Chapter XXIV: Rome 353 (9)

So, Signorelli. And we felt this, especially looking at the fresco of the Resurrection. For into the cold grey dawn of a featureless world rise men and women, struggling with the clay which seems to cling about their limbs, forcing them to make conscious efforts. Above them in the starry heavens two strong and splendid angels send forth the blast which calls them from the earth. The utter aloneness and the awful sense of space make the newly-risen dead shrink together, and some of them cling to each other, showing a pathetic human feeling of desolation in the midst of their wonderment and terror. Others are still engrossed in their struggle with the encumbering earth. But there are some who meet in this cold plain after long years of separation, and rush to hold each other. How Signorelli loved their splendid physical beauty! Even in his Paradise, where the heavenly choir makes music overhead, and the angels scatter celestial roses among the saints, he does not clothe them in gold raiment, only in their fair, strong limbs which were to him as beautiful as flowers.

It was not so long a step as it appeared from Signorelli's Visions of the Future Life to the Necropolis of Etruria, below the frowning walls of the city. For Orvieto is shadowed by the Wings of the Angel of Death--the _genie_ of the ancient Etruscans, which we see faintly limned upon their sepulchres--and as the old custode at the Mancini Tombs told us with arms outspread towards the plain, 'c'è una vasta città dei morti, più grande che la città alta.'

The way was strewn with flowers, like all the paths of Umbria, and it led us through the undergrowth at the foot of the rock of Orvieto to the olive garden of the Mancini Necropolis. Barren figs sprouted from the gaping crevices overhead, and sometimes the bearded ivy hung half-way down the cliff. Once we came upon two rude wooden crosses nailed to the brown tufa, with the marks of a third between them, making the desolate valley more like a Golgotha than ever.

The necropolis below the hanging church of Sant'Agostino is more interesting than romantic now that the tomb has been dismantled, which Signor Mancini used to show to the traveller, intact, with the inmate lying on his rough bed, surrounded by his last possessions. The sepulchres are not hollowed out of the living rock like most Etruscan tombs, but are built in a sort of honey-comb of rough masonry, back to back, with chambers about 12 ft. long by 8 ft. wide, and perhaps 10 ft. high. The round _cippi_ on the mounds which cover them make them appear curiously like Oriental villages.

But it is to the student rather than to the pilgrim in the world of Beauty that this sombre burial-place of the ancients will appeal. We found more joy in the painted tombs on the hill of the Cappuccini, where in the cavernous depths of the tufa rock we caught a fleeting glimpse of Proserpine seated beside the Lord of Hades, and heard the flutings of Etruscan slaves as their princes drank libations to their own departed souls. And it is worth while crossing the valley in the early morning to see the loveliness of Orvieto, crowning her great rock in the heart of her wide pale valley, with the sunlight gilding her towers and the jewelled face of her cathedral.

It was very early when we emerged from the frowning gate of the city and dipped down among the dewy vineyards. Beside the road an aqueduct rose out of the earth, a crumbling mass of ancient masonry. As we climbed down into the valley it towered above us, spanning the ravine, but when we toiled over the penitential stones of the Via dei Cappuccini, thankful for its shade as we mounted, it sank again into the hillside, and the leaping green things clambered upon it, eager to drag it back to the ditch. So we went leisurely through the play of light and shade, and always as we looked back we saw Orvieto rising sheer out of the valley like a queen on her brown rock. The morning mist wove a magic beauty round the spires of her Gothic cathedral and the giant pine-tree on the edge of her precipice, until she seemed the very city Turner immortalised.

And presently we came into a chestnut grove where the path was hidden under a carpet of rustling autumn leaves; and a tangle of wild flowers--harebell, cyclamen, saffron and fireweed--wove a tapestry on the loom of the grass. Here were our nameless tombs, sunk deep in the tufa rock, with over-arching trees above their gates and Canterbury bells growing on their mossy paths. Within, the damp had eaten away many of the beautiful forms about which Dennis wrote. But we could trace the shapes of the Lords and Ladies of Etruria as they sat like shadows before their eternal banquet in the halls of Elysium; we could see the slaves preparing their elaborate feast, here baking bread, there pounding meat to make it tender. And on another wall, a young warrior, attended by a winged genius, bearing in her hand a scroll inscribed with his good and evil deeds, drove in his chariot to Judgement in the Unseen World. In the midst of these wraiths there was one unspoiled fragment of plaster, the head of a youth, beautiful and Greek, who gazed sadly upon the ruin of his gods, shut from the world so fair, which he had dreamt was made for his strong youth and beauty, in whose ears even the faint, half-vanished music of the pipes will soon be silenced, if it is true that when the pictured ghosts of things have faded their soul is stilled.

