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Title: Rome
Author: Malleson, Hope, Tuker, Mildred Anna Rosalie
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Rome" ***
Transcriber's note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
[Illustration: MARBLE RELIEF OF THE AMBARVALIA SACRIFICE, IN THE
FORUM
The sacrifice of the _suovetaurilia_ took place at the confines of
Rome and Alba Longa after the perlustration of the Roman _ager_. See
pages 15, 70.]
ROME · PAINTED BY
ALBERTO PISA · TEXT
BY M. A. R. TUKER AND
HOPE MALLESON
PUBLISHED BY ADAM &
CHARLES BLACK · SOHO
SQUARE · LONDON · W.
_Published April 1905_
The twelve chapters in this book were all written for the present
volume, but Chapters III., V., VIII., part of XI., and IX. have
already been published in the _Monthly Review_, _Broad Views_,
_Macmillan's Magazine_, and the _Hibbert Journal_.
So much has been written about Rome and Roman subjects within the last
decade, good bad and indifferent, that the task of avoiding as far as
possible hackneyed ground is not an easy one. We have attempted to
present some aspects of Rome as we have ourselves seen it, and we have
drawn on our long acquaintance with the city and above all with its
inhabitants of the old school and the new.
Each chapter is the work of one writer.
ROME, 1905.
Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER I
ROME 1
CHAPTER II
ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION 17
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN CATACOMBS 41
CHAPTER IV
ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS 52
CHAPTER V
THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA 69
CHAPTER VI
THE ROMAN MÉNAGE 93
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMAN PEOPLE--
I. The Italians 112
II. The Romans 125
CHAPTER VIII
ROMAN PRINCELY FAMILIES 159
CHAPTER IX
ROMAN RELIGION 180
CHAPTER X
THE ROMAN CARDINAL 200
CHAPTER XI
ROME BEFORE 1870 212
CHAPTER XII
THE ROMAN QUESTION--
I. Before 1870 235
II. Since 1870 245
List of Illustrations
1. Marble relief of the Ambarvalia Sacrifice, in the
Forum _Frontispiece_
TO FACE PAGE
2. The Forum from the Arch of Septimius Severus 4
3. The Forum, looking towards the Capitol 8
4. Temple of Saturn from the Basilica Julia in the Forum 12
5. S. Peter's and Castel Sant' Angelo from the Tiber 16
6. Temple of Saturn from the Portico of the Dii Consentes 18
7. A Corner of the Forum from the base of the Temple of
Saturn 20
8. Temple of Mars Ultor 24
9. Temple of Vespasian from the Portico of the Dii
Consentes 26
10. The Colosseum on a Spring Day 30
11. The Colosseum at Sunset 34
12. Arch of Titus 38
13. A Procession in the Catacomb of Callistus 42
14. Flavian Basilica on the Palatine 44
15. Library of the House of Domitian on the Palatine 50
16. Forum of Nerva 54
17. Fountain of Trevi 56
18. Column of Marcus Aurelius, Piazza Colonna 58
19. Pantheon, a flank view 62
20. Silversmiths' Arch in the Velabrum 64
21. Convent Garden of San Cosimato, Vicovaro 68
22. A Tract of the Claudian Aqueduct outside the City 72
23. Campagna Romana, from Tivoli 76
24. Subiaco from the Monastery of S. Benedict 78
25. Garden of the Monastery of Santa Scholastica, Subiaco 82
26. Holy Stairs at the Sagro Speco 86
27. Little Gleaner in the Campagna 90
28. Sea-horse Fountain in the Villa Borghese 94
29. Ornamental Water, Villa Borghese 98
30. Village Street at Anticoli, in the Sabine Hills 100
31. Villa d'Este, Tivoli 106
32. In Villa Borghese 110
33. The "Spanish Steps," Piazza di Spagna 114
34. At the Foot of the Spanish Steps, Piazza di Spagna, on
a Wet Day 118
35. Roman Peasant carrying Copper Water Pot 122
36. Chapel of the Passion in the Church of San Clemente 126
37. A Rustic Dwelling in the Roman Campagna 128
38. Procession with the Host at Subiaco 130
39. Girl selling Birds in the Via del Campidoglio 134
40. Entrance to Ara Coeli from the Forum 138
41. In the Church of Ara Coeli 142
42. Doorway of the Monastery of S. Benedict (Sagro Speco)
at Subiaco 146
43. Chapel of San Lorenzo Loricato at S. Benedict's, Subiaco 150
44. Steps of the Dominican Nuns' Church of SS. Domenico
and Sisto 154
45. Porta San Paolo 158
46. The Colosseum in a Storm 162
47. Arch of Titus from the Arch of Constantine 166
48. Mediaeval House at Tivoli 170
49. Ilex Avenue and Fountain (_Fontana scura_) Villa Borghese 174
50. "House of Cola di Rienzo," by Ponte Rotto 178
51. San Clemente, Choir and Tribune of Upper Church 182
52. Santa Maria in Cosmedin 186
53. Chapel of San Zeno (called _orto del paradiso_) in
S. Prassede 190
54. Cloisters of S. Paul's-without-the-Walls 192
55. Cloisters in Santa Scholastica, Subiaco 196
56. Santa Maria sopra Minerva 198
57. Saint Peter's 200
58. Interior of S. Peter's, the Bronze Statue of S. Peter 204
59. A Cardinal in Villa d'Este 208
60. Villa d'Este--Path of the Hundred Fountains 210
61. Theatre of Marcellus 212
62. Island of the Tiber--the Isola Sacra 216
63. The Steps of Ara Coeli 220
64. Steps of the Church of SS. Domenico and Sisto 224
65. Santa Maria Maggiore 230
66. Arch of Constantine 234
67. Castel and Ponte Sant' Angelo 238
68. Bronze Statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol 240
69. S. Peter's from the Pincian Gardens 244
70. From the Terrace of the House of Domitian 252
_The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved by the Hentschel
Colourtype Process._
ROME
CHAPTER I
ROME
About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some
Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became
the Roman people. Where did they come from? Had they come across what
was later to be known as the _ager romanus_ from the Latin stronghold
of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those
men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In the
confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see Latins
in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter to a
special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three tribes
into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an Etruscan
chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of her six
kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the political
institutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan
civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil.
However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of
Rome--the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian
Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of
Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years
before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings
descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of
Troy bringing with him the _Palladium_, the sacred image of Pallas.
His descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the
twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are
cast adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of
the Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the
shepherd community already established there.
In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type
of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the
Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In
the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the
foot of the Palatine--the original _Roma Quadrata_--and we see that
the nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the
Italian shepherds' god, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This
cave was just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia;
here grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's
babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their
foster-father.
The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For
the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd
kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become
world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the arts
of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the arts of
the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the unity of
purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the destinies of
the known world.
The story is aptly figured in the person of the god Mars, who was the
reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman god was at first an
agricultural divinity--the "spears of Mars" were the rods with which
the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence of
Greece, Mars became the god of battles, the boundary marker of the
fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his
ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword to
the plough. The one was never far from the other--they put him in
possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and
subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never died
out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of victory,
when the relics of the _hastae martis_ were shown to the triumphant
followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the Roman the
image of the father of Romulus covering the land with gigantic strides
to strike these same _hastae_ into the soil as a sign of possession,
the emblem of primitive law.
Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the
theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the
one hill were the Latins--or let us call them the Roman people--the
site of _Roma Quadrata_ the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of
Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces of
the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the Sabine
arx, that _Capitolium_ so-called, says Montfaucon, "because it was the
head of the world, from which the consuls and senators governed the
universe." Whenever the marshy ground between them was passable, the
Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of their hills and
transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these early days they
felt the need of a _comitium_ where the rival chiefs could meet to
decide upon terms; and in no long space this battle-ground became the
nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome.
For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of
the common meeting ground--the common sentiments and needs--of human
beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life--its
common but its noblest business, civic, "civilised," pursuits. It is
the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the
common necessities to force upon him an ignoble peace. The
battle-ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition
that the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed
to the interests for which men should co-operate. Through the symbolic
_trait d'union_ of the Forum, two fortresses of barbarians became
the nucleus of the city which ruled the world, and their people the
imperial people of history.
[Illustration: THE FORUM FROM THE ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS
In the left corner is the _lapis niger_, the traditional tomb of
Romulus. Facing us is the Arch of Titus, and to the right is the
Palatine.]
The city on the Palatine had been extended so as to include the town
of the Sabines or Quirites on the neighbouring Quirinal hill, before
the first king, who was born in the Sabine country, was called to rule
the Romans. The Capitol at this time was a spur of the Quirinal, and
so remained until Trajan dug away a part of the latter to lay the
foundations of his forum. The Etruscans lived on the Caelian and the
two horns of the Esquiline hills; the former was incorporated in the
primitive city, but the Esquiline and Viminal were not enclosed until
the time of Servius Tullius when Rome first became "the city on Seven
Hills." The Aventine where Remus had wished to build the city was
colonised by the conquered Latin towns in the reign of Ancus Martius,
and this isolated hill, overlooking the Tiber on one side and the
campagna on the other, still haunts the imagination with its
melancholy beauty, its pariah history, as though it embodied the
undying protest of Remus, an unceasing claim upon Roman justice. The
varied and interesting Christian memories here, which begin with the
_titulus_ of Priscilla and Aquila, are continued in the Priory of the
once international Order of the Knights of Malta, recording the
noblest effort of the lay world during the middle ages--the
institution of chivalry; and in the modern Benedictine house of Saint
Anselm--our English Anselm.
The Janiculum, the site of a fortress built by Ancus Martius against
the Etruscans, was not enclosed within the city walls till the time of
Aurelian; the Vatican hill was only enclosed in the ninth century by
Leo IV. All these hills were once steep defences against enemies in
the surrounding country; now that there are no longer any enemies the
Romans appear bent on abolishing the hills, and the mania for planing
and razing is carried to an extent which must seem nothing less
than childish to the visitor. The Viminal has become almost
indistinguishable since the Villa Massimo was pulled down, and only
the name _Via Viminale_, which replaces the older Via Strozzi,
indicates the hill which lay between the Quirinal and the Esquiline.
Some idea may be gained of the original steepness of the hills when we
realise that in the memory of the Romans the road past Palazzo
Aldobrandini--on a slope of the Quirinal--used to be at the level of
the top of the high wall which now surrounds it. The Capitol was only
approachable from the Forum, and was never connected with the city on
the hither side until the construction of the historic steps of Ara
Coeli, one of the rare works undertaken by the Romans during the
absence of the popes in Avignon.
The Tiber is now but a narrow stream in the midst of its ancient bed.
The Romans had never embanked the swift-flowing river, and the
enormous deposits of the yellow sand which give it its traditional
colour, and which threaten to completely dam the river by the island
of the Tiber, may afford the explanation. The inundations of 1900 in
fact reached the same level as those of 1872, as we may see recorded
in the neighbouring church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Few spots in
Rome exceed in varied interest the _isola sacra_ which with its two
historic bridges the _pons Fabricius_ and the _pons Cestius_ spans the
Tiber at the heart of the city. Here was the temple to Aesculapius,
whose worship had been introduced into Rome during a time of
pestilence in obedience to the Sibylline oracles. The island itself
thereafter assumed the form of a huge stone ship, faced with
travertine, the prow with the sculptured staff and serpent of the god
being still clearly visible; and here Greece and Rome met a
civilisation and an art still older than their own, for the mast of
this great ship is formed by an Egyptian obelisk. Hard by is the
district where the Romans, who had borrowed from them their gods and
their cult, compelled the "_turba impia_" ("the impious crowd") of
Etruscans to dwell; while the walled enclosure in which, from the
eleventh century onwards, Christian Rome obliged the Jews to live, is
approached by the Fabrician bridge, as we may gather from the
inscription in Hebrew and Latin on the little church of San Giovanni
Calibita, beneath a painting of the Crucifixion, which says: "I have
spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk
in a way that is not good."
In the early twelfth century Otho III. brought, as he believed, the
body of the Hebrew apostle Saint Bartholomew to this island, as 1400
years earlier the cult of Aesculapius had been brought there from
Greece. The city of Beneventum had, however, it is supposed, palmed
off on the emperor the body of Saint Paulinus of Nola which rests in
the church dedicated to the apostle by the side of that of Saint
Adelbert the apostle of the Slavs. The Franciscans came to the _isola
sacra_ in the sixteenth century, and one of the friars of Saint
Bartholomew's is the popular dentist of the poor from all quarters.
Here, then, in the midst of the river which determined the site of the
cosmopolitan city, is a spot to whose history Egypt, Greece, Etruria,
Palestine have contributed--Aesculapius, "one of the Twelve," the
Christian Slavs, the Saxon Otho, Francis of Assisi. In Paulinus of
Nola we are reminded of the earliest Western monasteries, and the
Franciscan friars represent for us the thirteenth-century revival of
the religious spirit in Italy. What more? In the red-gowned
confraternity of the island we are put in touch with an institution
which seems to be as old as human history, with those burial guilds,
sanctioned by Roman law, under shelter of which the first Christians
obtained a legal footing for themselves and their cemeteries long
before their religion was tolerated.
[Illustration: THE FORUM, LOOKING TOWARDS THE CAPITOL
The Palatine is to the left. See pages 4, 5, 61.]
The vicissitudes of the city have made certain features of its life as
eternal as itself. Through the middle ages it was the sanctuary and
since the renascence of classical learning it has been the museum of
Europe. Long before there were any kind of facilities for travelling
every one came to Rome. A procession of people from every race under
heaven, in every variety--every excess and defect--of costume, has
passed along the streets under the observant but unastonished eyes of
the _blasé_ Roman; and when a lay pilgrim in a brown tunic, hung
with rosaries, and carrying a crucifix taller than himself, walked
last year out of Saint Peter's among the Easter crowd, no one noticed
him. The modern city in becoming the hostess of the other provinces of
Italy is approximating in size to the Rome of the early empire; but
the Rome of the popes made no sort of provision for the influx of
Europe. The Inn of the Bear, in the street of that name leading to
Ponte Sant' Angelo, provided the best accommodation; and here, it is
said, Dante himself had lodged. It is but a hundred years ago that a
pavement was placed for pedestrians, and then only one side of the
Corso boasted a narrow footpath. The streets were encumbered with
hucksters' stalls, with refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark
as pitch, and hygiene was only hinted at in the marble _affiches_
which may still be seen at certain old street corners announcing that
_monsignore_ the way warden would visit with a fine of 25 _scudi_ and
divers bodily pains the practice of emptying every kind of refuse into
the side streets.
Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages
the cry of "Vandals!" goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been
destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right to
be called "the eternal city" than her survival of the material ruin to
which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth and Vandal
have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and popes is
recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who stripped
the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of Saint
Peter's:--_Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini_. It is a
curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories
of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of
as "barbarians," should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace
in Rome. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._
One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of
Rome--barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders,
internecine brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each
brought the opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of
destruction must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from
the time of the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings
are doomed on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor
Emmanuel II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway
system--while the House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is
dishonoured--the Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those
who killed the prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres.
But when "new Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given
us what the learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never
compassed--an excavated Forum.
There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and
have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the Ghetto
and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence. This
brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life--the beggars.
Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always had troops
of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the Antonines as in
that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the latest of the
sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced beggar who was
licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint Peter lived to the
closing years of the century and gave a dowry of 200,000 francs to his
daughter on her marriage. The difficulties which met the Roman of the
era of Gregory the Great when pest and the transition to the
agricultural system of _coloni_ threw the serfs upon the streets, met
the government of Italy when after September 1870 the whole motley
crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian system of
alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the streets of the
city. Those who remember the "seventies" or the "eighties" in Rome
remember the menacing manner in which "alms" were "asked," how near
together were blessing and cursing, and how unfrequented roads and
hills were beset by sturdy beggars, lineal descendants of the brigand
who placing his hat in the roadway levelled his gun at you as he
proffered the request: "For the love of God put something in that
hat."
Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on wet
days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum; doles
of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising members
of their congregations. The men women and children who had passed
their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viaticum and funeral
processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions, were
suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern
spirit--hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a
couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the
restaurants, these latest recruits to the commercial spirit exchanged
the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade without
ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and simple.
Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging. The great
and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to the
excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding--in the _San Lorenzo_
quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with
five, six, and even seven families living _in one room_. The mania for
building in the "eighties" led to the "building crisis"; streets of
unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the "improvements" of
the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this
misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help;
they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies
and dowries come their way.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE BASILICA JULIA IN THE FORUM
The Capitol is to the left. The temple is built at the foot of the
Capitol hill. See pages 3, 13, 30, 91.]
The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The maximum
was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors--2 millions, but even
in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered 1,300,000. A
period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us to the date
of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this number by more
than a million (A.D. 335). After a thousand years of Christian
domination the population of the city had sunk to its minimum, 17,000
(A.D. 1377). Even in the reign of the magnificent Leo X. it was not
more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of the seventeenth
century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily increased, till in 1800
the population numbered 153,000. But during the "empire," 1812, it
fell to 118,000. Ten years after "the Italians" entered Rome it had
increased by 79,000, to 305,000. The last census, 1900, shows a
resident population of 450,000--not a third of its classical
total--and Naples is still the most densely populated city of Italy.
* * * * *
The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of
"Pallas"; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The
one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune--those
liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the
_gentes_ and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and
which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited
since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth
century; but the life of the Capitol has never been intermitted; it
has never ceased to represent all the moments in the life of the Roman
people. This distinction is sharply drawn to-day: the Palatine is a
hill of majestic ruins visited only by the tourist, the Capitol is
still the seat of the municipality of Rome, ascended by every couple
for the celebration of their marriage, and its registers signalise
every young life born to the city.
The municipal franchises of Italy have played a large part in her
history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of
Rome, the heads of each _gens_ from among the original settlers, and
the _Populus_, who be it remembered were the _gentes_ and were never
synonymous with the _plebs_, represented two constant facts and
factors--a free Senate and free municipal government by the _Populus
Romanus_. These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished
in the classical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to
restore them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal
letters to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the
Senate and people of Rome--a custom which influenced the early
government of the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other
Christian Churches were written in the name of "the Roman Church,"
even when, as in the case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual
handiwork of the then head of the Christian community. Again, when
Pepin obliged the Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to
the emperor but to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church
and the Roman Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III.
the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and
when the Romans again tired of their Senate--as tradition says they
had done when they made Numa king--they created in its place a supreme
magistrate who was designated "the Senator," one of whose duties was
to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for
his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within
his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps all that
now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman people. The
municipality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is conterminous
with the whole Roman _agro_, so that its history is inseparably linked
with that of the Roman boundaries as well as with the life of the
Roman people.
The outward and visible sign of these primæval Roman liberties is the
tetragram S.P.Q.R.--_Senatus Populus Que Romanus_ (the Roman Senate
and People), which took the place of the earlier formula _Populus
Romanus et Quirites_, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble
conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. All down the centuries we
may recognise those four letters--surmounted in imperial times by an
eagle--crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not
only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the
earth, but in that religious perlustration of the _ager_ when the
ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which
separated Rome from Alba Longa, the site of the combat between the
Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of the finest remains in the
Forum is the marble relief which represents the _suovetaurilia_, the
sow, sheep, and bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman greatness
which came to be synonymous with confines as large as the known world,
had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which
still define the Roman municipality--the symbol of Roman liberties.
The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be
more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into _Si Peu
Que Rien_ must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism"--it points
to an ecclesiastical not a political _diminutio capitis_. The tract of
the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking
towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land
in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this
unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the
tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations--the Etruscan, the Roman,
the Christian--resulted in the foundation of two world empires. Rome
is now entering on a third existence, its existence as the capital of
Italy, but has it suffered thereby no _diminutio capitis_? Is it not a
fact that the classical and the ecclesiastical represented her only
world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome which penetrated as truly
beyond the city as within its classic confines? Has not the papacy,
with all its faults, been the actual link connecting ancient and
modern Rome, preserving unbroken the tradition which gave her, beyond
her ritual boundaries, the government of the world without?
[Illustration: S. PETER'S AND CASTEL SANT' ANGELO FROM THE TIBER
See pages 16, 32, 239, 242.]
CHAPTER II
ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION
Shepherds' huts clustered upon a hill top whose base is washed by a
swift yellow river rushing to the sea not far distant. This is the
first faint foreshadowing of the existence of Rome which reaches us
dimly across the centuries. These shepherd settlers had chosen a site
propitious for the foundation of the great city which was to be raised
upon those grouped hills by the skilful hands of their descendants,
for the necessary building materials lay close at hand in lavish
profusion. One of the neighbouring hills, known later as the
Janiculum, and parts of another, the Pincian, yielded a fine yellow
sand. Beneath the surface soil was volcanic rock, which, in a
prehistoric age when the campagna was a sea-bed and waves lapped
against Monte Cavo, had been poured out in great liquid streams from
volcanoes amongst the Alban hills and at Bracciano. Close at hand in
the plain lay immense beds of a chocolate-brown earth with which later
builders were to manufacture cement.
The makers of Rome therefore had only to quarry their building stone
on the very site of their city, and we can still recognise in the few
fragments that have come down to us the rectangular blocks of brown
tufa used in the first period of her history. These earliest
monuments, the walls of Servius Tullius and the vaults of the
Mamertine prisons, were the direct outcome of a period of Etruscan
dominion, and one of the first great works undertaken in the growing
city, the draining of the swamps of the Forum, Campus Martius and
Velabrum, was due to Tarquinius Priscus, the immense _cloacae_ built
for the purpose being still in use, and their masonry as strong as
when they were constructed about 603 B.C. The two Etruscan kings,
Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, built the first triple
shrine on the Capitol dedicated to the three Etruscan gods, Jupiter,
Juno, and Minerva, and the primitive Roman temples, consisting of a
simple _cella_ with a peristyle, were doubtless Etruscan in character
and were decorated with terra-cotta and bronze in the Etruscan manner.
The Romans were born builders and engineers, and in these branches
they quickly outstripped their predecessors and instructors. If they
were deficient in artistic originality, they evinced a readiness to
imitate and a power of appreciating skill and proficiency in the arts
wherever they met with them, and their practical and utilitarian
spirit taught them how to adopt and improve upon experience and guided
them in the choice of right materials.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES
One of the earliest monuments of Rome; originally built in the reign
of the last of the Tarquins or the first years of the Republic, but
twice reconstructed during the Empire. It served as the Treasury of
Rome. The granite columns with marble capitals are of the Ionic
order. See pages 30, 181.]
A period when the influence of Greece predominated succeeded the first
epoch in the building of Rome, and to this time must be ascribed
the adoption of the Greek models for public buildings, for circuses,
baths, and basilicas. Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric columns were
imported into Rome, the latter undergoing some modification to suit
the Romans' more florid taste. The temples became Hellenic in style.
The small _cella_ was built within an open court surrounded by arcades
from which the people assisted at the sacrifices. The altar stood in
the open court. Later, windows were introduced into the building, and
the openings were filled in with a bronze grating similar to that
still in perfect preservation over the door of the Pantheon, or with a
perforated marble screen, fragments of coloured glass being inserted
in the interstices of the pattern. By the third century there were 400
temples in Rome, but the simple form of the early buildings was hidden
with excessive ornamentation, and frieze and cornice were loaded with
carving and figures.
The basilica, or kingly hall of justice, was a rectangular building
divided into a central portion or nave and side aisles by rows of
columns under a horizontal architrave. The columns were in two tiers,
the upper one enclosing a gallery which was reached by a flight of
stairs springing either within or without the building. The entrances
were at the sides, and one extremity, and in some cases both were
extended to form a semicircular apse or tribune where stood the
judge's seat. A marble screen, the _cancellum_, separated this portion
from the rest of the building, and this constituted the bar to which
the accused were brought; just beyond stood the altar, where incense
burned; and here, during the persecutions, Christians were arraigned
and bidden to throw incense on the fire as a sign of recantation.
These great buildings served as courts of justice and for the
transaction of business, and those which stood upon the _fora_ were in
some instances so large that several cases could be conducted in them
at once. Before the Empire the nave was probably unroofed or covered
only with an awning, and the upper galleries were entirely open so
that their occupants could at will attend to the proceedings within
the basilica or watch the games and events without. Similarly a single
rail or low partition only separated the open colonnades below from
the Forum. Curtains could be drawn across these to shut out
importunate onlookers and to muffle the sounds of street traffic, but
it is evident that the basilica precincts were regarded as a place of
familiar _rendezvous_ by the idlers in the Forum, as the gaming tables
scratched in the flooring of the Julian basilica testify.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE FORUM FROM THE BASE OF THE TEMPLE OF
SATURN
The column of Phocas, erected in honour of the Byzantine emperor who
was the contemporary of Gregory the Great, faces us, and to the
right are the columns of the temple to Antoninus Pius and Faustina,
now the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. The columns
are of _cippolino_ marble. See page 32.]
The era of _thermae_ or public baths began with Agrippa in 27 B.C.,
and by the end of the third century eleven such existed in Rome
exclusive of the smaller baths or _balnae_, of which there were 850.
Nero, Titus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Diocletian, were
all builders of _thermae_. These huge edifices were a great deal more
than public baths. They were a Roman form of the _gymnasia_ of the
Greeks, and the colossal ruins that remain can give but the barest
idea of what they must have been at their best. They included
immense halls and courts for athletic displays, vestibules, concert
rooms, picture galleries and libraries, pleasure grounds decorated
with statues fountains and shrubs and surrounded by open porticoes.
Feasts, concerts, and entertainments were provided, and pleasant hours
could be whiled away within their walls by the gilded youth of Rome.
The baths of Diocletian, of which the church of S. Maria degli Angeli
is a magnificent fragment, could accommodate 3600 bathers at a time,
those of Caracalla 2000. An army of slaves and attendants waited upon
the bathers and sped upon their errands along underground passages
from one end of the building to the other. Ruins of the _thermae_ of
Caracalla and of Titus are still standing. Out of the colossal vaults
and walls of Diocletian's baths have been constructed two churches, a
monastery, a large museum, and a variety of storehouses, warehouses,
stables, and cellars.
Equally remarkable was the Roman system for supplying their city,
their _thermae_, and their 1350 street fountains with pure water.
Appius Claudius was the first to collect the water from springs
amongst the mountains in the neighbourhood of Rome and to bring it
across the campagna. This was in 313 B.C., up to which date the
inhabitants of the city had depended for their water supply upon the
Tiber and upon sunken wells. Following in the steps of Claudius,
fourteen aqueducts whose united length measured 360 miles were built
at various times. They varied in length from 11 to 59 miles and their
course lay sometimes under ground and sometimes 100 feet above it,
while the amount of water they poured daily into Rome has been
estimated at 54,000,000 cubic feet.
Four of these ancient aqueducts are still in use. The Virgo, built by
Agrippa in 27 B.C., and now known as the Trevi; the Alexandrina,
constructed by Alexander Severus (222-235), probably to supply his own
baths, and now known as the _acqua Felice_; the ancient Trajana, now
Paola, and the Marcian, restored by Pius IX. The Marcian was always
considered the best drinking water, and the Trevi being a softer water
was preferred for bathing purposes.
The amphitheatre alone was, perhaps characteristically, a building of
purely Roman origin. Intended for shows and fights of gladiators and
wild beasts, these were at first temporary wooden structures. The only
stone predecessor to the great Flavian amphitheatre was a smaller
building in the Campus Martius, the work of Statilius Taurus in 30
B.C. The Colosseum was begun by Vespasian in A.D. 72, was dedicated
eight years later by Titus, and was completed by Domitian. It stands
upon the site of Nero's artificial lake, is one-third of a mile in
circumference, covers some 6 acres of ground, and is 160 feet in
height. It could seat 87,000 spectators, and its staircases,
galleries, and entrances are so admirably planned that this crowd of
sight-seers must have found their seats and filed out when the show
was finished with little delay and difficulty. The numbers of the
entrances, cut in stone, can still be seen over each of the arches.
The Colosseum is built entirely of travertine, the blocks are fitted
together without mortar and are studded with holes from which the
greedy despoilers of the middle ages wrenched the metal clamps. In
spite of its having been used as a fortress and served as a stone
quarry for centuries, it is still one of the most magnificent of the
monuments of Rome.
The solidity of the public buildings seems to have been in marked
contrast to the flimsy nature of the common dwellings or _insulae_. In
the time of Augustus these numbered 46,600, the _domui_, or houses of
the rich, 1790. The former were roofed with timber or thatch. As land
was dear, they were often of several stories and perilously high; many
of them were built of unbaked bricks with projecting upper floors, and
they were constructed with wooden framing filled in with rush and
plaster, so that when a fire broke out in the city whole regions were
laid waste in a few hours. As a measure of safety Augustus limited the
height of the _insulae_ to 70 feet, and Trajan reduced this again to
60 feet, while a distance of 5 feet between each house was prescribed
by the law of the Twelve Tables.
The volcanic tufa used by the earliest Roman builders was discarded
gradually in favour of better materials. _Peperino_, a grey-green
volcanic stone from the Alban hills, began to take its place, and was
used for the construction of the Tabularium in 78 B.C. and for
Hadrian's mausoleum. It was cut in the same way in large rectangular
blocks, clamped together during the Republican and early Imperial
periods with iron. Mortar was not used till later, and at first served
only to level the surfaces of the stones; it came into use for
binding bricks together only at a later and degenerate period of
architecture. Travertine was adopted towards the first century B.C. It
is a cream-coloured stone hard and durable though easily calcined by
fire, formed by deposit in running water. It was quarried at Tivoli
and on the banks of the river Anio, where it is still plentiful. To
the present day the quarries are worked at Tivoli, and the stone is
brought to Rome on waggons drawn by immense white oxen which pace
majestically along the dusty roads beneath the goad of their
wild-looking drivers.
The chocolate-brown earth imported from Pozzuoli or dug from beds in
the campagna, is known as _pozzolana_, and early in the history of
Rome her builders discovered that when mixed with lime it made a
remarkably strong cement. As such they used it for foundations, for
the lining of walls and ceilings. With pieces of brick and stone a
concrete was formed which was poured in a liquid state between wooden
casings, and when set proved to be one of the hardest and most durable
of the materials used. It was the strength of this concrete which
enabled the Roman builders to give the vaults of their baths and
basilicas such an enormous span; and it could be used for the flooring
of upper stories without beams or supports. When especial lightness
was required, the concrete was made with broken pumice stone.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF MARS ULTOR
The temple erected by Augustus in his Forum to the God of War under
the title of Mars the Avenger. Only the upper part of the ancient
arch of the Forum, now known as _Arco de' Pantani_, is visible. This
represents the first imperial building in Rome. See pages 3, 30.]
After the first century B.C. concrete became a favourite building
material. The walls so made were lined with stucco and faced without
in various fashions, the variety of the facing determining with
considerable accuracy the date of the fabric. The earliest facing, of
the first and second century B.C., was of irregular blocks of tufa set
in cement, and is known as the _opus incertum_. This was replaced in
the middle of the first century B.C. by tufa blocks cut in squares and
set diagonally giving the appearance of a network and hence known as
_opus reticulatum_. In or after the first century A.D. this fashion
was superseded by a facing of triangular bricks set point inwards, and
by the end of the third century bricks were mixed with the _opus
reticulatum_, a style known as _opus mixtum_. To the casual observer
the narrow brown bricks of the ruined buildings of ancient Rome seem
to play an important part, but, with few exceptions, they are merely a
brick facing upon concrete.
Up to the first century B.C. there was little or no splendour or
decoration introduced into the buildings of Rome, and the city of
Augustus' inheritance was a city of sober-hued, volcanic rock. When
marble was first sparingly used, Livy reprobates it as too showy and
extravagant. Notwithstanding, the fashion rapidly spread, first in the
embellishment of public buildings, then for private houses as well
until in the first century of the Empire it became a common building
stone.
For nearly three centuries it was imported into the city in a
continuous flow from the quarries of Greece and Egypt. The native Luna
marble, the modern Carrara, was not at first worked, but thousands of
slaves and convicts toiled in the quarries of the Roman provinces. The
great blocks were numbered and stamped with the name of the reigning
emperor and shipped off in the great triremes across the Mediterranean
to Ostia. Thence the trading vessels were towed by oxen up the river
to Rome, their slow progress ceasing with nightfall, when they were
drawn up and moored to the banks till next morning, bands of _vigiles_
watching over the safety of their cargoes and restraining their
lawless crews from acts of brigandage. At their journey's end, the
cargoes were unloaded upon the marble wharf beneath the Aventine; here
unused blocks still lie upon the site of the once busy _Marmoratum_,
now a deserted quay beside a deserted river; and the harbour of Ostia,
built by King Ancus Martius at the river's mouth, is now four miles
inland.
