It is not more than a quarter of a mile above our hotel, and is accessible by a good piece of road, though very steep. As we approached the town, we were a.s.sailed by some little beggars; but this is the case all through Italy, in city or solitude, and I think the mendicants of Radicofani are fewer than its proportion. We had not got far towards the village, when, looking back over the scene of many miles that lay stretched beneath us, we saw a heavy shower apparently travelling straight towards us over hill and dale. It seemed inevitable that it should soon be upon us, so I persuaded my wife to return to the hotel; but J----- and I kept onward, being determined to see Radicofani with or without a drenching. We soon entered the street; the blackest, ugliest, rudest old street, I do believe, that ever human life incrusted itself with. The first portion of it is the overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the town in generations subsequent to that in which it was surrounded by a wall; but after going a little way we came to a high, square tower planted right across the way, with an arched gateway in its bas.e.m.e.nt story, so that it looked like a great short-legged giant striding over the street of Radicofani. Within the gateway is the proper and original town, though indeed the portion outside of the gate is as densely populated, as ugly, and as ancient, as that within.
The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city"s street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably gossips with everybody, being everybody"s blood relation, as they cannot fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up together within the narrow walls for many hundred years. They looked round briskly at J----- and me, but were courteous, as Italians always are, and made way for us to pa.s.s through the throng, as we kept on still ascending the steep street. It took us but a few minutes to reach the still steeper and winding pathway which climbs towards the old castle.
After ascending above the village, the path, though still paved, becomes very rough, as if the hoofs of Ghino di Tacco"s robber cavalry had displaced the stones and they had never been readjusted. On every side, too, except where the path just finds s.p.a.ce enough, there is an enormous rubbish of huge stones, which seems to have fallen from the precipice above, or else to have rained down out of the sky. We kept on, and by and by reached what seemed to have been a lower outwork of the castle on the top; there was the ma.s.sive old arch of a gateway, and a great deal of ruin of man"s work, beside the large stones that here, as elsewhere, were scattered so abundantly. Within the wall and gateway just mentioned, however, there was a kind of farm-house, adapted, I suppose, out of the old ruin, and I noticed some ears of Indian corn hanging out of a window.
There were also a few stacks of hay, but no signs of human or animal life; and it is utterly inexplicable to me, where these products of the soil could have come from, for certainly they never grew amid that barrenness.
We had not yet reached Ghino"s castle, and, being now beneath it, we had to bend our heads far backward to see it rising up against the clear sky while we were now in twilight. The path upward looked terribly steep and rough, and if we had climbed it we should probably have broken our necks in descending again into the lower obscurity. We therefore stopped here, much against J-----"s will, and went back as we came, still wondering at the strange situation of Radicofani; for its aspect is as if it had stepped off the top of the cliff and lodged at its base, though still in danger of sliding farther down the hillside. Emerging from the compact, grimy life of its street, we saw that the shower had swept by, or probably had expended itself in a region beneath us, for we were above the scope of many of the showery clouds that haunt a hill-country. There was a very bright star visible, I remember, and we saw the new moon, now a third towards the full, for the first time this evening. The air was cold and bracing.
But I am excessively sleepy, so will not describe our great dreary hotel, where a blast howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how sleepy I am.
SETTE VENE.
October 15th.--We left Radicofani long before sunrise, and I saw that ceremony take place from the coupe of the vettura for the first time in a long while. A sunset is the better sight of the two. I have always suspected it, and have been strengthened in the idea whenever I have had an opportunity of comparison. Our departure from Radicofani was most dreary, except that we were very glad to get away; but, the cold discomfort of dressing in a chill bedroom by candlelight, and our uncertain wandering through the immense hotel with a dim taper in search of the breakfast-room, and our poor breakfast of eggs, Italian bread, and coffee,--all these things made me wish that people were created with roots like trees, so they could not befool themselves with wandering about. However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew.
