles, and everyother form of conveyance. You will certainly find a “Seeing Rome” automobile, with the lecturer pointing out the castellated old Palazzo di Venezia and telling his people that it was built of stone from the Colosseum, and has been the seat of the Austrian embassy to the Curia for over a hundred years. So far as traffic is concerned, this is the heart of Rome. Nothing less than a whirlpool could be expected in a spot that is the confluence of such full streams of life as the Corso and the Via Nazionale. One admires its broad, busy sweep, and the dignity of the solid old gray buildings that rim it. No mid-afternoon heat lessens the bustle and activity that rages here; even the experienced natives can be found in large numbers, jostling their way across it, and visitors pass through in droves to reach the Cenci Palace or to see the spot where Paul dwelt for two years “in his own hired house.”
If you stopped, as I did, at one of the hotels near the Baths of Diocletian, the Via Nazionale will have a friendly suggestion of the nearest way home. With thoughts of that temporary home the recollection often comes to me of the mildly stimulating delight I once found in getting lost by night in this city of superior chance encounters. It seemed, on the first occasion, as though I had scarcely turned the corner into the Via Cavour before a delicious conviction of unfamiliarity with my surroundings assured me I was pursuing a course that was certain, sooner or later, to lead to artistic discoveryor adventure. Nothing was easier than getting lost, for I was newly arrived; and yet localities and objects of consequence were not without significance, for, like every one else, I had a vivid idea of the landmarks of the famous city. And first of all, I discovered I was passing the infamous spot where “the impious Tullia” drove her chariot across the bleeding body of her royal father; whence I hastened on, with furtive glances. Next, after some speculation I identified an enormous church to be none other than the famous Santa Maria Maggiore, whose ceilings, I had read, were crusted with the first gold brought from the New World, and to whose high altar the popes used to come by torchlight for New Year’s mass. I thrilled at the incredible reflection that the street cars crossing that corner would be passing, a moment later, the site of the gardens of Mæcenas where Horace and Virgil had mused and read their verses. A few blocks farther on I came to a halt before the house of Lucrezia Borgia; and I tried to fancy the circumstances of the night of their quiet family supper there, before the children took leave of their mother with false words of affection and Cæsar hurried to gather his bravos and overtook Francesco, and, muffled in a cloak, sat his horse in easy unconcern while his brother was done to death and thrown into the Tiber. For relief I turned across the street to the church of St. Peter-in-Chains, and imagined how Michael Angelo’s vigorous Moses might be appearing in the dark of the side aisle, andthought of the master striking the completed work with his mallet and crying out, “Now, speak!” On I rambled, through a block or two of darkened shops and gloomy houses, and suddenly a great open space yawned before me and I was staring at rows of column stumps, mellowed and battered, and among them a tall, ghostly shaft of marble with a spiral band of half-mutilated reliefs winding away up to the summit, where was the dusky outline of a sculptured form. It was the old school-geography picture come to life! There was I in the heart of an unfamiliar city, alone, by night, with this vast relic of the ancients. It was like Stanley finding Livingstone in Africa. I felt I had honestly discovered it and that it ought to be mine. It was the Forum of Trajan!
It will seem a violent transition to jump from midnight to mid-afternoon, but the plunge must be taken. The normal state of the Corso at three-thirty of a summer afternoon is one of leisurely activity. The crowds are lethargic, slow-moving, inclined to curiosity. An interesting social comedy is proceeding, with foreign ladies playing sight-seeing rôles, clutching their red Baedekers and Hare’s “Walks in Rome.” Jostling groups of them gather before the beguiling shop windows, and occasionally one enters and possesses herself of a Roman pearl or cameo, or perhaps a mosaic or copy of an antique bronze. Business people pass along in their habitually distrait manner, and priests beyond numberbrighten the scene with habits of every hue. There is little enough of room in the middle of the street and scarcely any on the sidewalks. Like all Roman thoroughfares, the Corso is clean and distinguished. Long perspectives of gayly awninged shops extend toward the Piazza del Popolo, agreeably broken here and there by the interposition of mellow old palace fronts and richly sculptured baroque façades; and there is frequent opportunity for passing glimpses into cool courtyards attractive with foliage and fountains.
Visitors keep forsaking the Corso at every turning to make inspiring discoveries in the tangled mesh of side streets. We are at liberty to suspect those who go to the west, of sentimental designs on the star under the dome of a neighboring church that marks the spot where Julius Cæsar was assassinated in Pompey’s Senate House; or, perhaps, of an intention to visit the sombre statue of Giordano Bruno in the Field of Flowers, and reflect upon what a constant rebuke it must be to the church that burned him there, three centuries ago, for persisting in his “modernism” to the outrageous extremity of defending the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and like heresies of the hour.