Their melody rang in our ears when we stood once more in the chequered shadow of the chestnut grove, already gilded with autumnal gold, and looked across the wide pale valley to Orvieto. It was the hour of Mass, a Sabbath day and wonderfully silent. Again we seemed to hear that plaintive strain. But it was only the humming of the insects, and the bells of the distant city calling her people to prayer.

VITERBO

Though they are sisters in name--Urbs Vetus and Vetus Urbs--and though their function in the mediaeval history of the Papacy was the same, it would be difficult to find two cities so dissimilar as Orvieto and Viterbo. The mystic sadness of Orvieto is foreshadowed in the pale valley of the Paglia, strewn with the débris of volcanic upheavals; but instinctively our spirits rose as we drew near the gay and beautiful city of Viterbo, across the rolling plains of Lazio, which have been trodden by the feet of all the armies who sought to invade the sanctuary of Rome. It is a field of history and romance, full of memories.

Far away upon our left the Appennines were piled like storm-clouds on the horizon; and upon our right, over the valleys once guarded by the strongholds of Etruria, rose the splendid outline of Montefiascone, the shrine of the Goddess of the Etruscans--the Fanum Voltumnae, to which they gathered in times of doubt or danger to consult the oracles and appease the gods. Near at hand, black against the blue Sabine mountains, was the mysterious Ciminian Mount, whose terrors held the Roman legionaries in check until the Consul Fabius Maximus in B.C. 310 plunged through its forests into the great Etrurian Plain, to the terror of the Senate, whose prohibition reached him too late.

The sun was sinking behind the hill of Montefiascone when we entered Viterbo. It was Sunday, and the passeggiata between the station and the Porta Fiorentina was filled with a gay crowd of citizens and soldiers. For unlike the other papal cities of refuge, Orvieto and Anagni, which have fallen upon evil days, Viterbo, always a natural centre, is becoming an important provincial capital, one of the most prosperous towns in Italy, with a rapidly increasing population. And to her honour be it said that her municipal energy is making itself felt to great advantage in the direction of stripping from her Gothic palaces and churches the baroquetries which have veiled their beauties during the last three centuries.

The origin of Viterbo is as mysterious as the source of the Nile. An Etruscan city is known to have stood upon its site; it contains positions of great strength, tongues of hill, guarded by gorges, well suited to the Etruscan style of fortification; and it stands at the Etrurian gate of the Great Ciminian Forest, the chief obstacle which the Romans had to pierce for the subjugation of Etruria. So, putting aside the stupid forgeries of Annio of Viterbo, who 'claimed for his native city an antiquity greater than that of Troy,' it is curious that the Vetus Urbs is not mentioned before the eighth century, when the old chroniclers speak of an ancient castle--castrum Viterbii--standing on the present site of the cathedral. But from the year 773, when it attracted the attention of Desiderius, the last King of the Lombards, who made it the base of his intended conquest of the States of the Church, has its history been interwoven with that of the Papacy.

Little is known of Viterbo in Lombard times, for all the grandeur of her Lombard walls, which were many times thrown down and built up again in her constant warfare with Rome. It was not until the beginning of the twelfth century that she sprang into importance in mediaeval history as the capital of the Patrimony, bequeathed by the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany to the occupants of the Chair of St. Peter, assuming the rôle of a fully-armed Minerva springing from the brow of Jove, because her lofty position made her a fortress for the Popes in time of peril from the sword, and a sanatorium in seasons of pestilence. In the twelfth century Eugenius III. summoned the vassals of the Church to assemble in Viterbo, and in the thirteenth century five popes were elected within her walls, and four popes died there; in 1240 Frederick II. was living in peace in Viterbo; and five years later the city inscribed the most glorious page in her annals when the great Emperor was humiliated by her heroic defence against his onslaughts and forced to retreat into Pisan territory. But her power decayed from the end of the thirteenth century, when Honorius IV., in removing the interdict which his predecessor had laid on the city for the outrages committed in the papal elections, decreed that she was to raze her fortifications, lose her jurisdiction, and yield her rectorate to Rome. Later, we find Urban V. staying in the Rocca when he returned from Avignon, the mediaeval Babylon, in answer to the exhortations of Petrarch; and here died the great soldier and statesman, Cardinal Gil d'Albornoz, before the Pope continued his unwilling journey to Rome. But it is chiefly as a city of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we regard Viterbo to-day; for in those stormy years which saw the rise and fall of the great house of Hohenstaufen, the fate of Viterbo was synonymous with that of the Papacy, and it is to this period that most of her mediaeval monuments belong.