Occasionally a granite obelisk was brought from Thebes or Heliopolis
to adorn an imperial circus. That now in the Lateran Piazza is 108
feet in height and weighs 400 tons. Ships had to be built on purpose
for the task, and one of these was so enormous that after safely
conveying the Vatican obelisk to Rome, it was sunk by the Emperor
Claudius to serve as a breakwater for the harbour at Porto. When the
laden ships arrived at the _Marmoratum_ the obelisks were hauled on
shore by men and horses and then dragged and pushed on rollers along
the streets by gangs of workmen. Forty-eight obelisks were once
erected in Rome, of which thirty have disappeared and left no trace.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF VESPASIAN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII
CONSENTES
Built in honour of the first Flavian Emperor by his sons Titus and
Domitian. The three remaining Corinthian columns are of Carrara
marble. The Arch of Septimius Severus to the right was dedicated to
the emperor and his sons Caracalla and Geta in A.D. 203, to
commemorate their Parthian victories. It is of Pentelic marble. The
church of Santa Martina in the background is near the site of the
Senate House. See pages 31, 32.]
While the fashion for marble lasted, no material was considered too
rare or too costly. Parian marble, the most beautiful of all white
marbles, from the island of Paros; Pentelic marble from Pentelicus;
Hymettan marble from the mountains of Attica; rich yellow _giallo
antico_ from Numidia; _cippolino_ with its beautiful green waves from
Carystos; purple _pavonazzo_ from Phrygia; black marble from Cape
Matapan; green and red porphyries from Egypt; alabaster from Thebes;
serpentine from Sparta; jasper and fluor-spar from Asia Minor; _lapis
lazuli_, with which Titus paved a chamber in his baths, from Persia,
besides countless varieties of the so-called _Lumachella_ marbles and
rare and beautiful _breccias_.
There arose in Rome an army of marble workers, cutters and sawyers,
polishers and cleaners, carvers of simple mouldings and of
inscriptions, and more skilled sculptors of ornament and of statues
and busts.
Coloured marbles were first used in small pieces for making mosaic
pavements. This art was introduced from Greece some time in the first
century B.C., and in its simplest form was an arrangement of smooth
pebbles in a rough pattern on a bed of cement. As the art developed,
cubes, lozenges, and hexagons of travertine and grey lava were cut and
fitted together in simple patterns. Then cubes of coloured marble were
used, and the designs, of figures and flowers, became more elaborate.
The floors were prepared with a bed of concrete, covered with several
layers of cement; the last layer was carefully smoothed and levelled,
and in this the cubes were fitted according to the pattern, and
finally liquid cement was poured over the whole to fill in the cracks.
When dry and hard the surface was polished with sand and water rubbed
on with little marble blocks.
Pavements of the best building period can be recognised by the size of
the cubes, about three to the inch, and by the neatness and finish of
the work. Two varieties of mosaic can be distinguished, that in which
marbles, stones, and coloured glass are cut into cubes only and the
so-called _sectile_ mosaic in which elaborate scenes and groups of
figures are represented, the coloured pieces being sawn into shapes to
fit in with the design. The _Tablinum_ in the house of the vestals and
the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol were paved with sectile mosaic.
The most brilliant mosaic which came into use during the Empire for
the decoration of walls and vaults was made of fragments of coloured
marble and glass, the latter specially prepared with acids to make it
opaque and to give it a brilliant appearance. The art of mosaic work
has never died out entirely in Rome. The Roman mosaic pavements and
mosaic wall decoration were copied by the builders of mediæval
churches, and even now a mosaic factory is kept up at the Vatican.
Although first used in this way, coloured marbles were gradually
employed for the interior decoration of houses, for columns, dados,
and friezes. Lucius Crassus, the consul (176 B.C.), was the first so
to adorn his house, and Lucullus (151 B.C.) paved his hall with black
marble. Later, entire rooms were lined with thin slabs clamped to the
concrete wall with iron. Sometimes such marble walls were given a thin
coat of stucco and painted. As the passion for sumptuous interiors
grew all the decorative arts were put into requisition. Walls were
painted in fresco, as we can still see at Pompeii and in the house of
Germanicus on the Palatine. Ceilings, walls, and cornices were
ornamented in stucco in shallow relief. An extremely hard stucco was
made with lime and powdered marble--it was nearly as durable as marble
and could take almost as high a polish. It was even used for floors;
for internal decoration, plaster of Paris was mixed with it.
Mouldings, figures, arabesques, groups and scenes were worked in this
stucco and delicately coloured. Examples have been preserved in the
Diocletian museum and can be seen _in situ_ in the Latin tombs.
The greatest plans for the building of Rome were conceived by Julius
Caesar and Nero. Of Nero's buildings nothing remains except some ruins
of his Golden House beneath the baths of Titus, while the designs of
Caesar were destined to be carried out by his great successor
Augustus. Justly could this emperor boast that he found Rome a city of
brick and left it a city of marble. The republican period succeeding
the expulsion of the Tarquins, and which his accession brought to a
close, had not been so fruitful in public buildings as the epoch
immediately following. Of the former, the Tabularium, the tombs of
Bibulus and Cecilia Metella, the temple of Fortuna Virilis, and the
ruins of the Fabrician bridge, the modern Ponte Quattro Capi, have
come down to us. The city, however, was beginning to assume a more
majestic appearance. On the accession of Augustus, the Capitol was
crowned by the Tarquins' temple to Jupiter, which was to be restored
by Domitian. The valley between the Palatine and the Aventine was
occupied by the enormous Circus Maximus, built by Tarquinius Priscus
and decorated by Julius Caesar, and which has so entirely disappeared
that we can only trace its site along the present Via dei Cerchi. The
temples of Concord and Castor and Pollux stood upon the Forum
Romanum, while the temple of Saturn bounding the steep _Clivus
Capitolinus_ which led upwards to the Capitol--the ancient _Mons
Saturninus_--recorded the golden age when Saturn reigned in Italy.
The streets of the city were paved, and beyond the walls the immense
Appian causeway crossed the Pontine marshes and stretched onwards
towards Brindisi and the east.
In the forty years following Rome was transformed. There arose in the
Campus Martius, the Pantheon with the baths and aqueduct of Agrippa,
the portico of Octavia dedicated by Augustus to his sister, the
theatre of Marcellus and the great mausoleum where the emperor and his
kindred were to lie, and which, almost smothered in poor houses, has
in modern times served the ignoble offices of a bull-ring and a
third-rate theatre. Temples were restored, the Basilica Julia was
completed, another Forum built with the temple of Mars Ultor in its
midst. Upon the site of Augustus' birthplace on the Palatine hill a
great palace was raised by himself and Tiberius, and this district of
Rome became henceforth the abode of the Caesars.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM ON A SPRING DAY
The Flavian amphitheatre, called Colosseum from the _colossus_ or
colossal statue of Nero which stood on the _velia_ before it. The
picture is taken from an _orto_ belonging to the Barberini on the
Palatine, looking across the Arch of Constantine. See pages 22, 23,
31.]
Augustus and his immediate successors were to witness the golden age
of Roman building. After Hadrian came the period of decadence
characterised by florid ornamentation, bad taste and workmanship,
which culminated under Constantine and his sons.
Following in the steps of Augustus, Caligula and Nero erected palaces
on the Palatine. Caligula connected the hill with the Forum, and Nero
opened up an entrance towards the Caelian. Vespasian built there the
Flavian house which his son Domitian was to dedicate as the _Aedes
Publica_, a gift to the people. Septimius Severus extended the
Palatine towards the south by the construction of his Septizonium.
Of the buildings of Tiberius, the columns of the temple of Ceres built
into the church of S. Maria in Cosmedin remain to us; of those of
Claudius, the beautiful ruined arches of his aqueduct. The Flavian
emperors were great builders, and to this period belong the arch of
Titus, built in A.D. 70 to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem, a
monument of Rome's best period, the ruined baths erected by this same
emperor, and the great amphitheatre and ruins of the temple of
Vespasian.
Trajan's great buildings--his forum and triumphal arch, his basilica
and library--are represented by a very small excavated portion of the
basilica, and the column whose summit marks the height of the hill cut
away by this emperor to make a roadway between the Quirinal and
Capitol and thus relieve the congested traffic of the city.
The only fragments left of the work of Hadrian are the ruins of a
villa near Tivoli, the mausoleum and _Pons Aelius_, now the castle and
bridge of S. Angelo; and behind the church of S. Francesca Romana in
the Forum the ruins of the _Templum Urbis_, the temple of Venus and
Rome, with its twin niches for the gods, one turned towards the
convent the other looking outwards towards the Colosseum. The gilt
bronze tiles from the roof of this temple were removed by Pope
Honorius I. to deck the Christian _Templum Urbis_ S. Peter's.
During the following 140 years there arose in Rome, amongst other
monuments that have perished, the temple of Antoninus and Faustina
built by Antoninus Pius in memory of his wife and now transformed into
the church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda, the column of Marcus Aurelius,
the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus dedicated to his sons
Caracalla and Geta, the baths which bear this eldest son's name,
although only begun by him and completed by Heliogabalus and Alexander
Severus, the walls of Aurelian which still encompass the city and the
_thermae_ of Diocletian. The latest of the imperial buildings were the
temple built by Maxentius to his son Romulus, now the church of SS.
Cosma and Damian in the Forum, and the baths, basilica, and triumphal
arch of Constantine.
A visitor to this city of the Cæsars must have been almost bewildered
by what he saw. As he passes through the town great buildings meet his
glance on every side, their gilded tiles and white marble walls
glistening in the sun and clear atmosphere. Crowds jostle him in the
narrow paved roads. He crosses one Forum after another, six in all,
and finally reaches the Campus Martius. He pauses upon the steps of
temples and basilicas which seem on all sides to surround these busy
centres of Roman life. Open spaces are crowded with trees and shrubs,
fountains and statues. He can count thirty-six triumphal arches and
eight bridges that span the yellow Tiber. He passes theatres and
_stadia_ for races and games, columns and obelisks. Occasionally he
comes across a giant building, a colossus even in that city of
marvels, the amphitheatre of Vespasian or the _thermae_ of Diocletian,
or an immense circus where 285,000 spectators are seated waiting for
the chariot races to begin; he has noticed groups of charioteers in
their distinctive colours, and heavy betting is going on. He has
walked from one end of the city to the other sheltered from sun and
rain, along covered porticoes, their pavements rich mosaics, and their
length decorated throughout with a continuous series of statues and
pictures. He has gazed upon the stupendous palaces of the Palatine,
and has noticed the streams of people passing in and out of the city
gates on their way to the suburbs which extend to Veii Tivoli and
Ostia, or to the villas, parks and gardens, villages and farms, which
cover the outskirts of Rome to a distance of 15 miles, amongst which
great roads lined by marble tombs radiate outwards towards the hills.
With the decay of this mighty city began the era of church building.
The origin of the Christian basilica is still a matter of
controversy, but the results of careful and recent research[1] go to
confirm the view that it was modelled not upon its Pagan namesake the
forensic basilica, but upon the private hall found in many of the
dwellings of rich Romans of consular or senatorial rank which served
for those domestic tribunals for the adjudication of family disputes
sanctioned by Roman law. This conclusion has been overlooked from a
mistaken belief that the first Christians were recruited from the
slaves and poorer classes of the population, but it is now proved that
noble Romans and even members of Imperial families early embraced
Christianity, and it was more than probable that the domestic
basilicas in their houses should be utilised as places of assembly by
members of their faith, the gathering of a large body of persons being
concealed during times of persecution, by the use of the many
entrances common to the Roman house.
[1] _Le Basiliche Cristiane._ Mons. Pietro Crostarosa. Rome.
The domestic basilica dedicated as a place of Christian assembly,
became with the development of the ecclesiastical system, the Roman
_titulus_, the church in the house, and as no public hall was built
until after the Peace of the church, these were multiplied as the
Christian population grew and numbered 40 by the second century. The
Christian basilica was thus in existence and perfected in all its
liturgical parts in the first three centuries, and when Constantine
built his great extramural churches, he only amplified a type familiar
to every Christian.
S. Maria Maggiore probably existed as a domestic basilica at a time
anterior to that of its reputed founders Liberius and Sixtus, and we
know that S. Croce and the Lateran were constructed within the
Sessorian palace and the house of the Laterani of which they probably
formed the halls.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM AT SUNSET
Taken from the _Mons Oppius_, one of the two spurs of the Esquiline
hill. See pages 5, 11.]
Architecturally also the earliest churches resembled more nearly the
domestic hall than the public basilica. The latter were little more
than a covered portion of the Forum upon which they stood. They were
entered from either side through the open ambulatories which as we
have seen were free to all. The extremities were walled up later and
prolonged into an apse to increase the space available for legal
purposes. The domestic basilica on the other hand was a rectangular
building roofed and closed on all sides, its single apse at one
extremity facing the main entrance. The central space was surrounded
on three sides by porticoes dividing it into portions which became the
aisles for the worshippers and the narthex for the use of catechumens.
The domestic judge's seat standing in the apse was replaced by the
bishop's throne, and the _cancellum_ became the chancel rail dividing
this portion, the presbytery of the church, from the rest of the
building.
The ruins of the Flavian basilica in Domitian's house on the Palatine
(81-96) affords us a ground plan of such a domestic hall, in this
instance placed close to the _triclinium_ of the house and not in a
direct line with the _vestibulum_ or entrance as was generally the
case. Here a fragment of the _cancellum_ can still be seen _in situ_.
The Christian altar of the earliest churches placed in front of the
apse, faced the congregation, and a space before it, beyond the
depressed portion or _confessio_, was reserved for the choir and was
surrounded by a marble balustrade. The columns supported a horizontal
architrave, above it a flat wall pierced with windows and the plain
roof of cedar-wood beams.
The floors were paved with a fine mosaic of marble and green
serpentine alternating with slabs of white marble or discs of red
porphyry. Tribune, arch, and vault, and sometimes other portions of
the walls, were decorated with brilliant mosaics and examples of this
work, of the fourth, sixth, ninth, and twelfth centuries, and possibly
of the second or third, have happily escaped the ravishing hand of the
restorer. In the twelfth century the art of marble working underwent a
temporary revival under the influence of a talented family of artists,
the Cosmati; and a good deal of their work and that of their school is
still to be found in Rome, the carved marble and an inlay of mosaic
upon marble being easily recognisable in the decoration of the
cloisters of the Lateran and of S. Paul's outside the walls, upon
ambones, candelabra, and tombs scattered throughout the churches.
The straight architectural lines of the Christian basilicas and their
subdued colouring of floor and apse produce a delicate and harmonious
effect, but they were erected during a debased building period and
were not designed for strength, and only a few have weathered the
storms of the middle ages and escaped destruction beneath the
tasteless restorations of the Renaissance.
The new building epoch born in Rome was to be nourished entirely at
the expense of the old. Columns and mouldings were transferred bodily
from the nearest basilica to furnish the Christian church, and were
there arranged haphazard. Simpler still, walls of ancient bricks were
quickly run up between the solid columns of a temple; marble casings
were torn off to be used as common building stone; statues, carved
cornices, and friezes were thrust into lime-kilns which sprang up all
over the city wherever the ancient monuments stood thickest; priceless
marbles were ground into fragments for making mosaics or were mixed
with cement and made into concrete.
When Constantine left Rome to found his new capital the city had
already degenerated into a squalid provincial town, and fifty years
later Jerome could refer to its gilded squalor and its temples lined
with cobweb.
Already the seal had been put upon the old order when Gratian in 383
abolished the privileges of the pagan places of worship, and quickly
disaster followed upon the heels of destruction. Twice Alaric
despoiled the city and carried off priceless booty. Vitiges tore the
marble from the mausoleum of Hadrian and destroyed the aqueducts;
Genseric dismantled the temple of Jupiter; Robert Guiscard laid waste
the Campus Martius and other parts of the city by fire. Sieges, sacks,
earthquakes, fires, and inundations succeeded each other until the old
level of the city was in places buried 50 feet beneath accumulated
ruin and rubbish.
The scene shifts once more; centuries have slipped by and the city of
Rome has become a desolation. Marble columns and granite obelisks lie
prone upon the ground, and many more have found graves beneath the
soil. Enormous mounds of earth and masonry, disfigured with rude
battlements, represent all that is left of the great monuments;
crumbling ruins and waste land stretch away to the walls, and without
the campagna has become a fever-stricken wilderness.
Military fortresses, watch-towers on the walls, and bell-towers of
churches are the only buildings kept in repair. Gaunt wolves snarl and
fight over the refuse heaps under the walls of S. Peter's. A gibbet
crowns the bare summit of the Capitol, goatherds pasture their flocks
on its sides and along the green slopes of the Forum, and thus the
hill and the tract of land at its foot have returned once more to
their primitive pastoral state and their pastoral names, the "hill of
goats" and the "field of cows." Over all broods the ominous silence of
terror, bloodshed, and pestilence.
Upon this scene of ruin the Renaissance and modern city of Rome was to
come into being, and the mediaeval buildings were in their turn to be
destroyed or overlaid with a modern garb, leaving only a few churches
and convents, a few towers and palaces, a few cloisters to mark the
passing of the centuries.
The remains of the imperial city are described by a modern writer[2]
lying like a skeleton beneath the modern town, beneath streets,
villas, and public buildings; and from the fifteenth century, when
Rome, which had only just escaped an extinction as complete as that of
her neighbour and ancient rival Tusculum, began once more to rise from
the dust, to modern times, all the building materials have been
furnished by her ruins. The few monuments that have been preserved owe
their safety to their consecration as churches.
[2] Gabelli, _Roma e i Romani_.
[Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS
Erected to commemorate this Emperor's destruction of Jerusalem, A.D.
70. It is decorated with reliefs of the seven-branched candlestick
and other spoils of the Temple which were carried through the city
in the Emperor's triumph. See page 31.]
Of all the despoilers to which Rome has fallen a victim, none have
been so assiduous in their destruction as her own rulers and people.
Streets have been paved with building stone, churches and palaces
built with ancient materials. Monuments of the utmost artistic and
historic value have been destroyed for the purpose, the Colosseum
alone being robbed of 2522 cart-loads of travertine in the fifteenth
century. The inadequate prohibitions issued at rare intervals proved
impotent in presence of a practice so deep rooted and time honoured.
Every villa garden and palace staircase is peopled with ancient
statues. Fragments of inscriptions, of carved mouldings and cornices,
marble pillars and antique fountains, are met with in every courtyard.
Even a humble house or shop will have a marble step or a marble lintel
to the front door. To the present day no piece of work is ever
undertaken in Rome, no house foundation dug or gas-pipe laid, but the
workmen come across some ancient masonry, an aqueduct whose
underground course is unknown and unexplored, a branch of one of the
great _cloacae_, or the immense concrete vault of a bath or temple
whose destruction gives as much trouble as if it were solid rock.
Fortunately for the student and the archaeologist a government
official, a "custodian of excavations," now watches all such
operations, and all "finds" of importance, fragments of inscriptions
and statues, earthenware lamps, bronze or glass vessels, fragments of
mosaic, and gold ornaments, are collected and reported.
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN CATACOMBS
From the catacombs, the subterranean burial-places of the first Roman
Christians, to the basilica of S. Peter's, the greatest ecclesiastical
building on earth, there is no break in the drama of history. When you
come out from the cemetery of Callistus, on to the fields bordering
the Appian Way, and look across to the dome of the great church
commemorating Peter, you say to yourself "That is the interpretation
of this": this may see in its own humble features the lineaments of
that; the church which dominates the Roman country--in imperial
possession of Rome--may recognise that the silent underground
galleries of the Appia had already taken as effective a possession of
the capital of the world.
The Roman Church is founded upon three events: the apostolic
preaching, the constancy of its martyrs, its position as the heir of
Imperial Rome--a position early figured and represented in the persons
of its bishops. All these things have their monument in the catacombs;
which bear indisputable traces of the sojourn and the preaching of
the Apostles, which are the earliest shrines of the Roman martyrs, and
which preserve for us in the crypt in the cemetery of Callistus, set
apart for the leaders of the Roman Church from Antheros to Eutychian
(A.D. 235-275),[3] the veritable nucleus of papal domination. It was
the successors of these men who were to fill the rôle left vacant by
Constantine's departure for Byzantium; to be forced into a position of
overlordship through the uncertainty of the emperor's government by
lieutenants--first in Rome and then in Italy; to consolidate this
power by constant accretions of Italian territory, and, finally, to
acquire by spiritual conquest a universal suzerainty as real as that
of the Roman emperor. If those who inscribed the proud words round the
dome of S. Peter's had known that hidden in the catacombs there were
frescoes representing Peter as the new Moses striking the rock from
which flow forth the saving waters of Christ--the name _Petrus_
clearly written above him--even they must have thrilled with wonder
and awe: the upholders of Petrine primacy could not have imagined or
devised a parable of the first centuries better fitted to their hand.
[3] The popes from the time of Zephyrinus, the predecessor of
Callistus, to Miltiades, who lived on the eve of the "Peace," rest
in this great cemetery.
The burial-places of the first Christians in Rome were their only
certain property. The law allowed to every corporation its _religiosus
locus_, its God's acre, property seldom confiscated even in the worst
hours of the great persecutions. It was thus that the Christians,
though they never lived in the catacombs, came to regard them as
retreats, as places where it was safe to meet for prayer, for mutual
encouragement, even for the catechising of neophytes and children.
Round them were their dead, their loved ones, nay, round them were
their martyrs, the men and women who were to prove that "the blood of
the martyrs is the seed of the Church"; whose heroic deaths had been
witnessed by many; the memory of whose heroism was to prove almost as
potent as ocular witness when their burial-places became the nuclei of
the first Christian churches, and the abounding reverence felt for
them inaugurated the Christian cult of the saints.
[Illustration: A PROCESSION IN THE CATACOMB OF CALLISTUS
The nucleus of the great catacomb on the Via Appia was formed by the
crypts of Lucina and the _hypogaeum_ of the family of the
_Caecilii_, both pagan and Christian members of which had their
burial places on the Appian Way. S. Cecilia was buried here. See
pages 42, 45, 46, 29.]
The catacombs lie for the most part within a three mile radius of the
wall of Aurelian. They number forty-five, and it is calculated that
the passages, galleries, and chambers of which they consist cover
several hundred miles, forming a vast underground city--"subterranean
Rome." For the first 300 years, until "the Peace of the Church," this
was the ordinary place of burial, certain catacombs being affiliated,
from the third century, to the ecclesiastical regions in the city.
Even after the "Peace" Christians were sometimes buried here, until
the fifth century, after which the catacombs were visited as places of
pilgrimage for another 400 years.
From the ninth century they fell into complete neglect; no one visited
these sanctuaries of the sufferings, these monuments of the human
affections and religious beliefs of the first Christians. Visitors
heard that Rome was built upon terrible underground chasms, filled
with snakes, some part of which was every now and then revealed to the
terrified inhabitants. No one penetrated till the fifteenth
century--the first pioneer belongs to the sixteenth--and it was not
till the second half of the nineteenth that a new world was laid bare
to the student by the excavations of De Rossi, who rediscovered the
great cemetery of Callistus, containing the now famous "papal crypt,"
and whose labours have resulted in restoring to us nearly twenty
catacombs.
The terrible underground chasms filled with snakes were found to be
galleries of tombs, crypts of all sizes, lighted by shafts, some with
seats for catechists, some adapted as miniature basilicas, decorated
with frescoes recording biblical scenes, New Testament parables and
symbolical representations of New Testament events--(in which the
"apocrypha" is not distinguished from the "canon," and the history of
Susanna and the Elders sustained the faith and comforted the courage
of Christians by the side of the scene of Moses striking the rock or
Christ feeding His disciples); eloquent with inscriptions in the
epigraphy of the first four centuries, recorded in moments of simple
human emotion, intended only for the dead and those who survived them
sorrowing; and lastly, covered with _graffiti_, with prayers, names,
acclamations, scratched on the walls of galleries leading to some
favourite crypt by pilgrim visitors in later centuries.
[Illustration: FLAVIAN BASILICA ON THE PALATINE
See pages 31, 35, 45, and fly-leaf, page 252.]
In this hidden and quiet place of the dead there is recorded a
revolution parallel to a volcanic upheaval of nature. Here we have
a permanent record of the meeting of classical Rome with Judaea and
Christianity; here the graceful art of Pompeii meets the imagery of
the Hebrew bible; here the Flavii met the Jews of the Dispersion; here
as in a Titanic workshop, Rome, taking its religion from the Jew,
moulded the faith which the Chosen People had discarded into the
greatest religious organisation on earth--Catholic Christianity.
The two arch-cemeteries are those of Callistus on the Via Appia and
Priscilla on the Salaria. They are arch-cemeteries because their
origin and the part they played in the early years of Roman
Christianity gave them a pre-eminent importance, and having been
bestowed upon the Church by their owners they became the official
catacombs of the Christian community. Each bears in its bosom the
record of the first Roman converts; each is rich in frescoes and
inscriptions; each bears testimony to the fact that from the beginning
the Roman Christians counted among them many of patrician and
senatorial rank; we meet with the names of the _Aurelii_, _Caecilii_,
_Maximi Caecilii_, of _Praetextatus Caecilianus_ and _Pomponius
Grecinus_, and of _Cornelius_, the first bishop to belong to a Roman
_gens_, in the catacomb of Callistus; and with those of the _Prisci_,
_Ulpii_, and _Acilii Glabriones_ in that of Priscilla. Priscilla, with
her son the Senator Pudens, is the reputed hostess of Peter on his
visit to Rome, and in the catacomb which bears her name there occurs
repeatedly the Apostle's name--unknown in classical nomenclature--both
in its Greek and Latin forms, _Petros_, _Petrus_. It is a region of
this catacomb which preserves the tradition of the _Fons sancti
Petri_, "the well or font of S. Peter," "the cemetery where Peter
baptized" or "where Peter first sat," still unconsciously recorded in
the Roman feast of "the Chair of S. Peter" on January 18. Here too was
buried the philosopher Justin, martyred under Aurelius in A.D. 165,
who lived in the house of Pudens, and here, when Justin was describing
the rite itself in his Apology to the emperors, was frescoed the
earliest representation of the solemn moment of the breaking of bread
at the Eucharist. The mystical number of the guests, seven, the fish
on the table, archaic symbol of Christ, the "seven baskets full" in
allusion to the miracle of the loaves, and the fact that the _agapê_
was already dissociated from the Eucharist in the time of Justin, mark
this out as a typical example of that symbolical treatment of real
events which is characteristic of early Christian art. The celebrant
stands at one corner of the crescent-shaped table breaking the bread;
five men and women sit at the table, the only other standing figure
being that of a woman wearing the Jewish married woman's bonnet,
filling, apparently, the office of _vidua_ or woman-elder. The
catacomb of Callistus--an agglomeration of separate _hypogaea_, which
originated in the _crypts of Lucina_ and the cemetery of those
_Caecilii_ who were among the earliest Roman families to embrace
Christianity--is no less interesting.
The unique interest of these monuments lies in the fact that they are
the incorruptible record of the sentiments, affections, and beliefs
of the first Christians. In these frescoes and inscriptions no
forgeries or interpolations could creep, no P1 and P2, no "Elohist"
or "Jahvist" could confuse the issues and mystify the interpretation.
The untouched story appeals to us in mute eloquence.
To what side does the testimony of the Roman catacombs lean? The
critical method in history has destroyed the foundations of historical
Protestantism: has it laid bare the foundations of historical
Catholicism? The people who frequented the catacombs did not feel or
think or believe like the men who reformed Christianity in the
sixteenth century, but it is as true to say that they did not think or
believe like the men of the Catholic reaction. The catacombs record a
period when Christian life and Christian discipline still seemed more
important than Christian dogma, when this last was not yet fixed, when
it was still true that "what can be prayed is the rule of what may be
believed"--_lex orandi lex credendi_; and here in the place of the
dead "what could be prayed" became a veritable norm of what Christians
were to formulate as precious dogma later.
In the first place then, the frescoes and inscriptions frequently
bring before us the notions of rebirth by baptism, and of eternal life
by participation in Christ through the mystical commerce of the
Eucharist--the Johannine conception; new birth and new life are the
keynote ideas in this place of the dead. Sacraments, conceived as
material channels conveying grace, already form an integral part of
the Christian consciousness; but the assumption that "the seven
sacraments" are to be found in the catacombs shows as little knowledge
of the history of the Church for the first twelve centuries as of the
habits of belief of the Christians of the first, second, and third.
If there had ever been an age of the Church before controversy, we
might say that the catacombs recorded it. But there never was such an
age: what can be found here, however, are the spontaneous
Judaic-Gentile beliefs of Christians who learnt their faith through
terrible and comforting experiences almost as much as through the
first apostolic preaching or the later ministrations of those visitors
between Church and Church called in the New Testament "apostles and
prophets." The religion of the catacombs was partly formed in the
living; it is the faith, formulated, gauged, and tested by the
faithful. Hence there is not only spontaneousness, but boldness,
liberty of spirit, the absence of all fear of being misunderstood,
misconstrued. They did not think as we do, and centuries were to
elapse before the minimisers or the maximisers would torture what they
said and did with meanings they would not bear.
Of these bold spontaneous doctrines none is more conspicuous than that
of the intercourse between all the members of Christ, "those who have
gone before us with the sign of faith" and those "who wait till their
change comes, till this corruptible puts on incorruption." A Christian
called upon his dead to pray for him in the realms of light, he called
upon God to give to his beloved a place of light and refreshment, he
besought the confessors gone to their reward to pray for both them and
him. So strong was this belief in a holy and indissoluble union
between the members of the one Church and the one Body of Christ, that
at every celebration of the liturgy the whole body of the faithful
were understood to be present--either really or mystically; and thus
the Commemoration of the Living in the mass speaks of those (present)
who offer and those (absent) for whom they offer the sacrifice of
praise, as all equally "standing round about." And as they offered and
prayed for those who were with them in the same town, so they offered
and prayed for those who were already with Christ--_in bono in
Christo_. The three commemorations of the Roman Canon, the _Memento
Domine ... omnium circumstantium_ of the living, the _Communicantes et
memoriam venerantes_ of the martyrs, and the _Memento ... qui nos
praecesserunt_ of the dead, may be thought of as liturgical features
crystallised in the catacombs.
It is easy to see too how the funeral celebrations of the
liturgy--given this initial idea of intercommunion and intercession
among all Christians living and dead--extended the idea of eucharistic
sacrifice. How easily the oblation of Christ--the Christian's one
offering--became the means of intercessory prayer for all men and all
occasions, and gave rise to the requiem mass, the mass for some
special grace, the mass of thanksgiving, the mass in commemoration of
a saint.
Bold treatment of sacred things belongs naturally to an age when the
_sentiments_ of the faith, aspiration and hope, outrun dogma--before
unfaithfulness in doctrine urged upon the early Church and its leaders
the necessity for stricter definition, or unfaithfulness in life had
made it easier to substitute a hard and fast creed for "the weightier
matters of the law." The symbolism and inscriptions of the catacombs
testify how freely such elements were at work there. Take as an
instance the fresco representing Christ on a throne giving a book to
Peter, with the legend, _Dominus legem dat_, "the Lord gives the law."
In other examples of this subject Peter is replaced by some simple but
faithful disciple--"the Lord gives the law to Alexander--to Valerius."
The allusion is to the "tradition of the Gospel" in baptism; it is not
hierarchical.
The catacombs influenced the Roman Church in another way. There are
none but martyrs' names among the liturgic commemorations of the
confessors of the faith (whom we now call "saints"); and these names
loudly proclaimed in the _Canon_--in the solemn portion--of the
eucharistic services which were held at their graves, not only on the
day of deposition but on many other stated days besides, were the
nucleus of that long line of "_canonised_" saints which figures in the
modern calendar. When, after the "Peace," churches began to cover the
city, the very grave of the confessor became the nucleus of the
Christian edifice--that confession or sunk tomb which is the central
point of the Roman basilica. And as the liturgy had been celebrated on
the stone slab which closed the grave so when churches were built
the altar was placed over the confessor's tomb: "I saw under the altar
the souls of those that had been slain for the word of God, and for
the testimony which they held."
[Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN ON THE PALATINE
Painted on a stormy day. The sombre scene of the ruined Library in
the Palace of the Flavian Emperors suggests the ruin of classical
learning which followed on the introduction of Christianity. The
mother of Domitian's two nephews, whom he had intended to designate
as his heirs, was martyred as a Christian, and their cousin of the
same name--Flavia Domitilla--founded the catacomb of the Flavian
House.]
