Italian Hours

Roman Neighbourhoods

I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that

I had been talking of the "picturesque" all my life, but that now

for a change I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across

the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with

its half-dozen towns shining on its purple side even as vague

sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an

agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that

during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground,

have been suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small

mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily

through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find

the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The

walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward

the neighbouring town of L'Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty

years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of

calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine

which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to

fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct--

in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there in a pensive

posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the

Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances

we make to vanished powers. An ardent nero then would have

had his own way with me and obtained a frank admission that the

Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the

charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the

Chigis into the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road

at the bottom of which, in the good old days, tourists in no

great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for

the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist might

have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look

out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into

the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of

quaintness, as to the best "bit" hereabouts, I should certainly

name the way in which the crumbling black houses of these

ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery edges of

all the steepest chasms. Before you enter one of them you

invariably find yourself lingering outside its pretentious old

gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony hillside by

this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that grow.

Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between

their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and

violet fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the

viaduct at the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the

full force of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The

pillars and arches of pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with

a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no

better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their

sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the

antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate.

Will those they give their descendants be as good?

At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a

couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-

faced Palazzo Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an

imposing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is

adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the

seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this fine old

decoration that preparations were going forward for a local

festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain

mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults.

The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a

group of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe.

I regarded it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered

remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again

of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such

venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any

more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds

and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy

you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken

proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into

on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of

it. One finds one's self at last--without fatuity, I hope--

feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as

if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social

sense, and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in

size out of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the

only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste they collectively

form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures on all the

altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I

suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by

worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the

Ariccia, rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance

temple whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the

population of a capital. But where is the taste of the

Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for whom

Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred

clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there,

from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her

devotions with more profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant

on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a

bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his blue breeches.

But where is the connecting link between Guido and Caravaggio and

those poor souls for whom an undoubted original is only a

something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning

save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at

best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be

looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented

foundations alone remain, with the carved and painted shell that

bends above them, while the central substance has utterly

crumbled away.

I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a

brisk constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before

the shabby fa*** of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow

in its grey forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated

expression of the opposite church; and indeed in any condition

what self-respecting cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a

little romancing in the shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the

face of the matter, I know, there is often no very salient peg to

hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the

establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But a

hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the

Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the

most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like

the beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered

with massive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I

saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, and I made much,

for the effect of the roof, of a great covered loggia or

belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing or mended with paper.

Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an

ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby

little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an

impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to

American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade mean

nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the most invidious)

on the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked

street, with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad

smells, by the braying of asses and by human intonations hardly

more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you

with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there are

still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted

constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark

over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and

guarded gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a

mental image of the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the

peace with the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough,

the votary of this ideal may well occasionally turn over such

values with the wonder of what one takes them as paying for. They

pay sometimes for such sorry "facts of life." At Genzano, out of

the very midst of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo

Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between

peasant and prince the, contact is unbroken, and one would

suppose Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual

allowances; that the prince in especial must cultivate a firm

impervious shell. There are no comfortable townsfolk about him to

remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune.

When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant

against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black

bread.

I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused me to find

the little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no

manner an exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon

being cool, many of the villagers were contentedly muffled in

those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, which, when tossed

over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of

the few lingering remnants of "costume" in Italy; others were

tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the grass outside

the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone archway

thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms.

Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are

groaning serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many

of the roads hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their

size than for their picturesque contortions and posturings. The

woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw green

light of early spring, a jour vastly becoming to the

various complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides.

I have never seen these untended parterres in such lovely

exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if

he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with

its hood thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds;

and here and there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-

me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the commonest

plants; there are dozens more I know no name for--a rich

profusion in especial of a beautiful five-petalled flower whose

white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes certain fair

copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate. An

Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its English

brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even more

effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches

its hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles

its bark into strange rugosities from which its first scattered

sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid fungus.