Coming from Orvieto we found Viterbo very gay and gracious, with exquisite fountains making music in all her piazzas, and her mediaeval streets full of the merry air of vintage time. Already the great vats had been cleansed, and we had encountered enormous barrels groaning and rumbling down the hills as they were rolled to the fountains to be soused and sweetened by sun and air, or tumbled back to their accustomed cellars. All day long the yoked oxen swung slowly in through the ancient gates, drawing carts filled with barrels of fruit; and in front of more than one humble osteria we found a group of men and girls singing and laughing as they pressed the grapes with bare white feet, up and down, up and down, while the dark fluid flowed through a conduit into the vats below. This alone would have made us love Viterbo, just as we still carry gentle memories of Mantua, not so much for its great castles of the Gonzaga, as for the beautiful simplicity of the vintage which we watched being brought home to that city of arcades from the fields round Virgil's home not many autumns ago.

But Viterbo, 'the Nuremberg of Italy,' is full of charm. She is one of the most mediaeval cities in Italy; she has a whole quarter of thirteenth-century houses cheek by jowl with barons' towers and ancient churches; she has exquisite cloisters like that of Santa Maria della Verità, where the recent Camorra trial was held; and on the hill where the ancient castle of Viterbo stood she cherishes a gem of Gothic architecture--the Palazzo Vescovile, which was once the palace of the popes.

This was the stage on which the chief personages in the history of Viterbo and the Papacy played their parts. Here came the Barbarossa to pay his unwilling homage to proud Adrian IV., who thought of lowering human dignity far more than any Latin would have done. Here came Frederick II. in peace, because Viterbo had departed from her loyalty to the Papacy for the time being, since the cause of Gregory IX. had been espoused by her ancient enemy, Rome. Here was elected Urban IV., the pope who never entered the Lateran or St. Peter's. Here Charles of Anjou, and King Philip III. of France, travelling from Tunis with the body of his father, Louis IX., waited for the election of Gregory X. in 1271; and the impatient Charles, seeing that the cardinals were in no hurry to choose a successor for Clement IV., took the roof from their council chamber, confident that discomfort would hasten the decision of those luxury-loving priests. That same year, in the presence of the King of Sicily and the King of France, Henry, son of Richard, Duke of Cornwall, who was on his way to England from the Tunisian crusade, was done to death by Guido di Montfort, Charles' vicar in Tuscany. 'The sight of the English prince awoke the fury of this bloodthirsty warrior, and impelled him to avenge himself on the royal house of England, by whom his great father, Simon of Leicester and Montfort, had been slain in battle, and his remains outraged in death. He stabbed the innocent Henry at the altar of a church, dragged the corpse by the hair, and threw it down the steps of the portal.'[29]

It is interesting to note that the murderer was not punished by Charles, and that, as Gregorovius points out, only twelve years later he was spoken of by Martin IV., who made him General in the service of the Church, as his beloved son. But Dante places his soul in hell among the tyrants who were given to blood and rapine, where he commemorates the fact that Prince Henry's heart was exposed before the sorrowing eyes of the English nation beside the waters of the Thames.

'... He in God's bosom smote the heart
Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames.'

But it is difficult to realise such stirring scenes in Viterbo to-day. For directly we left the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, with its cheerful provincial bustle, behind us, and crossed the sunny Piazza del Plebiscito, guarded by the lions of Viterbo, rampant on columns below their heraldic palm-trees, we found her a gentle city fallen upon sleep, full of stately mediaeval houses with outside staircases, and ancient hospices for pilgrims, Gothic and grey, with buttressed walls and cowl-like windows.