Thus subterranean Rome prepared, as in the hidden working of a mine,
not only many affirmations of the faith which was to assert itself in
the light and replace the religion of classical Rome, but also the
sanctuary of those great basilicas which were to spread over the
surface of the city as soon as the Christians, in no real but
nevertheless in a highly suggestive sense, "came up from the
catacombs." The catacombs are the link between pagan Rome "drunk with
the blood of the saints" and the Christian Rome which arose in the
imperial city from the ashes of her martyrs. The pagan city on the
seven hills as truly sunk into the grave with the bodies of the Roman
martyrs as Christian Rome eventually took possession of the same _urbs
septicollis_ by carrying her dead into it.
CHAPTER IV
ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS
The regions and the guilds of Rome illustrate two contradictory
tendencies running parallel throughout the administrative history of
the city, the one towards division and separation as first principles
of organisation, the other towards union and centralisation as
measures of strength. These antagonistic elements which we find at the
very dawn of Roman history were at once utilised as factors in the new
commonwealth.
It is the tradition that King Numa organised nine guilds of
handicrafts amongst the Roman people that they might sink their race
animosities in an identity of interests. Similarly one of the first
great works for the young community, the city wall projected by
Tarquinius Priscus and built by Servius Tullius, was intended to
produce a fusion of the tribes which inhabited the seven hills he thus
physically linked together, and which he had already united under a
common government. Another enterprise, the draining of the marshes and
pools which made impassable barriers of the valleys between the
hills, had the same aim and result--it was a levelling process, moral
as well as physical, to minimise the separation between hill and hill,
race and race.
On the other hand, Servius' division of the city into four regions,
and these again into six parishes or _vici_, laid the seeds of an
internal disunion which lasted throughout the centuries. These four
regions (1) the Suburra or Caelian, (2) the Esquiline and its spurs,
(3) the Collina, comprising the Viminal and Quirinal, which were
called _colles_ in distinction to the other hills, the _montes_, and
(4) the Palatine, persisted until the reign of Augustus. By that time
the city had grown beyond its primitive limits, a thickly populated
region had sprung up on the Esquiline beyond the walls and Augustus
found a new division necessary. He increased the original number of
regions to fourteen, and each of these he subdivided as before into
parishes, the number in each region varying from seven to
twenty-eight, making 265 in all. A magistrate or curator with a set of
officials under him presided over each region. Each parish had its
magistrate, its officers, its chapel built upon the boundary road for
the public worship of the _lares compitales_, the protecting spirits
of the district.
At this period the poorer quarters of the city--a network of narrow
streets with high houses built of inflammable materials--had been
again and again devastated by fire. At night the densest darkness
descended upon the city, street lighting was unknown, shop doors were
shut and barred, and it was unsafe to walk abroad; those who ventured
carried lights, or were preceded by servants with staves and torches.
The ubiquitous beggars haunted the byways, and brigands raided the
outskirts of the town.
As a remedy against these evils Augustus created a force of 7000 men
who were to act both as police and firemen. The whole body he placed
under the command of a prefect, who acted in conjunction with the
curator of the regions in keeping order, and divided it into seven
battalions or cohorts, each under a tribune, and so disposed in the
city that one battalion watched over the safety of two regions. The
cohorts were again subdivided into seven companies under a captain or
centurion. The force was distributed over the town in seven different
barracks, with outlying detached quarters or _excubitoria_.
The firemen's duty was to inspect public furnaces and private
kitchens, the heating apparatus and the offices where the wardrobes
were kept and warmed in the public baths. If a fire broke out in the
town it was the subject of an official inquiry, just as it is to-day,
and if arson or willful neglect were suspected, punishment was meted
out by the proper authorities. Like the modern policeman in Rome,
Augustus' _vigiles_ were not a popular force, and to make it more
palatable he gradually increased its privileges. He built large and
luxurious stations and _excubitoria_ which were beautifully decorated
with precious marbles and statues. Members of the force were granted
the coveted Roman citizenship, and the captains were permitted to
serve _ex officio_ in the Praetorian guard.
[Illustration: FORUM OF NERVA
The picture represents a portion of the ornamental enclosure of the
Forum built by Nerva, near Domitian's Temple of Pallas; she is
represented on the entablature. This fragment is popularly known as
_Le Colonacce_. See page 33.]
At a later period, perhaps sometime in the third century, the regions
of Rome were reorganised on an ecclesiastical basis, and seven were
formed out of the fourteen by the amalgamation of two into one, each
being placed under one of the seven deacons of the city. It is not
known at what precise date their number was again increased to
fourteen, nor when they assumed their present names and distribution,
but probably early in the middle ages. By the thirteenth century only
thirteen regions are recorded, and it was not till the year 1586 that
the conservators and senators of Rome and the captains of the regions
consulted together and decided to include the Leonine city as a
fourteenth region, granting it at the same time a captain, a standard,
and an heraldic device of a lion upon a red field, his paw planted
upon the three mounds of the coat of Sixtus V.
These fourteen regions do not correspond in position, name, or extent
with those of Augustus except that the present thirteenth, Trastevere,
is identical with the ancient fourteenth, Transtiburtina. The names
that they bear to-day represent either their position or some
characteristic feature within their limits. Thus the first and largest
region, the _Monti_, formed from the union of the fifth and sixth of
Augustus, the _Esquilina_ and the _Alta Semita_, is so called from the
hills, the Esquilina Viminal and Caelian, within its boundaries; the
second the _Trevi_, derives its name from the famous fountain in its
midst; the third, _Colonna_, from the column of Marcus Aurelius; the
fourth, _Campo Marzo_, covers this historic ground; the fifth,
_Ponte_, is named from the old _Pons Triumphalis_, that united Rome
with the Vatican region; the sixth or _Parione_ comprises the ground
of which the Chiesa Nuova is the centre, and the name was derived from
the ancient wall and tower which stood close to it; the seventh,
_Regola_, inhabited by some of the most wretched of the population, is
a corruption of Arenula, the drift sand of the river near which this
region lies; the eighth, _S. Eustachio_, behind the university, takes
its name from a parish church; the ninth, _Pigna_, from the bronze
pine cone now at the Vatican and which was once supposed to adorn the
Pantheon (this region corresponds to a certain extent with the ancient
Via Lata); the tenth region, _Campitelli_, includes the Capitol and
Palatine hills and the Forum; the eleventh, the _S. Angelo_ district,
a region inhabited by the very poor, by tanners, and formerly the
Jews' quarter, is named after the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria;
the twelfth is the _Ripa_ or river bank; and the thirteenth and
fourteenth, as we have seen, are _Trastevere_ beyond the river and the
Leonine city or _Borgo_.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI
One of the numberless fountains of the city; built by Clement XII.
in 1735. The red house is the _palazzo_ of the celebrated art
jeweller Castellani. Visitors leaving Rome who throw a _sou_ into
this fountain are sure to return to the eternal city. See pages 22,
55, 227.]
Each region became a little civic and social centre complete in
itself. Each had its captain, its sub-officers, its religious
organisations, its separate funds for charities and dowries, its
separate police and militia recruits. And the importance that accrued
to these regions lay in the fact that they represented the _plebs_,
the democracy of Rome. With a people so incapable of co-operation for
a common end as the Roman, the spark of their civic liberties would
have been trodden out or have remained for ever dormant but for this
administrative setting which kept it alive and through which, given
the opportunity, it could become once more a living force.
The heads of the regions, the _caporioni_, heirs to the position of
Augustus' tribunes but without their discipline, were the people's
leaders and spokesmen, their representatives and the guardians of
their liberties. They were elected by ballot and the ballot urn was
carried in procession to the Capitol, where the chosen captains
received their investiture at the hands of the Senate. In times of
difficulty they assembled for consultation in that council chamber of
the people, the church of Ara Coeli, but their counsels seldom led to
measures of conciliation which were uncongenial to their fierce
independence and to the arbitrary authority they assumed. In peace or
in war, in sanguinary insurrections or in national rejoicings, the
_caporioni_ were always to the front, their banners with the regional
device upon a coloured field fluttering in the breeze. It was to them
that Cola di Rienzo looked for assistance and support. When a royal
visitor or one of the German Emperors of Rome entered the city in
state, the _caporioni_ were amongst the officials who received them,
their banners carried by their pages on horseback, and themselves clad
in their gala tunics of crimson velvet, cloaks of cloth of gold, white
stockings and shoes, and black bonnets jewelled and feathered. When
Pope Gregory XI. returned to Rome, restoring the papacy to the land of
its birth after an exile of seventy years, the _caporioni_ rode in
procession to give him welcome, and at his death they hurried to the
cardinals assembling in conclave at the Vatican to implore them at all
costs to elect a Roman pope, and they emphasised their petition with a
fierce menace which would assuredly have been carried through to its
sanguinary end but for the intervention of the Colonna forces.
In the carnival processions of the fifteenth century which issued from
the Capitol to perambulate the city, the _caporioni_, surrounded by
fifty mounted grooms wearing their distinctive livery, preceded the
Senators. Representatives from each region marched with them in the
order of their precedence carrying halberds, banners, and lances, and
shields emblazoned with their arms, and escorted by grooms on
horseback. In the same procession, in front of the regions, were
delegates from all the handicraft and trade guilds in the city,
shoe-makers, hatters, apothecaries, tavern keepers, and many others,
each with their banners captains and sergeants; the guild of
ironworkers alone numbered 300, in the midst of whom a team of horses
were harnessed to a cannon of their own making. The procession was
headed by municipal officers and soldiers, and as an emblem of law and
justice a wretched criminal was driven along with blows.
After the Renaissance the _caporioni_ degenerated into mere regional
captains, retaining only a shadow of their former power and
jurisdiction, and the present government has abolished the office
altogether. The organisation and the spirit of the regions are,
however, by no means dead.
[Illustration: COLUMN OF MARCUS AURELIUS, PIAZZA COLONNA
The only work of the time of the emperor-philosopher which has come
down to us. The column is now crowned by a colossal bronze statue of
S. Paul. See pages 32, 55.]
Until the racing of riderless horses down the Corso was forbidden,
each region entered a horse for the race which was decked in the
regional colour, and its success or failure aroused a perfect passion
of rivalry between region and region--an antagonism as old as the age
of Plutarch, who relates that in the month of October chariot races
were run in the Campus Martius; the victorious horse was sacrificed to
the god Mars, but its head was borne in procession to the Forum, all
the regions fighting for possession of the trophy until nothing was
left of it, and the combatants themselves were wounded and disabled.
To this day, on occasions of popular rejoicing or in patriotic
demonstrations, representatives from each region form into procession,
the regional banner carried by _vigili_, who march surrounded by a
group of the so-called _fedeli_, inhabitants of the little town of
Viturcchino, who for good services rendered to Rome in the past have
earned special consideration at the hands of the Roman municipality.
Such processions are headed by the standard of the Commune, S.P.Q.R.
upon a red and yellow ground, and immediately behind follows the
banner of the Monti, the first region, three green hills on a white
field.
The different devices of the regions, carved upon marble shields, were
affixed to house walls in many parts of the city to mark the
boundaries, by order of Benedict XIV., and can still be seen in
position. All those who know Rome at all are probably familiar with
the Monti escutcheon upon the wall of the Aldobrandini palace, and
with the Campo Marzo crescent on a house wall at Capo le Case.
The passage of time has not wholly wiped out the fierce and hereditary
enmity between the inhabitants of one portion of the city and another,
which has been always fostered and encouraged, though unintentionally,
by the regional system.
The Monticiani and the Trasteverini were the most irreconcilable of
foes. The Monti was the first region to be inhabited after the
barbarian invasions, but it was left in comparative isolation and
neglect when the Campo Marzo became the busy centre of papal Rome, and
its people have retained something of their untamed native
independence. They are proud and passionate, are the quickest with the
knife in a quarrel, and will not stoop to domestic service or to
menial trades. They choose husbands and wives amongst their own
people--they believe S. Maria Maggiore to be the most beautiful church
in the world, and will brook no dissent on the subject. Even to-day
they will not speak willingly to a Trasteverino. The enmity between
these two may have had a Guelph and Ghibelline origin. Certainly
Trastevere was a stronghold of the Ghibellines as is shown by an
episode which occurred on the day of Pope Callistus III.'s coronation
in 1445. A groom in the employ of the Orsinis came to words about a
girl with a groom of a rival house, the Anguillara. From words they
came to blows, and quickly the quarrel became general, until in a few
hours 3000 men were under arms ready to fight in an Orsini cause. The
inhabitants of Trastevere, separated from the rest of Rome by the
river and comparatively far from its centre, have retained to the
present day much of their individuality, their habits, character, and
appearance. The sight of a Monticiano arouses in them all the evil
passions. Even as late as the year 1838, it was their habit on every
holiday to meet the Monticiani for a stoning match on the green swards
of the Forum--"the field of cows" as it was then called--the historic
fragments lying about serving as missiles of war. Such matches were
not to revenge any particular wrong but merely for honour and glory,
the victorious region bearing off the palm in triumph until the next
occasion. Sometimes they met at the Navicella, sometimes in the ruined
courts of Diocletian's baths; sometimes a champion from each side came
forward for the contest, sometimes it was a general scrimmage, members
of other regions looking on and encouraging their allies. Sometimes
when the matches fell upon a market day--a market was held once a week
in the Campo Vaccino--the crockery stalls were requisitioned for
ammunition, and earthenware pans and pipkins flew across the Forum in
company with fragments of classic statues and marble friezes. Only
when heads were broken in plenty, and blood poured from wounded faces
and limbs, did these fighters desist, or when the cry "al fuoco"
warned them of the tardy arrival of the _sbirri_. Even these agents of
law and order were powerless to separate the combatants unless they
had had enough, and during Napoleon's occupation of Rome the cavalry
had to be called out to disperse them, the gendarmes having entirely
failed to do so. These stoning matches between Monticiani and
Trasteverini were so recognised an institution in Rome, that the poet
Berneri writing two centuries ago, sums up the Forum Romanum in the
words:
Campo Vaccino
Luogo dove s'impara a fare a sassi.
Field of cows
The place where one learns to throw stones.
The movement towards association between members of a craft or of
persons of identical interests, seems to be, as we have seen, as old
as Rome herself. Whether or no King Numa gave it its first impulse, it
is certain that throughout the first years of the Republic trade
corporations were multiplied in the city without let or hindrance, and
only when their number and importance seemed to menace the
tranquillity of the State were measures taken for their control.
The wave of prosperity which spread over the Roman provinces during
the early Empire gave a further impetus to trade in every branch, and
an industrial class which had been long in the making amongst the
people of Rome, awoke to its own interests and claimed if not sympathy
at least recognition from the aristocratic ruling caste which held all
_plebs_ in contempt.
[Illustration: PANTHEON, A FLANK VIEW
Designed as a Hall of the Baths of Agrippa the contemporary of
Augustus, but appears to have been at once dedicated as a temple.
The Black Confraternity of S. John Beheaded are seen passing the
building, their cross bearer preceding them. See pages 30, 56, 67,
86; [see also pp. 8, 77, 143].]
The only response given however was to prohibit the formation of trade
guilds, exception only being made in favour of a few of the most
ancient, and those devoted to purposes of religion and burial. They
continued nevertheless to multiply under cover of this latter clause
until under Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus they received final
encouragement and recognition. At this time they had increased
enormously in number wealth and importance throughout Rome and the
provinces. Every group of merchants and all those engaged in
handicrafts banded themselves together to form a _college_ or
_university_ as they were called in Rome, as much for the social
pleasures to be derived from such association as for the mutual
support and protection afforded against the impositions and
aggressions of outsiders. Charioteers, gladiators, disbanded soldiers,
itinerant merchants, seamen, Tiber boatmen, grain weighers at Ostia,
palace servants, carters and coachmen founded corporations equally
with the bakers and innkeepers, dyers weavers and tanners.
Every young community sought a rich patron willing to give a plot of
land or the funds necessary for the building of a club-room, promising
in return certain anniversary banquets in his honour, or commemorative
reunions to keep his memory green after death. Each corporation placed
itself under the protection of a god whose name it adopted, and as its
wealth and importance increased, by members' testamentary bequests or
by gifts from patrons, the club premises were increased, and shrines
and chapels were built in honour of the titular deity. Some of the
corporations rose to such a position of importance that senatorial and
consular families sprang from them; they supported colleges of
doctors sculptors and painters of their own, they contributed to the
building of public monuments and made loans to the State, while on
special occasions the emperor's retinue was increased by a hundred
standards and five hundred lances contributed by the trade colleges of
Rome from amongst their own retainers.
Although democratic in constitution, in so far as every member,
however humble, could serve as one of its officers, the college was
founded on the civic pattern, with president, curators, fiscal officer
and all the grades of rank down to its slave members. Thus each unit
represented in miniature the Roman commune and contributed to its
consolidation. Unlike some of the guilds of the North however which
became the nurseries of civic freedom, the Roman Colleges were too
ready to subject their individuality to the spirit of civil discipline
which was characteristic of Roman organisations and we find them
submitting to one Imperial decree after another, losing one after
another of their rights until they fell altogether under State
patronage and became a mere portion of State machinery, a petrifying
slavery being thus imposed upon their members whose liberties they
were founded to safeguard.
As an integral portion of the administrative life of the State, they
proved of the greatest use, not only as adding to its stability and
prosperity but as affording a sort of scaffolding upon which to build
its complicated daily life. To them was given the collection of taxes,
the superintendence of public buildings, the development of the
military system, the clothing of the militia, the provisioning of
the citizens and the supplying of all their daily necessities.
[Illustration: SILVERSMITHS' ARCH IN THE VELABRUM
This arch stands against the Arch of Janus, and was erected to the
Emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Pia, and his sons, by the
guilds of silversmiths and cattle merchants. When Caracalla murdered
his brother the name of the murdered prince was removed from the
inscription. The arch, as the inscription proves, is on the site of
the _Forum Boarium_.]
In return for these services they were exempt from all other
obligations to the State. The livelihood and wellbeing of members of
colleges were thus ensured but at the cost of their liberty. Every
member was obliged to sink a portion of his estate in the funds of the
college, and to contribute another to its expenses. He was forbidden
to will away the remainder except to his sons or nephews who in their
turn were bound to enter the same trade; no member could change his
own trade for any other, the priesthood alone excepted, in which case
he must furnish a substitute. The goods of the corporations were thus
inalienable, and whole families were bound to the same occupation in
perpetuity.
During the civil wars, barbarian invasions and general disunion
following upon the decadence of the Empire, the Roman colleges are
lost sight of, but there seems little doubt that their privileges were
left intact by the foreign conquerors of Rome and that it was their
direct descendants that we find flourishing once more as trade
corporations in the middle ages. As early as the eighth century, the
Lombards, Saxons and Franks had formed _scholae_ for members of these
nationalities resident in Rome, and a little later trade guilds,
founded for the mutual support and protection of their members against
oppression, had already grown prosperous and strong enough to take an
active part in insurrections and civil wars.
We find history repeating herself. The guilds placed under the
protection of a Christian saint were constituted with the obligations
to bury their dead, to succour the widows and orphans of poorer
members, to lend them funds in case of need and to offer masses for
their benefactors. All members swore to the articles of enrolment, the
statutes were formally drawn up, and many of them are preserved to
this day. As funds increased, hospitals were built for sick brethren,
and schools for the children; dowries were given to the daughters, and
the guild standard-bearers and men-at-arms swelled the ranks of
mediæval processions just as those of their pagan predecessors had
done. The colleges kept great feasts and festivals, and their
messengers paraded the streets two and two bidding householders deck
their windows with bunting for the coming festivities. They endowed
convents and hospices and built churches, many of which still bear the
name of their founders. S. Giuseppe _de' Falegnami_ was built by the
carpenters' guild; S. Caterina _de' Funari_ by the ropemakers'; S.
Lorenzo in Miranda in the Forum belonged to the apothecaries; S. Maria
dell' Orto to the fruiterers and cheesemongers; S. Barbara to the
librarians; S. Tommaso a' Cenci to the coachmen. Streets called after
the cloakmakers, the ropemakers, the watchmakers and other craftsmen
still mark the districts given over to these different industries.
The regulations imposed within the guilds pressed heavily upon the
poorer members. The chief of each guild, the _Capo d'arte_ exacted
implicit obedience. He was the sole arbiter on all trade questions, on
the opening of every new shop, and the examination of every new
worker, and played the part of a petty tyrant. An arduous
apprenticeship of seven years from the age of thirteen was followed by
two or three years as worker, and the payment of heavy fees, before
the position of master-worker was reached.
These powerful guilds hampered the development of trade by the
establishment of monopolies, and they were more than once suppressed,
and finally abolished in the seventeenth century. Many of them,
however, survived, taking on the form of religious confraternities.
These had coexisted with the trade guilds throughout the later middle
ages. They were founded with a purely religious object, were a more
spontaneous creation and were not under any State control. One
confraternity was founded for succouring the sick, another for feeding
pilgrims three days gratuitously, a third begged about the town for
the benefit of prisoners, and a fourth prayed with condemned
malefactors. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, this
confraternity had the right to liberate one prisoner each year, who
was afterwards taken in triumph round the town. Another gave dowries
to deserving girls, and to this day the chapter of S. Peter's conducts
a procession of the _zitelle_ or maidens round the basilica on the
octave of Corpus Christi. At the head of the procession the capitular
umbrella is carried; those girls who are destined to a convent life
wear a crown of flowers, and those to be married are accompanied each
by her _fiancé_.
The confraternity of blacksmiths had the privilege of blessing animals
on S. Antony's day (January 17) and the space before their church of
S. Eligio, patron of blacksmiths, used to be crowded with horses,
mules, dogs, sheep and oxen brought for the purpose. The owners paid
large sums to the confraternity, and the Pope's horses and the
equipages of Roman patricians arrived decked in flowers, the Piombino
and Doria coachmen driving eighteen pairs in hand to the admiration of
the crowds.
Since 1870 the confraternities have lost their importance and much of
their amassed wealth, while such of the trade guilds as have not
become purely religious confraternities, have resolved themselves into
the modern trades unions and beneficent clubs.
[Illustration: CONVENT GARDEN OF SAN COSIMATO, VICOVARO
This convent in the Sabine hills stands on a plateau between the
river _Digentia_ (now Licenza) and the Anio. Near it is the site of
Horace's Sabine farm. See page 169.]
CHAPTER V
THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA
Rome is set in the _campagna romana_. The strange beauty of this
"Roman country," the birth country of the Latin League, assails the
very doors of the Roman citizen, intruding its poetry, its stillness,
from point after point of vantage, causing the beholder to lead every
now and then a sort of dual existence, to lose his sense of time and
place and personality, and with his feet planted in the city which was
once the hub of the world to find himself dreaming in a cloister
garden. The atmosphere, the combination of colour and light, is
characteristically Roman, it suggests what is mystic but never fails
in perfect clearness. With its mystic blues, its blue-greens, its
silence, its vastness, the campagna presents none of the features of
the _pays riant_ of Florence where little olive-crowned hills, so
cared for, so laughing, convey a message like its history definite,
homogeneous, cultured, charming. But here a dead city has been
besieged day and night by a dead campagna, big with its speech of
silence, untilled yet a cradle of civilisation, with the complex
language suited to a more difficult message, not entering into your
humour but taking you into its secret, beautiful, austere, massive and
careless of little things, yet yielding you out of its rich secular
treasure details of beauty in abundance--here before you lies a
history, a power, heedless of your judgment, but century after century
looking back at you [Greek: meidiasais' athanatô prosôpô], as one of
the finest lines in Greek verse says of Aphrodite, and recreating your
universe for you.
_Latium_ was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium--as
though it were wide and spacious, suggesting the civilisation which
was to spread from here, with its largeness, its spaciousness, its
contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita
Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles
in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty
miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this
last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The _ager
antiquus_, the Roman _ager_, however, was of much smaller extent,
bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of
the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the _Massa Festi_ between the seventh
and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point
eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome
on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual
purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became
the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate--the
so-called _gentes_. The extension of the campagna beyond the _ager
antiquus_ to form the _ager publicus_ was the result of conquest, the
territory thus acquired being let or assigned to private persons as
tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in
allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and
towns, the _castelli romani_, are so-called not as is popularly
supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were
colonised by Romans from the _ager_ under the protection of the great
feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus
_castello_, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village
which clustered round it.
Something of the dualism which possesses the soul of the Roman, which
has I think always conveyed a message to his eyes, his ears, his
heart, is derived from the scene before him. Life and death, the _va
et vient_ of the world's masters, "the desolation of Tyre and
Sidon"--the Roman campagna has looked on both. Chateaubriand describes
it as a desolate land, "with roads where no one passes," with "tombs
and aqueducts for foliage" usurping the place of trees and life and
movement; the stillness is broken by no happy country sounds, the eye
sees no smoke ascend from the few ruined farmsteads. No nation it
would seem has ventured to succeed the world's masters on their native
soil, and the fields of Latium lie "as they were left by the iron
spade of Cincinnatus or the last Roman plough." Decimated by plague
and pest and deserted by man, malarial, fever-bound, the smiling
country-seats of the world's conquerors have given place to tiny
scattered colonies--as at Veii--haunted by a people emaciated by
fever, where lads of eighteen, looking like boys of twelve, are
certified by the parish priest as unable to bear arms. Along the
world-famous roads lined by the Romans on either hand with the
monuments of their dead, that they might retain a constant place in
the thoughts of the living who journeyed on these most frequented
ways, the ruined tombs are left in possession of the dead alone. The
tombs, the _hypogaea_ and _mausolea_ of the great families who dwelt
there, often remain standing when all trace of the villas to which
they belonged have disappeared, as though one further proof were
needed that this is indeed the land of the dead.
[Illustration: A TRACT OF THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT OUTSIDE THE CITY
The Sabine hills are in the distance. See pages 21-22.]
Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life--some seventy
cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas
and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators,
made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being
forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these
villas met the _rheda_ outside the gates, drawn by its pair of
fast-stepping horses. These light carriages were gaily painted with
some classical subject, as the peasants' carts still are in Naples,
and a leather hood with purple hangings protected the owner from the
heat. At all the cross-roads are fountains for the use of man and
beast, near which a seat shaded by ilex or olive awaits the tired
traveller, as we may see it still awaiting him for example at the
Porta Furba on the way to Frascati. Excellent roads kept in excellent
repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, trees,
shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the
journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are
seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious
feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known
to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where
each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme,
but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained
English box hedge. The shrubs are tortured into the semblance of
beasts and snakes, the name of the owner being sometimes cut in the
foliage, a device which may still be seen in the modern grounds of the
Villa Pamfili-Doria. The most conspicuous features of the campagna
from classical times are the aqueducts, stretching right across the
_agro_ to the walls of Rome; gigantic remains of the Claudian aqueduct
extend for six miles, and the ancient _peperino_ arches of the
favourite _acqua Marcia_, which cross the Claudian aqueduct at Porta
Furba, still bring water to the city. As classic Rome is represented
by the aqueducts and mausolea, so feudal Rome is represented by the
towers which rose in the campagna between the eighth and the fifteenth
centuries--the early semaphores on the coast-line to give warning of
the approach of Saracen or Corsair, the vedette towers which figured
in the baronial wars, and the later fortified towers of the baron's
castle. Last but not least Christianity has strewed the campagna with
chapels and shrines, the earliest of which supplanted the cult of the
local pagan divinity in the ages when Christianity was gradually
driving the religion of imperial Rome into the villages and hill
retreats. So S. Sylvester replaced the woodland deities, Michael
supplanted the god of war, S. George became the Christian protector
against the depredations of ferocious beasts, S. Caesarius replaced
the genius of the imperial Caesars. Of the same period are the
basilicas erected over the _sepulcretum_ of a martyr at the mouth of a
catacomb.
Several causes led to the abandonment of the _agro romano_. The
neglect of the roads and the ruin of the aqueducts, which cut off the
water supply, the poverty of the despoiled landlords, and the general
insecurity following the incursions of the barbarians in the fifth and
sixth centuries, brought about a rapid depopulation and gradually
turned the _agro_ into a pest-bound desert. It would seem that
malarial fever is virtually indigenous to the soil of the _agro_,
besetting every region as soon as man deserts it. It did not make its
appearance, we may suppose, in the inhabited towns of the classical
period, but that it existed before the middle ages, the popular date
for its appearance, is shown by the allusions of classical writers
since the time of Augustus and by the existence of several temples to
the goddess Fever. In Rome itself it is the persistent belief, which
appears to be abundantly confirmed by statistics, that the more
building is extended and the horribly noisy paved streets are
multiplied, the faster the evil diminishes; for the malarial miasma is
held to be an exhalation of the soil, and where earth is freshly
turned there is danger. As we all know, it has been quite
recently shown that the microbe of malaria is carried by mosquitoes,
mosquitoes abound where water abounds, and one of the reasons for the
unhealthiness of the _agro_, one of the greatest obstacles to its
reclamation, is that there are not less than ten thousand little
water-courses which filter down to the valleys, creating marsh and
stagnant pools. The evil may really date from the last years of the
republic, which saw the displacement of the small freeholders by the
large landowners, of the old free labour by slave labour, and the
consequent fatal depopulation of the _agro_. But during the middle
ages, from the sixth century onwards, all the causes were intensified,
and the difficulties which now beset the secular problem of the
restoration of agriculture in the Roman campagna and the expulsion of
malaria, resolve themselves "into a vicious circle"; for men cannot
live there until the malaria is exorcised, and until men live there
the malaria will remain in possession. No less than seventy-nine
measures for what is known in Italy as the _bonifica dell' agro
romano_ have from time to time been projected; and whether Italy will
succeed where the popes failed is still doubtful. The initial
necessity, the drainage of the campagna, seems in itself to be a task
too great for Hercules. For the last four years the military _Croce
Rossa_ has perambulated the campagna during the summer and autumn
months, combating the malaria with doctors and medicines. It is hoped
that this will be followed by the establishment of a larger number of
permanent sanitary stations. Since 1870 millions of eucalyptus trees
have been planted as air purifiers especially at the little railway
stations and other inhabited sites. It is not forgotten that the
agricultural colonies of the classical age were once the saving of
Rome, and within the last few years similar schemes have been devised
in the hope that the birth-land of the Roman people may become once
more the home of agriculture. Such a _colonia agricola_ for Roman
lads, outside the Flaminian gate, was founded by a visitor who has
since become the wife of an Italian well known for similar enterprise
in Italian Africa.
The moral wants of the _agro_ have appealed to the sympathies and
occupied the attention of the excellent society of young Catholics,
the _Circolo San Pietro_, which has opened and furnished thirty-four
of the closed and neglected churches and chapels of the _agro_ for the
use of the scattered population; mass is also said in the hayfields on
Sunday for the haymakers, on a wain drawn by oxen, and a very charming
little picture of this scene has been prepared under the auspices of
the President, Prince Barberini. There are within the city many
hundreds of extra-parochial clergy--monks, friars, clerks regular,
missionaries, and members of the various ecclesiastical congregations,
with scores of churches and chapels where hundreds of masses are daily
celebrated, and where expositions of the Sacrament, novenas, and
benedictions are multiplied. But just outside the walls there are
people who never hear mass, who live and die without the consolation
of religion, "without a priest." When the _Circolo San Pietro_ set
their hand to the good work of opening the churches and chapels of the
_agro_ their difficulty consisted in finding priests to minister in
them without payment. "Your Indies are here" said the Pope of his day
when S. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, wished to go abroad as a
missionary, and Pius X. has recently echoed the saying. There is only
one confraternity in the city which imposes on itself the duty of
seeking and burying the bodies of those who die from sudden illness or
from violence in the campagna. This well-known black "Confraternity of
Prayer and Death" accompanies the funerals of the poor gratuitously.
It is affiliated to the Florentine _Misericordia_.
[Illustration: CAMPAGNA ROMANA, FROM TIVOLI
See page 78.]
The _agro romano_ is divided into nearly 400 farms owned by half as
many proprietors. The largest of these farms comprise between 8 and
18,000 acres, the two smallest 5 acres each. About half remains
ecclesiastical property, while a third belongs to the great Roman
families, one-sixth being still owned by peasant holders. The
proprietors allow the big estates to be farmed by the so-called
_mercanti di campagna_, who take them on a three or nine years'
tenure. These large merchants of country produce keep a _fattore_ on
the farm who is the actual manager; he is both farmer and bailiff. The
cattle of the _agro_ are, Signor Tomassetti tells us, its most
considerable inhabitants. There are 32,000 sheep, 18,000 cows, 10,000
goats, 7000 horses and mules, 6000 oxen, and 1800 buffaloes. The oxen
were brought by Trajan from the basin of the Danube, the buffaloes
came with the Lombards and were originally natives of India.
