RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ARTIST. PART II (In Two Parts.) 1 entered Civita Vecchia, or Chivita Veck, as it is commonly called, early on Sunday morning. The first thing that met my eyes was the picture of three or four hungry-looking French soldiers in their fatigue-coats, perfectly absorbed in holding fishing-rods in their hands and in watching the fate of the lines that depended from them into the water. Sprinkled on other parts of the mole and swarming half clad about the doors of the barracks, appeared other military groups belonging to the two French regiments then in possession of the place; while, further along on the sandy shore of the beach beyond the moles, which triangularly bind in the harbour from the waves, were more soldiers, refreshing the camp horses with a swim. We had ample time to observe all this, and some other sights that were not quite so inviting, for we were detained two hours by the stringent passport regulations which met us at the door of his holiness's dominions. But after that delay and the payment of a few fees, we found our way through the strictly-guarded city-gate to an hotel. While waiting for our breakfast the Sabbath stillness of the morning was suddenly broken by the peal of a trumpet, next came the short sharp rattle of a French drum, and close upon that swelled the full notes of a grand brass band playing a march in a superb style, all of us poured forth to the balcony, and hard by in the same street we saw a full regiment drawn up for review. Cevita Veechia is the "Trijauns portus" of the old Romans, where many a captive king has been dragged at the wheels of the chariots of " these conquerors of the world; it still continues to be the principal part of the Papal dominions, the Emperor Trajan constructed its massive stone harbour, and for eighteen hundred years it has been the point whence the legions of the old Empire, or the swarms of such of its invaders as entered from the sea, have poured in and gone forth respectively for the most momentous expeditions. In a half-hour's walk, which I took after breakfast, I discovered that the town, though not large, was laid out regularly; some of the buildings to the north were large and imposing, but the southern parts exhibited a sorry appearance, and were occupied by the poorest class of people. The men sauntered about as if they had nothing in this world to do, and had a Lazzeroni look, and the women, though coarsely handsome, had a disheveled and slatternly appearance. I made arrangements at nine for a conveyance to take me to Rome, and a few minutes after I passed out of the city-gate, which had cost me so much trouble to enter. It had been my impression that every step of my progress over this classic ground would be attended by the deepest interest, but I soon found myself in the situation of persons who go forth to observe a country in a snowstorm, and where time is spent in keeping the drift out of their faces. The sun was broiling hot, the whole country was parched and desolate; not a house or a hovel was to be seen-scarcely a tree or shrub relieved the blank face of the earth, and at the outset of the journey only a litter of flat hills appeared on the left. Soon these disappeared, and from the dry and pulverized road arose successive clouds, which blinded our eyes and filled our ears and nostrils with a searching and impalpable white powder. We soon took the appearance of rough cast plaster busts. The postillion, a gay Ragazzo, who had set out with hair well oiled and as black as jet, had gradually become a veteran about his carlocks; and the brown horses of his team had, by a like process, turned to an unexceptional grey. Thus we went on, enveloped in a sort of white simoom, there being nothing to relieve us except the sea we skirted. We now left the blue edge of the Mediterranean, along which we had travelled in a southerly direction for 24 miles, and struck into the country from the coast in a more easterly direction. During this part of the journey neither the road nor the face of nature much improved; the same mineral drift enveloped us, the same treeless, shrubless, scathed and blasted surface presented itself in all directions, and the same desolation of human forms and human habitations weighed us down with depression. About half way from Palo to Rome, however, nature appeared to rally a little, and we saw one or two villas, a few trees, an occasional border of hedge, and actually two carts, drawn by bisonlooking oxen; who moped slowly along at their own pace, while the peasants in charge, who should have urged their steps, lay stretched prone upon their backs in a sleep so sound that even the noise of our passage by did not awaken them. After this interlude-this travestie of population, everything relapsed into solitude again, and nothing was to be seen but naked hillocks of scorched earth rolling away in waves of barrenness and desolation. I inquired the cause of this melancholy sight and the absolute desertion of so enormous a waste in the near vicinity of such a capital as Rome; the answer was that the earth was blighted and the atmosphere baneful, and that no offers of the government could succeed in tempting population to redeem it. The entire campagna or open country that surrounds Rome is equally pestilential; while, over a portion of the plain known as the Pontine Marshes, some twenty miles further to the south, the air is charged with a malaria that