But the tree which has the greatest charm to northern eyes is the

cold grey-green ilex, whose clear crepuscular shade drops against

a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not oppressive. The ilex has

even less colour than the cypress, but it is much less funereal,

and a landscape in which it is frequent may still be said to

smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in old

Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked

into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the

niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare

at you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely

intense. A humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better

things than help broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the

olive, which covers many of the neighbouring hillsides with its

little smoky puffs of foliage. A stroke of composition I never

weary of is that long blue stretch of the Campagna which makes a

high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of olive-tops. A

reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean seen

above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand.

To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I

ought to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I

passed. But the reader would find my rhapsody as poor

entertainment as the programme of a concert he had been unable to

attend. I have no more learning about bird-music than would help

me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the

wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter

of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only

hope it was the nightingale. I have listened for the

nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song

would have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty,

and have never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a

prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge,

however, I generously believe him a great artist or at least a

great genius--a creature who despises any prompting short of

absolute inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody

around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the prodigal

spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it

was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good

things and various others besides that I relished so keenly my

visit to the Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-

hour in the wood. It stands above the town on the slope of the

Alban Mount, and its wild garden climbs away behind it and

extends its melancholy influence. Before it is a small stiff

avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts you to a grotesque

little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just

here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may take a

very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the

grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and

livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he

stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in

life. Horror of horrors, you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance?

You discover of course in a moment that it is only a Capuchin

joke, that the monk is a pious dummy and his spectral visage a

matter of the paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the

surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand

entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very

foolish fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by

the conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the

cloister in obedience to my knock and, on learning my errand,

demurred about admitting me at so late an hour. If I would return

on the morrow morning he'd be most happy. He broke into a blank

grin when I assured him that this was the very hour of my desire

and that the garish morning light would do no justice to the

view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his

good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination that

was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and

out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother

standing with folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable

harmony with the scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for

which he is still most precious. This, however, was surely too

much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for gratitude that,

though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with

an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was support to my

idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was in

its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-

set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light

mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--

occupies the crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup,

shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising

high and densely wooded round the placid stone-blue water, has a

sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of the long

circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly lodged. It

is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water

seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it

has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. The

winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its

deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you

fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous

forces of nature. Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue

as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and

wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very

type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I

had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of

classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me

with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are haunted with

these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen there

to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look

across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is

not less romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may

have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great

trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these

hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if

there ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the

deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas struggling away into

impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the sake of climbing

upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions that rise

from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and

lovelier view of lake and hills and sky.

I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with

which I started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a

walk. It may be a different walk each day, moreover, and not

resemble its predecessors save by its keeping in the shade.

"Galleries" the roads are prettily called, and with the justice

that they are vaulted and draped overhead and hung with an

immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few miles from

Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna

framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which

completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I

compared it just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth,

for it has the same incalculable lights and shades, the same

confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have seen it at moments--

chiefly in the misty twilight--when it resembled less the waste

of waters than something more portentous, the land itself in

fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly surging

and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one's very

last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however,

which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems,

is that of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller

hastens to compare with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in

this case is particularly odious, for in order to prefer one lake

to the other you have to discover faults where there are none.

Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies in a deeper cup, and if with

no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody shores, at least, in

the same position, the little high-perched black town to which it

gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite

shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the

Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a

certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch

away under a double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke

Cesarini has a villa at Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose

gardens overhang the lake; but he has also a porter in a faded

rakish-looking livery who shakes his head at your proffered franc

unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at Rome.

For this annoying complication of dignities he is justly to be

denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in

the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a

prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-

chequered corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you

for a town of rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits.

It has quite the usual allowance, the common cynicism, of

accepted decay, and looks dismally as if its best families had

all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping

anything better than donkeys in their great dark, vaulted

basements and mending their broken window-panes with anything

better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano

that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained

that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a

pretty New England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher

of quaintness on the face of it inacceptable; but calmly

considered it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of chalk-

white painted planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones

of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb on occasion to the

charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias glowing in

the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs bending

over a white paling to brush your cheek.

"I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend; "but I prefer

Farmington to such a thing as this." In fact an Italian village

is simply a miniature Italian city, and its various parts imply a

town of fifty times the size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor

lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. Flowers and other graces are

all confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, to

which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The houses on

the other hand would generally lodge a New England cottage,

porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their

cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a

fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve

nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when

Italy was either not shabby or could at least "carry off" her

shabbiness. For what follies are they doing penance? Through what

melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed? You ask these

questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street

and watch the hot sun glare upon the dust-coloured walls and

pause before the fetid gloom of open doors.