The Palace of the Popes, where there are memories for every stone, stands with the cathedral in a sunny square beyond the Piazza della Morte and the picturesque palace where the great Farnese Pope was born. Thanks to Pedro Juliani, that most distinguished scholar, who took the name of John XXI. when he was elected to the vacant chair of St. Peter at Viterbo, the palace which was the home of so many popes in the thirteenth century is one of the most beautiful Gothic ruins in Italy. For it was the ill-fated John XXI. who built the exquisite chamber supported by a single mighty column and an arch, which is the chief glory of the Palazzo Vescovile. Legend has been busy with the name of this pope, whose scientific studies made him hated and feared by the ignorant and superstitious monks of his day, and whose untimely death increased the popular belief that he was a magician. He was killed by the falling ceiling of the very room which he had taken such pride in adding to the papal palace, and on the night of the catastrophe it is said that a monk roused his companions from sleep by crying out that he had seen a huge black man knocking with a hammer on the wall of the Pope's room--a legend quite in keeping with the general belief circulated in Rome more than two hundred years later, that the devil had called in person at the Vatican to carry away the body of the wicked Borgia Pope.

At the first glance the Palazzo Vescovile seemed nothing but a gracious ruin, for the lovely Gothic chamber of John XXI. is only a shell whose loggias frame the blue heavens, and whose fountain, fallen into decay, is overgrown with weeds. It is open to the sky; but the great Council Chamber, from which that impatient Prince, Charles of Anjou, took the roof above the heads of the Papal Conclave, has been closed in again, although the wind strays at will through its beautiful trefoil windows. And here we loved to sit looking through the empty Gothic frames at the great church of the Trinità across a vine-clad slope, and the grey convents and buttressed walls of Viterbo shimmering in the opal light of an October morning, with the noble sky-line of Montefiascone upon the horizon, and the misty blue hills of Umbria beyond. For we never wearied of the mediaeval grace and the deliberate beauty of this palace of the Popes with its silent fountain and its grass-grown loggia; and one day, while we sat in the lofty Council Chamber which has been witness to so many stirring scenes, a motor drove up to the foot of its sweeping steps, oh, splendid anachronism! and from the inner palace hastened a proper dignitary to meet the ancient prelate who descended from it, and conduct him into the presence of his master, reminding us that this stately ruin is still the episcopal headquarters of Viterbo.

'Città delle belle fontane e delle belle donne' was the boast of the ancient chroniclers of Viterbo, but we did not see many beautiful women in her streets, although the splendour of her fountains is still a proverb. Every little piazza, no matter how humble, is endowed with a fountain of exquisite grace, where silver floods of water pour over lichened stones, or trickle from the spouting mouths of the Guelph lions of the city; even Rome cannot boast so many gracious fantasies of the fifteenth century. They are as numerous as the beautiful outside staircases which are to be found on more mediaeval houses in Viterbo than in any other Italian city. Such an one is the Casa Poscia, half way up the Via Cavour, which is turned to a humble use to-day, like all the great palaces of Viterbo, having an osteria in its basement, but which is a perfect specimen of the local domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, still closed at night by ancient wooden doors. The Viterbesi invariably point out this house as the Casa of the bella Galiana, whose inscription in the Piazza del Plebiscito bears witness to the mortality of that Helen of the Middle Ages, who was 'flos et honor Patriae, species pulcherrima rerum.'

But the chief glory of Viterbo is the romantic mediaeval city which lies between the Via Principe Umberto and the gates of the Carmine and San Pietro. Here even the names of the narrow and mysterious streets have not been changed by the rise of the House of Savoy. Would it not give a thrill even to the most unimaginative of travellers to step from the Square of the Dead into the Via di San Pellegrino with its grey thirteenth-century houses huddled on either hand, now flowering into Gothic windows and elegant outside staircases, now frowning defiance from square fighting towers with evil slits for eyes, now opening a passage down the steep hillside like the Street of a Hundred Bridges or the staircase street which leads to the Bridge of the Paradox?

Here the Middle Ages come to life again; nor are the people themselves greatly changed, for the women scrub their linen at ancient fountains, and the men work in the dark _bassi_ at their humble trades; here we saw a white-haired dame plying her distaff in a little vine arbour at the head of her balcony staircase, and there we met a man coming from the bakery with a plank of bread, three and a half feet long on his head. As in Orvieto, there were hooded owls on stands outside the doors to give another mediaeval touch, and from the upper windows women looked down with the languid curiosity of the Latin races. In the smaller streets there were dirt and squalor unimaginable, broken fruit and flies, unspeakable smells and the noise of screaming children, but in their midst were serene-eyed mothers, with the mysterious calm in their faces which has made the Italian woman the most subtle type of Madonna, who seemed in some strange fashion to be exalted above the impure atmosphere in which they lived, like the crimson garofani, or the long sprays of Morning Glory which flowered in their mediaeval windows. Though there was poverty it was the poverty of the country rather than the destitution of a city, just as the sheets and towels which fluttered from loggia and arch and balustrade were threadbare in spite of their fine embroidery and rich insertions of hand-made lace.