Beyond the _agro_ are the _castelli romani_, the hill towns of the
Alban and Sabine district. There above Frascati lies the site of
Tusculum, the mighty rival of Rome; to the right is Monte Cavo the
highest peak in the Alban range where stood the temple of the "Latian
Jupiter," sanctuary and rallying point of the Latin League. Below lies
Albano of which See the English Pope, Hadrian IV., was Cardinal
Bishop. In the Sabine range is the famous city of Tibur (Tivoli), the
villa of Hadrian, and S. Benedict's town of Subiaco. To the east is
the rock Soracte, "the pyramid of the campagna" and the meeting place
of Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins; while a score of little townships
in both ranges of hills record the feudal families of Rome, and
harbour the descendants of the Latin rural _plebs_. The life led here
is not the village life of England, but the life of small, primitive
townships, with a mayor, a commune, and the customs of the middle
ages. There are no manufactories and no crafts, and there are no
cottages, the dwellings being divided into floors as in the big towns.
[Illustration: SUBIACO FROM THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT]
The great business of the year is the vintage, which takes place in
the Roman campagna in October; in land held under manorial rights,
however, the tenants must await the lord's pleasure. The vines are
trained round short canes set close together, and the grapes are
collected in wooden receptacles narrowing towards the base: these are
emptied into the _tino_, whence they are pressed, by the old biblical
method of treading with the feet, into an enormous cask below called
the _botte_. Here the grapes are left for several days to ferment,
the skins rising to the top. In the little yards of filthy houses one
may see the grapes being boiled in a cauldron, an illegitimate
substitute for fermentation. The wine of the _castelli romani_ is
famous; every district makes both red and white, the latter being
generally preferred in Rome itself; the white "Frascati" and white
"Genzano" are famous; Albano wine is praised by Horace, and excellent
"Marino" is still made in the vineyards of the Scotch college which
has its summer quarters there. The Sabines yield the "Velletri," a
good red wine but difficult to find pure; Genazzano and Olevano also
produce an excellent grape, but the difficulty in some of these small
towns is to find a vine grower to take sufficient pains with his wine
making. Colouring matter is usually employed for the red wines, the
least noxious resource being a plentiful admixture of elderberry. The
wine made one year is not as a rule drunk till the next; it is not
prepared for exportation, but is kept, or sent to Rome, in barrels,
from which it is decanted for retail commerce into flasks where the
wine is protected with a few drops of oil in lieu of a cork. The wine
is also sold by the _barile_ (sixty litres), _mezzo barile_, and
_quartarolo_ (fifteen litres), the usual price given in Roman
households being about seven francs the _quartarolo_. Every
_trattoria_ and restaurant, however, sells wine by the Roman
half-litre measure--the _fojetta_--and the prices 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 may be
seen chalked up outside the wine-shops. Outside vineyards and rural
_trattorie_, where wine is sold, a bough is hung out as a sign,
reminding one of the origin of the proverb "Good wine needs no bush."
The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive
more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed
it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in
usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the
fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is
very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter
comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and
smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "_L'olio si sente_"
(One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some
vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "_Ojo è sempre ojo, ma
strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sarà?_" (Oil is always oil, but who
knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the
fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber
for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most
beautiful things in the Italian country--and its grey-green colour,
with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian
landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or
the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of
ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any
cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be
over after the middle of February.
The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same
Latin _plebs_, except that they no longer serve the world's masters
and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great classical
civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits
of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the
general outlines the same people--but more not less barbarous than of
yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised,
by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has
been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are
consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to
the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("_è il
destino_" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and
coarse as the cruel are coarse. The inhabitants of the _castelli
romani_ were described by a compatriot as "_pieni di superbia, debiti,
e pidocchi_" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to
hear mass in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a
bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the
Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the
baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house,
there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds
of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more
than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised
his gun and calmly shot his brother _in the presence of their mother_.
The mother and son were punctual in their obligations to church and
convent, and the _arciprete_ of the parish journeyed to Rome to bear
witness at the trial that the murderer was "il fior del paese," (the
flower of the flock). When the man was acquitted, the priest had no
better lesson to inculcate for the community of which this was the
"pearl," than to accompany the local band which went forth to welcome
the fratricide back to the village which held the still fresh grave of
the brother he had treacherously murdered.
[Illustration: GARDEN OF THE MONASTERY OF SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
This fifth-century monastery (restored five hundred years later) was
dedicated to the sister of S. Benedict, the founder of Western
Monasticism. The first printing press in Italy was established
here.]
It is commonly believed, even by the educated, that "things" happen in
the campagna which happen nowhere else, possession, obsession,
"overlooking," witchery. Hysterical manifestations are indeed common
at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is
at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical.
Some sixteen years ago the government determined to check this source
of hysteria, and directed the rural clergy to perform no more
exorcisms. I visited a friary in the Sabines at this time and saw the
work of the evil spirits in the shape of a packet of hairpins
(complete with its sample pin), tresses of hair, or a good fat nail
which had been swallowed by the energumen and which under the
emotional stress attending the exorcism--the dim light, the monotonous
droning of the _frati_ who are saying their office behind the high
altar--are brought up again. I enquired of the Father Guardian what
happened now that exorcism was forbidden? Well, a woman had been there
only the day before, and he had explained to her that he could only
pronounce "a simple benediction," which had resulted after a quarter
of an hour before the altar in the ejectment of the objects shown
me. Such an end to an ancient Christian ministry destined to free poor
human beings from the toils of Satan gives food for reflection. The
secular conflict between religion and science has set foot even in the
Roman campagna. If in England we have our Christian scientists, in
Italy the authorities have to cope with a people whose remedy for the
bite of a rabid animal is a mass said at the shrine of some special
madonna--both put faith before a trust in "dry powder," and there has
never yet been an age of the world in which there have not been those
who thought them right. The popular sanctuaries in Italy, indeed, help
to keep up much that is undesirable. At the April festa at Genazzano a
peasant will kneel down before the miraculous image of the Madonna
which hangs, like Mohammad's coffin, without visible support, and
having made his prayer will rise and shake his fist at the picture,
exclaiming "_Bada, Maria!_" (Beware, Mary!) Many things, thin silver
hearts, candles, and other dainties have been promised if the desired
favour be granted, but if the Madonna be not tempted by these to
accede to the wishes of her worshipper, she must look out for herself.
Wax images can be laid out to melt in the sun, there to learn how
agreeable is a continued drought, statuettes can be stood in the
corner with their faces to the wall, a rival patron saint can be
pitched into the river, by the same hand which brings gifts. "See how
you like it!" Does not the primitive man create his god by looking
into himself? and Caliban with his "So he!" inaugurates theology.
Another Roman picture is afforded us by the lottery. It is to be
found, indeed, all over Italy, but we are only concerned with its
influence in Roman life, where it has always flourished, first under
the popes when a prelate presided to bless the opening of the lottery
and now under the State, for the Romans are born gamblers. Seventeen
millions a year are raised in this way out of the pockets of the
poorest of the poor. The excuse made is that as the people will gamble
the only safeguard against gigantic frauds on the gamblers is to make
the lottery a department of the State. Certainly it would be
absolutely impossible to trust to fair play if the choice of the
numbers depended on any private persons; even if they were honest, no
Italian would believe it. The "Book of the Art," with its rough
hideous drawings of the things represented by the lottery numbers--one
to ninety--is the only book which the unlettered Italian can read.
Every event national or domestic becomes the subject of play. You
"play" the assassination of the King or the death of the Pope, the
accident which has happened to your neighbour your master or your
mistress, and you play the death of your kinsfolk. In order to get the
money the people have recourse to the _monte di pietà_--the
pawnshop--and the women will pawn the mattress off the bed. Sometimes
the choice lies between the two chief pleasures of the Roman, eating
and the lottery, and it is the best proof of the fascination of the
latter that it is so often preferred to the joys of the table. In
every tiny village as in every great city throughout Italy there is a
_banco dell lotto_, and the winning numbers are exhibited over its
doors every Saturday. Five numbers--for example, 5, 9, 27, 36,
50--appear each week. This is called the _cinquina_. But you can win
the _ambo_ (two correct numbers), the _terno_ (the most usual of all),
or the _quaterna_. Not more than five numbers can be played, but if
you "plump" for the _cinquina_ you gain a big sum; or you can declare
your intention to play for all four possible combinations. In this
case you gain little if the _cinquina_ comes out. It is the same with
the _terno_, if you plump for it you gain much more. But the gain also
depends on the amount you put into the lottery, and any sum from six
_centimes_ can be played. When Pius IX. died a Roman jeweller won
40,000 scudi (£8000). How can one expect the gambling of the poor to
cease when even twelve _centimes_ (less than five farthings) may bring
fifty francs?
The Roman goes to the lottery with all the paraphernalia and a good
deal of the sentiment of devotion. "Se ci aiuti Iddio e la Madonna,"
they exclaim--If God and the Madonna will help us--we shall win the
_terno_. There are several "tips" for winning. One which is as awesome
as it is efficacious consists in starting the _kyrie eleison_--hardly
recognisable in its popular dress as _crielleisonne_--and then say on
your knees thirteen _ave marias_ to as many madonnas. Having invoked
Baldassare, Gasper, and _Marchionne_ (Melchoir)--though what the three
wise kings have to do in that _galère_ is not very obvious--you go out
of the house, taking care to answer nothing if any one calls you. You
go straight to the church of S. John Beheaded, where those who
suffered capital punishment used to be interred, and then whatever you
see or hear inside or out, look it up in the "Book of the Art" and you
are safe to win. Another _bella divozione_ for the same end is to go
up the steps of Ara Coeli on your knees reciting a _requiem aeternum_
or a _de profundis_ on each step. A large number of the people praying
so devoutly to the Madonna di Sant' Agostino (whose other principal
care is the safety of childbirth) are praying for luck in the
lottery--praying or threatening, for the one is very kin to the other
in the primitive mind as it is in the magic of all primitive peoples.
Some of these may have been conducting a solitary nocturnal vigil,
having risen from their beds, kindled two candles, and proceeded to
carry through one or other of the _belle divozioni_.
[Illustration: HOLY STAIRS AT THE SAGRO SPECO
The ravine (above the monastery of S. Scholastica) where S. Benedict
took refuge from the corruption of Rome, became the site of the
_Sagro Speco_, the sacred cavern, with the ninth-century monastery
of _San Benedetto_. The peasants of Subiaco ascend the stairs here
represented on their knees, as the _Scala Santa_ in Rome is
ascended, and, occasionally, even the numerous stairs of _Ara
Coeli_. See page 86.]
In the country-places the great stand-by is the Capuchin, who has a
reputation for suggesting lucky numbers. When he comes collecting alms
in village or city the poor man asks him for a likely _terno_. He is
not supposed to suggest these numbers, but he and the people
understand each other, and every word, every allusion, which falls
from his lips is thereupon eagerly noted. If he mentions a recent
assassination, you "play" number _72 morto assassinato_, then the
numbers indicating the day or some special circumstance, "a quarrel,"
"the knife" with which it was done, "jealousy," "a man," or "a woman."
The element of chance, the ineradicable belief in luck, makes a man
sure to play if three numbers come unbidden into his head. No pious
person dreams of the "numbers of the Madonna"--6, 8, and 15--without
at once "playing" them. The Madonna evidently intends "to do
something" for you; indeed "if the Madonna suggests numbers" it is a
safe thing, you can put five francs on it. It is popularly said that
2, 3, 5, 6 are numbers which always come out, these and their
combinations. Fifty-eight is the number indicating the Pope, and 52,
_morta che parla_, is played by good simple women who have dreamt of
their dead mother. The industrious working middle classes and even the
better classes "play," though the latter play _sub rosa_. On Saturday
the people collect round the little lottery offices--some of them have
waited to pay their bills until they ascertained their luck. On the
appearance of the fateful numbers there is a general talk, a general
lamentation: "If I had only done so-and-so." "If I had only played
_morto_ instead of _ferito_" ("dead" instead of only "wounded.") For
the Roman the whole known world sacred or profane is absorbed in the
business of the lottery. Thus one of the popular sonnets in the Roman
dialect describes how the flight into Egypt came about. On the 27th of
December the Patriarch Joseph is snoring in bed, dreaming of lottery
numbers, when an angel appears to him and says: "See here, old man,
what a fine _festa_ there is going to be over number 28" (the 28th of
December commemorates the massacre of the Innocents). Thereupon S.
Joseph wakes like one crazy, hires a young donkey, and takes the
Madonna and her child off to Egypt.
Many English travellers to this favoured country of the gods since the
days when Vulcan and Minerva vied with each other as to which should
bestow the best gift on Italy, must have wished that nothing more
sensitive than the olive had been placed in the hands of its
countrymen. Signor Gabelli has described the burly Roman carter
beating his horses or mules, the red cap which hangs over one ear
matching his flaming face, afire with triumphant pride in this
exercise of brute force and dominion. No one rebukes him. On the
contrary the clergy delight to dwell on the distinction between the
duties owed to men and the absence of all obligation towards the
brutes. The distinction, of course, works no better in modern than in
ancient times, and means nothing less than the systematic
brutalisation of the Italian people. The doctrine that animals (like
"the sun and moon") were "made for man" is held to justify all
mishandling of them, all domineering and callousness. This is frankly
immoral; and until priests overcome their reluctance to set forth
ethics in a way that does not involve a break with the order and march
of all human civilisation, theology will continue to accommodate
itself to racial characteristics, and specious theological
propositions will still serve as a cloak for bluntness of moral
perception. Only this year a _marchese_ told me that he "could not
admit that animals feel." The effect of such sentiments in a squire
among an illiterate tenantry may be readily imagined; the ignorant
Italian gentleman justifies theology by the astounding proposition
that all sentient creatures below man have been provided with a set of
non-sensitive nerves; the rustic finds in the pleasure which it
affords him to know that this proposition is untrue an ampler
justification of the ways of Providence.
The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of
the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands
in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming
assistance against them from the government. One of the best known
Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi.
In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great
festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts
for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the
brigands are the chief herdsmen called _butteri_, in blue jacket and
brass buttons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill
as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when
Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A
primitive and classical feature of campagna labour is the singing with
which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a
monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at
regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the
accompaniment--the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying
cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the
Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which
their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights
which pass these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for
Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour,
protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful
species known as the _lupetto romano_--the Roman wolfling--balances
himself on the cargo and constitutes himself the protector and
companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a
tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver
and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a
garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the
wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where
a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These
cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across
the sunburnt plain of the _agro_ the men drop asleep, and it is then
easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse
or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside
sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer
salutes as he passes, still exist in some of the untouched parts of
Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the
Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the _butteri_ and the
wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of
Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on
the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as
were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country"
but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly
reminded, when figures like these with their pastoral divinities took
possession of the Palatine hill.
[Illustration: LITTLE GLEANER IN THE CAMPAGNA]
Italy has always been the land of Saturn, the nature god. Her
festivals were the festivals of the doings and events of nature, the
Lupercalia of Lupercus, the Palilia of Pales; she was and she remains
pagan, if pagan is to mean the natural as opposed to the supernatural
attitude towards life--natural and humanistic as opposed to mystic and
ideal. Under the new names lie concealed the old gods. The true Latin
goddess is Pales, the earth mother, the source of grace, the real
giver of gifts to her devotees--enshrined, dedicated to the gospel
under a hundred aspects of what Bonghi has happily called that
"gentilissimo fiore del cattolicismo," the cult of the Madonna. Some
unseemly tracts and pictures have represented Christ as turning away
from the leprosy of the sinner's sin, and it is Mary whose compassion
for the prodigal never wavers, who persuades the Christ to have pity.
That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the
Italian mind. The nature goddess, the mother, the earth and its
fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on
his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From
the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never
parted with it.
It is the hour of the god Pan, that midday hour which Pan alone can
withstand. The sun is high in the heavens, the earth exhales heat,
round about are the great silences. Nothing else stirs, nothing
moves, nothing breathes. The great repose is indeed tense with a great
activity, but a hush of nature greets this supreme hour of the sun in
its glory--the world lies dead at the feet of the giver of life. The
hour of the god Pan is the mystery which is daily renewed for the
Italian; what has remained constant amid all changes is the
nature-myth, and the secrets it is always whispering to the children
of its soil.
CHAPTER VI
THE ROMAN MÉNAGE
As in other European towns, the custom in Rome is to live in flats.
The houses are high, of no particular style of architecture, and in
the older portions of the city they overshadow a labyrinth of narrow
streets paved with large uneven slabs of stone. Here are no side walks
for pedestrians who with an indifference born of long practice walk
habitually in the middle of the roadway, moving leisurely to one side
in obedience to the warning cries of the drivers, or patiently waiting
and flattening themselves against the shop doors if two vehicles
desire to pass one another. Long ragged grooves scraped along the
house walls and at street corners by the hubs of heavy cart-wheels,
testify to centuries of clumsy driving.
There have always existed in Rome, however, a certain number of villas
within the walls, and their timbered parks and terraced gardens
ornamented with fountains and statues, have been one of the
characteristic features of the city. Their wealthy owners probably
possessed a sombre palace as well along the Corso, but the villas
were pleasant in the warm weather, and two centuries ago wonderful
Arcadian entertainments were given beneath the shade of their ilex
groves. Some of these villas still exist in their original state or as
public property, many have been crowded out and demolished and their
gardens have been cut up into building plots. The taste for
villa-building is, however, not yet dead, and of late years small
dwellings in a Baroque style have been springing up like mushrooms in
the new quarters, and immense rents are asked for them.
Roman flats or apartments as they are called, vary from magnificent
suites of thirty or forty rooms to a small domain of three or four.
They can be leased even in the most princely of palaces which are so
much too large for the requirements of modern life that their owners
are glad to let what they cannot use.
[Illustration: SEA-HORSE FOUNTAIN IN THE VILLA BORGHESE
The glades of Roman villas offer us some of the rare green effects,
the colouring which prevails being that in picture 27. See page 46.]
The single entrance-gateway, which is locked at night, is under the
charge of a porter whose appearance varies according to the social
standing of his employer from an imposing figure in gold lace and a
cocked hat, to a surly fellow out at heels and elbows who ekes out a
precarious livelihood by cobbling or carpentering while he keeps a
vigilant but no friendly eye upon the incomings and outgoings of the
inhabitants of the wretched tenement under his care. Often, even in
good houses, a single room by the side of the gateway serves the
porter with his wife and family for bedroom, kitchen, living room, and
workshop, and sometimes the same number of human beings are stowed
away at night in a mere hole, windowless and doorless, under the
stairs. Yet this employment is so sought after that a cabinet
minister's portfolio is said to be easier to obtain than a position as
house-porter.
One or more public staircases lead up from the central courtyard.
Before 1870 it was not obligatory to light these, and many a crime has
been committed on a long dark flight, the only witness the dwindling
oil-lamp before an image of the Madonna.
Even now a front door will seldom be opened at once in answer to your
ring; a little shutter is pushed back, and you are first inspected
through a grating. Or you are greeted with a shrill _chi è_, and only
when you have given the reassuring reply, _amici_, "friends," will you
be admitted. A middle-class Italian household is not very approachable
in the morning. Although extremely early risers--no hour seems too
early in Rome for people to be up and about--the house remains _en
déshabillé_ till the afternoon. The beds are unmade, the mistress
shuffles about in dressing-gown and slippers, adjuring her
maid-of-all-work in shrill tones; she even goes out to shop unwashed,
in an old skirt and jacket. At first sight all the rooms appear to be
bedrooms which are used indifferently to sit in. Nevertheless one
room, generally the smallest and least attractive, is set aside as the
"reception room." The family never sit in it, and never enter it
except to receive their visitors. It is kept carefully closed and
shuttered, and if you arrive unexpectedly the maid lets in some light
for you with pretty apologies while you wait in the doorway afraid of
falling in the dark over the innumerable objects, what-nots and small
tables, which crowd the room. A jute-covered sofa of the most
uncomfortable pattern, with a strip of carpet before it, is _de
rigueur_, and a visitor would consider herself slighted if she were
not ushered to this post of honour. There are no carpets on any of the
stone floors, and no stoves or fireplaces. If there happens to be a
chimney, it is considered unwholesome and is blocked up. There are no
comfortable sofas and no lounge chairs. If the weather is fine and
warm all is well with such a household. But Rome knows fog, frost, and
snow, and though none last for long, wintry days may succeed each
other and bitter winds blow down upon the city from the snow-capped
Sabine mountains, and then the Romans, forced to stay at home,
uncomplainingly wear their coats and jackets within doors to keep body
and soul together, and sit warming their fingers over little pans of
glowing wood-ash.
Like cats, they have a constitutional horror of rain, and will prefer
to remain indoors than risk a wetting in search of some place of
amusement, or to keep an engagement. Every carter, every beggar, every
peasant carries an umbrella; horses and draught oxen are swathed in
flannel and mackintosh in the wet, and the drivers of the little open
cabs cower beneath leathern aprons and enormous umbrellas, under the
dripping edges of which their "fares" creep in and out as best they
can. Brigands only, so it is popularly believed, carry no umbrellas,
and by this you may know them.
The Romans' cheerful acquiescence in what we should consider
considerable hardship is nothing less than admirable. After long
working hours spent in government offices for example, which are for
the most part despoiled monasteries and always bitterly cold, they
return to their homes where creature comforts as we understand them
are unknown, not because they cannot be afforded, but because they are
not desired or missed; and their gaiety or their enjoyment of one
another's society is in nowise diminished because they spend the
evening sitting at a dining-room table on straight-backed chairs.
On the other hand much attention is devoted to the preparation of the
meals. Food is daintily prepared and cooked, well flavoured and
seasoned. Meat and vegetables are generally cooked in oil- or
bacon-fat, and no Roman would look at a dish of food plainly boiled or
roasted. Even the poor are skilful in concocting a savoury dish with
_polenta_ (ground Indian corn) bread and potatoes flavoured with a
dash of onion or tomatoes. All cooking and eating utensils are kept
scrupulously clean, and the dirtiest _contadino_ will wipe out his
glass carefully before he is satisfied as to its fitness for his use.
Romans break their fast with a cup of black coffee and bread without
butter, but it is quite usual for them to eat nothing at all until
twelve or one o'clock. Their midday dinner begins with either soup or
macaroni (_minestra_ or _minestra ascuitta_). If with the soup, then
the meat which has been boiled to make it is served next with
vegetable garnishings. The macaroni is served with butter, cheese,
and tomatoes and there are numberless tasty ways of preparing it.
Half a kilogram (eighteen ounces) is considered the portion for each
person. If the meal begins with macaroni, this dish would be followed
by meat _in umido_, a favourite Roman dressing of tomatoes and onions.
People who live quite simply will never touch stale bread, and it is
no unusual thing for a fresh batch to be delivered at the door three
times a day. Salad, cheese, and eggs done in a variety of ways form
the staple of the Roman's evening meal.
It is a perpetual wonder to the foreigner what elaborate and
excellently cooked dinners can be produced in the unpromising Roman
kitchens. Larders and sculleries are almost unknown. A white marble
sink--marble fills the lowliest offices in Rome--and a tap in a corner
do duty for the latter. The kitchen is often a slip of a room, and the
"range" is little more than a table of brick and tiles fitted with
small holes for holding charcoal, and with a shaft above for carrying
away the unwholesome fumes. Upon these small holes all the cooking is
done; the charcoal is fanned into a glow with a feather fan, and if
there are many pots and saucepans they must take their turn upon the
tiny fires. Scuttles do not exist, and the stock of charcoal for use
is kept on the floor beneath the range.
[Illustration: ORNAMENTAL WATER, VILLA BORGHESE]
Italians of all classes are very fastidious about the cleanliness of
their beds, and in this particular their habits contrast favourably
with the antediluvian practices prevalent in England, for not only is
every article of bedding aired at the window daily, but all the
mattresses are picked to pieces and the wool pulled out and beaten
every year. This process is carried on generally on the flat
house-roofs when the weather is sunny; a mattress-maker with his
assistant, his bench and his combs, coming round to do it for you for
the modest fee of one lira and a half the mattress.
Beyond this the Roman's standard of cleanliness fails altogether.
Floors are never washed; they serve to tramp about on in thick boots,
to spit upon, and to receive matches and cigar-ash. Doors, painted
woodwork, walls, are always soiled; if there is a terrace it becomes
at once unsightly and the receptacle for hideous refuse. There is
complete indifference to cleanliness as a first condition of hygiene,
and it is not unusual to find fowls kept in the kitchen of a good
bourgeois house, which take their walks abroad on the balcony and pick
up their living under the table.
Even in the houses of the great, where many servants are kept, there
is often the same Spartan indifference to comfort. Great halls are
kept unwarmed except for a brazier of glowing wood-ash, and
fireplaces, if they exist, are only sparingly used in the
sitting-rooms. Bathrooms are rare, and the habit of the daily bath is
almost unknown in a city which once boasted the finest baths the world
has seen.
If the Roman does not know how to make himself comfortable indoors, no
one knows better how to enjoy himself in the open air. The ragged
loafer suns himself in the public squares, the workman dozes away his
dinner hour at full length under the shelter of a wall; it is in the
streets that a Roman holiday is spent. Parents and children of the
working classes, the father carrying the baby, stroll about happily
for hours, or they walk out beyond the city gates to rest and refresh
themselves at one of the wayside _osterie_. Here they gather round the
rude tables under a shelter of bamboo canes and eat and drink
according to their means. The most forbidding country eating-house can
rise to the requirements of better-class customers, and at a pinch can
furnish a cleanly cooked and quite palatable dish of macaroni or eggs
and vegetable fried in oil for forty or fifty centimes the plate,
which is abundant for two. All day long on _festa_ in warm spring
weather, chairs and benches outside every wine-shop and eating-house
are crowded with a changing throng of holiday makers enjoying
themselves simply and harmlessly; and on such days, at a likely
corner, you may come across a country man or woman in charge of a huge
wild boar roasted whole, stuffed with meat and sage and garlanded with
green, from which a succulent morsel will be cut for you, then and
there should you desire it, for a trifling sum.
[Illustration: VILLAGE STREET AT ANTICOLI, IN THE SABINE HILLS]
Out-of-door pleasures appeal no less to the better classes.
Fashionable Rome drives daily in the afternoon along the Corso and
round the Pincio, the carriages drawing up at intervals near the
bandstand. So dear to the Roman heart is the possession of smart
clothes and a showy carriage and horses, that entire families will
live with parsimony within doors that they may afford these luxuries.
During long afternoon hours men will congregate outside the
Parliament House and along the Corso to meet and chat with their
friends, and chairs and tables with their fashionable occupants block
the pavements outside the cafés and restaurants, obliging the
passer-by to step out into the roadway.
The Roman of the poorer class carries on as much of his domestic life
also as he can in the open air. Chairs, kitchen tables, and wash-tubs
are dragged out into the streets. Food is prepared and eaten, clothes
are washed, and the occupations of sewing, knitting, cobbling, and
carpentering are conducted in the open, subject to a lively attention
to what is going on in the street.
Occasionally a basket attached to a string comes bobbing down from an
upper window accompanied by a shrill message: Would Sor' Annunziata
have the kindness to buy a copy of the _Messagero_ just being cried in
the street? she will find a soldo in the basket. Or would she tell
that good-for-nothing vagabond Mark Antony or Hannibal (the raggedest
urchins always rejoice in some such name), who is playing _morra_
round the corner, to run at once and buy a ha'porth of white beans.
The errand accomplished, the basket is drawn up with its burden, and
then blissful hours of leisure slip by in desultory talk with
neighbours at their doors and windows opposite, chairs tilted back
comfortably against the house wall in the mellow Roman sunlight. In
the quiet piazzas, and in shady nooks by the city gates, humble folk
can be shaved for a small sum by barbers who ply their trade in the
open and pay no shop rent. It is even quite usual in the hot weather
for fashionable coiffeurs to move their client's chair outside the
door and continue shaving operations there without exciting any
comment.
Before reading and writing were made obligatory, public letter-writers
were common, and they still can be met with in Via Tor de' Specchi, in
the shelter of the Salarian gate, and in other quiet places, the group
of anxious clients waiting their turn round the table testifying to
the inefficiency of a compulsory education Act. Girls used to dictate
their love-letters to these scribes, and perhaps still do so, and even
the boys did and do write to San Luigi for his _festa_ on 21st
June--the letters, tied up with blue ribbon, being subsequently
deposited on his altar.
The fashion of open-air washing tanks, once universal, is gradually
passing away. Outside the walls, the women wash their clothes in the
streams and rivers, and inside the city, by the new Ponte Margherita,
one of the old public washing-places may still be seen, protected only
by a roof and surrounded by a crowd of women in bright-coloured cotton
bodices and skirts, washing clothes in the cold turbid water and
scrubbing them vigorously on the stone slabs in order that what is
left of them after this heroic treatment may at least be clean.
Owing to the smallness and darkness of all Roman provision shops, most
of the inspection of wares and all the talking, bargaining, and
quarrelling is perforce done upon the pavement. Many of the Roman
shops still consist of a narrow vault, with no outlet of any sort at
the further end, the whole front being closed with a shutter at
night. In the early morning all the cooks in Rome and all the general
servants are afoot in the streets buying provisions, and they crowd
around the temporary market stalls set up in the small piazzas under
gay umbrellas, filling the air with their noisy disputes. The
curb-stones are occupied by peasant women and their baskets of country
produce, which from this central position they extol to the
passers-by. These women have walked into the city at dawn carrying
their baskets on their heads, and at the gates their poor little
merchandise has been overhauled with no gentle hand by the Customs
officers, every egg and turnip has been counted, and its _octroi_ duty
paid.
It takes the foreign resident some time to grasp the idiosyncrasies of
Roman shops. A linen draper looks at you with kindly pity if you ask
him for ribbons or haberdashery, which can only be obtained at a
mercer's devoted to this trade. A grocer only sells dry goods, the
numerous shops entitled _pizzicherie_ deal exclusively with cheese,
lard, butter, bacon, salted fish, and preserves. Your fishmonger will
only sell fish, your butcher closes most inconveniently between twelve
and five, and will seldom sell mutton and never lamb, which must be
sought at a poulterer's. Macaroni is provided by your baker, or it can
be bought in one of the numerous small shops licensed to sell salt and
tobacco, where you may also obtain postage stamps, soap, tin tacks,
china plates, and mineral waters.
All the transactions of daily life have to be conducted in Rome, as
every householder soon learns, at the cost of a continuous and
exasperating conflict with a class to whom it is second nature to
cheat and deceive, to falsify weights and measures, who have no
standard of honesty in small things, and who will always say what will
please you or themselves rather than what is. The visitor naturally is
their peculiar prey. To exploit him is traditional in Rome. In a town
with no resources of its own, there is the foreigner and his purse to
look to; and he falls an easy victim to people whose language he
imperfectly understands, and who are past-masters of all the deceitful
arts. The seasons are short and a plentiful harvest must be raked in
while they last. Shops in the best quarters will raise the value of
their goods a hundred per cent at the sight of a foreign face. Unless
the legend "fixed prices" appears in the window for the benefit of the
customer, the shopmen will expect you to bargain over every
purchase--to haggle for half an hour over a question of six sous or
ten is indeed the only commercial instinct they possess. They will
generally ask about twice as much as they mean ultimately to accept,
and, to their credit be it said, it is not only for the sake of the
francs more or less, but quite as much for the excitement of the
sport. "I say 200 lire, now it is for you to say something;" or, "The
price is so-and-so, what will you give?" are the preludes to some
really enjoyable quarters of an hour. The foreigner who pays
unquestioningly what he is asked is a poor-spirited creature not worth
fleecing.
Romans still reckon up their rent or their wages in the old papal
currency of a _scudo_ (five francs), and food is cried about the
streets at so much the _paolo_ (half a franc). Half a _paolo_ (or
_giulio_) the _grosso_, two _paoli_ the _papetto_, three _paoli_ a
_testone_, and the halfpenny or _baioccho_ are still the familiar
names which come most easily to the tongue. The difference between the
old weights and the new, the papal scales and the decimal system of
united Italy, is a fruitful source of gain to the tradesman. He
clings, partly from sentiment and partly from self-interest, to the
old unit of weight, the pound of twelve ounces, and as it appears
nowhere on the official scales, he reckons it at one-third of the
kilogram (330 grams) or, if you do not watch him carefully, at 300
grams, thus profiting from 1/100 to 1/10 on every kilo (1000 grams)
sold. Similarly the Roman measure for firewood is a tightly packed
cart-load, but the wood-seller is an adept at making a cart look full
when it is not, and your only resource is to buy wood by the weight.