for ages has been notorious for its hostility to life. No one occupies this accursed platform or ventures to reside in any portion of the campagna, except a few outcasts whom Society has driven from its bounds, or the brigand-like postillions who inhabit the gloomy post-stations on the road. These latter are generally desperate and reckless men, many of them fugitives from crime, who find refuge and association at these God-forsaken points, and who, taking up the trade of postillions, have their offences tolerated because of the perils they endure and the service they render. re myself into civilized trim, and threw open my blinds. I had but time to observe that there was a very fat padre in the same room, when the servant knocked at my door, and communicated to me the delightful intelligence that my dinner was ready. I had made a very early acquaintance with Rome, having commenced to read its history and consequently to lay out its streets and erect its buildings at an early age; and I was quite familiar in imagination with all the avenues and edifices where the early masters of the world had made their processions and their promenades; I was quite surprized, therefore, when I found this elaborate empire of the mind vanish in an instant and give no better exchange than a general aspect of narrowness and dirt. And for the lordly phantoms, who should all the while have stalked about in togas, no nobler representative than a sallow, vapid, limp-looking people, wearing for the most part a parody of our costume, diversified by a large sprinkling of black spectres, who flitted about in the shape of shovel-hatted priests, with now and then French soldiers marching to and fro from their quarters. I felt as if I had mistaken my journey and landed in a wrong place, but when I wandered to an open forum, where a forest of broken columns held up their riven heads in piteous desolation, I was reminded that the "Niobe of Nations" lay beneath my feet, and that nearly 2,000 years had not sufficed to cover all her matchless beauty with the grave. The column of Antoninus Pius, which rises one hundred and twenty-two feet from the centre of the piazza Colonna, met me on my return, and the last fragment of my doubts Though we were now within sight of Rome, submitted to the reality that I was in Rome. the face of the country did not improve, every- After dinner I hired a vehicle and drove thing was still burnt, sterile, and unoccupied; round the city, teeming with sad memories, on and desolation mocked the grandeur, which we the road to the Piazza del Popolo, which anycould easily see from the hill tops, by envelop- one may see faithfully portrayed in an exquisite ing it with a blight of death. It seemed impos- picture hanging in the picture gallery at the sible that we were now in the environs of the Taylor-buildings, Oxford. With the two old former mistress of the world and present churches on each side of the way opposite you, in Empress of the Arts; there were no suburbs; one of which Monsignor Capel has been lately no villas extending out to greet the traveller; electrifying his audience by his eloquence, you no swarms of peasantry or artizans can see the street and look down it so perfect leased from labour enjoying a Sabbath leisure; is the illusion, that you cannot help fancying no pleasant inns; no cottages; no children. you are standing in the big square with that None of those sights which bespeak comfort and beautiful column in the centre; but those olda civilized life; not even a bird wheeled a dismal looking lumbering gilt coaches belong to some circuit in the air to let us know that besides our- centuries past, so do those quaint cavaliers and selves any shape of animated nature could exist. old-fashioned-looking ladies. I had to pass the Indeed, up to a few hundred yards of the very pillar of Trajan, which is the model of the gate of Rome, we met with but a single human triumphal pillar of Napoleon in the Place being; and so strangely did he appear to us, Vendôme, Paris; though not so high as the that it seemed as if he must be some fugitive column of Antoninus Pius, it is more elegant in who had eluded the vigilance of the centurions its proportion; and though earlier in date, its at the gates and made his escape from the city. fine basso relievos, representing the achieveAt six o'clock we passed the French guards, ments of the Emperor Trajan, are much better entered the western gate of Rome, and, crossing preserved. Its congruity has suffered an inthe Tiber by the bridge of St. Angelo, plunged vasion, however, similar to that which befel the into the heart of the city; making our way to Parisian copy at the downfall of the French the custom-house, and afterwards to the hotel, emperor, and in the place of the figure of the where I soon relieved myself of the accumula-imperial Roman founder, which it once bore on tion of soil I had gathered during the day, got the apex, stands the colossal statue of St. Paul, From the column of Trajan we drove to and through the Corso, or principal avenue of modern Rome. This extends from one end of the city to the other in a straight line, and forms its principal promenade and business street; it is filled with fine palaces and handsome shops, and being fifty feet wide, it enables the best of them to show to some advantage. Here the wealthier part of the population in the afternoon drive along in their gilt coaches, as in the Paséo in Havana and the Champs