At Ponte Centino my pa.s.sport was examined, and I was invited into an office where sat the papal custom-house officer, a thin, subtle-looking, keen-eyed, sallow personage, of aspect very suitable to be the agent of a government of priests. I communicated to him my wish to pa.s.s the custom-house without giving the officers the trouble of examining my luggage. He inquired whether I had any dutiable articles, and wrote for my signature a declaration in the negative; and then he lifted a sand-box, beneath which was a little heap of silver coins. On this delicate hint I asked what was the usual fee, and was told that fifteen pauls was the proper sum. I presume it was entirely an illegal charge, and that he had no right to pa.s.s any luggage without examination; but the thing is winked at by the authorities, and no money is better spent for the traveller"s convenience than these fifteen pauls. There was a papal military officer in the room, and he, I believe, cheated me in the change of a Napoleon, as his share of the spoil. At the door a soldier met me with my pa.s.sport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house--a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place--appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented. This whole set of men seem to be as corrupt as official people can possibly be; and yet I hardly know whether to stigmatize them as corrupt, because it is not their individual delinquency, but the operation of a regular system. Their superiors know what men they are, and calculate upon their getting a living by just these means. And, indeed, the custom-house and pa.s.sport regulations, as they exist in Italy, would be intolerable if there were not this facility of evading them at little cost. Such laws are good for nothing but to be broken.
We now began to ascend again, and the country grew fertile and picturesque. We pa.s.sed many mules and donkeys, laden with a sort of deep firkin on each side of the saddle, and these were heaped up with grapes, both purple and white. We bought some, and got what we should have thought an abundance at small price, only we used to get twice as many at Montanto for the same money. However, a Roman paul bought us three or four pounds even here. We still ascended, and came soon to the gateway of the town of Acquapendente, which stands on a height that seems to descend by natural terraces to the valley below. . . . .
French soldiers, in their bluish-gray coats and scarlet trousers, were on duty at the gate, and one of them took my pa.s.sport and the vetturino"s, and we then drove into the town to wait till they should be vised. We saw but one street, narrow, with tall, rusty, aged houses, built of stone, evil smelling; in short, a kind of place that would be intolerably dismal in cloudy England, and cannot be called cheerful even under the sun of Italy. . . . . Priests pa.s.sed, and burly friars, one of whom was carrying a wine-barrel on his head. Little carts, laden with firkins of grapes, and donkeys with the same genial burden, brushed pa.s.sed our vettura, finding scarce room enough in the narrow street. All the idlers of Acquapendente--and they were many--a.s.sembled to gaze at us, but not discourteously. Indeed, I never saw an idle curiosity exercised in such a pleasant way as by the country-people of Italy. It almost deserves to be called a kindly interest and sympathy, instead of a hard and cold curiosity, like that of our own people, and it is displayed with such simplicity that it is evident no offence is intended.
By and by the vetturino brought his pa.s.sport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, pa.s.sing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria. The new town, which I suppose is hundreds of years old, with all its novelty shows strikingly the difference between places that grow up and shape out their streets of their own accord, as it were, and one that is built on a settled plan of malice aforethought. This little rural village has gates of cla.s.sic architecture, a s.p.a.cious piazza, and a great breadth of straight and rectangular streets, with houses of uniform style, airy and wholesome looking to a degree seldom seen on the Continent. Nevertheless, I must say that the town looked hatefully dull and ridiculously prim, and, of the two, I had rather spend my life in Radicofani. We drove through it, from gate to gate, without stopping, and soon came to the brow of a hill, whence we beheld, right beneath us, the beautiful lake of Bolsena; not exactly at our feet, however, for a portion of level ground lay between, haunted by the pestilence which has depopulated all these sh.o.r.es, and made the lake and its neighborhood a solitude. It looked very beautiful, nevertheless, with a sheen of a silver mid a gray like that of steel as the wind blew and the sun shone over it; and, judging by my own feelings, I should really have thought that the breeze from its surface was bracing and healthy.
Descending the hill, we pa.s.sed the ruins of the old town of San Lorenzo, of which the prim village on the hill-top may be considered the daughter.
There is certainly no resemblance between parent and child, the former being situated on a sort of precipitous bluff, where there could have been no room for piazzas and s.p.a.cious streets, nor accessibility except by mules, donkeys, goats, and people of Alpine habits. There was an ivy-covered tower on the top of the bluff, and some arched cavern mouths that looked as if they opened into the great darkness. These were the entrances to Etruscan tombs, for the town on top had been originally Etruscan, and the inhabitants had buried themselves in the heart of the precipitous bluffs after spending their lives on its summit.
