Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that, but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations, but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of that most n.o.ble facade of the church, with its lofty bal.u.s.traded entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out forever to the Alban hills.
XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI
One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter pa.s.sed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad, that I began to feel anxious lest I should miss them altogether. I had, for instance, always had the friendliest curiosity concerning Tivoli and Frascati as the two most amiable Roman neighborhoods, and hoped to see both of them in some informal and casual sort; but they persisted so long in keeping off on * their respective hills that I saw something positive on my part must be done. Clearly I must make the advances; and so when, one morning of mid-March, a friend sent to ask if we would not motor out to Tivoli with him and his family, I closed eagerly with the chance of a compromise which would save feeling all round. My friend has never yet known how he was bringing Tivoli and me together after a mutual diffidence, but, as he was a poet, I am sure he will be glad to know now.
Our road across the Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside the tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched rough, if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between the wide, lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat. The Campagna is said to be ploughed only once in five years by the peasants for the proprietors, who have philosophized its fertility as something that can be better restored by the activities of nature in that time than by phosphates in less. As they are mostly Roman patricians, they have always felt able to wait; but now it is said that northern Italian capital and enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be cropped every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we had the company of the different aqueducts, but their broken stretches presently ceased altogether, and then for other human a.s.sociation we had, besides the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered among the gra.s.sy humps and hollows. There were more humps than I had remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the rounded and turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere showed their naked masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the pa.s.sing centuries. At times a dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop up from the roadside ditches, followed us a little way with children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs that barked for pleasure in their joy. Women with the square linen head-dress of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each with his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a horse or a mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and both man and beast are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to the automobile. Now and then a carter would set his team slantwise in our course and stay us out of good-humored deviltry, and when he let us pa.s.s would fling some chaff to the fresh-faced English youngster who was our chauffeur.
"I suppose you don"t always understand what those fellows say," I suggested from my seat beside him.
"No, sir," he confessed. "But I give it to "em back in English," he added, joyously.
He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp, broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an opinion of the government"s motives in the matter with respect to motors, as if he thought them bad.
The scenery of the Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow. But as we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all others, is the friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple, which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like each other, in the ma.s.s, that this boundless forest of olives around Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our pa.s.sing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children"s play-fellowship. You felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast h.o.a.r silence, full of mystery and loneliness.
If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose _Walks in Rome_ include Tivoli, does not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to the Villa d"Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily pa.s.sed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much more circ.u.mstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold cla.s.sic a.s.sociations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 38 STAIRWAY AND FOUNTAIN, VILLA D"ESTE]
The Villa d"Este is not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the fancy without c.u.mbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some neglected pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in them, but the forgottenness of the Villa d"Este hospitably allured me to instant and permanent occupation, so that when I heard it could now be bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars, nothing but the want of the money kept me from making the purchase. I indeed recognized certain difficulties in living there the year round; but who lives anywhere the year round if he can help it? The casino, standing among the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the sixteenth-century arts, and in its n.o.ble halls, amid the painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which its bal.u.s.trated terrace looked into. From that level you descend by marble steps which must have some trouble in knowing themselves from the cascades pouring down the broken steeps beside them, and companionably sharing their seclusion among the cypresses and ilexes. You are never out of the sight and sound of the plunging water, which is still trained in falls and fountains, or left to a pathetic dribble through the tattered stucco of the neglected grots. It is now a good three centuries and a half since the Cardinal Ippolito d".Este had these gardens laid out and his pleasure-house built overlooking them; and his gardener did not plan so substantially as his architect. In fact, you might suppose that the landscapist wrought with an eye to the loveliness of the ruin it all would soon fall into, and, where he used stone, used it fragilely, so that it would ultimately suggest old frayed and broken lace. Clearly he meant some of the cataracts to face one another, and to have a centre from which they could all be seen--say the still, dull-green basin which occupies a large s.p.a.ce in the grounds between them. But he must have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the s.p.a.ce beneath; of fragmentary G.o.ds or giants half hid in the tangling gra.s.ses. It all has the air of something impatiently done for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might have been expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If there was design in the treatment of the propitious ground, self-shaped to an irregular amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and the cultiavted tourist of our day may reasonably please himself with the belief that he is having a better time there than the academic Roman of the sixteenth century.