I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched

upon a cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after

all, when I had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing

beneath a great arch which I suppose once topped a gateway, and

counted its twenty or thirty apparent inhabitants peeping at me

from black doorways, and looked at the old round tower at whose

base the village clusters, and declared that it was all queer,

queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is worth saying

about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its lovely

position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a

dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower

is an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on

the only freshness they find in these dusky human hives--the

blooming seam, as one may call it, of strong wild flowers which

binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di

Papa I must say as little, It consorted generally with the

bravery of its name; but the only object I made a note of as I

passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises directly

above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its face

setting forth that Massimo d' Azeglio had dwelt there. The story

of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his

delightful Ricordi. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a

prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever good-nature is

left you by the reflection that the modern Passionist convent

occupying this admirable site was erected by the Cardinal of York

(grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins of an immemorial

temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish race. For me

I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent all but

spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have been

to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava

pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and

untrodden through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing

spoils is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this

same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the

edge, as we have seen, of the Alban Lake, and though it occupies

a classic site, that of early Alba Longa, it displaced nothing

more precious than memories and legends so dim that the

antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a meagre

little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel

crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas;

and it has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits

and charts and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed

a mysterious interest from the sudden assurance of the simple

Franciscan brother who accompanied me that it was the room of the

Son of the King of Portugal. But my peculiar pleasure was the

little thick-shaded garden which adjoins the convent and commands

from its massive artificial foundations an enchanting view of the

lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and lettuce, over which

a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was bending with a

solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap and greet

me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every now

and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities

of monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other

funereal umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked

fountain black with water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is

furnished with good stone seats where you may lean on your elbows

to gaze away a sunny half-hour and, feeling the general charm of

the scene, declare that the best mission of such a country in the

world has been simply to produce, in the way of prospect and

picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild here as a dream the

whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild as one's

thoughts of another life. Such a session wasn't surely an

experience of the irritable flesh; it was the deep degustation,

on a summer's day, of something immortally expressed by a man of

genius.

[Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.]

From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little

cities to Frascati, a rival centre of villeggiatura, the

road following the hillside for a long morning's walk and

passing through alternations of denser and clearer shade--the

dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the brilliant corridors of fresh-

sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you continually, with the

sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the sun upon its

chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, lying

at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway

passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence

behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and

twisted cordon; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout

road for the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia.

Castel Gandolfo is indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the

peculiar protection of the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises

in the midst of it like a rural Vatican. In speaking of the road

to Frascati I necessarily revert to my first impressions,

gathered on the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, which

falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by a peasants' fair.

As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this spectacle, at

which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all the costumes

of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and measured,

in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the

half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held.

The road winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled

olives and through a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked

upon the oaks by women's fingers and the birds were singing to

the late anemones. It was covered with a very jolly crowd of

vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only creatures not in a state of

manifest hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, overbeaten

donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to themselves in any

description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible beggars who

were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under every

tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light

of dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike

jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes

roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd surely at once so jovial

and so gentle as an Italian crowd, and I doubt if in any other

country the tightly packed third-class car in which I went out

from Rome would have introduced me to so much smiling and so

little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little village,

with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside and

nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old

fortified abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little

booths and declining a number of fabulous bargains in tinware,

shoes and pork, I was glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded

corner of the abbey and divert myself with the view. This grey

ecclesiastical stronghold is a thoroughly scenic affair, hanging

over the hillside on plunging foundations which bury themselves

among the dense olives. It has massive round towers at the

corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church and a

monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now

serves as the public square of the village and in fair-time of

course witnesses the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to

be found in certain great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where

wine was in free flow from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of

these trickling grottos shady trellises of bamboo and gathered

twigs had been improvised, and under them a grand guzzling

proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old style that I was

roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The banquet

was far less substantial of course, but it had a note as of

immemorial manners that couldn't fail to suggest romantic

analogies to a pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a

feast of reason close at hand, however, and I was careful to

visit the famous frescoes of Domenichino in the adjoining

church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to say that, when I came