Reaching the plain, we drove several miles along the sh.o.r.e of the lake, and found the soil fertile and generally well cultivated, especially with the vine, though there were tracks apparently too marshy to be put to any agricultural purpose. We met now and then a flock of sheep, watched by sallow-looking and spiritless men and boys, who, we took it for granted, would soon perish of malaria, though, I presume, they never spend their nights in the immediate vicinity of the lake. I should like to inquire whether animals suffer from the bad qualities of the air. The lake is not nearly so beautiful on a nearer view as it is from the hill above, there being no rocky margin, nor bright, sandy beach, but everywhere this interval of level ground, and often swampy marsh, betwixt the water and the hill. At a considerable distance from the sh.o.r.e we saw two islands, one of which is memorable as having been the scene of an empress"s murder, but I cannot stop to fill my journal with historical reminiscences.
We kept onward to the town of Bolsena, which stands nearly a mile from the lake, and on a site higher than the level margin, yet not so much so, I should apprehend, as to free it from danger of malaria. We stopped at an albergo outside of the wall of the town, and before dinner had time to see a good deal of the neighborhood. The first aspect of the town was very striking, with a vista into its street through the open gateway, and high above it an old, gray, square-built castle, with three towers visible at the angles, one of them battlemented, one taller than the rest, and one partially ruined. Outside of the town-gate there were some fragments of Etruscan ruin, capitals of pillars and altars with inscriptions; these we glanced at, and then made our entrance through the gate.
There it was again,--the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened street of piled-up houses which we have so often seen; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, grape-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, peaches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a fertile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which nature tries to heap into their hands. It seems strange that they can never grasp it.
We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner,--the Via di Castello,--and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend. The street--a strange name for such an avenue--clambered upward in the oddest fashion, pa.s.sing under arches, scrambling up steps, so that it was more like a long irregular pair of stairs than anything that Christians call a street; and so large a part of it was under arches that we scarcely seemed to be out of doors. At last U----, who was in advance, emerged into the upper air, and cried out that we had ascended to an upper town, and a larger one than that beneath.
It really seemed like coming up out of the earth into the midst of the town, when we found ourselves so unexpectedly in upper Bolsena. We were in a little nook, surrounded by old edifices, and called the Piazza del Orologio, on account of a clock that was apparent somewhere. The castle was close by, and from its platform there was a splendid view of the lake and all the near hill-country. The castle itself is still in good condition, and apparently as strong as ever it was as respects the exterior walls; but within there seemed to be neither floor nor chamber, nothing but the empty sh.e.l.l of the dateless old fortress. The stones at the base and lower part of the building were so ma.s.sive that I should think the Etrurians must have laid them; and then perhaps the Romans built a little higher, and the mediaeval people raised the battlements and towers. But we did not look long at the castle, our attention being drawn to the singular aspect of the town itself, which--to speak first of its most prominent characteristic--is the very filthiest place, I do believe, that was ever inhabited by man. Defilement was everywhere; in the piazza, in nooks and corners, strewing the miserable lanes from side to side, the refuse of every day, and of acc.u.mulated ages. I wonder whether the ancient Romans were as dirty a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them; for there seems to have been something in the places that have been inhabited by Romans, or made famous in their history, and in the monuments of every kind that they have raised, that puts people in mind of their very earthliness, and incites them to defile therewith whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal arch may fall in their way. I think it must be an hereditary trait, probably weakened and robbed of a little of its horror by the influence of milder ages; and I am much afraid that Caesar trod narrower and fouler ways in his path to power than those of modern Rome, or even of this disgusting town of Bolsena. I cannot imagine anything worse than these, however.
Rotten vegetables thrown everywhere about, musty straw, standing puddles, running rivulets of dissolved nastiness,--these matters were a relief amid viler objects. The town was full of great black hogs wallowing before every door, and they grunted at us with a kind of courtesy and affability as if the town were theirs, and it was their part to be hospitable to strangers. Many donkeys likewise accosted us with braying; children, growing more uncleanly every day they lived, pestered us with begging; men stared askance at us as they lounged in corners, and women endangered us with slops which they were flinging from doorways into the street. No decent words can describe, no admissible image can give an idea of this noisome place. And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not live a beautiful and jolly life.