Afternoon walks in Rome should be frequently interrupted, not only to escape the floods of sunshine, but to find out occasionally what is behind the mellow garden walls over whose tops glistening, green foliage droops enticingly down with hints of cool and restfulretreats. Such an opportunity presents itself here in the rare Colonna Gardens, just around the corner of the great Colonna Palace where earlier in the day the Titians and Tintorettos ravish the artistic. Spacious, elegant Rome has nothing more charming and exquisite than such gardens as these. Art and antiquity are everywhere in restful profusion—“storied urn and animated bust.” It is even said that sculptures are to be found almost anywhere underground for the mere pains of exhuming. One rests with infinite satisfaction in the deep shade of eucalyptus, cypress, ilex, and laurel, to the sweet singing of multitudes of birds. There are roses and oranges in bloom, and tall hedges of clipped box, and musical little cascades tumble down from terrace to terrace and drip over mossy marble steps. In this particular garden come thoughts of Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, who so often strolled along these very paths and communed in their serene and beautiful friendship. Theirs was a faith that brought its own reward.
And what, pray, without its amazing faith, would this Catholic Rome be, anyway?À chaque saint sa chandelle.Otherwise, what would become of that marble block from the floor of the Appian Way—which the stubborn archæologists will insist was really paved with silex—that is preserved with so much reverence in the church of Domine Quo Vadis, as showing the impressions of the feet of Our Lord and St. Peter when they faced each other there on the occasion of the memorable rebukeof the latter for his proposed flight from Rome? And how about thescala santa—the worn and venerated marble steps in the shrine near the church of St. John Lateran, which were brought from Jerusalem and up which we are told Christ passed on his way to the judgment seat of Pilate? The faithful thank God for the privilege of ascending them on their knees, praying, and receiving the indulgence of a thousand years of purgatory; and they were worn thin with kisses long before the day when Martin Luther got halfway up and suddenly quit and came tramping down with a voice crying in his ears, “The just shall live by faith.” And without faith, where would be the use of the miraculous Bambino, the adored and bejeweled little wooden image that a Franciscan pilgrim carved from a tree of the Mount of Olives and which is imposingly domiciled in a glass case in the church of Ara Cœli? They say there is no disease that the Bambino cannot cure; and when his keepers accompany him through the streets on his errands of mercy, conveyed in his magnificent buff coach, people kneel by hundreds and beseech a blessing. Such blessing may be secured, though possibly of a diminished efficacy, by buying one of his legended cards at the church and having the priest rub it across the glass top of the case. Who would eschew faith and forfeit such advantages? Would we not still have Life’s puzzle, and without this key? Might we not even be reduced to a plane as confused and desperate as that ofthe famous Sultan of Turkey, who knew so little of music that, when his new Italian band had finished tuning-up, he shouted in delight to the leader, “Marshallah! Let the dogs play that tune again!”
At this languorous hour of the afternoon the broad, sunny piazzas with their many fountains afford incomparably lovely loitering-places on the way to the Pincio. The one of the Quirinal is a near neighbor to the Colonna Gardens, and there you may shelter under eucalyptus trees and dream over the brown old obelisk and the vigorous fountain sculptures of the “horse-tamers” that once graced the Baths of Constantine, and philosophize over the irony of fate that converted a papal summer residence into a royal palace. Or you can thread your way through narrow streets of the Middle Ages that are lined by ochre-colored houses with sun-shades, where artists have their studios and transients theirhôtels garnis, and down which a belated wine-cart may jangle or a gayly painted Campagna wagon creak, with its oxen festive in bells and crimson tassels and its rugged driver clad in blue. Were you to follow these typical byways of mediæval Rome until you came to the embankment of the Sant’ Angelo Bridge, you would pass by where Benvenuto Cellini lived among his goldsmiths, and could identify the Gothic window of the old Inn of the Bear where Montaigne stopped, centuries ago.
At this hour the Trevi Fountain is doubly appealingand refreshing, rejoicing the whole side of its roomy square with sparkling waters that dash merrily about Neptune and his allies in the wall niches. Devoted as one may be to the venerable tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Appian Way, he will fervently commend Pope Clement for having pillaged some of its stone to supply this cheery fountain with its dramatic setting. Were this our last day in the city we should certainly toss a copper coin over our left shoulder into these boiling waters, to insure a return to Rome. Of course, one is pretty sure to come again anyhow; but that makes it a certainty. Besides, it is much less trouble than going away out to Tivoli to ask the same thing of the Sibyl in the Grotto.
