The Spirit of Rome Part 9

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 gra.s.s 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 f.a.ggots; 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 s.p.a.ciousness 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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. Suns.h.i.+ne; distant noise and incessant bells. Rome in a fas.h.i.+on 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 refres.h.i.+ng, 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 unblus.h.i.+ng _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 pa.s.s. 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 ma.s.s was going on at a side altar, and the canon's ma.s.s 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 peac.o.c.ks apparently all gone; but two superb green ones, their tails outspread, glittering on the gra.s.s 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.

San Saba to-day, for the second time this year, with those pleasant 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 capsic.u.ms, 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 kammt 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.