I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site, including, I suppose, the s.p.a.ce occupied by the lower city, which looks as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange confusion of black and ugly houses, piled ma.s.sively out of the ruins of former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, that might have adorned a palace. . . . . The streets are the narrowest I have seen anywhere,--of no more width, indeed, than may suffice for the pa.s.sage of a donkey with his panniers. They wind in and out in strange confusion, and hardly look like streets at all, but, nevertheless, have names printed on the corners, just as if they were stately avenues. After looking about us awhile and drawing half-breaths so as to take in the less quant.i.ty of gaseous pollution, we went back to the castle, and descended by a path winding downward from it into the plain outside of the town-gate.
It was now dinner-time, . . . . and we had, in the first place, some fish from the pestiferous lake; not, I am sorry to say, the famous stewed eels which, Dante says, killed Pope Martin, but some trout. . . . . By the by, the meal was not dinner, but our midday colazione. After despatching it, we again wandered forth and strolled round the outside of the lower town, which, with the upper one, made as picturesque a combination as could be desired. The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of ma.s.sive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented ma.s.s of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. ------ sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch. They are a lovable people, these Italians, as I find from almost all with whom we come in contact; they have great and little faults, and no great virtues that I know of; but still are sweet, amiable, pleasant to encounter, save when they beg, or when you have to bargain with them.
We left Bolsena and drove to Viterbo, pa.s.sing the gate of the picturesque town of Montefiascone, over the wall of which I saw spires and towers, and the dome of a cathedral. I was sorry not to taste, in its own town, the celebrated est, which was the death-draught of the jolly prelate. At Viterbo, however, I called for some wine of Montefiascone, and had a little straw-covered flask, which the waiter a.s.sured us was the genuine est-wine. It was of golden color, and very delicate, somewhat resembling still champagne, but finer, and requiring a calmer pause to appreciate its subtle delight. Its good qualities, however, are so evanescent, that the finer flavor became almost imperceptible before we finished the flask.
Viterbo is a large, disagreeable town, built at the foot of a mountain, the peak of which is seen through the vista of some of the narrow streets.
There are more fountains in Viterbo than I have seen in any other city of its size, and many of them of very good design. Around most of them there were wine-hogsheads, waiting their turn to be cleansed and rinsed, before receiving the wine of the present vintage. Pa.s.sing a doorway, J----- saw some men treading out the grapes in a great vat with their naked feet.
Among the beggars here, the loudest and most vociferous was a crippled postilion, wearing his uniform jacket, green, faced with red; and he seemed to consider himself ent.i.tled still to get his living from travellers, as having been disabled in the way of his profession. I recognized his claim, and was rewarded with a courteous and grateful bow at our departure. . . . . To beggars--after my much experience both in England and Italy--I give very little, though I am not certain that it would not often be real beneficence in the latter country. There being little or no provision for poverty and age, the poor must often suffer.
Nothing can be more earnest than their entreaties for aid; nothing seemingly more genuine than their grat.i.tude when they receive it.
They return you the value of their alms in prayers, and say, "G.o.d will accompany you." Many of them have a professional whine, and a certain doleful twist of the neck and turn of the head, which hardens my heart against them at once. A painter might find numerous models among them, if canvas had not already been more than sufficiently covered with their style of the picturesque. There is a certain brick-dust colored cloak worn in Viterbo, not exclusively by beggars, which, when ragged enough, is exceedingly artistic.
ROME.
68 Piazza Poli, October 17th.--We left Viterbo on the 15th, and proceeded, through Monterosi, to Sette Verse. There was nothing interesting at Sette Verse, except an old Roman bridge, of a single arch, which had kept its sweep, composed of one row of stones, unbroken for two or more thousand years, and looked just as strong as ever, though gray with age, and fringed with plants that found it hard to fix themselves in its close crevices.