back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight of the peasants

swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than the

masterpieces--Murray calls them so--of the famous Bolognese. It

amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino;

which I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the

rickety trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there

were no costumes to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive

statement on this point was, like many of his statements, much

truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone or fast

going; I saw among the women not a single crimson bodice and not

a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort, dressed in

vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones in

calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had

honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of

grease. The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with

their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and

rattling leather leggings, may remind one sufficiently of the

Italian peasant as he figured in the woodcuts familiar to our

infancy. After coming out of the church I found a delightful

nook--a queer little terrace before a more retired and tranquil

drinking-shop--where I called for a bottle of wine to help me to

guess why I "drew the line" at Domenichino.

This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of

the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it,

picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown

cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through

whose narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond

touched up old earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow

that it held but a single small table, placed lengthwise; yet

nothing could be pleasanter than to place one's bottle on the

polished parapet. Here you seemed by the time you had emptied it

to be swinging forward into immensity--hanging poised above the

Campagna. A beautiful gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down

the hill far below you, beyond which Marino and Castel Gandolfo

peeped above the trees. In front you could count the towers of

Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don't know that I came to

any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it was

perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more

than ever mediocrity. And yet I don't think it was one's bottle

of wine, either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it

was the sense of the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of

the derisive in his ever having been put forward. To say so

indeed savours of flogging a dead horse, but it is surely an

unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray assures ten thousand

Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner that his

Communion of St. Jerome is the "second finest picture in the

world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where

such institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest

convent; with such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And

yet this sport of destiny is an interesting case, in default of

being an interesting painter, and I would take a moderate walk,

in most moods, to see one of his pictures. He is so supremely

good an example of effort detached from inspiration and school-

merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his fine frigid

performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every

academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent

lessons or point a more precious moral; and I would have the

head-master in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by

the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or the Chase of

Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl and make him some such

little speech as the following: "This great picture, my son, was

hung here to show you how you must never paint; to give

you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the

providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge--an artist

whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is

charm, and the great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino,

having talent, is here and there an excellent model--he was

devoted, conscientious, observant, industrious; but now that

we've seen pretty well what can simply be learned do its best,

these things help him little with us, because his imagination was

cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its efforts

never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and that,

concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the

second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances

a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in

a composition you might suppose that among them all some charm

might be born; yet they're really but the hundred mouths through

which you may hear the unhappy thing murmur 'I'm dead!' It's by

the simplest thing it has that a picture lives--by its temper.

Look at all the great talents, Domenichino as well as at Titian;

but think less of dogma than of plain nature, and I can almost

promise you that yours will remain true." This is very little to

what the aesthetic sage I have imagined might say; and we

are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one

on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the

chapel at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man's

effort to dream beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously

enough with our multifold impressions of Italy, where dreams and

realities have both kept such pace and so strangely diverged. It

was absurd--that was the truth--to be critical at all among the

appealing old Italianisms round me and to treat the poor exploded

Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked back to Frascati, I

treated the charming old water-works of the Villa Aldobrandini.

I confound these various products of antiquated art in a genial

absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to

watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of

mouldy rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the

fantastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit

posturing to receive it. The sky above the ilexes was incredibly

blue and the ilexes themselves incredibly black; and to see the

young white moon peeping above the trees you could easily have

fancied it was midnight. I should like furthermore to expatiate

on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive hereabouts, of

all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the midst is as big as

the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched

on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, looking

straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness

of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn;

there was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows

on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you

wonderfully near. The place been for some time lost to private

uses, since it figures fantastically in a novel of George Sand--

La Daniella--and now, in quite another way, as a Jesuit

college for boys. The afternoon was perfect, and as it waned it

filled the dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. Into this

came leaping and shouting a herd of little collegians with a

couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their heels. We all

know--I make the point for my antithesis--the monstrous practices

of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe I

declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone

and receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other

memories, the avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the

Campagna, the atmosphere of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense

of "mere character," shameless incomparable character, has

brought one to this it is time one should pause.