Were you to yield to the fountain habit, you would go bird-hopping all over town, for no city has so many or such beautiful ones as Rome, thanks to its huge aqueducts. It is a never-failing delight to turn a corner and come across one of these sun-deluged pleasaunces with its crowds of picturesque loungers; its tritons, “rivers,” and sea gods disporting themselves in attitudes of aqueous grace and gayety; its flower-girls banked behind fragrant barriers of roses and violets; and the slender columns of water streaming sideways like tattered flags in a breeze.
ROME, THE PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
ROME, THE PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
Mid-afternoon is an admirable time to drop in at the most popular of all the piazzas, the Spanish Square. One wonders how the jewelers of the Via Condottimanage to make both ends meet, with such a superior attraction at hand. It is certainly one of the most charming nooks in Rome. A heavy golden sunshine glorifies, at this hour, the broad reach of the Spanish Steps, themselves quite as wide as the square, that sweep between picturesque parapets like a yellow cascade from the terraces of the church at S. Trinità de’ Monte to the boat-shaped fountain in the piazza below. About them, drowsy, dusty, Old-World houses supply a pleasant background of soft color, and the crystal-clear Italian sky spreads above like a cathedral dome. The flower market is the crowning touch, with a flood of fragrant blooms welling over the lower steps and rimming the fountain edge in brilliant hues of purple Roman anemones, orange wallflowers, white narcissus, golden daffodils, snowy gardenias, violets, camelias, hyacinths, mignonettes, and every fair and odorous blossom. A lovely, sunny, fragrant spot—this Piazza di Spagna; a place to dream whole days away in; a well-beloved corner of fascinating Rome, where one may realize to its fullness the beautiful, consoling reflection of Don Quixote, “But still there’s sunshine on the wall.”
Literature has had its chosen seat in the Piazza di Spagna. Half the traveled world of letters has lived or visited there. It invests the spot with a fresh and human interest to know that it has been the musing-place of such rare spirits as Byron, Smollett, Madame de Staël,Cooper, Andersen, Thorwaldsen, Hawthorne, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Dickens, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Lowell, and Longfellow. One thinks of the Brownings entertaining Thackeray, Lockhart, and Fanny Kemble. But, of course, the closest memories are of Keats and Shelley, who lived in either corner house—those radiant friends whose ashes repose under myrtles and violets in the cypress-shaded cemetery beyond the Aurelian Wall. The works of all these authors, as also of the others who may or may not have seen the Piazza di Spagna,—along with the idealism of Fogazzaro, the sensuality of D’Annunzio, the realism of Verga, and the grace of De Amicis,—are to be had at the celebrated shops of Piale or Spithöver, in the square; where, also, you may at little expense become a momentary part of Rome’s bohemia over toast and muffins in the adjoining tea-rooms.
Chacun à son goût.If you are cold to tea there may be something else to interest in the numerous cafés of the neighborhood that begin to hum with activity as the hour approaches four. And, indeed, they may be angels in disguise for such as have triedpensionlife and grown sadly familiar with puddings as mysterious as Scotch haggis, meat that suggestedtravertine, and pies constructed of something likesilexandtufa. Besides, in the cafés you can regale yourself with vermouth, syrups, or ices, and at the same time observe the Roman at his afternoon ease—thus realizing in yourself the acutenessof the Italian proverb, “One blow at the hoop and one at the cask.” It is quite worth the cost to see how quickly the chairs and little marble-topped tables, out on the sidewalk, are taken by leisurelyhabituésbent on gossip; by precise old gentlemen in lavender gloves who drop in for a tumbler of black coffee and a hand at dominoes; or by foppish young men in duck trousers, who clatter on the tables for thecameriereto bring copies of the “Tribuna” so they may sup on frivolities and horrors along with coffee and tobacco.
A ruder jocundity also, at this time, is making its start for high tide in poorer sections, where in arboredosteries, Tuscan wine-shops, andspacci da vinostraw-covered fiascos of chianti are passing, along with glasses of local wines whose prices will be found conspicuously chalked up on the outsides of the taverns at so manysoldiper half-litre.