Academic it all is, however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I have so signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am going to let a far politer observer celebrate the beauties of the other supreme interest of Tivoli. When Mr. Gray (as the poet loved to be called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in May, 1740, the Villa d"Este by no means shared the honors of the cataracts, and Mr.
Gray seems not to have thought it worth seriously describing in his letter to Mr. West, but mocks the casino with a playful mention before proceeding to speak fully, if still playfully, of the great attraction of Tivoli: "Dame Nature... has built here three or four little mountains and laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a ca.n.a.l into which she has put a little river of hers called the Anio,... which she has no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles down a declivity fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to shatters, and is converted into a shower of rain, where the sun forms many a bow--red, green, blue, and yellow.... By this time it has divided itself, being crossed and opposed by the rocks, into four several streams, each of which, in emulation of the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you have at one view all these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one (that which forms the extremity of the half-circle"s horns) is seated the town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the brink of the precipice, stands the Sibyls" Temple, the remains of a little rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of whose beautiful Corinthian pillars are still standing and entire."
For the reader who has been on the spot the poet"s words will paint a vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr.
Gray"s point of view. I do not know a more filling moment, exclusive of the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those cascades before him and those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray has mentioned only one of the two, I do not know why, that exist on this enchanted spot, and that define their sharp, black shadows as with an inky line just beyond the restaurant tables. One is round and the other oblong, and the round one has been called the Sibyls", though now it is getting itself called Vesta"s--the G.o.ddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately been dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the Sibyls" Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks, high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly striving upward out of it: the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the toil of the washers melts into music, and their chatter, like that of birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One Girl," and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Cafe Sibylla in Tivoli, but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some sixty-cent _table d"hote,_ with wine and music included.
It was a fortnight later that we paid our visit to Frascati, not proudly motoring now, but traversing the Campagna on the roof of a populous tram-car, which in its lofty narrowness was of the likeness of an old-fashionable lake propeller. The morning was, like most other mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of; but none of us pa.s.sengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the car. We all did this, whatever our nation--American, English, German, or Italian--and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the morning"s warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We pa.s.sed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino had a gigantic peac.o.c.k painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees were in bloom in the villa s.p.a.ces. When we struck into the Campagna we found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.
There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts" tails blowing picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a pa.s.senger near one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome, but on our course building so slowly that our pa.s.sengers had to walk rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line; and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses.
The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating the forest"s broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided ravine worth any man"s American money; and the dead leaves littered the sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head to resist.
Elsewhere the tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked, after it left the Campagna"s level, with vineyards as measureless as the olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination, our car pa.s.sed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on the sidewalks before them.
We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our eyes from feasting, even at eleven o"clock in the morning, on the wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and still fared well; but we chose the best--a glittering victoria and an animal of proud action, with a l.u.s.trous coat of bay. He wore a ring of joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse"s headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city; because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.