Even then, if you desire to receive the quantity you order and pay
for, you must not only see it weighed but you must keep an eye upon it
on its journey to your house, or it will become beautifully less for
the benefit of the carter. The charcoal for kitchen use you buy in a
measured sack of a given weight. The first time you bestow your custom
you are delighted with quality and quantity, but with each order the
sack shrinks in size, and when you expostulate the coal-seller will
answer you unblushing that if you insist upon having the coal weighed
he cannot supply it at the price!
There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each
morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system
to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant
illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept
there is no alternative. The _donna di servizio_ or maid-of-all-work
goes out each morning to spend an enjoyable half-hour or more, meeting
her friends and making shrill bargains at the shop doors. An Italian's
servant will buy a halfpenny worth of bacon-fat or lard or preserved
tomato, and as such small quantities cannot be weighed she receives a
spoonful of lard or a dab of butter wrapped up in a leaf, and the
whole is tied up and carried home in a brilliant cotton handkerchief.
The man-cook will not condescend to one of these shopping
handkerchiefs. He will carry a few parcels, but he generally returns,
a small boy in his wake bearing a basket on his head wherein all his
purchases are displayed. The prevalent custom in Rome is for the
servant to give the least possible price for all she buys, and to
charge her mistress a higher one, the balance going into her own
pocket. Servants of unimpeachable honesty in every other respect will
succumb to this temptation. If serving foreigners, they can often
double their wages, and so well is the practice recognised that the
mistress who is too watchful to permit it is spoken of as giving only
a _mesata secca_, a dry wage.
[Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI
Built in 1549 for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Alfonso II., Duke
of Ferrara. It passed thence to the heir of this family, the Duke of
Modena. See pages 172, 174.]
Rome used to be one of the cheapest of European cities to live in;
rents were low and food was cheap; meat was three sous the pound,
and when it rose to four the Romans were indignant. Heavy taxation
under the Italian Government has now changed all this. Beef is
seventeen sous the pound, and rents have been almost doubled in the
past twenty years. Wages are still very moderate. A woman servant gets
from eighteen to thirty francs a month, a man thirty to sixty. If an
English mistress engages an Italian servant, even if he or she is said
to know their work, she must begin from the rudiments and even then
there comes a point beyond which instruction fails to produce any
result. The refinements of English service are looked upon as so many
curious rites without meaning, and our standard of cleanliness and our
fastidiousness are a perpetual source of wonder.
The pride of the Roman prevents her, as a rule, from undertaking
domestic service. When she does, she makes the roughest and worst of
maids. The natural instinct of every ordinary Italian servant is to
throw all refuse out of the window, as she still does in the towns of
the campagna, or where her kitchen window gives upon an unfrequented
courtyard, and the rest of her service is in keeping with this
standard, the restrictions laid upon her by the demands of
civilisation being the very thinnest veneer.
She will never clean a floor on her own initiative, and very seldom on
yours, and is quite capable of giving you notice should you expect it.
Nevertheless if you can bring yourself to compromise with your own
standard and put up with some of hers, you will find her on the whole
a genial creature to deal with. She is blessed with abundant leisure,
and has always time to carry on protracted conversations and even
flirtations out of the kitchen window. No event in the street or in
the courtyard beneath escapes her attention, yet she manages to do the
housework, cook the meals, wait at table, clean the boots, iron and
mend the clothes, and buy the provisions. She will, moreover, think
nothing of sleeping in a mere cupboard without air or light, only fit
to store boxes in, or in one of the passages on a sofa-bed which is
folded up in the daytime, such plans being quite usual in a Roman
household.
The Italian man-servant is the most domestic of beings and is on the
whole the most teachable and efficient; but he also is accustomed to
lay a table by placing a knife, fork, and spoon in a bunch before each
person, adding a glass, and _voilà tout_, and a higher ideal than this
is a severe tax on memory and intelligence. "He certainly knew how to
lay a cloth when he left me," an American lady said of her man-servant
who had been with her nine years, "but perhaps he has forgotten"; and
he certainly had, though he had only been out of her situation a year.
A so-called finished servant, who had been years in a prince's
establishment, thought nothing of receiving a basket of linen from the
French laundress and depositing it on our dining-room table pending
further instructions, and our disapproval only grieved without
enlightening him. And no instruction will impress upon an Italian the
impropriety of announcing English callers by a description rather
than attempting to pronounce their foreign names: "The gentleman from
the hotel," or "The young lady who married that old man!" But their
charming manners and easy grace disarm criticism and win forgiveness
for many shortcomings.
In military households the master's orderly is often turned into a
domestic drudge. Yet such situations are eagerly sought by young
soldiers, for though they receive no extra pay they are excused
military duty after the first ten months of their enrolment, and they
compound their rations for a weekly government allowance. It is no
uncommon thing to see a young man in uniform doing the whole work of
an officer's house, cooking, cleaning, marketing, waiting at table,
taking the children to school, wheeling the perambulator, and even
doing the family washing and ironing.
A measure of magnificence and pomp still obtains in the great Roman
households, but it is combined with a simplicity of life and an
informality of relation between employer and employed which rob it of
its stiffness. The servants of a great house are not a caste apart,
they are part of the family establishment. Their masters give them the
familiar _tu_, and they are treated with far more intimacy and
friendliness than is ever the case with us. In return the servants
identify themselves with their employers' concerns, and take the
greatest interest in all their doings, an interest no doubt fostered
by the utter indifference to privacy existing in most households,
where conversations on all subjects are carried on with widely open
doors regardless of listeners.
Servants and others of the same class will generally abide by an
agreement clearly made, though foreigners are always advised to have
even the conditions of service in black and white, and it is never
safe to trust to precedent or to general rules in one's dealings with
them. They are quite unfettered by the existing laws and unwritten
obligations which make up their English counterpart's code of
respectability, and they will be faithful to you only so long as their
interest does not clash with yours. Instances to the contrary are
rare. An Italian servant is quite capable of giving you instant notice
for a mere whim, and departing the same day without the slightest
compunction for the inconvenience he causes.
Woe to the foreigner who seeks redress for conduct of this kind, or
who is involved in any dispute however righteous his cause. Such cases
are brought up in the district courts before magistrates who are
appointed to act in each division of the city as conciliators (save
the mark!). No solicitor of any standing likes to appear in these
courts, they are beneath the dignity of his position, and he will only
do so as a favour. An attorney of an inferior order, who is as often
as not a layman masquerading as such, can be hired on the spot like a
porter to see you through. Your opponent will certainly engage the
services of one of these individuals, and when the case comes on to
your no small amazement he will rise and make a fluent speech in
favour of his client having little or no reference to the events as
they occurred. If considered needful, he will also call several
false witnesses who will swear entire falsehoods with perfect
_sangfroid_. When your solicitor attempts to state your case the
attorney on the other side interrupts him with indignant denials, and
the conciliator joins in with the most injudicial display of temper.
The comedy ends by all three talking at once in loud excited voices,
without listening to one another, and the conciliator announces the
close of the sitting. He then proceeds to give his verdict which is
invariably in favour of the servant, and his socialistic tendencies in
this particular are assisted by his not having paid the least
attention to the evidence before him.
[Illustration: IN VILLA BORGHESE
A priest and one of the Austrian Seminarists, whose red dress has
bestowed on them the popular nickname of "_boiled prawns_," are here
seen conversing in the shade of the villa; the spring sunshine
glints through the trees.]
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMAN PEOPLE
I. _The Italians._
There are four great movements which moulded the political
intellectual and moral life of other European countries without
leaving their impress on Italy. Feudalism and scholasticism took less
hold there than in Germany England or France; the spirit of chivalry
never touched the Italian, and Puritanism, of course, left him
scatheless. Feudalism had little affinity with a people democratic to
the core, scholasticism had little attraction for the most open-minded
and the least didactic nation on earth, and neither the chivalry of
the Frank nor the Puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon awoke echoes in a
people whose self-interestedness and lack of the sense of personal
responsibility are only equalled by the absence of all illusions, and
whose hatred of shams is as radical as their freedom from hypocrisy.
Compared with the non-Latin peoples the lines of Italian development
have been intellectual rather than on the side of character and
conduct. The intellect of Italy has constantly spread a banquet
before the spirit of Europe, as the beauty of the land from north to
south has offered a feast of material beauty to every generation.
Italian quickness in appropriating an idea is matched by Italian
open-mindedness; you never meet in Italy the wall of thick-headed
self-righteous prejudice--that array of pre-judgments which an Italian
has aptly called _idols_--which the Englishman never fails to brandish
when confronted by a new idea. Perhaps it is the fact that the
Italians are the least prejudiced people on the face of the earth
which makes living in their country delightful to Northerners. Some of
our countrymen have certainly reason to be pleased that this is so;
but the Italian illimitable tolerance of the foibles and
eccentricities of others does not mean that they acquit us of bad
manners and provincialism.
Italian intellect, the familiarity with and the play of ideas in the
Italian, is not the same thing as a lofty idealism; and when a Dane
recently wrote that the Italians possess the highest humanistic
qualities and therefore are also nearer the supernatural than other
people, he made, I think, this mistake. He confused ideas with
idealism. The Italian gift _par excellence_ is _le sens très vif des
réalités_,[4] a vivid hold on the real; and this realism is the source
at once of their qualities and their defects. The Italian has only one
use for an idea, he must see it as it is. Hence he strips everything,
tears away its drapery, exposes it to the garish pitiless light of
fact. There is nothing which deserves in itself and always
reverence--for him a spade is a spade, a fiasco a fiasco, a corpse a
corpse. There is none of that prevenient idealism which in the north
draws a veil over the crudities of sense, and helps to illuminate the
half-truths they reveal. It is easy to see that such a quality as this
is intellectually valuable, but morally disastrous. The special
loveliness of the nature formed in the north is the persuasion that
there are things one is not to see, not to hear. That northern
"custody of the senses" which is not an ascetical exercise, but an
inner illumination thrown upon them.
[4] Gebhart, _L'Italie Mystique_.
The intellectual limitation "thus far shalt thou go and no farther,"
which the Englishman willingly imposes on himself, is impossible to
the Italian, whose moral qualities have to reckon with the
intellectual liberty which is proper to his genius. The passionate
love of intellectual truth for its own sake is one of these moral
qualities, and the people who do not possess it inevitably contract
certain moral defects. These are not the defects of the Italian; he is
not a hypocrite in his moral relations, not a snob in social concerns,
not a prig in matters of intellect, and has no faculty for the
mystical self-deceptions of the Northerner. His complete democracy of
sentiment is shown in many pleasant ways. It is difficult for the
average Englishman to imagine that rank should make no difference, to
understand the dignified and simple relations which subsist between
classes in Italy. A man in a good coat is not ashamed to be seen
talking with a friend in fustian; people of entirely different walks
in life may be seen buttonholing each other; and a Roman prince arm
in arm with a man of the lower bourgeoisie is no infrequent spectacle.
"We are all people of consideration in this house," said a Roman to
me--"on the floor below there is a Senator, upstairs there is a
teacher of languages, and I am a shopkeeper." Sovereignty too, in
spite of the heavy etiquette of the House of Savoy, is democratic in
Italy. The King does not live in inaccessible _penetralia_, and the
man of the people when he comes across the man to whom he invariably
refers as _sua maestà_ will speak his mind to him. King Humbert
assisted at the inauguration of Bocconi's big shop in the Corso and
congratulated him on this new piece of commercial enterprise in the
city; which is as though King Edward VII. should pay an inaugural
visit to Whiteley's. Queen Margaret has always attended some Sunday
lectures given in Rome by the association for the higher education of
women--no Englishman could have imagined Queen Victoria attending,
say, a university extension lecture at Bedford College. The Latin
believes much more than we do in the principle of authority, and cares
infinitely less about its representatives.
[Illustration: THE "SPANISH STEPS," PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
Erected for the Romans at the expense of a Frenchman in the
eighteenth century. The _Piazza_ takes its name from the Spanish
Embassy to the Vatican which has its residence here. At the Sacred
Heart Convent attached to the church of the Trinità de' Monti, at
the top of the steps, generations of girls of Roman families have
been educated. The Egyptian obelisk came from the gardens of Sallust
and was placed here by Pius VI. See page 141.]
Italian civilisation is imperialistic and social, not individualistic.
There is a greater sense of public decorum (as distinguished, however,
from private decency) than among us, and more sacrifice of the
individual to the society. One consequence of this is that there is
less of that eccentricity, which is the individualism of the poorly
endowed, less personal initiative, less enterprise, and nothing of
that spirit of adventure which is the Anglo-Saxon's romance. The
Italian would always, in spite of loud complainings to a just heaven,
rather "bear the ills he has than fly to others that he knows not of."
Just now it is the fashion in Italy to regard the "individualism" of
modern Italians as the reason for their failure to co-operate. But a
want of cohesion (mental and moral) is mistaken for individualism. It
is certain that the Englishman is an "individualist" yet he achieves
everything by co-operation; it is certain that he possesses that
sign-manual of individualism--initiative, and certain that the Italian
does not. Italy is not suffering from an orgy of individualism in her
people but from an orgy of egotism--which is quite a different matter.
It is a fact worth noting that every nation believes its own family
life to be the purest and most solid. The truth is that family life
plays a more important part in Italy than in England, and Latin
parents everywhere sacrifice themselves more for their children than
we do. So strong is the blood tie that it has been said that there is
nothing at the back of the Italian character but the love of family.
Children make far more difference in the life of an Italian than in
the life of an Englishman; and when love and devotion and obedience
are required of them, they have already seen in their parents as in a
mirror how life and personal comfort and personal ambition can be
squandered for love. An English parent can leave all he has away from
his children, and he frequently leaves the elder provided for and the
younger not provided for at all. A Latin parent cannot do this, and it
is a signal witness to the sense of obligation towards those they
bring into the world which subsists among the Latin races.
If the blood tie is strong in Italy, friendship is very rare. As in
the family relations so here it is the lack of marked individualism
which is the determinant. It requires little effort to come up to the
family standard; such effort, too, while it may lead to
self-repression seldom brings about self-development. To come up to
the standard of your peers outside the home requires on the contrary
an exercise of all the individual powers; and friendship belongs to
the individualistic peoples, those who prize personal rather than
tribal and family character; to a people with no moral indolence, with
the initiative and the power to become something on their own account,
and to stand by themselves. The one "provincialism" of the Italian
is--perhaps--his suspicion of all who stand without the blood tie: the
adventurous spirit of the Anglo-Saxon which has colonised three
continents has led him to a very different estimate of reliance on and
co-operation with his fellow-men, and the capacity for genuine
friendship outside the blood tie may claim to have always acted as an
anti-barbaric note in Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
The Italians have another strongly distinctive feature. They are a
more passionate but a less sentimental people than we. I suppose the
Germans are the most sentimental people of Europe, and we come next.
But in Italy the Englishman is not credited with sentiment. According
to the Italian press, for example, he has "the patriotism of the pound
sterling." For my part I regard the Italian as the least sentimental
man in Europe; we, on the contrary, both as individuals and as crowds,
are governed by our sentimentality. The whole British middle class
would make war to-morrow to satisfy a sentimentalism which the Latin
peoples regard as exclusively their own. Those who recollect that the
reception accorded to Garibaldi put into the shade the entry into
London of the bride of our future King, ought not to accuse the
English of lack of disinterested sentiment. The Italians have the
sentiment of the beautiful the grandiose and the fit--but they are the
last people in the world to be put out of their course by a scruple or
an _élan_. On the other hand there is a real sense in which the
Englishman is devoid of a quality which is allied to the Latin
graciousness. England shows a want of pride in and sentiment towards
dependencies like the Channel Islands or Ireland which we should not
find in France or Italy. She forgets, neglects, has no grip, and takes
no hold on the imagination. Other nations have exploited their
colonies and dependencies and the British suzerain is not appealed to
in vain for protection under his flag--but something lacks, and so it
comes about that the foreigner frequently likes our justice but not
ourselves.
[Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF THE SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA,
ON A WET DAY]
That sentiment which comes of a certain noble graciousness in peoples
is shown in other ways in Italy. It is a moving thing to see the sons
bear the coffin of father or mother, to see men of all classes
follow the dead _on foot_; and then there is the Latin gracious
treatment of birthdays and anniversaries, the Latin power of making a
fête, of "fêteing you," surrounding you with the feeling that you are
of importance for the moment, that content is really reigning round
you; the many ways in which the sentiments of piety to the hearth and
piety to the dead are expressed; the power of handling life lightly
and of expressing feeling appropriately.
The Italian though he is not so "intense," in the slang sense, as we,
and gives way to less emotional sentiment, is far more impressionable.
On the other hand he is not ashamed to betray emotion, or to speak of
his _agitazione_; and it will astonish the Englishman to be told that
although the Italian is so quick of feeling that one may think he is
at the death grip with a man in the street to whom he is only
narrating his unexpected meeting with a relative from the country, he
studiously avoids those sentimental "scenes" which are so dear to the
Anglo-Saxon. The hot-blooded Italian speaks of the "_furor
francese_"--that unmatched capacity for summing the intellectual
points of a case and exhausting its emotional possibilities in one
lightning moment,--and it is a fact that they judge the French people
to be far more mobile and inconstant than themselves.
In common with other Latins, they have more vanity than we, but less
self-consciousness, more simplicity, and none of that _mauvaise honte_
which betrays that the Englishman has not got his emotions under
control. But there is in the best Englishman an excellent sort of
simplicity which frees him from attending to the _personal point_
which is always present to the Italian whether he is dealing with
matters public or private. On the other hand the Italians are
completely free of the French _bête noir_, _chauvinisme_. And they
have another great moral superiority: in America every one brags on
his own account; in England we plump for national brag--there is a
howling blast of the national trumpet always chilling the air round an
Englishman. But the Italians do not brag; they have, indeed, no reason
at all to act as _parvenus_. Their scepticism applies to themselves
even more than to others, and no people are so ready for
self-depreciation. According to them A, B, and C--the other nations of
the earth--can accomplish this or that, while "_un italiano non è
buono a niente_." In nothing, I believe, would Italians achieve
greater distinction than in medicine, where a distinguished tradition
of the art of healing goes hand in hand not only with the intellectual
gifts of the people, but with an unrivalled delicacy of intuition. In
no country are there better doctors, men armed at all points with the
science of their age; yet as an Italian has remarked "Among us the
physician counts as less than nothing while in France he takes rank as
a scientific authority."
The Italian and the Irishman are the only amiable men in Europe--we
must go as far as Japan to find their equals. Both people have the
desire to please--or is it a mark of ancient breeding?--the
self-effacement, the courteous absence of self-assertion so difficult
to the Englishman. The Italian will offer you the reins of his horses,
and any and all of those privileges and advantages which the English
owner regards as inalienably his. The traditional hospitality of cold
climates is indeed nowhere greater than in England, but there is no
more entirely hospitable host than the Italian when he admits you to
his house.
Nowhere are crowds so good-natured or so well-behaved. Yet the
Italians complain louder than any other people, and have not French
buoyancy in the troubles and tragedies of life. Who will believe it if
we add that they have an admirable patience? The Englishman makes his
holiday miserable by his indignation if the train is late, if some one
steps on his toes, if he has to wait an hour while his dinner is
cooking. The Italian takes all these things as part of the day's work
or play, and finds his amusement in them besides. That is another
great distinction--he cares for life for its own sake. The Englishman
cares for it for some end he has in view, and the end may be noble or
mean. With quicker sympathy and much quicker response than ours, they
are a less kindly people; and what is it in the Italians that allows
you to find them all at once in undress, the veneer gone, and the raw
material left? The Englishman would find it hard, too, to understand a
certain terrible outsideness, something callous and pitiless in the
uneducated Italian: self-interest looms too large, and an apparent
want of power of self-sacrifice--outside the blood tie--I take to be
the great moral weakness of the Italian character.
We shall already have understood that the Italian does not wait to be
told these things by others--he is the first to judge himself; he has
no illusions. In England we are fond of throwing a veil over our
national defects or of calling them by some fine name, but the Italian
of all ranks has put the defects of his qualities over and over again
in the crucible of his terrible love of reality with its quick
perception of shams; and to understand the defects of Italians one has
only to read their own masterly appreciations of national character.
[Illustration: ROMAN PEASANT CARRYING COPPER WATER POT]
The Italian race is, I believe, prepotent in mixed marriages. In
marriages between German and Italian or English and Italian the child
shares indeed some of the mental characteristics of Angle or Teuton,
but the _personality_ is an Italian personality. This prepotence of
the Latin people I take to be the effect of what some one has called
"a great temperament"--the one quality which we may be quite sure has
belonged to every remarkable man. Of all the great races the men of
modern Germany leave least trace of themselves. It is noteworthy that
the instances of mixed marriages are nearly all instances of women of
the English German and American races intermarrying with Italian men;
but whichever way it is, it remains as true of Italy as of France that
"the _ménage_ is always in the country of the Latin partner."
The Italians say: "_inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato_," and
this is also true of Americans and may be true of Teutons. Two Italian
girls who spent a season in London described to me their attempts to
imitate what they called "_lo stiff_," the stiff reserved manner of
the Englishman of breeding. They failed, it seems, woefully, for they
could not acquire "_lo stiff_" and they lost their own pretty manners.
So it is with the Anglo-Saxon in Italy. We have not their _finesse_,
or the mental and temperamental qualities which balance their moral
defects; the Englishman adopts these with interest and his national
virtues are shed like a garment. It is therefore perhaps fortunate
that Italian women give Englishmen small encouragement to turn
themselves into _diavoli incarnati_; for it must be recorded that the
English and American wife in Italy runs no such risk: she remains
herself, the national character does not wear off like a poor veneer,
she does not outrage native susceptibilities without acquiring native
graces, and distinguished women of our race have for the past two
hundred years brought their native virtues to Italy while adopting
Italian causes with an enthusiasm which did not yield even to that of
Italians themselves. In Rome the English wife of General La Marmora,
the two Talbots who became Gwendoline Borghese and Mary Doria, the
American wife of Garibaldi, and the Scotch wife of the triumvir
Aurelio Saffi (still alive), all played a conspicuous Italian rôle.
There are more people with great temperaments among the Latin races
than among ourselves; and as it is "plenty of temperament" which is
wanted for the creations of art it is not difficult to understand why
the Italians are artistic and we are not. And the Italians are a
people of artists. In England where one man in a thousand may possess
the artistic temperament it is difficult to realise the keen
observation, the appreciation of technique for its own sake, the
intuitive way of gauging and grouping the data of the senses, the
balance and proportion implied in a race where one man in ten judges
as an artist. Wagner expresses, in a letter to Boïto, his admiration
of the Italian attitude to art--the open-mindedness and delicate
feeling in artistic questions which make him "understand again," after
a visit there, "the matchlessly productive spirit to which the new
world owes all its art since the Renaissance." When Edward VII.
visited Rome the _Times_ and other English newspapers compared the
consummate yet simple scheme of decoration with the tasteless and
meaningless banner and bunting displays which London witnesses on
similar occasions. The love of beauty--the Greek horror of
deformity--is so strong with this people that its imperatives take
precedence of moral considerations--of pity, delicacy, kindliness. The
uneducated Italian shows his instinctive disgust at what is ugly or
horrible and, as we have seen, no prevenient idealism checks the
impulse.
It is an important truth that Italians learn from the outside and that
Northern peoples get from without only what they bring from within;
that Italians have, perhaps, as little ethical awareness as they have
signal and abiding æsthetical awareness. But that uninterrupted
vision of reality which has relegated moral vision to the second place
has bestowed on Europe not what is crude and naked and bare, but
another mode of seeing, of feeling, of being--one of the great modes
of human expression--art. This people who have been called "prodigals
of themselves" have been so prodigal of their gifts that the hand
which stripped the veil from the objects of sense is also the hand
which clothed them, returning them to us with the crudity gone,
replaced with new meaning, by new vision--expressed for ever in higher
terms. The ruthless vision which saw so much, and suffered no
illusion, saw also something which we did not see; and revealing to us
what lay beyond our sight held up a mirror in which the real looks
back at us as the ideal.
The imagination of the Kelt, said Matthew Arnold, "with its
passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of
fact" has never succeeded in producing a masterpiece of art. Here we
have a clue to the truth--which the Greek had already taught us--that
_interpretation_ is not left only to the peoples whose vision is
turned inwards; that when, for such, the external seems bared of all
meaning, the realist may restore it to us with the new vision in it.
II. _The Romans._
In no European country has the secular conflict between race and race,
province and province, been keener than in Italy--Lombards, Venetians,
Tuscans, Romans, and Neapolitans have formed not only politically but
morally antagonistic communities; and Italy has yet to create that
moral unity which is no more a tradition of her past than is the civil
unity she has already achieved.
Nowhere, during the era of the _Risorgimento_, was this antagonism
more keenly felt than in Rome and by the Romans who have always
divided the inhabitants of that "geographical expression," Italy, into
"Romans" and "Italians." To this day the difficulties of moral union
are fed by the incompatibilities and the jealousies of "north" and
"south." To the warm Southerner, Lombards and Piedmontese are a nation
of shopkeepers; to the Northerner, the Neapolitan, the Calabrese, and
the Sicilian are as brilliant impossible and mediæval Irishmen.
Midway between these two, neither north nor south, stands and always
has stood the Roman: by sympathy, proclivity, and geographical
position a little more south than north; but by history achievement
and tradition independent of either. Florence represents the fine
flower of the Italian spirit, the South its poetry, Venice and the
North its civil greatness. What is notable everywhere is an
incomparable productiveness in all activities of the human intellect,
all fineness of the human spirit. But Rome has not produced. After
that one act of creation, the Roman polity, Rome has been sterile; its
function has been not to create but to criticise. Like the great
Church which has developed within its borders, Rome has been the
lawgiver, the critic of other men's gifts, but has laid no
claim--when once we cede her initial gift of an infallible
_magisterium_--to _charismata_. And so the Roman possesses in its
highest terms the gift of _criterion_. Some witty person--a Frenchman
of course--said that England was an island and every Englishman was an
island; and so we may say that Rome was arbiter of the world and every
Roman possesses that keen vivid abounding gift of _arbitrament_.
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF THE PASSION IN THE CHURCH OF SAN CLEMENTE
The church, which is in the street leading from the Lateran to the
Colosseum, belongs to the Irish Dominicans.]
Rome therefore is not Italy for taste, art, delicacies of sentiment,
for the great creations of the intellect the spirit and the
imagination--Rome is the ancient mistress of the world; and the rôle
the function and the influence of Rome must all be viewed in relation
to her gift of infallible criterion, of world dominance.
The Roman of to-day not only lives in the city of the Roman who gave
laws to the known world, he thinks his thoughts and to a great extent
lives his life. He is the result of the grandiose memories of the past
playing upon such a temperament as his. He lives surrounded by vague
memories, understanding that it was something exceedingly great which
fell, leaving him in the midst of these ruins. And the Roman has a
supreme indifference--he looks upon every event with the same
tolerance, the same sentiment of Emerson's "fine Oxford gentleman"
that "there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter." One
procession passes him by to honour Giordano Bruno, victim of
theological bigotry; another passes to the Vatican to render homage to
the power which crushed Bruno: the Roman looks out upon both with the
same eyes, the same indifferent dignity. "The Roman apathy," say some;
but others call it a superiority, Roman largeness of outlook, the
Roman freedom from what is petty and intolerant.
Who are the modern Roman people? Are they the genuine survivors of the
rulers of the world? That there has been an immense influx of alien
blood since the fifth century is certain. The incredible depletion of
the Roman population in some periods was repaired by immigration from
other parts of Italy; but Roman characteristics at the present day are
too well marked to allow us to suppose that Rome has been at any time
swamped by foreign admixture, or that the persistence of these
characteristics can be accounted for merely by the continuity of Roman
civilisation and the Roman _milieu_. The Romans of to-day, therefore,
are the same people as the Romans of the great epoch--but with a
difference. They are Romans with the energy sapped out; with the power
of self-sacrifice for a public good gone, and with it the power to
impose themselves on the nations, on their fellows. Romans with no
heroes and no martyrs.
[Illustration: A RUSTIC DWELLING IN THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA]
Nowhere, in fact, can the Italian character be seen so unspoiled as in
Rome, where fewer outside influences and neither education nor social
polish have conspired to modify the characteristics of the nation who
were once the _buontemponi_ of Europe. The people of classic Rome had
always been men of a certain roughness, whose heroic qualities were
formed at the expense of delicacy of sentiment. This rudeness of
mind, of sentiment, of taste showed itself in every part of the Roman
life. While Athenians watched the tragedies of Sophocles in theatres
which could only hold a select audience, the Romans crowded into huge
amphitheatres where a hundred thousand men and women gloated over the
sufferings of sentient creatures--animals or men, it made no
difference; the same hideous "practical jokes," as Walter Pater notes,
being impartially meted out to both. Centuries after Athens met to
applaud the periods of Pericles, the Roman ladies were turning down
their thumbs that they might be sated with the spectacle of the last
agony of the vanquished in the arena. The refined symposia of Greece
became in Rome barbaric banquetings where the guests prolonged the
pleasures of the table by vomiting what they had already eaten. The
stern self-repression, the admirable power of devotion in a public
cause, the contempt of pleasure and of life, the _animus lucis
contemptor_ of the early Republic, were qualities which did not
descend to the Romans of the Empire.
_The Roman Type_
Not only Roman characteristics but the Roman type also have descended.
The large round massive Roman head still contrasts with the narrow
pointed head of the Tuscan. The type still admired in women is the
_tipo giunonico_, the type of Juno and of the Roman matron--large
massive and imposing. The Roman has a ruddy fresh complexion, the
swarthy southern skin being comparatively rare; he has black hair, is
burly and tends to obesity. His expression is tranquil and contented,
and Signor Aristide Gabelli in his essay on Rome and the Romans bids
us observe that the type has improved, that we no longer see the hard,
bitter, threatening expression of the busts in the Capitol and
Vatican, the prominent jaw and cheek bones have been softened; and the
Roman of the city, at any rate, wears a more genial and humane
expression than his classic ancestor. At a church function, among the
Roman peasants--though I fear the type was more frequent in the
"eighties"--one may see a face which might serve as the model for
Jove, for a Roman poet or philosopher. It is such a face as could
never be met with even among the best specimens of our peasantry.
Muffled in his great fur-collared cloak, dirty and ragged, with eyes
which seem to look from a soul that harbours every noble aspiration,
our old peasant who can certainly neither read nor write, is probably
cogitating why Checco refused to give him the wine at three sous the
measure, or whether he would have done better to put the franc the
_forastiero_ gave him into shoes, instead of following Peppe's
suggestion as to lottery numbers. So much for the wonders which an old
civilisation can confer without any effort or any preparation.
[Illustration: PROCESSION WITH THE HOST AT SUBIACO]
Many assert that the _Trasteverini_ are the only lineal descendants of
the Romans. The legend is that Trastevere was colonised by the Greeks
brought by Aeneas, and the Greco-Roman type may frequently be seen
there in absolute perfection--women of the people having the
classic features and the noble bearing of empresses. They are a more
robust race than the Romans on the other side of the Tiber, the black
hair of the women is still more luxuriant, the character more
passionate and vindictive, the language coarser, the reputation of the
women not so fair.
In common with all Italians the Romans are more graceful than English
men and women. The simple dignity and grace of the pose and carriage,
with no stiffness or awkwardness, makes it easy to distinguish an
Italian among Englishmen Germans or Americans whether he is sitting or
standing. They have the small Latin bones and small hands and feet;
the foot, however, is flatter than ours, and every one from the
children to the soldiers drags his feet along the ground. But the walk
is so unstilted that Italians form a natural procession, whereas a
procession in England is achieved with much difficulty and is not
really pleasing to the eye when it is achieved. Have you ever noticed
the _mesquin_ gesture--the fear to let himself go which is so closely
allied to the knowledge that he cannot do it gracefully--with which
one commonplace Englishman bids good-bye to another? You will see
nothing like this in Italy. The ample Roman gesture--that Italian
gesture of reassurance which seems to the Englishman quite
sacerdotal--is the property of every one; and a woman of the people
will hail an omnibus with the classic gesture that her ancestor might
have used when bidding Olympian Jove stay his thunderbolt.