As we follow the Corso toward the Pincian Gardens we find the congestion increasing, with a decided addition of carriages all bound in our direction. It is now the hour of the afternoonpasseggiata; and one marvels that the ancient campus Martius should still be the heart of Rome, and wonders how this narrow street could have held its crowds when the mad, brilliant scenes of Carnival riot and revelry were enacted before these old Renaissance palaces. Every restaurant of the tumultuous Piazza Colonna is working to capacity, and groups of gay army officers swagger about the cornersand over by the marble basin beside the Column of Marcus Aurelius where the taxi-cabs have their chief stand. No red-and-white street car dares venture in this favorite square, but busses and cabs supplant them to distraction. And who, indeed, does not prefer an omnibus to a street car! It may want the latter’s business-like directness, but what a holiday air it has of cozy, informal deliberateness! It is coaching in town. You may not arrive so soon, but what a lark you had! And if you mock at the faithful bus, there are the impertinent Roman cabs. Here is speed, seclusion, and economy. You cannot fail to be suited both financially and æsthetically, for you may pick between the latest varnished output of the factory and venerable, decrepit ramshackles that look to have been contemporary with the Colosseum. The Roman cabmen are an inconsequent lot; they wear green felt hats and greasy coats, and dash at one with a reckless scorn of human life that strengthens a suspicion that they are really banditti of the Campagna, transparently disguised. The famous Column of the philosophic Emperor never lacks its groupings of adaptable “rubber-necks,” who are twisting themselves into suicide graves trying to read the spiral band of reliefs that winds away up to the statue of St. Paul.
The Corsopasseggiatais an interesting affair. Toward four o’clock it quite fills the street. Young girls are out, with their inevitable chaperons, kittenish and alert-eyed;Bergamasque nurses, with scarlet ribbons and extraordinary silver ornaments falling below their snowy muslin caps; clerks in sober black; Douane men, in short capes and shining hats with yellow rosettes; hatless women, with light mantillas over their blue-black hair; the stolid country-folk,—thecontadini,—with the men in brown velvet jackets and goatskin breeches, and the women in faded blue skirts and with red stays stitched outside their bodices; the despisedforestieri, with guidebooks;carabinieri, in pairs, resplendent in braided uniforms and cocked hats; the nervous Bersaglieri, with shining round hats and glossy cocks’-feather plumes; army officers in cloaks or bright blue guard-coats, fresh from vermouth at Aragni’s; Savoyards in steel helmets and gold crests; diplomats in silk hats and Prince Albert coats; and clericals by the hundreds. The clericals, indeed, may always be relied upon to supply an effective color-touch anywhere in Rome. They come along in fluttering groups of every hue: English and French seminarists in cassocks of black, Germans in scarlet, Scotch in purple, and Roumanians in orange and blue; it is diverting to see them raise their black beavers to one another with the quietest and most serious air imaginable. Solemn lay brethren shuffle past in sombre brown of Franciscan and Capuchin, or white of the cowled and tonsured Dominicans. Occasionally, along a side street, one passes slowly, absorbed in his breviary, like Don Abbondio in “I PromessiSposi.” Rome abounds in shovel-hats, shaven heads, sandals, and hempen girdles. But you must not expect to see them all in a Corsopasseggiata.
Unless we have yielded too much to the blandishments along the way, we should be crossing the sunny, somnolent circle of the Piazza del Popolo and climbing the fountained and statue-set terraces of the Pincian Gardens as the first strains of the promenade concert usher in the hour of four. The spectacle that confronts us on the low, broad brow of the old hill is animated and brilliant. Hundreds of motor-cars, private carriages and hired cabs roll in a long, gay procession around the driveways, their occupants arrayed in the last word of Italian fashion, and a multitude of happy loiterers stroll leisurely in the mild afternoon sunshine along sylvan paths hedged with box or bordered with flowers, where long lines of marble portrait-busts of Italy’s dead immortals extend into the pleasant shade of groves of myrtles and fragrant acacias. What a contrast in occupation to the scenes that in olden days were enacted here—the luxury and splendor of the golden suppers that the war-worn Lucullus gave to Rome’s poets and artists; or the vicious and voluptuous orgies with which the vile Messalina indulged the depraved favorites of the Claudian court! Young Rome, this afternoon, has decked itself in its gayest raiment, and youth vies with youth in gallantries to the fashionable beauties who prefer the fascinating town, even in summer, to the listlessdiversions of the country. “Visiting” goes on between carriage-parties, which is said to answer the social requirements of calls at the house. Mild refreshments are being served in a lively little café to which many repair when weary with lounging among the brilliant flowers and lovely foliaged paths; and groups ramble across the new viaduct and stroll among the sycamores and stone-pines of the neighboring Villa Borghese. The Pincian Gardens seem very formal and compact and precisely ornate as compared with our parks at home, but there is much more of sociability and comfort than is to be found Sunday afternoons in New York’s Central Park, for instance. That is probably because New York’s pedestrians are centred in the Mall to hear the band, or around the lakes to watch the boating, and all her carriage-folk are by themselves in the East Side Drive. The Pincian promenade mingles both classes into a great family party. It is a brilliant scene, but it must have been much more so in other days when the popes joined the company in the great glass coach drawn by six black horses in crimson trappings, and outriders and footmen flocked about them.