We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 39 VILLA FALCONIERI, ENTRANCE, FRASCATI]
Our driver decided for us to go first to the Villa Falconieri, which had lately been bought and presented by a fond subject to the German Emperor, and by him in turn bestowed on the German Academy at Rome. In the cold, clean, stony streets of Frascati, as we rattled through them, there breathed the odor of the great local industry; and the doorways of many buildings, widening almost in a circle to admit the burly tuns of wine, testified how generally, how almost universally, the vintage of that measureless acreage of grapes around the place employed the inhabitants. But there was little else to impress the observer in Frascati, and we willingly pa.s.sed out of the town in the road climbing the long incline to the Villa Falconieri, with its glimpses, far and near, of woods and gardens. It was a road so much to our minds that nothing was further from us than the notion that our horse might not like it so well; but, at the first distinct rise, he stopped and wheeled round so abruptly, after first pawing the air, that there could be no doubt where the popular interest we had lately enjoyed in Frascati had really originated. Probably our horse"s distinguishing trait was known to everybody in Frascati except his driver. He, at least, showed the greatest surprise at the horse"s behavior, as unprecedented in their acquaintance, which he owned was brief, for he had bought him in Rome only the week before. With successive retreats to level ground he put him again and again at the incline, but as soon as the horse felt the ground rising under his feet he lifted them from it and whirled round for another retreat. All this we witnessed from an advantageous point at the roadside which we had taken up at his first show of reluctance; and at last the driver suggested that we should leave it and go on to the Villa Falconieri on foot. On our part, we suggested that he should attempt some other villa which would not involve an objectionable climb.
He then proposed the Villa Mandragone, and the horse seemed to agree with us. As we drove again through the clean, cold, stony streets, with the rounded doorways for the wine-casks, we fancied something clearly ironical in the general interest renewed by our return. But we tried to look as if we had merely done the Villa Falconieri with unexampled rapidity, and pushed on to the Villa Mandragone, where, under the roof of interlacing ilex toughs, our horse ought to have been tempted on in a luxurious unconsciousness of anything like an incline. But he was apparently an animal which would have felt the difference between two rose-leaves and one in a flowery path, and just when we were thinking what a delightful time we were having, and beginning to feel a gentle question as to who the pathetic little cripple halting toward us with a color-box and a camp-stool might be, and whether she painted as well as a kind heart could wish, our horse stopped with the suddenness which we knew to be definite. The sensitive creature could not be deceived; he must have reached rising ground, and we sided with him against our driver, who would have pretended it was fancy.
It was now noon, and we drove back to the _piazza,_ agreeing upon a less price in view of the imperfect service rendered, and deciding to collect our thoughts for a new venture over such luncheon as the best hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty, yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled formed a good soup; there was an admirable _pasta_ and a creditable, if imperfect, conception of beefsteak; and there was a caraffe of new Frascati wine, sweet, like new cider. If we could have asked more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed me to weave a whole realistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so out of season.
Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was without moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who was almost as exemplary as the horse, would a.s.sume the unfulfilled contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon further acquaintance, that the man paid a hundred dollars for the horse; his brother had paid a hundred and twenty-five for the balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it would be worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the rising ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come from a long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the next week with two ladies for pa.s.sengers, who were to pay him five dollars a day for himself and horse and their joint keep. He said the ladies, whose names he gave, were from Boston; he balked at adding Ma.s.sachusetts, but I am sure the horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would have gladly paid them five dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even upon his brother and his brother"s horse: one of those perfect Italian temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.
We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our first; but, as we necessarily pa.s.sed over the same route again, we had the applause of the children in streets now growing familiar, and a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and blithe matrons of all ages rhythmically washing in the public laundry, who recognized us in our new equipage. The public laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian town, and probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous comment throughout the day which was now pa.s.sing only too rapidly for us. We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is perhaps as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri and the Villa Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in Frascati. We did, indeed, penetrate the chill interior of the local cathedral, but as we did not know at the time that we were sharing it with the memory of the young Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose brother, Cardinal York, placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we were conscious of no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of course, to have visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella and the Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in person, and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing the Atlantic for.
Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum unvisited, just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to Hadrian"s Villa--the two things supremely worthy to be seen in their respective regions. But, if I had seen only half as much as I saw at Frascati--the Villa Falconieri, namely--I should feel forever over-enriched by the experience.