Elysées in Paris. It is in this favourite avenue, too, that at the carnival the races are conducted, the riderless horses being started at the Capitoline Hill at one extremity, and finding their goal at the Piazza del Popolo at the other end, extending about a mile. In old times the poor Jews served for the amusement of the Christians, one of them was regularly put into a cask and rolled from the top of the Capitoline Hill. Afterwards the synagogue obtained leave to substitute for this barbarism a foot-race run by several Jews. Later on, in more civilized times, the biped racers were changed into steeds, and the ghetto had to supply the eight palliums, a species of fine velvet of various colours, for the eight days of the carnival. On the first day a remarkable ceremony was performed at the Capitol. The senate assembled, the senator was installed on his throne; the rabbi and the deputation from the ghetto kneeled before him and presented an address containing a humble and devoted expression of the loyalty of the chosen people to the senate. The address having been read, the senator put out his foot and bestowed a kick upon the rabbi, who then withdrew meekly, apparently full of gratitude for the distinguished favour. This was not so bad as in the middle ages, when the mob during the carnival insulted the Jews and plundered the ghetto, and the poor wretches applied to the municipality and declared themselves the subjects and slaves of the Roman people. This was the origin of the ceremony I have described, and the declaration of vassalage, on condition of the immunity of their persons. The kick was bestowed up to the year 1830; formerly, instead of the kick, the senator set his foot on the neck of the rabbi. In due time we reached the Piazza del Popolo, a large square terminating at the northern end, near the old Flamian gate in the Porta del Popolo. Just by this gate, which I found guarded, of course, by the everlasting French soldiers, stands an unpretending church called the Church of Mary. I entered it at the recommendation of my guide, and drawing aside the heavy serge curtain which filled the doorway and excluded the outer air, I found myself transferred to an atmosphere of refreshing coolness and agreeable quiet. There were several forms kneeling about in different places, and some were sitting idle, as if they had selected the place as a retreat merely from the oppressive heat outside. In a distant nook an aged priest was silently going through some motions and genuflexions, in which a knot of kneeling devotees took a deep interest, while two or three strangers like myself were moving slowly round the interior observing the paintings in the side chapels. As I was returning towards the door my attention was suddenly riveted by a bust, or rather by a half-length figure of a female form set in an alcove, and fenced across with heavy bars of iron, so as to represent a prisoner looking through a grate. The figure was draped in serge, and it wore a hood, or cowl, but instead of the human features, which should have appeared within its folds, there grinned a skull artistically cut in polished ivory. I turned to my guide for an explanation, and he gave me the following story: "The effigy represented a very wealthy lady who had been a great patron of the Church of Mary, and who, on her death-bed, had been persuaded by the excellent fathers of that establishment that the repose of her soul would be best provided for by leaving her huge fortune to them. This circumstance came, however, to the ears of a vigilant padre of the church of Jesus, who, gaining access to the invalid, endeavoured to convince her that it would be a much more eligible arrangement to leave her property and her future interests to the care of the Jesuit, chapel. The good lady was sorely puzzled; she was desirous to make the best bargain possible now the two contractors for her heavenly repose were in the field, and yet she feared to give offence to either. At length it struck her that she would divide her fortune between two establishments, and thus secure the ministrations of both and die out of their hands, leaving them both satisfied. Having done this, she gave up the ghost. Alas! she made a great mistake. The Church of Mary, which had expected all, disputed the codicil in a suit at law; and the Church of Jesus, which had hoped for all, was equally dissatisfied with its luck, and accepted the legal contest. The dispute lasted for some years, but while it was going on a lot of keen, outsidefriars, like the fox in the fable during the contest of the lion and tiger for the lamb, organised a church which they called "Jesus and Mary," and received the entire fortune from the sacred tribunal as an avoidance for all further struggle. This decision was most disastrous to the unfortunate beneficiary. The good fathers of the church of Mary, incensed beyond measure at the fickleness of purpose which had cost them so much, condemned the poor lady to purgatory for ever and ever; while the friars of the church of Jesus, being in receipt of nothing for good offices, have not felt called upon to take her out. To make her punishment more signal, and at the same time to convert her folly into a lesson, the holy fathers of the former church have put her in this iron cage; and, poor creature,' "concluded my guide, piously crossing himself, "she is now burning, burning worse than any poor soul who never gave a scudi to the cause of Christ!" |