It was through these streets that we saw the vintage coming in through the ancient Porta San Pietro under the shadow of the magnificent palace which was the home of Donna Olimpia Pamphili, the infamous sister-in-law of Innocent X., just as it was brought in the days when the Vetus Urbs was a sanctuary for the princes of the Church.

Una giornata di tempo bello we drove across the swelling plains of Etruria to the ruined city of Ferentinum. It was the happiest of days, the last, though we did not know it then, of our careless pilgrimages, for the next morning came autumn with cold winds and rain, and we were forced to hurry after our luggage which had already gone to Rome. But on that day there was a special beauty in the rolling plain which once was peopled by the vanished cities of Etruria, and now is so like the Campagna with its ruined tombs and scattered trees and lonely farmsteads. Here we found the same enchantment that we remembered in the fields of Rome--the silence, the gnats hanging in the air in glinting masses as though they danced in an invisible net, the larks singing in the blue distance, the song of a ploughman hidden in a fold of the plain. From our feet stretched the dusty road losing itself in the valleys and cresting the hills beyond. Far ahead rose Montefiascone with its great dome soaring above its ilex wood, and to the right, blue and mysterious in the early morning sunlight, was the dark Ciminian Mount, misty with spreading columns of smoke as though the shepherds or the woodcutters within the precincts of its haunted forest were offering incense to the Gods.

And once we came upon a dozen yoke of oxen ploughing the heavy brown earth, with the sunlight shining on their smoking flanks and glistening on the freshly-turned clods of mould behind them. How little it has altered, this immemorial plain, since the days when Rome feared to plunge into the dark recesses of the Ciminian forest, and the Lucumos of Etruria rioted their energies away in the little cities below the mighty fane of Voltumna! For if mankind has changed, Nature is still the same; those rolling oxen are on the tombs of Thebes; the ancient poets have sung of these dark woods and scented plains, and the husbandmen at work!

The way was long until we came, between hedges with a flower like japonica, to an outpost of Ferentinum standing over the green valley of the Acqua Rossa,--a disused tomb which had been a home for the living long after the dust of the poor forgotten dead had been scattered to the winds. Here we dismounted and climbed up a path so thickly spread with soft brown dust that our feet sank into it and made no sound. Here and there we saw the basalt _selce_, which marked the direction of the Roman road. Among the tangled brambles at the side were half-demolished tombs, now a columbarium for cinerary urns, now a niche, now merely a heap of tumbled stones. For the earth is taking this ancient city back to her heart again, and though the summer drought had withered the flowers which bloom where once the pitiful dust of humanity was laid, the empty chambers were full of golden bracken and fantastic thistles, silver with scattered seeds.

Still we wound up the hillside, and presently we came upon two wind-blown oaks, the only watchers at that city's gates, beside a rough stone wall, built by some shepherd to prevent his sheep from breaking in upon the sleeping silence of Ferentinum. It was a city of the dead, deserted save for the lizards fleeing from our footsteps, and a few white butterflies dancing above the mullein stalks.

At first it seemed as though no stone had been left standing on the other, but on the crest of the hill, overlooking the wooded and precipitous valley of the Acqua Rossa, and framing in its Royal Gateway the misty forest of the Ciminian Mount, we came upon the Theatre of Ferentinum, the only building in the ancient city which retains any semblance of its former grandeur. So do our vanities outlive us when our loves and homes are covered with the dust of oblivion! Behind it the purple basalt of the road was worn into deep ruts by the chariot wheels of the ancient peoples as they drove by on pleasure bent, and the ground was jewelled with mosaics and the iridescent dust of ancient glass, powdered by time. Here and there we could trace fragments of the mediaeval town grafted on to the city of Etruria, which in the days of its Roman occupation was the birthplace of the Emperor Otho--like the remains of the Byzantine church in the shadow of the Theatre--but for the most part there was only ruin in the fallen city of the Etruscan Goddess of Fortune.

Surely the earlier Gods must wonder at the fate of this small country town, which was renowned among the ancients not so much for the greatness of its history, as for the beauty of its monuments and the art of its brass-workers, but which was destroyed in the name of Christ in the year 1014, nearly nine centuries ago! It is a strange story. How the Viterbesi, arrogant and always on the watch to increase their power as a commune, razed the little episcopal city of Ferento to the ground, because it persisted in the heresy of representing Christ upon the cross with His eyes open (after the manner of the Byzantines) instead of closed!