The Italians have the Latin eye and eyebrow; one never sees the
unmodelled elementary eye, with its gaze _bon enfant_, of our younger
civilisation. Naturally resonant, the voices of Italians are in all
classes harsh and unmodulated; and there is no better evidence of the
general ignorance in Rome than the uneducated speaking voices which
make it impossible to distinguish a princess from a peasant at her
prayers. The possession of a strong natural organ, quite untutored, is
here joined to the Roman love of noise and racket; and the result is
that the people scream at each other as if they were deaf, and you can
only be sorry they are not also mute. It is an odd thing to hear the
deep bass voice of some of the women alternating with the high thin
tenor of many of the men; one may often mistake in this way the sex of
unseen speakers. The deep voices of the women remind one that the
contralto, and even the _contro tenore_, have been cultivated _con
amore_ in Italy: on the other hand a labourer in the fields or your
servant-man in the kitchen region can be heard singing in high
falsetto like a girl. What one will never hear in Italy are the
affected speaking voices cultivated by Englishmen: the Italian does
not "put on side" either in his voice or his manners, and nothing is
more noticeable perhaps on one's return to England than the absurdly
affected voice of the men.
There is no Roman dialect in the sense in which there is a Venetian a
Piedmontese and a Neapolitan dialect--habitually spoken by all classes
among themselves. The _Romanesco_ spoken in Rome by the people is a
debased Italian, not a real dialect. The purest Italian is, as we all
know, spoken in Tuscany, where there is no dialect, and the best
pronunciation is the Roman. Hence the proverb: "The Tuscan language in
the Roman mouth," _Lingua toscana in bocca romana_.
_The Roman's Character_
The pride of the Roman is his chief characteristic; it keeps him from
some of the pettinesses of his neighbours and is occasionally the idol
to which self-interest is sacrificed. But the same people who are too
proud to work are not too proud to beg. This kind of pride, indeed, is
to be found a little everywhere in Italy, and I have known a
distinguished Italian with a starving family who would consent to give
lessons in "Italian literature" but not in "Italian grammar." In
France where there is the maximum of self-respect this kind of pride
is unknown. The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways
and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed,
is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in
all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by
no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he
will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as
an Italian from another province might do. But the Roman pride is a
disease; it clamours for its own license and respects no one else's
liberty; it plays into the hands of the Latin lawlessness, and the
Roman spirit of revolt has tormented the popes ever since Constantine
deserted the capital of the West. The Roman resents what he calls
_prepotenza_, but a self-disciplined law-abiding people can hardly
understand the stupid _prepotenza_ say of the cabmen in Rome--a
majority of whom are Romans. The Roman lad or the Roman man takes it
into his head to make a bee-line in your direction, to walk over that
particular piece of road or pavement, and the feeble sense of
righteous indignation he possesses is only kindled if you attempt to
thwart him. The satyr-like--half-childish, half-malignant--cult of the
_dispetto_, the miserable pleasure taken in deliberately
inconveniencing you, are so many proofs of an undisciplined
nature--and where shall we see so many undisciplined faces as in
Rome?--albeit that here it masquerades as the just _orgoglio_ of a
people descended from gods and heroes. _"Non me lo dica, perchè io
sono romano"_ (Do not say it to me, for I am a Roman), is a warning
phrase repeated in perfect good faith, as who should say: "Do not
provoke this son of a god."
[Illustration: GIRL SELLING BIRDS IN THE VIA DEL CAMPIDOGLIO
The Forum in the background. The road marks the old _Clivus
Capitolinus_. See page 30.]
The Roman's most pleasing characteristic is his genuineness; that, and
a certain magnanimity, a certain nobleness of mind. The Roman has no
"jesuitry," and he will not say behind your back what he dare not say
to your face. In contrast to other Italians is his roughness--a legacy
of old Rome--a rudeness of spirit which is a curious compound of pride
in the past, of age-long absence of mental cultivation--of a moral
quality, brutal sincerity, and of a mental quality, a terrific
realism. They are also, perhaps, the best hearted people in Italy;
and a dear old Roman friend used to declare that the Romans and the
English were the kindest hearted people in the world.
Intellectually, no people in Italy have more talent: it is a key which
opens many doors to say that the Roman is talented but not cultured.
There is no real culture in any class, but there is a facility
unmatched even in this land of natural gifts. The one exception to the
general ignorance which exists by the side of an extraordinary
quickness is an interesting one: every Roman is an archaeologist; to
be unable to take your part in an archaeological discussion would be
to write yourself down as an impossible ignoramus. On this subject
every Roman is alert, and I was present when the foundations for the
first houses which now lead to Porta Salara were being dug, and a
marble relief was found which the workmen at once told me was "the
rape of Lucretia." Imagine a bricklayer in London proffering a similar
observation! With the general ignorance there is also in the upper
class a widespread intellectual apathy; many of the Roman aristocracy
have never visited the Palatine, and when it was suggested to a young
Roman that she had never seen the Capitol, she answered: "Oh yes, I
saw it the day I was married." Part of the Capitol buildings are the
registry offices of Rome where the obligatory civil marriage takes
place. The drive on the _Pincio_, which is not larger than the tract
of the park from Hyde Park corner to the Marble Arch, satisfies the
most exacting ambition; and the fussy foreigner who spends his time
in museums and galleries is regarded as a harmless and well-meaning
lunatic.
Every human being is the product of contrasts; but the Roman is more
so than other men: to explain, not what he is, but what he is not we
have, I think, only to look at the contradictions, the inconsequence
of a character which in the expressive Italian phrase is
_sconclusionato_, it comes to no conclusion. For the Roman though he
is turbulent is easily led; he is at once obstinate and teachable; he
is not _fin_ but he throws a terrible light on all things; without
being "_finto_" (feigned) he puts self-interest first. He is both
ingenuous and suspicious; to his overweening pride he joins
considerable diffidence; and the tongue which babbles of his personal
affairs is the tongue of a man who has a profound distrust of his
neighbour.
A fine critic with a child's simplicity, he is sceptical and
superstitious, credulous and incredulous, seeing the works of the
oracle but allowing it to deceive him. Joined to his indifference is a
faculty for staking his all on some absurd punctilio: his interest in
ideas is greater than in many parts of Italy, his ambitions and
pleasures more materialist. The changes which the Roman has witnessed
in unchanging Rome are met in himself by changeableness and fickleness
of purpose, though the conception of the majestic, the grandiose, the
eternal is always there. What are we to say of a people who can unite
the pettiest spite with a magnanimous tolerance?
The denizen of the eternal city is proverbially _campanilista_, which
may be translated "attached to the village pump"; and while on the
other hand he has a sense of public decorum unequalled in Europe, the
_blasé_ Roman fritters time and talents in petty preoccupations, in
distractions which are neither dignified nor stately, and eats and
gambles to show his distrust of human effort in general, of all human
achievement since the incomparable days when his heroes walked the
earth.
The Roman does not merge in you, and he no longer imposes himself on
you. He is not free of obsequiousness; and such customs as the
_baciamano_ (hand-kissing) are said to derive from the fact that the
Romans have been "the hosts of Europe" and have learnt to depend on
its bounty. A readier explanation is certainly afforded in that aspect
of Catholic Christianity which has always encouraged personal
humiliations and servilism in the inferior clergy and the laity: but
perhaps the real explanation is to be found in the fact that the
present day Roman is the descendant of the Empire, not of the
Republic, and Christianity, as we know, easily adopted as its own the
servilisms of the later Empire, with those Byzantine proclivities for
despotism and adulation which at last led the independent Roman to
burn his incense before the "genius" of the most infamous of the
Caesars.
_The Romans and the "Italians"_
It is said that the Roman belittles things, that he is an easy
despiser. Perhaps the gift of _criterion_ nourished among the
grandeurs of classical and Christian Rome is a sorry preparation for
enthusiasm over the sights to be seen in other men's cities. The fact
too that his pride sometimes forbids his stooping to means which
ensure the success of his "Italian" brother who comes fortune-seeking
to Rome, joined to his sincerity and hatred of humbug are, he thinks,
the reasons why as a rule he is cordially detested by other Italians.
The "clericals" have another explanation; the Romans are hated,
according to them, because they would take no part in the doings which
led to the union of Italy and the invasion of Rome. We may give a
little weight to all these reasons and yet understand that the Roman
is disliked on other counts. His pride, so think other Italians, is
altogether too immoderate for his achievements; and when they entered
Rome they found a people devoid of the mental and moral qualities
which make fine manners--a certain amount of self-forgetting and
graciousness of mind.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ARA COELI FROM THE FORUM
The ever-open door of the popular Franciscan Church on the Capitol
hill, which became in the middle ages the centre of the civic life
of the Roman people. See pages 6, 57.]
After "the Italians" entered the city, these provincial animosities
waxed fast and furious. Men from the north were dubbed _buzzuri_,
Neapolitans got nicknamed _cafoni_, and to this day a residence of
twenty or thirty years does not preserve the hapless "_forestiere_"
and his family from such epithets as _buzzuri_ and _villani_ if they
presume to come to words with "a Roman of Rome." On the other hand
"the Italians" returned these compliments with interest: the Romans
were unlicked cubs, _maleaucati_, lazy, ignorant--the proud tetragram
S.P.Q.R. was rendered by the Neapolitans _Sono Porci Questi Romani_
"these Romans are pigs"; while the Roman, finding in the Neapolitan
a man still dirtier than himself, retorted that the "Neapolitans' sky
is beautiful, and it is clean, because they can't reach it" ("Il cielo
di Napoli è bello, ed è pulito, perchè non arrivano a sporcarlo").
At the same time it is an indubitable fact that Italians who live
among the Romans come to prefer them to their other compatriots; and I
have heard this preference expressed by people so far apart as an
educated Piedmontese and an uneducated Calabrese. Perhaps they learn
from the Romans tolerance, the smallness of small things, and the
greatness of great ones. Perhaps they realise that the Roman has
learnt with an admirable patience and teachableness the new lessons
that have been put before him. Thrown from easy circumstances into the
vortex of the struggling life of the new capital--overtaxed and
underfed--he has suffered as much as the newcomers for a political
change which he demanded less loudly than they; and it is to his fair
credit that a revolution has taken place in Rome without bloodshed,
without violence, without undue bitterness, and that the element of
crime and lawlessness has not been supplied by him. The Roman is not a
hero, and not a saint, but neither is he a _Camorrista_ and _mafioso_
like the men of the South, nor a _teppista_[5] like the men of the
North.
[5] The _Teppa_ and the _Camorra_ are respectively institutions of
the north and south of the peninsula. The former is recruited
exclusively from the lowest classes, and is nothing less than a
league of the ill-conditioned bent on every sort of evil deed. The
_Camorra_--like the _Mafia_--is more akin to a secret society, and
to those factionist practices which are eminently characteristic of
Italy. In this sense the _Camorra_ is a national institution, which
infects every Italian enterprise, and functions in every Italian
theatre. The _Mafia_, like the _Camorra_, is widespread in Naples
and Sicily and counts men of all ranks among its members. None of
these were ever Roman institutions; and the _teppisti_ who now
afflict Rome are an importation from the north.
_Roman Customs and Roman Satire_
The customs of the Romans have been depicted by the inimitable art of
Pinelli, their ways of thinking and feeling by Belli in his sonnets
and in the modern sonnets of Pascarella. Here the satire, the
cynicism, the rude intellect, the ignorance, the self-interest, meet
us in every picture.
Nothing and nobody have ever escaped the Roman satire, which turns
everything into ridicule and burlesque. From the end of the fifteenth
century the torso called after the tailor Pasquino, and the statue of
Marforio kept up a running fire of wit and mockery. When Pope Sixtus
V. who was of the humblest origin made his sisters countesses, Pasquin
appeared in a dirty shirt. Asked by Marforio the reason, he replied
the next day, "_Perchè la mia lavandaia è diventata contessa_,"
"because my washerwoman has become a countess." Pius VI. encumbered
Rome with inscriptions recording his "munificence"; when bread became
dear Pasquin seized the occasion to exhibit a tiny loaf with the
legend _munificentia Pii Sexti_; and when Urban VIII. died the
following epitaph alluding to the bees in his coat of arms, recorded
his nepotism:
How well he fed his bees
How ill he fed his sheep.
All this is very unlike the ideas held by some Catholics who cry
"outrage" at the least criticism, and would consider the jests of
Pasquin and Marforio sufficient to keep the Pope a prisoner in the
Vatican. The popes thought differently; and preserved what face they
could under the stinging satire of the Romans.
Pasquin gave place to the _capo-comico_ Cassandrino, who was
delighting every class in Rome at Palazzo Fiano in the Corso when the
Italians broke upon the scene.
It must be remembered that the Roman would never accept servile
occupations; the industries he chose were perforce those which
required no plant and no capital, but also those which left him
independent--such were the making of Roman pearls and mosaics,
watchmaking, the favourite crafts of butcher, tanner, and carter, or
the river industries of fisherman, boatman, and wharf porter. The most
picturesque of his amusements were the dance, the mandoline, the lute,
the song and serenade, and that improvisation for which he was always
famous. One may still see the _tarantella_ danced on the "Spanish
steps" in May by the artists' models, dressed in the old Roman costume
which persisted till Napoleonic times--the half Spanish dress of the
girls and the short velvet jacket, feathered hat, and knee-breeches of
the youths.
When the Roman railway was built, things were conducted in truly
homely fashion; the train which was timed to leave at 10.30 was still
in the station at 11. When at length it got under way, it might be
put back again to land two peasants who had got into the wrong train.
If you fumed and fretted, you were told to remember how long the
journey would have taken before the day of railways. The Roman indeed
had then and has now no sense of time--least of all has he learnt the
proverb which he supposes is ever on the lips of our countrymen
"_times_ is money." If you enquire of a Roman the hour of mass he
replies "About ten, or half-past, or eleven--thereabouts." The
shopkeeper, the waiter in a café, used to take no notice whatever of
you when you entered his premises; he continued tranquilly to read his
paper or finish his cigar, and only marvelled that there could in your
opinion be any reason sufficiently urgent to warrant your disturbing
these occupations. The Roman's time is as eternal as his city, and one
of the lessons he has yet to learn is its value for other things than
money-making. No one answers a letter; your lawyer or your banker
think themselves as unobliged to satisfy your curiosity as to the fate
of your cheque or your business as the butcher and the baker. The
Roman learns on his moral side, but remains so obtuse on the material
side as to be a perpetual illustration of the reputation he has for
strong-headedness, for "putting Trajan's column in his head," and
refusing to budge like a mule. The Romans indeed are haunted by the
past, and they are perhaps the people of Europe who have least grip on
the present.
[Illustration: IN THE CHURCH OF ARA COELI
See pages 57, 230-31, and interleaf, page 138.]
It is in their folklore, the popular rhymes and tales, the customs and
amusements of the people, that we realise that no loyalty or
reverence can exist by the side of that passion for laying bare; and
understand the coarseness which waits on the wide-eyed gaze of the
Roman, unsparing and gross, because it is the result of what Ricasoli
has called "the real poverty of the poor"--a moral poverty. The Roman
goes to see some tight-rope dancers and describes the treat it was for
him:
Above all there's the great pleasure of the height,
For if any one of them were to fall,
Nothing in the world could save him.
He goes to the play. This is his impression of the tragedy:
The last act when he kills himself and her
I can tell you was just satisfying
(_M' ha proprio soddisfatto_).
Or take his summary of the problems life presents:
... _a sto paese tutto er busilli_
_Sta ner magnà allo scrocco e ddì orazione._
"The whole difficulty in this life is how to eat without paying
for it, and to get your prayers said."
But the scene may change, and the same Roman is called upon to go
forth into the campagna with the beneficent _confraternità dell'
Orazione e Morte_ in search of the body of some victim of violence. He
is found _pancia all' aria_ and brought back to his family; but amidst
the keen observation of all that happens, of the situation, there is
not a pitiful or generous sentiment; the scenes suggest nothing of
interest but the faithful gross record of purely external
impressions. Yet these men have trudged along the heavy roads, up and
down, stumbling and struggling through the dark night to perform the
act of pity which teaches them, apparently, so little.
Tragedy, comedy, a funeral, a marriage, the visit to your dead, the
game of hazard, the incidents of an assassination, all these things
come under the same clear, coarse, unintimate, unloving observation of
a people who hold, wisely enough, that "L'occhi so' fatti pe'
guardà"--the eyes are made for looking--but who care as little how
they look as they trouble to select what shall be looked upon.
"_Che bella giornata; che peccato che non s' impicchi nessuno_" is the
traditional greeting to a fine day, repeated even now with a modern
humorous sense of its ghastliness. "What a fine day! what a pity no
one is going to be hanged!" And the Roman's liking for distraction and
noise is not sated even when he goes to bed. Before 1870 serenaders
waked, and charmed, the sleeping city; but the Roman who is supposed
to have been "killed between a policeman and official red tape," still
reminds us that he is not so very dead after all, or that the _guardia
"non s' è fatto viva,"_ for he now roars down the thoroughfares in the
small hours of the night, thus procuring for himself the pleasure of
disturbing you--a form of recreation with which even the police have
too much sympathy to interfere. For the Roman tolerates other men's
lawlessness but has no respect for their liberty.
_The "Coltello" and Crime_
As with children who cannot "play the game," his games of chance
degenerate into quarrelling and killing. The terrible habit of
carrying, stowed away in a pocket at the back of the trousers, or up
the sleeve, what the Romans call "the instrument" gives them a ready
means of converting hot blood into hot deed. The _coltello_ used to
be, and still is at times, the favourite gift of a girl to her
lover--to have used it with deadly effect is in her eyes a necessary
sign of prowess, and to feel it always ready is in his sight the
welcome earnest of power to assert his virility. Italian crime is
committed in hot blood; sudden rage or "love" supply the motive, and
there is very little of the premeditated cold-blooded crime of which
Dickens gives us an example in the details of Nancy's murder in
_Oliver Twist_. The worst crimes of violence, however, are brought
about from motives so futile as to seem incredible when they are
mirrored in some ghastly assassination. It is enough to disagree with
your comrade, to win a litre of wine from him, to refuse to withstand
the police--to find yourself on the way to _Sant' Antonio_ or the
_Consolazione_ with three inches of steel in your stomach, nay not
unfrequently in your back. Primitive, terrible, childish, barbaric,
this love of blood, this power of "seeing red" in a quarrel, has made
the Italian the bravo of Europe, and makes the total of Italian
homicides at the present day exceed those in England, Germany,
Belgium, France, and Austria put together. Ninety-five homicides for
every million of the population contrast in Italy with six for every
million in England. In the time of the Venetian pope Clement XIII., in
the middle of the eighteenth century, the proportion of homicides in
Rome was twenty-five times higher than this.
Is the Italian more cruel, more brutal, more wanton than his fellows?
To the first two questions I should answer No, to the last, Yes. The
cruelties of the French Revolution, the coarse brutalities of England
even down to the century just passed, the horrors recently revealed in
the German army, would at no time have found their counterpart in
Italy. But the Italian--the Roman--is wanton, he is an egoist who
sates his impulses without any reference at all to the other people
and the other interests involved. He is wanton, for he lacks the sense
of personal responsibility; wanton, for he carries on life and
government with no regard to justice. The Italian is a child of
nature, a combination of his own two conceptions of "faun"-like
irresponsible grace and "satyr"-like animality; an undisciplined
creature living in the conditions of modern civilisation. But although
the Italians are a vital people, a people alert on the side of the
self-protecting instincts, and with the egoism of the vital
temperament, they are not an inhumane people: they have in abundance
the imaginative sympathy which instructs and softens, and if they lack
the sense of justice they are in some ways more merciful than we.
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT (SAGRO SPECO)
AT SUBIACO
See interleaf, pages 82 and 86.]
No one can understand the disposition of the Italian in any part
of the peninsula who does not appreciate in it a certain
mildness--something expressed by the Italian _mitezza_ but not by
our English _meekness_--which preserves him from excesses from which
other peoples are not free. The Romans of antiquity boasted no such
sentiments; from that cruel period there has come down to us one story
of humanity--the humanity of a dog; the compassion shown by a dog for
one of a group of victims executed in the neighbouring Mamertine
prison, and callously thrown out upon the steps of the highway of
civilisation--the Roman Forum. But as a population the Romans of the
modern city are not cruel.
If you look in upon the Roman as he watches the public torture of
prisoners in the first part of last century you will have the story in
brief of his irresponsibility, his unstrenuous attitude towards all
such matters. He shrieks with delight at the writhings of the victims,
but will shout with pleasure if one of them succeeds in making good
his escape. Little has been done to instruct the spirit of the
ignorant Roman, yet few such scenes of repulsive cruelty to animals as
Naples and Florence present are to be laid at his door; and the best
of the population need fear no competitors in human and merciful
sentiment. What the country cries out for is for these better
sentiments to have the force of a public opinion--a civilising agent
as yet completely absent in Italy. No force in the country helps the
Italian to that "self-reverence" the lack of which Mrs. Barrett
Browning discerned in him. Nowhere in Europe is callousness to human
life so great;[6] nowhere in Europe, writes an enlightened Italian
priest, is there so much cruelty to animals as here; yet
so unaccustomed are the people to that best form of moral
education--moral suasion--a gradual civilising of spirit, that they
are incapable of putting two and two together, and still urge the
ignorant argument that if you inculcate humanity to animals while
there is so much to be done for men, you are somehow wronging the
latter; they suggest, apparently, that by kicking a dog you are
somehow helping a baby. It is to be hoped that the thesis of the
priest above quoted, that the protection of animals is a real means of
education, may be accepted boldly by the better clergy now that Leo.
XIII. has called such protection _altamente umano e cristiano_.
Visitors are outraged by the disgusting cruelties which even the
children in Italy are the first to practise, and no amount of
sophistry will make them believe that such conduct is decent in the
superior animal. That secular Italy will be obliged to take up the
subject is certain, and one hopes that then the clergy will return to
the simpler spontaneous religious feeling of the country--marred by
scholastic dogmas--which gave a patron saint to the lesser creation,
and which still places in every stable and cattle-shed of Umbria the
image of "S. Antony, protector of animals."
[6] The zone which supplies the maximum of crimes of violence is
Lazio (Latium).
_Law and Justice_
Those who know what it is to feel "righteous indignation" must suffer
in a country where justice is not understood and not appreciated by
any one. The Italians still know how to make laws, and legislation
here is ahead not only of the sentiment of the country but of the laws
of most European peoples--what they have forgotten is how to
administer them. It is no exaggeration to say that at present Italian
tribunals exist for the sake of the criminal; absurd "extenuating
circumstances," which can hardly be taken seriously, are always
forthcoming, and as a distinguished Italian declared in the Senate the
guilty man here must indeed be an unfortunate wretch (_un povero
disgraziato_) if he cannot manage to escape a condemnation. In place
of the inexorable penalty which would alone meet the case in a land
where lawlessness has prescriptive rights and where capital punishment
does not exist, there is a pleasing uncertainty about all penalties.
With a poor sense of humour as conspicuous as the poor sense of
justice, a bench of judges will gravely listen to a succession of
false witnesses, vulgar perjurers, mere play-actors, who spring up
hydra-headed in support of every villain or rascal, be the matter a
murder or an affair of two francs.
The terrorisation exercised by the knife and the _vendetta_ has caused
the Roman for centuries to enter into a shell of reserve; if an
assassination takes place--in broad daylight or in the dark, it does
not matter--no one sees it; the _guardia_ arrives round the corner in
time to make the "legal verifications" as soon as the misdeed is
safely accomplished, and if the victim shrieked first neither he nor
any one else happened to hear it. The desire to live in peace, seeing
nothing, hearing nothing, making no enemies, has affected a whole
people--with the result that the protected person is the malefactor.
The more audacious he is, the more he affects in the city the
_allures_ of the brigand, the more successful he will be in evading
the law, in gaining the support rendered by the silence or the false
witness of all who encounter him. The people, writes Aristide Gabelli,
"seek by silence and dissimulation their own safety rather than the
public safety at their own proper peril." The consequence is, of
course, that there is not the least co-operation with the law. The
Roman, indeed, feels humiliated by the necessity for seeking its aid;
government and law are abhorrent to him, and he alludes to the former
as "_questo porco di governo_"--if you are unable to defend yourself
the alternative is not the arm of the law but to stop at home.
The police service of Rome includes three corps--the carabineers, who
hunt in couples, in three-cornered hat and cloak and sword; the
municipal guard who wear a cocked hat, with cocks' feathers on feast
days, and a black uniform turned up with orange; the _Guardie di
Pubblica Sicurezza_, in black piped with blue, and a _capote_. These
last, called _questurini_ because they depend from the _Questura_, are
disliked by all Romans who call them "_avanzi di galera_," gaolbirds
and assassins. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find men of
civil condition to enter the corps; such work is eminently distasteful
to a Roman, and "set a thief to catch a thief" is the principle on
which he supposes the _governo_ acts.
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF SAN LORENZO LORICATO AT S. BENEDICT'S,
SUBIACO
See interleaf, page 86.]
Crispi tried to form one police force for the city; at present if you
apply to a _guardia di P.S._ your business is sure to concern the
absent municipal guard, while the carabineers do nothing but support
each other in the arduous task of standing at street corners watching
the follies of men, criminals and victims.[7] To the municipal
guard--the popular force, called _pizzardoni_--is entrusted the
maintenance of decency and order in the city, and they often brave the
wrath of their fellow citizens in its accomplishment. All matters not
connected with municipal legislation pertain to the State police, who
arrest thieves and act in criminal affairs. Soldiers, too, have
certain civil duties; they are frequently called upon to act as
police, they are called out to help if a house falls down, to form the
_cordon_ in case of a fire, and may in certain circumstances arrest a
malefactor.
[7] Very different is their rôle in the country districts, which
they police entirely, and with courage and devotion.
The soldiers form the most respectable and the only disciplined part
of the male population in a city like Rome. One often sees, of course,
battalions of men from all the Italian provinces, youths of twenty
just enrolled, and among them there is seldom a vicious face. For
these are the mothers' sons, and they compare very favourably with our
"Tommies." The same cannot be said of the other youths who throng the
city. Perhaps seven-tenths of the crime is committed by lads in their
teens and early twenties; I have heard a Senator declare that there
are boys of twelve in the prisons who are already _perfetti
criminali_; and surely nowhere in Europe are boys and youths worse
trained. The most appalling phenomenon, however, is the existence of a
degraded type, of all and every age, usually belonging to the
decently-clothed classes, whose outrages on decency were described by
an Italian in a Roman newspaper as "enough to sicken the coarsest
navvy." These practices, according to some old Romans, are one of the
results of the French occupation, but such an explanation of
occurrences which are to be met with nowhere else in Europe or out of
it, must be taken with all reserve. Gaolbirds like these molest women
with impunity; and the _amor proprio_ of the vile nature awakes just
in time to heap further outrage when this molestation is resented.
Women have always been hustled in the Roman streets, and as Italian
ladies are only now beginning to walk unaccompanied, the foreign
visitors bear the brunt of the amiable practice still in vogue of not
moving on the narrow pavements, but leaving the lady to take the
gutter. Such conduct from men to women contrasts strangely with the
courtesy so often extended even to beggars; and a woman of the people,
a servant or a porteress, will invite the beggar who is interrupting
your conversation to desist, with such phrases as: "Move aside a
little; Do me this pleasure."
_Courtship and Marriage_
It will be astonishing to many, no doubt, to hear that courtship in
Italy is a prosaic affair. Of passion there is plenty and to spare,
but the tragic element does not enter every day, and then no sentiment
comes in to disturb matters. After the first _etiquette_ of the
situation is over, and the letters vowing that you have _il paradiso
nel cuor_--which are duly discounted by the peasant _fiancée_--have
been written, things run uneventfully enough. A young Abruzzese
servant--from the most saving population of Italy--became enthusiastic
when recounting the virtues of his proposed bride to his mistress,
which culminated with: "Signorina mia, _è piena di biancheria_"--"she
is full of house linen."
There is among all Italian women more dignity in their relations with
men than there is among English women. The Italian woman has a noble
reticence, a power of self-protection, which imposes itself on lover
and husband. She is not accustomed, as we are in modern times, to
walking abroad unaccompanied, and there is no doubt that here the
Englishwoman shows a self-respecting demeanour which is everywhere
recognised as entitling her to all the respect she feels for herself.
What I speak of is the Italian woman's attitude towards the man to
whom she is engaged or married, in comparison with the Englishwoman's.
The former will not serve her husband as an English or German _frau_
will; nor, before marriage, will she lay herself out to keep the man
at any cost as the English girl of the servant class will do. Here
Italian self-respect is greater than English. The Roman woman of the
lowest class habitually displays this personal dignity and reticence
in the streets; and nowhere in Rome will you see such scenes as are
to be witnessed on any bank holiday at a seaside place in England, on
Saturday evenings in London, or in country towns after dark, among men
and women of the lower middle class.
The Italian woman will avoid scandal to herself and hers at whatever
cost; she will suffer any deprivation or loss to compass this, to keep
her trouble from the eyes of the curious world. There is none of that
vulgarity of soul--consummated in modern times among Anglo-Saxon
peoples--which hastens to wash dirty linen in public. This is one
reason why divorce is so distasteful in Italy, and especially to the
women, who would one and all suffer individually in order to bind the
man, to preserve the family and its honour, in preference to the
enjoyment of the personal freedom which the looser bond implies.
[Illustration: STEPS OF THE DOMINICAN NUNS' CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO
AND SISTO
This and the church of Santa Caterina da Siena form a Dominican
corner of Rome on a spur of the Quirinal. The garden of Palazzo
Aldobrandini is seen in the background. See pages 6, 171.]
A traditional characteristic of the Roman is that he has always given
a fairer share of life to women than other Italians. Since the day
when Romulus called the Roman _curiae_ after the thirty Sabine women
who had thrown themselves into the breach for the Romans, and
conferred on them special privileges, the Roman woman has played a
dignified part in the life of the city. As priestesses the vestals
possessed privileges shared by none but the emperor; and the idea of
the Roman matron, the wife not "in the hand" of her husband, was a
Roman contribution to social ethics two thousand years before the idea
occurred to Englishmen. There is nothing that antiquity has handed
down to us more dignified than the seated female figures in Roman
museums. These views of women ceased, naturally enough, when Rome
which had been the greatest political became the greatest clerical
city in the world; but the Roman tradition was handed on in the
Italian universities outside Rome, which admitted women five hundred
years before they were allowed to share in the benefits of those
colleges of Cambridge and Oxford which their money and influence had
done so much to endow.
The women of the people still, however, enjoy in Rome "an almost
unlimited liberty." The Roman man shares his recreations with his
wife, and the wife-kicking which is such a plague spot in the life of
the common people in England, is not one of them. English fair-play to
women is indeed merely a matter of class; it has never penetrated to
the lower strata, and in the English middle as in the English lower
class the men are still "the lords of creation." This conjugal
relation in fact remains a bulwark of a certain coarseness which no
one can deny to the Englishman, and which is registered in the
Italian's firm opinion that English wives are bought and sold in open
market. In other parts of Italy, however, in Calabria and the Abruzzi
(even Piedmont is conspicuous for want of gallantry), the wife is
regarded simply as a chattel, and the brutal husband aims his blow at
his wife's face in order that the neighbours may recognise _il segno
del marito_. The sufficient explanation _è suo_ (it is his own) is the
same which will be given you if a youth maltreats a dog; and in both
cases the moral quality of the argument is as ignoble as it can be.
Socially, the talents of the Romans are not higher than our own. The
Italian people have not the social gifts which are the _privilegium_
of their Latin neighbour. On the society of ancient Rome was
superimposed clerical Rome--a city where the sex which makes society
was nowhere, where the _pezzo grosso_ in every drawing-room was a
Roman cardinal, not a great lady; and there can be little doubt that
this has not proved a civilising influence on the Roman. But in
natural gifts of disposition the Italian greatly excels us; and in no
English gathering can the charm be approached which Italians will
impart to an _alfresco_ party, an impromptu _festa_--often including a
great mixture of classes--when the simplicity, the unfailing good
humour, and the successful efforts to please are a lesson to the
Englishman. The Italians by gathering together make a natural _festa_,
as by walking they make a natural procession--something that is
graceful and unselfconscious, absolutely simple without missing
stateliness.
_The Romans and Art_
The art history of Rome is as distinct from that of the rest of Italy
as is its social, its religious, or its political history. We look in
vain to Rome for a first-rate picture, a first-rate poem, even--with
the exception of Palestrina--for a first-rate composer.[8] The fatal
facility which hampers all Italians, who can achieve with little
labour what less gifted peoples travail to attain, meets in the Roman
that curious inconclusiveness, that strange universal sterility, which
begins with the character itself. Nevertheless the Roman has not
failed to give us what it is his function to give--he has always been
a fine-art critic; every great thing has come before him, and of all
he has been an incorruptible judge, seldom deceived, using all the
powers of _finezza_, of ridicule, of satire, and of fine judgment at
his command, to raise or to create a standard of fine work. If there
is one art which may be said to be not only the gift of Italy but to
have remained Italian, it is singing; and here the Roman has kept in
the forefront both as critic and executant. The Italian really _loves
a voice_--the Englishman loves the sentimental rendering of a theme;
and the criterion of vocal sound which the Italian possesses, he
finds, perhaps, in his own throat. "Roman throats and chests must, in
some particular way, be differently constructed from those of other
people" wrote Walter Pater; and the resonant voices of Italians may be
due to the absence of the protruding German and English chin which
captures and muffles so many of our vocal tones.