Slowly an ancient servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the Falconieri for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united years and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild violets, and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of the repairs and changes going on near the casino, led us first to the fish-pond, in the untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and silently showed us the magnificent view which the top commanded, if commanded is not too proud a word for a place so pathetic in its endearing neglect. It had once been the haunt of many a gay picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and all the faded fashion of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a wilder escapade than the grove before the casino invited, with its tables of moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet, or more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished forth the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about me, who can only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and cloud-shadowed, swam round the upland in the colors of a tropic sea.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 40 IN THE GARDENS OF THE VILLA FALCONIERI]
Our mild boy waited a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then led down to the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were some men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in terms. "What are they shooting?" "They are shooting larks, signore."
"What a pity!" "But the larks are leaving Italy, now, and going north."
It was a reason, like many another that humanity is put to it in giving, and I do not know that I missed any larks, later, from an English meadow where I saw them spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their friends had been shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see those fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not very good shots.
The workmen who were putting the place in repair were lunching near the casino, in a litter of lumber and other structural material, but the casino itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool, bare, still s.p.a.ces. If there was a great deal to see, there was not much to remember, or to remember so much as the satirical frescos of Pier Leone Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well as others in them. They are not bitter satires, but, on the contrary, very charming; and still more charming are the family portraits frescoed round the princ.i.p.al room.
Under one curve of the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time is shown, half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited, or at least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even than this most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother, and daughter are the figures of friends or acquaintances or kinsfolk: figures not only life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess from the other walls. They did not visibly move during our stay, but I know they only waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when there was a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in the polite gayeties of their period. One could hardly help looking over one"s shoulder to see if they were not following to that farthermost room called Primavera, which is painted around and aloft like a very bower of spring, with foliage and flowers covering the walls and dropping through the trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pa.s.s through the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without bordering the sh.o.r.es of the Campagna sea.
It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome, elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.
"And the German Emperor owns it now?"
"Yes, they say he has bought it."
"And the Germans will soon be coming?"
"They say."
She would not commit herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew very well what she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish now I could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always guess at these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded the aged gatekeeper according to the century of service his generations had rendered those of the frescos.
We were going now to the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the courage for the rise of ground where we had failed before, and we entreated our driver to go round some other way, if he could, and descend rather than ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when we came away that we pa.s.sed through that ilex avenue which we had not yet penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many foot-pa.s.sengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of the scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to seize its features, or some of them. I did not see whether she was succeeding so well as in pity she might and as I knew she did.
In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second attempt, we can never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri.
I forget what cardinal it was who built it so s.p.a.cious and splendid, with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately colonnade following as far round as the reader likes. When he pa.s.ses through all this magnificence he will come out on a gra.s.sy terrace, with a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college there, where only the sons of n.o.ble families are received for education.
As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old and young of both s.e.xes, but probably not of n.o.ble families, seated with their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing colder than it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup, and hot, that they could get.
After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing, in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The roof, which had been so popular and populous in the morning, was now so little envied that a fat lady descended from it and wedged herself into a row of the interior where a sylph would have fitted better but might not have added so much to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought of getting up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to stand. This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the conductor ask me to wait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach of our cities.
XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
[Ill.u.s.tration: 41 THE MARBLE FAUN]
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in Hawthorne"s romance of _The Marble Faun._ We made that our aesthetic handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like manner Story"s statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the "original" of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon"s Cleopatra, and a certain mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the doves that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals where Hilda"s tower was, and then stand with them watching the pigeons which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I could never forget it, but I must have pa.s.sed it several times unnoting in my latest Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero a contemporary of that earlier day glanced around the narrow piazza through which we were pa.s.sing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling aloft, joyfully shouted, "Look! There is Hilda"s tower!" and if Hilda herself had waved to us from its battlements we could not have been surer of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its indestructible integrity.
No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears, as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my satisfaction in the verification of the Faun"s ears. Instead of boasting it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted to something like his antique level. He, in fact, requires this from the spectator who would feel all his pathos, as we realized in sitting down and looking a little upward at him.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 42 MARCUS AURELIUS WITH OUT-STRETCHED ARM]