From that day there has been no human habitation in Ferento except the hut of the shepherd-guide. But the half-vanished city of three civilisations is filled with an inexpressible charm, not desolate because the sun and wind have peopled it with flowers, and not deserted by the fleeing footsteps of the Gods. For surely they were with us in the magic beauty of that soft October morning when the little breeze across the valley fanned our hair like an invisible plume, and Earth, the wise mother of mankind, was offering incense to the heavens--the fragrance of crushed herbs, the soft hymn of insects, the silver voice of the Acqua Rossa. Even the blue threads of smoke which still ascended from the ilex groves of the dark Ciminian Mount seemed part of the mysterious sacrament.

ROME

It was in Foligno, seeing that fair white road which threads the rich valley of Spoleto, now skirting the Hill of Trevi, now leading through the olive gardens of Le Vene to the crystal springs of Clitumnus, that we first began to think of Rome. Up to that time we had not raised our eyes to the horizon. The beauty of the road itself had led us on, but now, though she was still far off, we felt once more the magnetism of the great Mother of Cities. Truly in Italy every road must lead to Rome. Many times we had been greeted with the words,'_E Roma? Andate ancora a Roma?_'--in little Passignano that gazes like Narcissus into the mirroring waters of Thrasymene, rapt in the contemplation of her own beauty; in far-off Gubbio, wistful and forlorn in the shadow of her great hills; in San Marino, the eagle nest where Liberty has taken refuge upon a mountain top. And when we told our simple questioners that we knew the city well, they pressed to hear what she was like, this _città bella e magnifica_, whose light shining upon their horizons they perhaps might never see. We had not dreamed that she was so beloved. But at the oft-reiterated question some flame of enthusiasm, which we had thought quenched, began to burn again, and Rome became the secret goal of our pilgrimage, until we thrilled to see that white road leading through the plain from the walls of Foligno, because it had become the symbol and expression, as it were, of our desires.

We crossed the Campagna in a thunderstorm, when earth and sky were united in a mighty storm-song. Above the roar of the train we could hear the booming of the thunder and the shriek of the wind, the sibilant cry of the rain-lashed trees, and the exultant shout of rivers, which the demon of the tempest had changed from languid veins of water to brown and foaming torrents.

As we drew near the Eternal City across the many-bosomed desert of the Campagna we saw St. Peter's dome hanging like a mirage on the grey thunder-clouds, more like a mountain than a church, dwarfing Monte Mario. And we thrilled at the thought of nearing Rome, feeling the contentment that human beings feel towards each other when they meet a dear friend after long years of absence, knowing that, the strangeness of the first moment over, they will find themselves settled down with few words into the old dear comradeship of yesterday.

But perhaps it was because we came so lately from Umbria, sweet-scented, golden Umbria, where the only shadows are the heavy veils of night or the shifting reflections of sunlit clouds, that our hearts sank in Rome. We had bid our loves good-bye so lightly, looked our last upon their beauties, and shut their little voices up by miles of empty plain. Perhaps too we had caught something of the spirit of the simple country folk who clasped their hands and sighed over the splendid city of their imagination.

I will own that I felt very heartsick in those first few days, notwithstanding my old love for Rome. The golden peace of Umbria, which we had garnered and stored in our hearts through the long summer months, seemed lost in the urgent business of Rome. Memory had clothed her with antique grace, had peopled her with Emperors and Popes, had filled her winding streets with mediaeval palaces, her piazzas with the gay Renaissance. But coming from Umbria, where the Middle Ages still linger, and that older, simpler life of the Beginning of the World is pictured in her vineyards and olive gardens, we found Rome little more than a modern city, full of unrest and noise. Everywhere there was scaffolding and masonry, and we feared to look for our familiar landmarks lest the great god of change should have swallowed them up. It was impossible to enjoy walking in the streets; all we could do was to pick our way along the narrow pavements, one behind the other, thinking ourselves fortunate if a screaming demon of a tram did not come upon us unawares. We crossed the roads in a meaningless sea of shouting taximen and winecarts and motor-cars and jostling people. To make matters worse our beloved Via Tritone was being enlarged, and was still undergoing the process of having tramway-lines laid down it to the Corso. And the Piazza Barberini, our own piazza, where the Triton singing in his fountain had dwelt in our memories and dreams, was the workshop of the tramway people, full of stones and unconnected lines, which seemed to fall automatically upon each other with a hideous noise all through the day.