The next day we drove along the Ca.s.sian Way towards Rome. It was a most delightful morning, a genial atmosphere; the more so, I suppose, because this was the Campagna, the region of pestilence and death. I had a quiet, gentle, comfortable pleasure, as if, after many wanderings, I was drawing near Rome, for, now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart, as I think even London, or even little Concord itself, or old sleepy Salem, never did and never will. Besides, we are to stay here six months, and we had now a house all prepared to receive us; so that this present approach, in the noontide of a genial day, was most unlike our first one, when we crept towards Rome through the wintry midnight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary, and not knowing whither to betake ourselves. Ah! that was a dismal tine! One thing, however, that disturbed even my present equanimity a little was the necessity of meeting the custom-house at the Porta del Popolo; but my past experience warranted me in believing that even these ogres might be mollified by the magic touch of a scudo; and so it proved. We should have escaped any examination at all, the officer whispered me, if his superior had not happened to be present; but, as the case stood, they took down only one trunk from the top of the vettura, just lifted the lid, closed it again, and gave us permission to proceed. So we came to 68 Piazza Poli, and found ourselves at once at home, in such a comfortable, cosey little house, as I did not think existed in Rome.
I ought to say a word about our vetturino, Constantino Bacci, an excellent and most favorable specimen of his cla.s.s; for his magnificent conduct, his liberality, and all the good qualities that ought to be imperial, S----- called him the Emperor. He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino"s inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair"s-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price.
Finally, I think the tears had risen almost to his eyelids when we parted with him.
Our friends, the Thompsons, through whose kindness we procured this house, called to see us soon after our arrival. In the afternoon, I walked with Rosebud to the Medici Gardens, and on our way thither, we espied our former servant, Lalla, who flung so many and such bitter curses after us, on our departure from Rome, sitting at her father"s fruit-stall. Thank G.o.d, they have not taken effect. After going to the Medici, we went to the Pincian Gardens, and looked over into the Borghese grounds, which, methought, were more beautiful than ever. The same was true of the sky, and of every object beneath it; and as we came homeward along the Corso, I wondered at the stateliness and palatial magnificence of that n.o.ble street. Once, I remember, I thought it narrow, and far unworthy of its fame.
In the way of costume, the men in goat-skin breeches, whom we met on the Campagna, were very striking, and looked like Satyrs.
October 21st.--. . . . I have been twice to St. Peter"s, and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a visionary splendor and magnificence. I also went to the Museum of the Capitol; and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them. Yesterday we went to the Corsini Palace, which we had not visited before. It stands in the Trastevere, in the Longara, and is a stately palace, with a grand staircase, leading to the first floor, where is situated the range of picture-rooms. There were a good many fine pictures, but none of them have made a memorable impression on my mind, except a portrait by Vand.y.k.e, of a man in point-lace, very grand and very real. The room in which this picture hung had many other portraits by Holbein, t.i.tian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and other famous painters, and was wonderfully rich in this department. In another, there was a portrait of Pope Julius II., by Raphael, somewhat differing from those at the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries in Florence, and those I have seen in England and Paris; thinner, paler, perhaps older, more severely intellectual, but at least, as high a work of art as those.
The palace has some handsome old furniture, and gilded chairs, covered with leather cases, possibly relics of Queen Christina"s time, who died here. I know not but the most curious object was a curule chair of marble, sculptured all out of one piece, and adorned with bas-reliefs.
It is supposed to be Etruscan. It has a circular back, sweeping round, so as to afford sufficient rests for the elbows; and, sitting down in it, I discovered that modern ingenuity has not made much real improvement on this chair of three or four thousand years ago. But some chairs are easier for the moment, yet soon betray you, and grow the more irksome.
We strolled along Longara, and found the piazza of St. Peter"s full of French soldiers at their drill. . . . . We went quite round the interior of the church, and perceiving the pavement loose and broken near the altar where Guido"s Archangel is placed, we picked up some bits of rosso antico and gray marble, to be set in brooches, as relics.
We have the snuggest little set of apartments in Rome, seven rooms, including an antechamber; and though the stairs are exceedingly narrow, there is really a carpet on them,--a civilized comfort, of which the proudest palaces in the Eternal City cannot boast. The stairs are very steep, however, and I should not wonder if some of us broke our noses down them. Narrowness of s.p.a.ce within doors strikes us all rather ludicrously, yet not unpleasantly, after being accustomed to the wastes and deserts of the Montanto Villa. It is well thus to be put in training for the over-snugness of our cottage in Concord. Our windows here look out on a small and rather quiet piazza, with an immense palace on the left hand, and a smaller yet statelier one on the right, and just round the corner of the street, leading out of our piazza, is the Fountain of Trevi, of which I can hear the plash in the evening, when other sounds are hushed.