[8] _Clementi_, indeed, was a Roman, and a Roman buried in the
cloisters of Westminster Abbey.
The classical Roman had no taste: we wonder to-day that the Roman,
dazzled with rich marbles, should adopt the expedient of painted
columns in a scheme of decoration; but he did the same in the house of
Germanicus on the Palatine. That there is a distinction between taste
and artistic sensibility there can be no doubt whatever, and it is
equally true that the former is often mistaken for the latter. The
subject is an interesting one; but here we can only record the two
facts--that the Roman all through the centuries has been a sensitive
to artistic impressions, and a fine judge of the arts, and that he has
never possessed that gift of a certain refinement of sentiment--taste.
After all that has been said of the Romans, it is sad to have to
record that it will soon be difficult to find genuine Roman families.
The old "_Romano de Roma_"--the man whose ancestors, like himself,
were born _all' ombra del Cupolone_, under the shadow of the great
cupola--is disappearing, giving place to more successful, more
industrious, and 'cuter men--preserving up to the last moment of his
life those habits and customs which cause him and his house to suggest
Noah and his ark to the more modern Italian; but also learning up to
the last hour of his life new ideas, such as must also have importuned
the patriarch and his family when the waters receded leaving him and
the ark high and dry on Ararat, and the daughters of men began to
weave their toils round the sons of God.
[Illustration: PORTA SAN PAOLO
Gate in the Aurelian wall rebuilt by Belisarius. This is the gate of
the Ostian Way leading to the basilica of S. Paul's--one of the
seven great pilgrimage churches--of which the Kings of England were
Protectors.]
CHAPTER VIII
ROMAN PRINCELY FAMILIES
To be a patrician of Rome is to possess one of the proudest of titles,
and from the senator of the ancient city to the prince of to-day the
aristocracy of Rome has been one of its most vital and characteristic
institutions.
Though the Roman cardinal as a prince of the Church has always been
admitted, whatever his origin, within the pale, the Roman nobility
with the rarest exceptions has never swelled its ranks with newcomers
owing their tides to acquired wealth or successful public life, but,
conservative and exclusive, preserves the traditions of the past and
forms a society unlike any other in Europe.
The greater number of the princely families whose names are familiar
to every sojourner in Rome date their connection with the city from
the fifteenth century and onwards, when the popes ceased to be chosen
from among the Romans, and a new aristocracy grew up, the creation of
successive pontiffs, who, themselves reigning but not hereditary
sovereigns, wished to raise their relatives to a rank second only to
their own.
Others trace their descent from some mediæval chieftain, or are feudal
in origin, and these alone are indigenous to the city and its
surroundings, and their history is indissolubly woven into the records
of Rome's past. For many dark centuries, during a barbarous period of
bloodshed crime and cruelty, the history of Rome was what her great
nobles made it; and they in their turn rose to fame and power or sank
into oblivion, leaving no traces or but the scantiest records of their
fate. The great mediæval family of Conti, Counts of Segni, whose race
gave four popes to Rome, among them the great Innocent III., have
disappeared from history, leaving as a magnificent monument to their
greatness the huge tower which bears their name.
In the twelfth century, the Sabine Savelli and the Jewish Pierleoni
were great and prominent. Streets and piazzas called after them in the
region near the crowded little Piazza Montanara testify to their
importance. The Savelli dwelt in a castle in the Via di Monserrato. It
was afterwards turned into a prison, the _Corte Savella_, and here for
a time the unhappy Beatrice Cenci and her accomplices were confined.
Both Savelli and Pierleoni successively occupied a stronghold erected
within the ancient walls of the theatre of Marcellus, and a fortified
palace which stood against it, now Orsini property. One of the Savelli
popes, Honorius IV., built himself a castle on the Aventine, and at
one period the whole of the hill was entrenched and fortified, the
ancient temple of _Libertas_ on its summit being transformed into a
citadel. These immense buildings have crumbled away, and the sole
monuments that remain to record the past greatness of this family are
the tombs of Pope Honorius, of his father and mother, and of other
Savellis in their chapel in the church of Ara Coeli on the Capitol.
The Pierleoni, a rich and prolific race, descendants of a learned Jew
convert of the time of Pope Leo IX., filled important posts and made
alliances with the great houses of Rome, and in 1130 a member of this
Jewish family was elected and reigned several years in the Vatican as
the antipope Anacletus--an event unparalleled in history. After the
thirteenth century this name also slips out of historical records and
is heard of no more.
The ancient consular race of the Frangipani have left to Rome some
fine monuments in the church of San Marcello in the Corso, and the
name is still borne by a Marquess in Udine, but they are no longer
numbered amongst the princely houses. They earned their appellation of
_bread-breakers_ from having distributed bread in a great famine, but
in the middle ages their name spelt terror rather than benevolence.
They were a power not lightly to be reckoned with. Great allies of the
papal party, they more than once gave sanctuary to fugitive popes in
their strong _Turris Cartularia_, the ruins of which can still be seen
near the church of S. Gregory. In the thirteenth century this tower
fell into the hands of the Imperialists, and was utterly destroyed
with all the archives which had been stored there for safety. It
formed an outpost in a chain of fortifications with which the
Frangipani and their allies the Corsi enclosed a large portion of the
city. Their main stronghold was built amongst the ruins of the
Palatine, with flanking towers on the Colosseum and on the triumphal
arches of Constantine, Titus, and Janus. From this dominating position
they could take the field or rush upon their foes in the city at the
head of hundreds of armed retainers. Another mediæval family, the
Anguillara, has been merged in the Orsini, leaving a solitary tower in
Trastevere to commemorate a once great and powerful race.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM IN A STORM]
But of all the feudal princes of Rome none played so conspicuous a
part as the Orsini and Colonna, and this not alone in the history of
their own city, for their names were famous throughout Europe for many
centuries. These two great families were hereditary enemies and
belonged to rival factions. The Colonna were Ghibellines,
Imperialists, the Orsini Guelphs, supporters of the papacy, and when
they were not fighting in support of their political parties they were
engaged in private feuds on their own account. While in other cities
of Italy feudal tyranny was gradually giving way before the more
enlightened government of independent republics, Rome was too weak to
struggle against her oppressors. Deserted and neglected for nearly a
century by her lawful sovereigns the popes, at best ruled by a
vacillating and disorderly government, the city lay at the mercy of
her great barons who scorned all law and authority and asserted and
maintained their complete personal independence at the point of the
sword, while they swelled the ranks of their retainers with bandits
and cut-throats to whom they gave sanctuary in return for military
service. Great and prosperous Rome had become a small forsaken town
within a desolate waste, surrounded by a girdle of ancient walls far
too large for the city it protected. Amphitheatres, mausoleums of
Roman Emperors, temples, theatres, were converted into strongholds.
Such of the churches as were not fortified were crumbling into ruin,
and everywhere bristled loop-holed towers from which the nobles could
defy one another, and which commanded the entrances to dark filthy and
winding streets. At frequent intervals the despondent apathy of the
citizens would be rudely disturbed by a call to arms, and to the sound
of hoarse battle-cries, the clashing of weapons upon steel corslet and
helmet, and the waving of banners with the rival Ghibelline and Guelph
devices of eagle and keys, bands of Orsini and Colonna would rush
fighting through the narrow streets and across the waste spaces of the
city, would fall back and advance to fight again until, with the
darkness, they would retire behind their barred gateways, leaving
their dead as so much carrion in the streets.
These two families divided the greater part of Rome between them. The
Orsini held the field of Mars and the Vatican district from their
fortress in the ruins of the theatre of Pompey and their castle on
Monte Giordano. This is now Palazzo Gabrielli, and it retains its
portcullis and much of its mediæval appearance. Tor di Nona and Tor
Sanguigna were flanking towers to the Orsini stronghold. The Quirinal
hill was occupied by the Colonna, their great castle standing almost
on the same ground as their present palazzo, and they had an outlying
fortress in the mausoleum of Augustus near the river.
Occasionally a truce was patched up between the two families that they
might unite against a common enemy, and for a period they agreed that
two senators, one from each family, should be appointed to govern Rome
in the pope's absence. But these peaceful intervals were short lived.
On the slightest provocation, barricades would be run up, new
entrenchments dug, and civil war would break out afresh.
Again and again in their conflict with the Church the Colonna were
worsted in the struggle, their estates confiscated, and themselves,
root and branch, beggared and exiled; but there was a strength and
vitality about the race that no adversity could subdue. Pope Boniface
VIII., whose displeasure they had incurred, oppressed them for a
while. Six Colonna brothers were exiled, and their ancestral town of
Palestrina was razed to the ground by the Caetani, Boniface's
relatives and adherents, and a plough was driven over the site to
typify its permanent devastation. But a few years later the reckless
Sciarra Colonna broke into the Pope's castle at Anagni, and made him
prisoner with bitter taunts and reproaches. Later, Sciarra played a
conspicuous part in the coronation of Lewis the Bavarian, and in
gratitude for his services the Emperor allowed the single column of
the family coat of arms to be surmounted by a golden crown.
Greatest amongst the six brothers of this period was Stephen,
Petrarch's friend, an able man and good soldier who met prosperity and
adversity, poverty banishment and danger, throughout a long troubled
life, with the same calm resolution and intrepid courage. This Stephen
survived the last of his line--his two sons Stephen and Peter with two
grandsons being massacred after an unsuccessful skirmish against
Rienzo.
After Boniface's death, the Colonna came into their own again and
received one hundred thousand gold florins in compensation for their
losses, but Palestrina, which was later rebuilt, suffered again the
same fate and was torn down by order of Eugenius IV. within one
hundred and fifty years.
In the reign of Sixtus IV. Rome was again distracted by faction feuds.
The Pope, aided by the ever-ready Orsini, pursued the Colonna with
relentless hatred. Protonotary Lorenzo Colonna fell through treachery
into the hands of his enemy, and his friend Savelli was captured and
murdered on the spot for refusing to rejoice with the captors. Lorenzo
was tortured and beheaded, and the Orsini sacked and burnt all the
Colonna property in the town.
Other distinguished members of this distinguished family of a later
epoch were Vittoria Colonna, the poet-friend of Michael Angelo, and
Marc' Antonio, who commanded the papal fleet at Lepanto, and who was
given a triumphal entry into Rome after his victory.
Nothing is known of the origin of this famous race though it is
believed to have come originally from the banks of the Rhine. It first
appears in history in 1104, when the Lords of Colonna and Zagarolo
characteristically incurred the displeasure of Pope Paschal II. They
also owned part of Tusculum and were probably related to the Counts of
that place. Later, Palestrina became their principal stronghold and
they possessed Marino, Grotta Ferrata, Genazzano, and Paliano in the
Sabines, the last giving them their princely title. The family
produced many distinguished churchmen, but only one pope, Martin V.
Many daughters of the house took the veil, and in the year 1318 as
many as twelve had entered the convent of S. Silvestro in Capite,
which had been founded by the cardinal members of the family.
In 1490 a Colonna was appointed for the first time to be constable of
the kingdom of Naples, and it was popularly believed in Rome that the
Pope excommunicated the King of Naples every vigil of S. Peter (28th
June) because he had failed to proffer the tribute of his investiture.
The formula ran: "I curse and bless you," and as the curse was uttered
the Colonna palace trembled. This palace stands on the slopes of the
Quirinal; it is entered from the Piazza dei SS. Apostoli, but the
gardens cover the slopes of the hill as far as the Via del Quirinale,
bridges connecting palace and gardens crossing the Via della Pilotta
at frequent intervals. It was built by Martin V. for his personal use,
and contains a fine picture gallery and magnificent suite of state
rooms. After nearly eight centuries of life this family is still among
the greatest and most distinguished in Rome. One prince of the name is
now Syndic of the city, another shares the peaceful office of
Prince Assistant at the Pontifical throne with the descendant of his
ancient enemies, Filippo Orsini.
[Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS FROM THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
The arch which records the plenitude and the arch which records the
decadence of Roman power. See page 162, interleaf, pages 38, 234,
and pictures 12 and 66.]
The career of the Orsini race has been no less eventful, but this
family has now died out in many of its branches. In a metrical account
of the coronation of Boniface VIII., written by Cardinal St. George
and quoted by Gibbon, the Orsini are said to come from Spoleto. Other
writers believe them to have been of French origin, but at an early
date they became identified with the history of Rome, and in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries two members of the family became
popes, Celestin III. in 1191, and Nicholas III. in 1277. The last
Orsini pope was the Benedictine monk Benedict XIII. (1724).
In the sixteenth century the Orsini fell under the Pope's displeasure,
the head of the family was banished and his estates were confiscated.
This individual, Giordano Orsini Duke of Bracciano, became enamoured
of Vittoria Accoramboni, wife of Francesco Peretti, Sixtus V.'s
nephew. Vittoria was beautiful fascinating and unscrupulous, and
Giordano, no less unscrupulous, did not hesitate to rid himself of the
obstacles to his desires. His own wife he strangled in his castle at
Bracciano, and Francesco was set upon and murdered in the streets of
Rome by his orders and with the connivance of Vittoria and her
brother. Orsini and Vittoria were married, but their union was of
short duration. Sixtus V. had been meanwhile elected to the papacy,
and he lost no time in disgracing and banishing Giordano whose end in
exile is shrouded in mystery. Vittoria was shortly afterwards
surprised and brutally killed by her husband's relatives for the sake
of the Orsini inheritance.
The Orsini estates were at Bracciano, Anguillara, and Galera, but the
Bracciano property with the ducal title that went with it now belongs
to the Odescalchi. In Rome the Orsini still own and inhabit their
great palace near the portico of Octavia. It was designed by
Baldassare Peruzzi and was built within the ruins of the theatre of
Marcellus, the high ground upon which it stands being merely a heap of
fallen débris. It is approached through a gateway flanked by stone
bears, the emblem of the Orsini race.
Another mediæval family, the Gaetani or Caetani, Dukes of Sermoneta
and Princes of Caserta and Teano, is of Neapolitan origin. One of its
members became pope as Gelasius II. in 1118 and the first of the name
was military prefect under Manfred, King of Sicily, but the close
union of this family with Rome only dates from the reign of the
Gaetani pope, Boniface VIII. It was at this period also that the tomb
of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way was disguised with turrets and
battlements to serve the Gaetani as an outlying stronghold against
their enemies.
Of all the princely names which figure in the records of mediæval
Rome, none can claim a more venerable antiquity than the Annibaldi,
the Massimo, and the Cenci. The first, of the race of the great
Hannibal, are no longer extant. The Massimi, who derive their name
from the ancient family of Maximus, are Dukes of Rignano, Princes of
Roviano, and heirs to many other titles; they are still amongst the
greatest of Rome. The present prince lives in the family palace in the
Corso Vittorio Emanuele familiar to every tourist from its curved
façade and rows of columns, and still keeps up much of the princely
state and ceremony of a past age. The Cenci have become extinct in the
male line and the name is carried on by a distant branch as
Cenci-Bolognetti.
This family is first heard of in the person of Marcus Cencius, Prefect
of Pisa in the year 457 of Rome; and in 914 Johannes Cencius was
elected Pope as John X. In 1692 the Cenci were created Princes of
Vicovaro, a little mountain town in the Sabines, and in 1723 they
acquired the title and estates of Bolognetti by the marriage of
Virginius with an heiress of that name. With her came into the family
the dower-house, the graceful Palazzo Bolognetti-Cenci still standing
in the Piazza Pantaleone. The Bolognetti palace in the Piazza di
Venezia was sold to Prince Torlonia, and has just been destroyed to
make way for the colossal monument to Victor Emmanuel which is to
preside over Rome from the Capitol hill. The old Cenci palace, a few
years ago empty and deserted, but now government property, stands in
what was once the Jews' quarter of Rome, a forbidding pile eloquent of
its owner's tragic history. The family chapel close to it, San Tommaso
a' Cenci, dates from 1113 and was built by a Cenci who was Bishop of
Sabina at that time.
As these old families, "pure Romans of Rome," have died out, their
place has been taken by the aristocracy of papal origin, and though as
a rule natives of northern provinces, these newcomers have become
Roman in sympathies and have inherited the privileges and traditions
of the Roman patrician. Not only did each new pope bring his own
relatives to Rome in his train and grant them titles, but he also
gathered round him followers from his own province among whom he
distributed the great papal offices. Sometimes the period of greatness
thus bestowed was short-lived, in other cases a permanent aristocracy
was created and the papal offices became hereditary. Thus the Ruspoli
from father to son are Masters of the Sacred Hospice; the Colonna are
Assistant Princes; the Serlupi are Marshals of the Pope's Horse; the
Sforza have the hereditary right to appoint the standard-bearer of the
Roman people; the Chigi are Marshals of Conclave, replacing the
Savelli in this office who had held it for nearly five centuries.
Some of these families were nobles in their own province. The
Boncompagni were a noble family of Bologna. Coming to Rome with
Gregory XIII. in 1572, they were created Dukes of Sora and later
Princes of Piombino and of Venosa.
[Illustration: MEDIÆVAL HOUSE AT TIVOLI]
The Ludovisi were nobles of Pisa, the Borghese patricians of Siena.
This great family came to Rome with Paul V. in the early seventeenth
century, and was granted princely rank with the title of Sulmona. In
the middle of the eighteenth century, Marc' Antonio Borghese
married a Salviati heiress and at that period was owner of the
beautiful Villa Borghese with its museum and priceless collection of
statues, of the great palace by the Tiber, of the villas Mondragone
and Aldobrandini at Frascati, and of thirty-six estates in the
campagna, building and endowing at the same period the rich Borghese
chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At a later date, Camillo Borghese married
Pauline Bonaparte and was appointed governor of Piedmont by Napoleon
I. Of late years this family has been almost ruined by reckless
building speculations, and the greater portion of their magnificent
possessions has been sold and alienated. The Aldobrandini and Salviati
are both off-shoots from this family.
The Barberini and Corsini are Florentines, and came to Rome with Urban
VIII. and Clement XII. The Barberini villa at Castel Gandolfo and the
palace in Rome are familiar to all visitors. The grounds of the
Corsini villa on the Janiculum have been recently converted into a
public drive; the Corsini palace in Trastevere on the river bank is
famous for its library and picture galleries. Opposite to it is the
Farnesina palace built in the sixteenth century by the rich banker
Agostino Chigi. Here it was that he gave a famous banquet and,
desiring to make a display of his enormous wealth, bade his lackeys
throw the silver dishes into the river at the end of each course under
the eyes of his astonished guests who did not guess that nets had been
cunningly laid to catch them as they sank.
The Albani kinsmen of Clement XI. came from Urbino; the Rospigliosi
from Pistoja with Clement IX.; the Odescalchi from Como with Innocent
XI.; the Doria Pamphili from Genoa.
This papal aristocracy occupied a unique position. Relatives of popes,
who were at the same time reigning princes, they assumed royal rank
and lived with a magnificence and luxury unsurpassed in Europe. In
addition to the titles of Roman nobility bestowed upon them with a
lavish hand, many of them became grandees of Spain and their names
were inscribed in the "golden book" of the Capitol.
They bought country estates and suburban villas and built great
palaces in the town. These stately Renaissance buildings, some of them
larger than many royal dwellings, are grouped at the base of the
Capitol and along the Corso, the most important and at one period the
only great street in Rome. The Palazzo di Venezia, the home of the
Venetian Paul II., the Altieri, the Grazioli, and the Bonaparte
palaces, the latter originally the property of the Rinuccini, stand, a
stately group, on the Piazza di Venezia and the Via del Plebiscito.
The series is continued along the Piazza dei SS. Apostoli with the
Colonna, the Balestra, the Odescalchi, and the Ruffo palaces.
Greatest among those in the Corso is the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. Here
also are the Ruspoli, Fiano, Chigi, Sciarra, Salviati, Ferraioli, and
Theodoli palaces, and before its demolition to enlarge the Piazza
Colonna, the Piombino. The Costaguti in the Piazza Tartaruga, the
Antici-Mattei, the Longhi and the Gaetani palaces, the latter in the
_Via delle Botteghe Oscure_, "the street of dark shops," are grouped
at the foot of a further slope of the Capitol. More to the west, stand
the huge Farnese palace the present seat of the French embassy and the
Cancelleria built by Cardinal Riario nephew of Sixtus IV. and still
papal property. The Simonetti and Falconieri palaces are built upon
the banks of the Tiber close by, and face Via Giulia.
Latest of all the great papal families to settle in Rome were the
Braschi, Pius VI.'s kinsmen, and they built a palace in the Piazza
Navona. Not far off are the Patrizi and Giustiniani palaces near the
French church of San Luigi in the street of the same name. The
Giustiniani are Earls of Newburgh in the peerage of Scotland through
the marriage in 1757 of the heiress of the title and estates to the
Prince Giustiniani of that date.
Great was the opulence and magnificence of the Roman princes. When
they issued forth into the city they were attended by mounted grooms
with staves while running footmen cleared a way before them. An army
of servants waited upon their needs, their stables were filled with
horses, and their coaches were wonderful equipages of gilding glass
and painting, costing thousands of francs. Powdered flunkeys in silk
stockings stood behind on the foot board, three on a prince's coach,
two on a cardinal's. One of these men carried an umbrella and a
cushion. For if during his drive the prince chanced to meet his
Holiness the Pope or a religious procession in which the Host was
carried, he would instantly stop his coach, and alighting would kneel
upon the ground, the cushion being placed by his servants under his
knees and the umbrella held over his bared head to protect it from the
sun.
Many of the Roman nobles had private theatres in their houses; they
were great collectors of books, bronzes, tapestries, and mosaics, and
the Roman private galleries of pictures and statues are unsurpassed.
The Borghese alone possessed four Raphaels as well as their famous
collection of statues. At the same time they were generous to the city
of their adoption. They threw open their beautiful parks and villas to
the people, they admitted the public to their galleries museums and
libraries, and they endowed hospitals asylums and orphanages. The
Roman ladies had always patronised and promoted works of charity.
Nevertheless the later custom, which persists to this day, of
personally visiting the poor and the hospitals began with Gwendoline
Talbot, the daughter of the last Catholic Earl of Shrewsbury, who as
the wife of Prince Borghese was the first of the Roman ladies to walk
alone at all hours, intent on her errands of mercy. The wit which made
her present a gold coin to a man who on one occasion followed her, was
the talk of the city. Her name is still a household word in Roman
mouths, and her tragic death when only twenty-four years old, leaving
four little children, one only of whom, the present Princess Piombino,
survived the infection which killed their mother, moved an entire
population.
[Illustration: ILEX AVENUE AND FOUNTAIN (_Fontana scura_), VILLA
BORGHESE]
Many of the Roman palaces are as big as barracks. The Palazzo
Pamphili-Doria can accommodate a thousand persons; but this was none
too large for a patriarchal style of living which in a modified form
survives to the present day. Much space was taken up by the great
libraries, museums, picture galleries and reception and state
banqueting halls. A small army of officials were housed within the
walls--steward, bailiff, major-domo, secretaries, accountants, all the
underlings necessary to the management of great and distant estates. A
wing would be set entirely apart for the Prince Cardinal, a cadet of
the house; the domestic chaplain would require a set of rooms; he
would say the daily mass in the private chapel of the palace but would
not dine with the family. The sons of the house would require tutors,
the daughters governesses and companions.
The great double gates of every Roman palace which are securely locked
and barred at night, lead into a central court. Round it are open
colonnades, sometimes in two stories, and in the centre a fountain
splashes amidst ferns and palms. A porter presides over the palace
gates, magnificent in a cocked hat knee breeches and long coat trimmed
with coloured braid into which are worked the heraldic devices of the
family. His rod of office is a long staff twisted with cord and
crowned with an immense silver knob. This personage is the descendant
of the janitor who in ancient Rome watched the house door day and
night and whose fidelity was ensured when necessary by chaining him to
his post.
A grand staircase leads to the first floor and this, the _piano
nobile_, was and still is occupied in Roman houses by the head of the
family whose rule is more or less absolute and tyrannical. The second
floor is given up to the eldest son upon his marriage for his own use,
and similarly the second son is given the one above, while beneath the
roof accommodation is found for an immense retinue of servants and
attendants. It is still the custom for the whole family, married sons
and their families included, to dine together, and elaborate accounts
are kept of the allowances given to each son, of the quota contributed
by each to the general expenses, of the dowry of each daughter-in-law,
as to whether she is enjoying the number of dishes of meat per meal
and the number of horses and carriages stipulated for in her marriage
settlement. In the case of an English wife, a carpet used to be among
the stipulations.
Though the state coaches, the running footmen, much of the pomp and
ceremony have disappeared, some curious relics remain of an order of
things fast passing away. Every Roman prince has the right, should he
wish it, to be received at the foot of the great staircase of any
house he honours with his presence by two lackeys bearing lighted
torches; and these should escort him to the threshold of his hostess's
reception room. This ceremony is still observed for cardinals on state
occasions.
Again every prince has the right to, and in fact still has, a throne
room and throne in his palace. This is not for his own use, but for
that of the Pope should he elect to pay him a visit. In the hall of a
Roman palace a shield emblazoned with the family arms may be seen
affixed to the wall. In a prince's house it will be surmounted by a
canopy, beside it should stand the historic umbrella and cushion. Four
marquesses and these only the marquesses Patrizi, Theodoli, Costaguti
and Cavalieri enjoy the princes' right to the canopy above their
shield and are hence called the _marchesi di baldacchino_.
A good deal of natural confusion exists in the mind of the foreigner
with regard to the different ranks and the distribution of titles in
the Italian peerage. These in fact follow no general rule but depend
in each case upon the patent of creation. Princely titles conferred by
the Holy Roman Empire affect every member of the family equally;
titles conferred by the Pope, on the other hand, are as a rule
restricted to the head of the family only. Thus in the Colonna family
every member is a prince or princess; amongst the Ruspoli, a papal
creation, only the head of the eldest branch is legally a prince. In
these latter cases however it is usual to give the eldest son one of
the other family titles upon his marriage, and the same with the
second son. Such an act is in the father's option, but he is obliged
to notify the assumption of the title to the civil authorities. In the
same way a certain amount of latitude is allowed him as to the title
he uses himself or grants to his sons. Prince Gaetani, for example,
prefers to be known by the older title in his family, that of Duke of
Sermoneta, bestowing that of Prince di Caserta upon his eldest son.
The titles _Don_ and _Donna_ are only correct for the sons and
daughters of princes and of the four _marchesi di baldacchino_, though
they are often used for all the children of marquesses.
In the same way, the distribution of the other titles of Marquess,
Count or Baron amongst the various members of the family depends upon
the terms of the original patent. In some cases every member bears the
title, in others the head of the family only. Collaterals of a house
often take the style _Giovanni dei Principi N----_, or _dei Conti
N----_ as the case might be; "John of the Princes So-and-so," or "of
the Counts So-and-so."
The distinction again between the patrician and the noble is one that
is not understood by the foreigner. A patrician belongs by ancestral
prescriptive right to the governing class of his province. The names
of the patricians are balloted annually, and one of the number is
chosen as Prior or Governor of the province. He is in fact and history
of senatorial rank. Among the districts of Italy some have and some
have not a patriciate. Spoleto possesses one, but Todi, next to it,
has never had one.
In Rome the patrician families are called "_Coscritti_" in allusion to
the _Patres conscripti_ or senators of the city. Their number was
limited and defined by a constitution of Benedict XIV. but later popes
have added new names. There are now sixty patrician families.
[Illustration: "HOUSE OF COLA DI RIENZO," BY PONTE ROTTO
The architecture of this supposed dwelling of the last of the Roman
Tribunes is a _bizarre_ mixture of styles and epochs. It has been
suggested that a series of initial letters which surmount a doggerel
inscription are those of the many titles which Rienzo bestowed upon
himself. The people know the house as that "of Pontius Pilate."]
The nobles, on the other hand, often owed their titles not only to the
Pope but to their respective Communes, which, until the one fount
of honour was defined to be the sovereign, frequently bestowed titles
on their citizens. This privilege was enjoyed by the abbots of Monte
Cassino in the thirteenth century. The popes have always conferred
titles of nobility, as did the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir in this
matter the Pope claims to be. At present an Heraldic Commission is
sitting in Rome to regulate the use of titles, many of which have been
assumed for generations without any warrant. Henceforth every one will
be called upon to prove his right to the title he bears, and it will
be illegal for the Communes to describe any one who has not done so
with "a handle to his name." Foreign titles, and among them papal
titles, will in all cases have to be ratified and allowed by the
sovereign of Italy.
CHAPTER IX
ROMAN RELIGION
When we think of Rome as the cradle of more than one civilisation, we
should also recollect that the Roman has matured two great religions:
the religion of ancient Rome and the religion of Western Christendom.
Not that we can think of the Roman as a religious people, in the sense
in which the Asiatic has always been and remains to this day
religious, the sense in which the Hebrew or the sense in which the
Egyptian was religious. The Roman never had either the imaginative
philosophy which produced the religion of Greece, nor the metaphysical
mysticism which made the Hindu faiths. He had in fact in common with
the Hebrew, whom he was so totally unlike, a complete absence of the
metaphysical temper, of mysticism, of asceticism; and like the Hebrew
he did not apply any richness of imagination to religion. What he had
was a genius for bringing the other world to the support of this, and
what he created was the conception of religion as _piety to the
State_; and it is in this form that it survives in the sympathies and
the sentiment of the Roman people. In the pagan world this State was
secular, in the Christian world this State is the Catholic Church;
but in both cases the spiritual came to the support of the
temporal--ancient Rome deified the State by making it the subject of
the Roman piety; Christian Rome moulded religion into a citizenship,
and the Church became a _civitas_. _Civis romanus sum_, "I am a Roman
citizen," has never ceased to be the all-embracing formula of Roman
orthodoxy.
The original Roman theogony was Etruscan. Behind the veil were the
three great gods, the shrouded gods, answering to the Jove, Juno, and
Minerva (_Menerva_) of later times. Round them were their "Senate,"
the twelve gods and goddesses known to the Romans as the _Dii
Consentes_; and everywhere was the great Latin cult of Vesta, the cult
of the hearth. But when Rome was built its first king made of these
elements the Roman religion: Numa as a matter of fact appears to have
been the Roman Moses, and to have led his people forth not to the
worship of their one tribal god who was above all gods, God and Lord,
the unique divine realisation of the Hebrew people, to become the root
of the monotheism of the Western world, but to the worship of a unit
which made of the State the family, of the commonwealth the family's
hearth. It was, perhaps, his genius which made the hearth-divinity
preside over the little polity and confuse and identify for ever the
pieties of the home with the pieties of citizenship. It is these two
elements--the theological unit of Judæa and the political unit of
Latium--which meeting in Rome in the age of Claudius created the
religion of the West. Not once but twice had the Romans come and
wrested the sceptre from Judaea; under Titus, and again in the Roman
organisation of Christianity _venerunt Romani et tulerunt eorum locum
et gentem_.
We see then that the Roman religion was never a great imaginative
creation, but was always a great statecraft, and that Roman religion
began to be Roman statecraft when Numa identified the affections and
the piety of the hearth with the affections and the piety of the _res
publica_, and made the State the social unit. The original ingredients
of Roman religion however had nothing to do with statecraft; they were
the ingredients of nature worship, the ingredients brought by a
pastoral people. At the source was a reverence for natural things; and
old Latin paganism had the peace which belongs to the pastoral life,
and to the religion which is founded on the careful observance of
potent rites disturbed as yet by no speculative questionings. But it
was not free of the gloom of nature-worship--the obverse side of
nature-cult--fearful, suspicious, weighted with destiny, as one
imagines the religion of Etruria to have been.
[Illustration: SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH
The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more
ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest
meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house
of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and
altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir
is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the
lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the
fourth. See pages 35-36, 183, 186-7.]
It is much later in its history that Rome was captivated by Greek
religion and transferred to its crude impersonal gods the brilliant
divine personifications of an imaginative people. The Latin had never
been familiar with his gods, perhaps because they always remained
impersonal abstractions, gods who did not use human speech, but whose
language was the lightning-bolt of Jupiter and the wave-lashing triad
of Neptune. Into what had really always been impersonal, the Greek
came infusing warm human life, making the gods speak the language of
men, and inviting men to speak to them in their own tongue. Greek
religion was subtler, more individual, freer, more joyous than Latin.