Can you wonder then that our Goddess, Imperial and lovely Rome, seemed to have stepped down among ordinary mortals?

Another thing. We had left a great city in search of joy. And we had found it. Up there in Umbria we had culled it from the roadside as you cull flowers. We had drunk of Lethe and gathered forgetfulness beside its waters. The burden of the world had slipped from off our shoulders. Little by little our feet had grown lighter upon the hillside. Our mountainous doubts, our despairs, our days of little faith, became mere memories. All the old fears of a city 'with houses both sides of the street,' were forgotten. We no longer bruised our feet on paving stones, but felt the soft warm earth beneath our soles and smelt the fragrance of pine-needles in the woods. Life became a beautiful and simple thing. Holy too.

But here in Rome old doubts came back upon us, taking us unawares. 'The poor in great cities are not like the poor in Umbria,' said the Philosopher; 'here they suffer so.' We heard more tales of pain in those first days in Rome than we had heard in all the sunny months we had been dreaming away in Umbria. And on our first night in the city a courtesan screaming hopelessly below our windows as she was dragged to prison made our new-found joys shiver away to death. We felt like the Israelites when they looked upon their manna the second day and found it full of worms, and we knew that we had gathered the food of angels in the sunlit spaces of the Umbrian plain.

I am no Utopian who seeks to bring the country to the town. I know too well how soon its incorruptible beauty would be corrupted. It is only in the hills that we may find it and the open spaces. There, it seems, we must go to learn our lesson, and when we have learnt it, this A B C of beauty, we can come back to the towns and learn more difficult things, the reverence for beliefs which are no longer beliefs, as Emerson taught, the beauty of a city, and of a poor man's smile. But just as the Israelites, when the need for manna was past, returned to ordinary food and found it good, so we too drifted back to our old content and began reluctantly to worship our old gods again.

And it would be childish to deny that the great Exhibition for which Rome was preparing marked her splendid prosperity under the rule of the House of Savoy; or that the magnificent memorial to Victor Emmanuel on the brow of the Capitol is the most imposing monument in the whole city; or that the Palatine has gained in picturesqueness now that the débris has been cleared away from its lower slopes.

But it was not to see these things that we came to Rome, and we found their ancient charm untouched in those shrines of beauty to which we paid a special pilgrimage. For all the pictures which had given us delight upon our journeys, from the faded frescoes of Cimabue in San Francesco d'Assisi to the strange fancies of Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral of Orvieto, were only stepping stones to the vault of the Sixtine Chapel and the revelations of Michelangelo. Not any of the fountains in Viterbo or in Siena or Perugia had such a gracious setting as the moss-grown basins of the Villa Borghese, whose crystal jets, like Arachne of old, challenge Athena to spin a lovelier web below the ilexes and autumn-gilded maples. And when we came to worship at the shrine of the Unknown God on the sunny slopes of Rome's sacred hill, where the reapers were scything the fennel and thistles and tall rank weeds, which had grown higher than a man, we found the altar of the Genius of Rome fragrant with the last red roses of summer. Above it fluttered a butterfly like a soul that fain would speak, and a careless lizard was sunning himself upon the ancient inscriptions which mottled lichens seek vainly to erase.

Out on the Appian Way the roadside was still full of flowers, white, purple and gold. The dry fennel and yellow thistles and tall weedy mulleins were waist-high among the tombs. Butterflies fluttered their last dances before they yielded their little bodies to the enchantment of winter sleep; birds were fluting overhead, lizards sunned themselves upon the old grey stones.

For the rest we found the Ancient Way deserted, a home of sunshine and peace. If there was dust, was it not dust of the dead? Is not all the dust in the world dust of the dead? And were not the flowers, those gay brave pennons of spring and summer, the quintessence of this Roman dust?

To our right Tivoli was hidden in mist, but Rocca del Papa and the Alban Mount rose like shadows to the south. The aqueducts marched across the plain, or stumbled into ruin among the flowers with which the merciful earth covered their fall. Lonely farms, towers, nameless tombs, grew out of the folds of the plain. And the early setting October sun, dipping into a haze, empurpled the fields and wove a golden halo round the sheep who bleated homewards in the melancholy of the dying sky. The little trees, like mourners, bent down towards the tombs, or seemed to shrink back to the earth. Only the stone pines with their heads to heaven were unconscious of the death around their roots.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dante, _Inferno_, Canto xxii.

[2] Dante, _Paradiso_, xi. 41.