One wonders whether PiusXdoes not sometimes think with a sigh of regret of the liberties of his early predecessors, as he paces the flowered garden paths of his voluntary prison and lifts his gentle, shining face toward these pleasant Pincian heights. How often will the memory recur to me of that mild and friendlyman, as once I saw him in the Vatican’s Court of the Pine, in his snowy robes and the little cap scarce whiter than his hair. I remember his only ornaments to have been the famous Fisherman’s ring, and a long gold chain about his neck from which a great crucifix was pendent. It was the occasion of a calisthenic drill given by a local orphan asylum for his Holiness’s special benefit. Each little athlete in gray was burning to do his very best in so notable a presence, and was, indeed, succeeding, with the glaring exception of the smallest of the band, whose eager efforts had resulted only in an uninterrupted series of comical mischances, to the infinite chagrin of himself and associates and the increasing amusement of the Pope. In due time the performance came to an end, and the boys were drawn up facing each other in a double line through which, attended by cardinals, chamberlains, and members of the Papal Guard, his Holiness passed extending his hand to be kissed. When he reached the diminutive and blushing blunderer, he halted his imposing train and laid his hand on the boy’s head and smoothed his hair and patted his cheek with affectionate tenderness, whispering the while an intimate message of good cheer, as though it were something strictly confidential between himself and that fatherless little waif whose face was shining with reverence and awe and whose eyes were full of happy tears. I am, I trust, as confirmed a Protestant as the next, but I confess that my heartwas bowed as well as my head as that white-robed figure turned, as it disappeared through a door of the Vatican, and raised a hand toward us in the sign of the cross.
The marble parapet of the Pincio is, at this hour, a prime favorite among Roman loafing-places. As from an upper theatre box, one looks precipitously down into the great, peaceful, siesta-drugged circle of the Piazza del Popolo, the scene in other days of so much cruelty and often of so much happiness. The stone lions of the fountain spout patiently to the delighted observation of scores of playing children, and drowsy cabmen nod on the boxes of the long rank of waiting victorias. One may indulge to his fullest in moral reflections over the slender obelisk from the Heliopolis Temple to the Sun, upon which Moses himself may have gazed in days before Rome was thought of, and when the celestial consorts, Isis and Osiris, still waved their lotus sceptres and ruled the quick and the dead. Nineteen hundred years ago Nero, who should have begun blood-letting with himself instead of ending it there, was buried in this ground, and you are told how the evil spirits that haunted the accursed spot were not finally exorcised until yonder church of Santa Maria had been reared above his tomb. One will find it more agreeable to look across the piazza at the portal of the Flaminian Way and re-create the scenes of the triumphant entrance of the noble, hardy Trajan walking by the side of his fair and amiable wife.
The elm-tops are rustling in the deep groves of the Villa Borghese, and the yellow Tiber, “too large to be harmless and too small to be useful,” slips swiftly between the yellow walls of its quays. To the mind’s eye, in the azure distance Mons Sacer is clear, and Tivoli and the Sabine Farm of Horace. Like the Archangel Michael on the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, the sun, too, begins to sheathe his sword, and its glitter throws a warm mantle over the shoulders of the marble angels on the bridge. Most conspicuously, as is proper, it lingers on the pale dome of St. Peter’s, touches into life the sculptured saints of the portico, and floods obelisk, fountains, and all that vast elliptical piazza toward which are extended the sheltering arms of Bernini’s colonnade. How fair, beneath that roof, are the dazzling marbles, shining tombs, sculptured effigies, and glowing mosaics! But fairer far is this prospect from the hill, of Rome in her soft coat of many colors, the velvety ruins of the Palatine, the stone-pines in sentinel stiffness down the distant Appian Way, the sunny piazzas, the sparkling fountains, and the verdure and bloom of the slopes of the Janiculum, under the cloudless blue of a soft Italian sky.Ave, Roma eterna!