Looking over what I have said of Sodoma"s "Christ Bound," at Sierra, I see that I have omitted to notice what seems to me one of its most striking characteristics,--its loneliness. You feel as if the Saviour were deserted, both in heaven and earth; the despair is in him which made him say, "My G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still Divine, and Sodoma almost seems to have reconciled the impossibilities of combining an omnipresent divinity with a suffering and outraged humanity. But this is one of the cases in which the spectator"s imagination completes what the artist merely hints at.
Mr. ------, the sculptor, called to see us, the other evening, and quite paid Powers off for all his trenchant criticisms on his brother artists.
He will not allow Powers to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art, although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the Greek Slave and the Fisher-Boy very ingeniously.
The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Apollino in the Tribune of the Uzi; and the former is made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the Greek Slave, limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together,--a head to one purchaser, an arm or a foot to another, a hand to a third. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb by a happy accident or special providence. (The ill.u.s.tration was my own, and adopted by Mr. ------.) Yet Mr. ------ seems to acknowledge that he did succeed. I repeat these things only as another instance how invariably every sculptor uses his chisel and mallet to smash and deface the marble-work of every other. I never heard Powers speak of Mr. ------, but can partly imagine what he would have said.
Mr. ------ spoke of Powers"s disappointment about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress, and said that he was altogether to blame, inasmuch as he attempted to sell to the nation for that sum a statue which, to Mr. ------"s certain knowledge, he had already offered to private persons for a fifth part of it. I have not implicit faith in Mr. ------"s veracity, and doubt not Powers acted fairly in his own eyes.
October 23d.--I am afraid I have caught one of the colds which the Roman air continually affected me with last winter; at any rate, a sirocco has taken the life out of me, and I have no spirit to do anything. This morning I took a walk, however, out of the Porta Maggiore, and looked at the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, just outside of the gate,--a very singular ruin covered with symbols of the man"s trade in stone-work, and with bas-reliefs along the cornice, representing people at work, making bread. An inscription states that the ashes of his wife are likewise reposited there, in a bread-basket. The mausoleum is perhaps twenty feet long, in its largest extent, and of equal height; and if good bakers were as scarce in ancient Rome as in the modern city, I do not wonder that they were thought worthy of stately monuments. None of the modern ones deserve any better tomb than a pile of their own sour loaves.
I walked onward a good distance beyond the gate alongside of the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, which, in this portion of it, seems to have had little repair, and to have needed little, since it was built. It looks like a long procession, striding across the Campagna towards the city, and entering the gate, over one of its arches, within the gate, I saw two or three slender jets of water spurting from the crevices; this aqueduct being still in use to bring the Acqua Felice into Rome.
Returning within the walls, I walked along their inner base, to the Church of St. John Lateran, into which I went, and sat down to rest myself, being languid and weary, and hot with the sun, though afraid to trust the coolness of the shade. I hate the Roman atmosphere; indeed, all my pleasure in getting back--all my home-feeling--has already evaporated, and what now impresses me, as before, is the languor of Rome,--its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a weight of death.
Quitting St. John Lateran, I went astray, as I do nine times out of ten in these Roman intricacies, and at last, seeing the Coliseum in the vista of a street, I betook myself thither to get a fresh start. Its round of stones looked vast and dreary, but not particularly impressive. The interior was quite deserted; except that a Roman, of respectable appearance, was making a pilgrimage at the altars, kneeling and saying a prayer at each one.
Outside of the Coliseum, a neat-looking little boy came and begged of me; and I gave him a baiocco, rather because he seemed to need it so little than for any other reason. I observed that he immediately afterwards went and spoke to a well-dressed man, and supposed that the child was likewise begging of him. I watched the little boy, however, and saw that, in two or three other instances, after begging of other individuals, he still returned to this well-dressed man; the fact being, no doubt, that the latter was fishing for baiocci through the medium of his child,--throwing the poor little fellow out as a bait, while he himself retained his independent respectability. He had probably come out for a whole day"s sport; for, by and by, he went between the arches of the Coliseum, followed by the child, and taking with him what looked like a bottle of wine, wrapped in a handkerchief.