[3] The Flagellant Brotherhood originated in Perugia in 1259, and spread like wildfire through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome.

[4] 'Their Highnesses the Baglioni had the livery which Count Jacomo, son of Niccolò Piccinino, gave them, ... and for their arms they bore a shield azure traversed in the middle by a bar of gold, and above for crest a griffin's head, and behind this hung down a serpent's tail.'--Matarazzo, _The Chronicles of Perugia_.

[5] The mediaeval Italian apparently believed that he averted the visit of Death by blocking up the door by which the dead body was carried out, since Death was supposed to enter a house by the door through which he had already passed. But Mr. Markino gave me an interesting variant of the superstition. In Japan Doors for the Dead were used because the human body was considered not clean in comparison with the Gods; and especially after death, when the human body is only dust, it could not be allowed to pass where the Gods might come--through the chief doors of a house.

[6] I adhere to the Greek names because this is a digression into Arcadia.

[7] Mr. W. Heywood tells us in his admirable book, _Palio and Ponte_, that 'from the beginning of the seventeenth century the Feast of Our Lady of Provenzano became well-nigh the principal holiday of the Sienese year. It was celebrated on the 2nd of July, the day of the visitation of the Blessed Virgin.' The Palio was not actually presented to the victorious _contrada_, but the silver basin which accompanied it, or its equivalent in money. 'Not unfrequently they petitioned the Governor to permit the race to be run anew, by the other _contrade_, on the day after the Festival of our Lady of August, offering as a prize the silver basin which they had themselves won.... By degrees this practice grew to be so common that before the end of the eighteenth century the Palio of the 16th August had become as regular an event as that of July.'

[8] The Alfieri are pages in the mediaeval sense. Siena is the only town in Italy which still makes a study of the mediaeval sport of banner-tossing.

[9] Some of the horses which took part in the race were sorry nags, but the _contrada_ of the Porcupine had a really good animal.

[10] Dante, _Inferno_, Canto xxix. 17.

[11] This Annunciation is claimed to be by Sebastiano Mainardi, the friend and pupil of Ghirlandaio, with whom he worked while he was engaged on the Chapel of the Holy Fina. Mainardi, who later married Ghirlandaio's sister, and Vincenzo di B. Tamagni, a pupil of Raphael, were the only artists born in San Gimignano.

[12] But I do not doubt the wisdom of the Government, for our two soldier coachmen only voiced the general opinion when they told us that the peasants of the neighbourhood had been impoverished under the rule of the monks, but that they make an ample livelihood under the rule of the state.

[13] J. A. Symonds.

[14] Dante, _Paradise_, xvi. 73.

[15] 'It is by some pretended that these subterranean passages form part of the labyrinth of Porsena, but this opinion has no foundation. They are much more probably connected with the system of sewerage, and the subterranean chambers may have been either cellars to houses or _favissae_ to temples.'--Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, vol. ii.

[16] Livy, Book xxi.

[17] Dante, _Purgatory_, xi. 93.

[18] Laura M'Cracken, _Gubbio Past and Present_.

[19]

'Their origin has been variously assigned to the twelfth and the fourteenth century. If, as seems probable, they were designed by Gattapone, they may be placed in the middle of the fourteenth century about the time of the erection of the two municipal palaces.'

Laura M'Cracken, _Gubbio Past and Present_.

[20] Dante, _Inferno_, v. 118.

[21] Gregorovius, _Rome in the Middle Ages_.

[22] Their identity is disputed.

[23] Dante, _Purgatory_, xxviii. 40.

[24] Dante, _Inferno_, iv. 6.

[25] 'The energetic Lambert had made a genuine peace with Rome, where he had gloriously restored the Imperial power. The Pope, though compelled by necessity, had with equal sincerity striven to secure Lambert in the Imperium. Freed from all foreign influence, it seemed now for the first time possible to form an independent kingdom within the Italian frontier.'--GREGOROVIUS, _Rome in the Middle Ages_.

[26] 'This waterfall is in its present form wholly artificial. It was first formed by M'. Curius Dentatus, who opened an artificial channel for the waters of the Velinus, and thus carried off a considerable portion of the Lacus Velinus, which previously occupied a great part of the valley below Reate.'--_Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography_.

[27] _Purgatory_, Canto xxiii., Cary's Translation.

[28] J. A. Symonds, _Italian Studies_.

[29] Gregorovius, _Rome in the Middle Ages_.

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Transcriber's note:

Errors in printing and punctuation were corrected.