The pious customs which constituted the earlier Latin religion had
begotten a sense of obligation in the worshipper, but it was
conscience as the response to an external stimulus; and the peace it
brought was a formal peace, _ex opere operato_, not a peace brought
home to the individual conscience face to face with the Divine. It is
because conscience implies more of individualism than ever entered
into Roman religion that Roman religion has always remained without
it. It was only in the jaded period of the later empire that the
Romans turned altogether from the simple, natural, large elements of
the religion of their soil to the fantastic, emotional, and complex
cults of Isis and Mithras. The simple religion of the field and the
hearth, of natural law, of orderliness and decorum, of a piety
provoking and sustaining a sense of _what was owed_ to the gods, to
the dead, to that State which incarnated the religion of the gods,
fell away on the eve of Christianity before the foreign novelties of
Greece and Egypt, better suited to the luxuriousness of mind and the
growing introspection of a people who had undergone the influence of
Greek thought as something indeed always alien to their nature, yet
necessary to their place in the world.
When Peter's successors planted a Judaic sect on the ruins of this
paganism they had only to follow the genius of Numa's religion in the
creation of the Catholic Church--the _civitas Dei_. Here, we may feel,
an essential element of the new religion--the idea of the Kingdom of
God--came naturally to supplant the older State religion; and the
conception of the nation as a family was eminently germane to the
fraternal maxims which grouped round the idea of the _ecclesia_. But
old Rome as it had not stopped to inquire concerning small things, so
it had never penetrated to interior things, and the Kingdom of God
translated into the language of Rome lost in the process all its
interior characters. What was delicate and subtle had never entered
into Roman religion, but neither had what was petty, extravagant, or
indecorous. Religion was no delicate aroma, but a concrete duty; not
an individual choice, nor an individual necessity, nor an individual
attraction, but a public rite, a public piety, a public decorum: and
these characteristics, as we shall see, inhere in Roman religion
to-day.
It is in its liturgy that the mind, or if one may call it so, the
temperament of the Roman Church found an ample and worthy expression;
and it is in what it lacked as much as in what it put forward that the
genius of the Roman rite is seen to differ entirely from that which
presided at the making of the mass in every other part of Christendom.
The effusion the imagery and the gracious parts added from Gaul, the
mysticism of the Oriental, the philosophy of Greece, the Northern
inwardness and intimacy, contributed nothing to it. Like Roman
religion itself it was not a creation of the imagination or the
intellect, nor the outcome of devotional sentiment; it was the
creation of the Christian polity clothing its religious data, its
religious certitudes, in a becoming garment--giving them a form,
expression, a public characterisation. If there was no effusion there
was largeness; in place of tenderness there was disengaged from the
formal stately public act a perfect liberty of spirit. All through it
was the public act itself which justified and consecrated, which was
the sanction of the reality the criterion of the fitness of worship.
Here besides, _sacramenta_ were not mere signs nor _symbola_ mere
figures--they were stately vehicles of universal realities, always and
everywhere adequate, worthy, co-ordinating, effectual. Roman ritual
was quite bare of those things which in England and France are thought
ritualistic; its only ritual consisted in the so-called "manual acts,"
that is, in the things which had to be done; those very things which
the Eastern Church removed from the sight of the congregation,
creating a "ritual" as a superfluous symbolism to engage the attention
of the people. But the Roman dealt in real things, not imagery;
nakedly setting forth his _sancta_ in the dry light of a realism which
had no reticence joined to a great reticence of the emotions. This was
the temperament of all Roman religion, pagan and Christian, a
persistent rejection of all that could be described as unctuous, a
setting forth of worship as a great public piety which justified
itself. Unlike the Greek whose god must be behind a curtain, the Roman
required the divine to be recognised, always and everywhere, in the
_res publica_, in the act which had public sanction, public
significance, public utility. The deacons came to the holy table
bearing a cloth; one stood at one end and threw the roll across to the
deacon at the other end; the oblations of the people were manipulated
before the assembly; the wine collected in small phials is poured into
a large chalice, repoured into a bowl; the pontiff collects the
oblation bread, so do the priests, while acolytes stand at the side
holding cloths to receive it; and the same things, not rites but
familiar usages, are repeated at the Communion, when bishop and
deacons again pour, mix, distribute, wash and put away the holy things
and the sacred vessels in the presence and with the assistance of the
people of God. Here was nothing "common or unclean"; it was the wisdom
of Roman ritual justified of her children.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN
A very early Christian basilica, in the historic part of Rome by
Ponte Rotto and the round temple of Hercules, and on the site of the
temple of Ceres and Proserpine. In the sixth century it is
enumerated among diaconal churches. It belonged to the Greek colony
in this quarter, and its name is derived from the word _kosmos_.
Pavement, ambones, choir, and canopy are of the twelfth century. It
has been recently restored to its ancient basilica form, and its
many closed windows have been reopened. See pages 28, 31, 35-36,
186.]
It will be seen at once how widely different was such a conception of
worship from that elaborated in the East or which we owe to the vague
awe, the dreadful sense of mystery, of the middle age. If we compare
the Roman basilica with a Greek or Gothic church this difference is
immediately sensible. The former owed nothing to mystery, to dimness.
The celebrant faced the people, as he still faces them in all true
basilicas; he did not turn his back on them. No early building,
indeed, was flooded with light while glazing was in a crude state and
wind and weather had to be kept at bay; but the Christian basilica was
not darker than other buildings, there was no religious twilight. And
as we see it to-day, in _Santa Sabina_, _Santa Maria in Cosmedin_,
_Santa Maria in Domnica_, _SS. Nereo e Achilleo_, _Santa Maria
Maggiore_, or in the ruined basilicas of _Santa Domitilla_ and _San
Stefano_, so it was centuries ago--flooding the mysteries with what
light there was because it was the church of a people who cared for no
mysteries which could not bear the light. Nevertheless, the simple
realism of the Roman ritual by no means meant, for him who could see,
the absence of mysticity. Rather it recalled one to the suggestive and
sane mysticity which inheres in all common things, in all common uses.
Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small
matters and to the unobvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian
service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; but though
it is certain he had not set himself to create this mysticity it is
equally certain that he could not banish it from his churches.
Italian religion is not the same thing as Roman religion. Rome has not
been "the most religious city in the world" because it felt religion
more than those nations and provinces whose religious character
differed so profoundly from its own, but because it was able to
institute it on a scale as universal as its own imperialism. The
Neapolitan has the superstition and poetry, the emotional
impressionism, of the genuine South; but such a repulsive scene as the
peasant, upheld by his friends, licking his way to the altar along the
filthy church floor could not be witnessed in Rome. It would be
difficult to imagine a Roman wishing to be exorcised after putting his
head into the English or American church to see the stained glass
windows. The "Roman of Rome" leaves such things together with the
swallowing of pious-text pills to the unrestrained fervour of some of
our English Catholics. The Roman has less religious passion and also
much less abandonment to the external than the Southerner or even the
Englishman. Rome has had--with one illustrious exception--no great
saints since the sixth century; she has been evangelised by saintly
visitors from Sweden, from Tuscany, from Siena, as the primitive
Church had been edified by the itinerant Gospel visitors called
"prophets." From Lombardy, Venice and Umbria, from Parma, Ancona,
Florence, Pisa, Naples and the Abruzzi, saints, seers, missioners,
mystics, reformers, have brought her their message: but the terrible
proverb _Roma veduta fede perduta_ records the impression she has
often made on visitors less elect than these. Not Rome but Venice
counts as the "devout city" of Italy, and the well-known story of the
Jew who became a Christian on the ground that no religion could have
survived Roman corruption unless it were divine, was told me in Rome
by a prelate as an encouraging episode.
It was said by Matthew Arnold that the Latin people never cared enough
for Christianity to reform it; they never thought it worth while, it
is true, to break with the Church to find Christianity. The Italian,
moreover, had none of the things which made the Puritan--not his
fierce dogmatism, the Judaic strain of his piety, his dread of the
external, his contentment with doctrinal formulas. Joined to an
indubitable attachment to Catholicism--the magic of which inspired
the art even of men who did not believe it--the Italian had also too
keen an intuition of the real religious issues (as we understand them
to-day) to exchange ecclesiastical tradition for biblical dogmatism.
Christianity was for him much more of a self-justifying religious
tradition and much less of a dogmatism than it was for the Protestant.
The Christianity which the Italian would have liked was the
Christianity of S. Francis, familiar, meek, tolerant, a genuine
discipleship; and it did not irk him to add to this the forms of
Catholicism. Like the Reformers, the Italian of the sixteenth century
knew little of Church history, but his instinct was on the side of
reintegration rather than disintegration of the religious forces
enshrining the Christian revelation. The earlier Italian religious
movements were almost entirely, like that of the seraphic _frate_, on
the side of informing historical Christianity with the new spirit of
Christ. A great horror of the ways of Rome, never echoed by the
Romans, did, nevertheless, penetrate religious Italy, and few people
realise that it was among the Franciscans not among the Reformers that
papal Rome was first branded as the "scarlet woman," the unclean
Babylon of the Apocalypse.
Has Protestantism the evangelic marks which the Italian, consciously
or unconsciously, lays down for Christianity, and what chance would it
have in Italy? It will bear repeating that the Puritan's definition of
Christianity would never at any time have found acceptance with the
Italian; he never could have cared for reform in doctrine and
discipline which did not necessarily, did not primarily, involve a
real evangelic reform. When one remembers how very little
Protestantism was, in its inception, on the side of dogmatic freedom,
and that it put a theological formula before all other matters of the
law, one may admit that the Italian though he did not reform may yet
have loved true Christianity. In the next place the intense
individualism of Protestant worship is distasteful to the Italian who,
as we have already realised, does not ask or require that
subordination of the society to the individual which religious
subdivisions imply, and he would always be repelled by the phenomena
of revivalism. It is instructive for us to realise that such things
are stigmatised as "buffoonery" by the Italians, whose own elaborate
ritual often appears to suggest that description to the Protestant. In
the third place, he dislikes the _réclame_ of Protestantism, its
self-advertisement, the distribution of tracts at church doors and in
the public streets. To his mind no religion worthy of the name can
have need of such support. The Sister of Charity and the _frate_,
indeed, appear familiarly among them in their strange dress, not as
they, yet part of themselves, reminding the people of the great ideals
of their religion, tracts in their own persons but making no
_réclame_.
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF SAN ZENO (called _orto del paradiso_) IN S.
PRASSEDE
This mosaic chapel was erected by Paschal I. in 822. Its great
beauty gave it the name of "Garden of Paradise." The church is near
the house of Pudens, and is dedicated to Praxedis his daughter. See
pages 45, 46, 240.]
Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the
Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to
the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the
German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in
England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of
external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We
are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he
gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by
his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do
not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is
active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable,
for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony.
The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may
some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity--as the
catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"--he will always require
gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to assist his
imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense,
to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence,
and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not
understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service
conceived in the spirit of the mass, with its mystical renewal enacted
before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate;
but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal
element.
The visitor to Rome must be struck with the fact that the Italians are
a more religious people than we. They take more trouble about it.
Every morning, day after day, in scores of churches people are going
in and out of the heavy leathern door hangings, up and down the steps
of the façades; such a spectacle as the visit to the sepulchres on
Holy Thursday could not be witnessed in England from one year's end to
another. At the street corners, on the stairs, in the shops and the
porters' lodges, oil lamps burn before images and shrines; and the
deepest curse in the Italian vocabulary is to say _La mala Pasqua_--"a
bad Easter to you." "In all things I perceive that ye are somewhat
superstitious," said S. Paul, taking as the pretext of his appeal to
the Athenians the trouble and care which he saw everywhere bestowed on
the unseen world and the claims of worship: and he could make the same
appeal to the Romans to-day with perhaps a greater chance of
converting them than the missionary from America. For there is no
"provincialism" in Italian religion; the Sunday joys of discussing the
anthem, the sermon, the preacher, the details of the service and the
congregation, the half mystical half sentimental joy of chewing the
cud of sacred things which is so Northern, offer no attractions to the
man of the South. He has endless time in the South but no long
twilights. In religion as elsewhere the Roman harbours no illusions.
The things--petty or precious--which are possible to a people who can
maintain illusions, and have no inconvenient quickness of mind, are
not to be expected from him. Chadbands in Rome would have no success
and no dupes; and your transcendental emotional sentiments about the
Pope are perhaps as little understood as your rejection of him. The
Roman dreads death, and he refers to the anointing oil as "_quella
cosa più peggio del viatico_"--"that thing which is still worse
than the Viaticum." He lives familiarly with his religion and in a
sort of child-like simplicity; yet he is sceptical, and we are not, he
has no talent for meditative devotion, and we have.
[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF S. PAUL'S-WITHOUT-THE-WALLS
Erected between 1193 and 1208. The most beautiful cloisters in Rome.
See interleaf, page 158, and page 36.]
Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as
little tolerated as the _réclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is
absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride
and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is
so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are
the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better
educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of
the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies
in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible
"respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where
Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy
is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest
monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently
motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was
giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the
mass; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he
is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic
priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas
midnight mass to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival.
These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist
chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not
quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human
interest, the brotherhood of class, oppose themselves here to English
self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of
propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances
multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss
of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little
understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he
does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the attitude which
the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to
assume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The
Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon
popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma
and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked
and distrusted, in either sex, when met. The Roman peasant trudging
into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in
the Via Nazionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once
points out to him his place in the house of God--for this is the
American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was
uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not
Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another
surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds
he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no
more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not
mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you
from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic.
These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its
familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of
spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are
the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has
sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city
which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example,
Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of
its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing
up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who
enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal,
the priests are quæstors and their vergers are lictors. Such things
certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the
Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty
of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same title, the house of
the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis,
that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of
twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral,
in both cases women and Catholics, were assaulted by the beadle in
charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their
innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed
the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does
not easily feel that desire to assault which possesses the Teutonic
official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is
political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers
of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of
a Cologne beadle in their souls.
The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves
itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism
decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the
dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid
sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism
will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to
memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and
sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the
senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist
of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the
haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.
[Illustration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was
built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with
mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.]
The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races,
who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted
Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or
more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the
catacombs to a solemn mass in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and
the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on
Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in
catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its
primitive counterpart in the shepherds' god Lupercus "driver away
of wolves," whose worship was celebrated in _Roma Quadrata_ by the
original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a
libation. But he who said _Ego sum pastor bonus_ is gathering the
sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving
the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person
of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman
religion was capable of assimilating; but the moral implications of
this personality--after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of
the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its
realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist--were never really
appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal mass
prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his
predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too
officiated as _pontifex maximus_. The very chairs of the bishops in
Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his titular
church sits on a throne) are the _curule_ chairs of the Roman
magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things
in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan
pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions
were vested in the _Lucomones_. Though Greek theology twice enriched
Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek
and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive
feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and
in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is
least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been.
There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as
elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose
there as elsewhere among the "Jews of the dispersion," and certain
Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at
once took their place in its public worship. But Rome has, here also,
preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian
Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element.
At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon
one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a
fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there
the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--"the voice
of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew
history.
The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his
Kingdom of God on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of
Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion
of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience.
Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the
other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to
Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral
considerations connected with Abel.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA
The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called "S. Mary above
Minerva" because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the goddess,
was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only
instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the
Roman basilica is manifest.]
It is the _pax romana_, the peace of the Roman empire, which was
actually established as "the Peace of the Church." The peace,
juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of
Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the _civis
romanus_. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and
Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it
conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of
earthly entities--to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox
strangers dying in Rome record--_in pace_. The Roman citizenship
becomes the Catholic citizenship through the mediation of the Apostle
who could say "But I am a Roman born," while setting forth imperially
a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen
who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates
that new _imperium_ where Rome may claim that all homage is paid _et
mihi et Petro_, confounds those two things which the master of the
Gospel "of the Kingdom" had set apart, the things of Cæsar and the
things of God.
CHAPTER X
THE ROMAN CARDINAL
What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the
presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of
its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of
presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of
the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven
deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests,
because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because
the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may
indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by
Peter, at whose instance "the seven" were first instituted (Acts vi.
3). To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of
the Roman district who came in time to assist the Pope at the great
ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial
oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find "bishops"
presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan
Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans.
[Illustration: SAINT PETER'S]
As the Church grew these presbyters of the original "titles" or parish
churches of Rome, together with the regional deacons of the city, and
the suburban bishops, took rank as the cardinal or principal Roman
clergy, and in time the privilege of forming part, even in only a
titular sense, of this body of presbyters and deacons of the great See
of Rome, was coveted by other than Romans, and the Pope would create
the metropolitan of a foreign See or some distinguished foreign
ecclesiastic cardinal priest or cardinal deacon of the Holy Roman
Church. By the eleventh century the cardinals of the Roman Church are
a recognised body, the Senate of the Pope, whose election is being
gradually confined to their hands alone. In the next century the
popular vote--the vote of the clergy and people of Rome--is altogether
abolished, and thenceforth the election of a pope is exclusively
vested in the College of Cardinals, whose privileges and dignity were
further enhanced at the close of the thirteenth century by Boniface
VIII.
Cardinals therefore are the honorary parish clergy of Rome, nominally
holding the place of the presbyters of the Roman _titles_ and of the
deacons of the Roman regions; and though a foreign cardinal cannot of
course be also a local parish priest in Rome, he is bound to appoint a
"vicar" to represent him. The six suburban Sees are always held by six
of the senior cardinals _di curia_, that is the cardinals resident in
Rome, among whom is always the Pope's cardinal-vicar, and they are
called the cardinal bishops. Cardinal priests are usually in episcopal
orders, and cardinal deacons are usually in priest's orders. Each
cardinal priest or deacon takes his title from one of the Roman
churches, and is styled _John Cardinal Priest_ (or deacon) _of the
title of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian_. The oldest presbyteral
titles are to be found in the outlying districts--as SS. Andrea and
Gregorio, Archbishop Manning's title, S. Clemente, S. Prisca, SS.
Bonifacio and Alessio, or S. Eusebio, on the Caelian Aventine and
Esquiline, or among the old ecclesiastical foundations in Trastevere.
The diaconal titles, on the contrary, are to be found in the centre,
corresponding to the ancient regions--S. Maria in Aquiro behind Piazza
Colonna, S. Adriano on the Forum, or S. Giorgio the title of John
Henry Newman in the ancient quarter of the Velabrum.
The Pope was chosen from among the deacons of Rome for eight hundred
years, and was consecrated bishop on his election; later on the Pope
was chosen from the bishops, but if, as has happened, a layman were
elected he proceeded at once to receive the three major orders. A man
in deacon's orders or a layman may similarly have the Hat conferred on
him, but in this case he may remain in deacon's orders, or if a layman
may take simple minor orders. The last deacon in the College of
Cardinals was created by Pius IX. He had been a member of the High
Council in the "forties," and as such formed one of the deputation
sent by the Romans after the flight to Gaeta to beg Pius IX. to return
to Rome. The deputation was not even received. Antonelli, this Pope's
Secretary of State, was another cardinal who was never in priest's
orders.
A cardinal is called the Pope's _creatura_; at the time of Leo XIII.'s
death the only surviving cardinal of Pius IX.'s creation was the
Cardinal Chamberlain Oreglia di Santo Stefano, so that Leo could all
but declare in the words of one of his predecessors, with an allusion
to S. John xv. 16, "You have not elected me, but I have elected you."
The full number of the Roman cardinals is seventy. About twenty-five
of these are always resident in Rome, and form the papal _Curia_, or
administrative council of the Church, with the _entrée_ at all times
to the Vatican. They are the chief members of the Roman Congregations,
the Congregation of Rites, of the Inquisition, the Index, the Bishops
and Regulars, etc., through which all ecclesiastical affairs are
administered. Cardinals _di curia_ receive a sum of twenty-four
thousand francs a year, or less than one thousand pounds. A special
stipend is also added for the work done as members of the various
congregations.
Their position before 1870 was however a very different one. Then they
enjoyed large incomes and their comings and goings were attended with
a certain measure of regal state; and in the preceding centuries when
the Hat was often conferred, like any other secular distinction, on
mere youths and on laymen, their wealth and the luxury and
magnificence of their style of living was unsurpassed in Rome, while
the power and position of some cardinal nephew or relative of the Pope
was second only to his own.
Cardinals are created--and the process is long and elaborate--in a
special assembly of the Pope and his Council of Cardinals known as
Consistory. In a preliminary and secret meeting, the Pope proposes the
names of those he wishes to honour to his assembled councillors, and
as a relic of the ancient custom of asking the consent of the people
to the election of their bishop or deacon, the question: "quid quis
videtur?" is put as each name is announced. No opportunity of dissent
is however afforded the cardinals, and all they are expected to do is
to rise, take off their _berrettas_ or stiff caps, and bow as a sign
of assent. The Pope may, and often does, keep back "in his breast,"
_in petto_, the name of some candidate if he thinks it expedient. But
this candidate comes forward nevertheless at a future consistory for
the subsequent formalities.
At another secret consistory, the Pope first closes the mouths of the
newly created cardinals and then pronounces them open with the words:
"I open your mouth that in consistory, in congregations, and in other
ecclesiastical functions, you may be heard in the name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Ghost."
Most important of all these ceremonies is the public consistory held
in one of the great halls of the Vatican, and before 1870 this was a
"festa" of the first magnitude. The new _porporati_, wearers of
purple, rode in triumph through the streets upon gaily decked horses,
wearing their scarlet robes and hats; bands of ecclesiastics, grooms
on foot and on horseback, papal guards and attendants escorted them;
cannon were fired and church bells rung, and the Roman people never
so happy as when a procession is afoot, crowded into the streets.
On reaching the Vatican, the cardinals-elect take their oaths in the
Sistine chapel and then accompanied by two cardinal deacons as
sponsors, one walking on each side, they are led into the presence of
the Pope.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF S. PETER'S, THE BRONZE STATUE OF S. PETER
The statue, the origin of which is uncertain, is near the shrine of
the apostle, and peasants and seminarists kiss the outstretched
foot, and then touch it with their foreheads. See page 11.]
The Pope sits enthroned in full state, surrounded by his court, all
his cardinals in a great semicircle around him, cardinal bishops and
priests on his right, cardinal deacons on his left--the train bearers
sitting on foot-stools at their feet. Kneeling on the steps of the
throne, the new cardinals kiss the Pontiff's foot, hand, and cheek;
they then rise and embrace the whole college in the order of their
precedence, and as a final ceremony, they kneel again before the Pope,
the hoods of their cloaks are drawn over their heads by two masters of
ceremonies, and a cardinal's hat is held over them while the Pope
addresses a few words to each. The new cardinals now take their seats
according to the rank just conferred upon them, and the proceedings
close with an address of thanksgiving to the Pope made upon his return
to his apartments, and a _Te Deum_ in the Sistine chapel. In the
afternoon of the same day, couriers and messengers hurry through the
streets of Rome. The new red hat is carried to the happy recipient by
a "monsignore of the papal wardrobe," the rochet and the scarlet
_berretta_ are conveyed by less important functionaries, and all and
each have to be thanked and entertained and recompensed when possible.
The Secretary of State, all the cardinals and papal officials, as well
as personal friends and private individuals hasten to pay
congratulatory visits (_visite di calore_) upon the new cardinals; and
royal fashion, the state calls have to be immediately returned. If the
cardinal is a foreigner and out of Rome, his hat is carried to him by
a papal messenger especially appointed, and in Catholic states is
presented with considerable ceremony by his sovereign.
The cardinal's hat, at one time an article of attire, is now only a
symbol. It is of red cloth with a wide brim and shallow crown, and on
either side hang fifteen red tassels, the number denoting the
ecclesiastical rank of the wearer. From the day of its presentation
the hat is put by until its owner's death, when it is brought out once
more to be hung up in some side chapel of his titular church, where it
remains until it falls to pieces with age.
One of the first duties of a new cardinal is to take possession of his
titular church, and in old days this was another occasion for pomp and
display, and the Pope's guards attended in full dress uniform. Now the
cardinal drives quietly in his sombre closed carriage. At the church
door he is divested of his cloth cloak and hat, and in flowing scarlet
silk he walks up the nave bestowing benedictions on all sides. He
seats himself on his throne in the chancel and the vicar of the parish
reads to him an address in Latin to which he replies, he is then
saluted by all the clergy of the parish in the order of their
precedence ending with the acolytes, and the "taking possession" is
over. He must however present the church with his portrait painted in
oils which is hung with that of the reigning pope in the nave; and
with a large escutcheon of his heraldic coat, emblazoned in colour and
surmounted by the red hat and tassels, which is placed over the main
entrance to the building, and which side by side with the papal arms
is the outward and visible sign of a titular church. As princes of the
Church, cardinals enjoy the princely distinction of displaying their
coats of arms in the halls of their houses, affixed to the wall and
sheltered beneath a silken canopy. Further they must have a throne and
throne room, but unlike the secular princes of Rome who are entitled
to the same privilege, their thrones are turned towards the wall, and
are only reversed during a vacancy of the Holy See, when they may be
used by their owners, who, for the time, become sovereigns and rulers
of the Church.
No great church ceremony is complete without a cardinal, who by his
very presence makes a function, but except for such occasions as these
little is seen of the Roman cardinals by the casual visitor to the
city. Their heavy carriages, painted black, drawn by black horses
their harness unrelieved by brass or plating, pass unnoticed in the
streets. Only occasionally on the Janiculum or outside the city gates
on fine afternoons, a cardinal may be seen taking a walk, his servant
at a discreet distance behind him, and his carriage following at a
foot's pace. Before 1870 the streets of Rome were enlivened by the
cardinals' brilliant equipages. A cardinal possessed two or three
coaches to be used according to the degree of state required. He
drove to the Vatican on grand occasions with all three to convey
himself and his retinue of attendants, and his gala carriage drawn by
six horses with postilions and standing footmen was of brilliant
scarlet and was so magnificently gilded and painted that it cost over
a thousand scudi.
During the period of their greatest splendour, it was no uncommon
thing for a cardinal to have a household of several hundred persons,
and though this number was later greatly reduced, a considerable
retinue of servants, secretaries, domestic chaplains, and attendants
of all sorts was always considered necessary to his princely state.
Chief among these was his _gentiluomo_. This gentleman was indeed his
constant "guide, philosopher and friend"; he drove with him, paid
visits for him, entertained his friends, and in a wonderful
Elizabethan dress of black velvet, with silk stockings, lace ruffles
and a rapier, he was by his side at all state and church functions.
Cardinal Wiseman's _gentiluomo_ still lives in Rome where he received
the guests of the new cardinal in the palace of the Consulta opposite
the Quirinal, then occupied by Pius IX., and he remembers the cardinal
taking the official costume with him to England for his English
substitute. At the present day when the temporal rôle of cardinals is
shorn of its significance, nothing better illustrates the unworthy
subordination of the civil career to the clerical than the position of
a cardinal's _gentiluomo_. Dressed in his knee breeches, a sword by
his side, this attendant who belongs to the good _bourgeoisie_ and
may be an architect or engineer, is to be seen at every cardinal's
high mass, waiting with the minor clerks, and presenting himself on
one or two occasions during the ceremony with a ewer and basin which
he offers kneeling on one knee while the cardinal washes the tips of
his fingers.
[Illustration: A CARDINAL IN VILLA D'ESTE
Villa d'Este at Tivoli was the residence of the late Prince-Cardinal
Hohenlohe. See interleaf, page 106.]
It is fondly believed by the tourist, who will go any distance as a
rule, and push through any crowd for a sight of the scarlet clothes,
that a cardinal habitually lives in robes of red silk, with a white
fur tippet round his shoulders. As a matter of fact his red robes are
for state occasions only--either for attendance at the papal court or
for great church functions. He wears a plain black cassock in ordinary
life with a red sash and red buttons and silk pipings, and thus cannot
be easily distinguished from other prelates whose silk trimmings vary
with every shade from crimson to purple. The state robes of scarlet
are very splendid indeed. The soutane of light scarlet cloth has a
train; over this is worn the white rochet trimmed with deep lace and
over this again the _cappa magna_ a voluminous circular cloak of red
watered silk, with a single opening for the head. It is gathered up to
the elbows in front and floats behind into an ample train which is
carried by pages or acolytes. The stockings, gloves, skull cap and
_berretta_ are of scarlet. The _cappa magna_ has a hood pointed behind
and forming a sort of shoulder cape in front, which in the winter
months is covered with white ermine. Canons of the Roman basilicas
wear a _cappa magna_ of purple cloth, but they are not permitted to
spread it out, it must be tightly coiled into a long rope and slipped
through a loop at the side.
At social receptions a cardinal wears his black soutane and red sash,
and over it a flowing scarlet silk cloak from the shoulder. If the
occasion is an important one he is received at the palace gates by two
servants with lighted torches, and these accompany him up the stairs
to the door of the _salon_ and there await his departure, when they
escort him to his carriage again. When in this gala attire, a cardinal
wears as an out-door wrap a gorgeous cloth cloak with many capes of
purple and deep red, and a red priest's hat around which is twisted a
red and gold cord finished with minute tassels the requisite fifteen
in number.
The most responsible and arduous duty of the College of Cardinals is
the conclave when the election of the future head of the Church
depends upon their united vote. With the death of a pope their
position changes on the instant from that of subject to ruler, and for
the time being the destinies of the Church lie in their hands. They
receive deputations and state visits seated upon their thrones, they
drive in their carriages alone upon the principal seat, no companion
being of sufficiently exalted rank to sit beside them, and the first
among them, the Cardinal Chamberlain, is attended by a detachment of
the Swiss guard and affixes his own seal to papal documents.
[Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE--PATH OF THE HUNDRED FOUNTAINS]
Scarcely in accordance with this regal state are the rules still in
force for conclave, which are, to say the least, antiquated. The
incarceration to which the cardinals are obliged to submit is of
the strictest, and for its maintenance the secular arm is called in in
the shape of the Marshal of Conclave, a Roman nobleman who with his
officers and subordinates assumes complete control outside the
building. Accustomed to spacious rooms and numerous domestics, the
cardinals are now forced to lodge in a tiny apartment of two rooms in
a circumscribed portion of the Vatican palace--the rules prescribe one
cell--one valet and one secretary each are allowed them, while two
barbers and one confessor are considered sufficient to shave and
shrive the whole college. From sumptuous living they are reduced to
meals brought to their cells by their servants, and the rules permit a
gradual reduction of the _menu_ to an ultimate diet of bread and
water, as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon the voters and so
precipitating their agreement. This rigorous treatment has been often
tried in the past with various results.
When assembled for the scrutiny in the Sistine chapel each cardinal is
provided with a throne before which stands a small table with ink and
paper. Over the throne is a canopy or _baldacchino_ the emblem of
sovereignty. These are ingeniously fitted with a hinge and when the
election of the new pope is announced all the canopies fold up except
one, leaving the elected member of the college alone sitting enthroned
beneath his _baldacchino_, a sovereign amongst his subjects.
CHAPTER XI
ROME BEFORE 1870
A stranger who had found himself in Rome the week before September 20,
1870 would have noticed the strange expectation, and also the strange
apathy in the Romans. "The Italians" were besieging their city, and
when it pleased them to enter they would enter. The Pope would not
resist them, and no one in his city thought it his business to die a
martyr to such a cause. Some workmen who had had orders to make a
barricade had got themselves under way with much difficulty and not
without many complaints, declaring as they prepared their tools and
tramped along the hot road in the September sun: "_ci vuole molto vino
per queste cose, molto vino_." At five o'clock on the morning of the
20th the bombardment began and at ten the white flag was hoisted in
Rome. Then a great silence succeeded in the city, every one stayed
within doors, and the papal brigand corps patrolled the streets. Thus
ingloriously the "Patrimony of Peter," the historical sway of the
popes, came to an end.
[Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
Begun by Julius Caesar, and completed by Augustus who dedicated it
to his sister's son. See pages 30, 160, 168, 228.]
Did the Romans welcome or reprobate the entry of "the Italians"? To
answer this question for ourselves we must bear in mind the political
events which preceded 1870 and the various elements represented in the
city. In September 1870 when the Italians entered, Rome was already
won for Italy, the Pope could not have offered any effective
resistance to Italian arms, Italian unity was already an accepted
fact; it only remained to take possession of Rome as the centre and
capital of this political unity, Victor Emmanuel having, out of
consideration to the Pontiff, fixed his capital first at Turin and
afterwards at Florence. And the events which led up to this result had
not spelt harmony between the Pope and his subjects or been years of
peace in the papal states. When Pius mounted the throne in 1846 people
were tired of Gregory XVI.'s old world methods, and Giovanni
Mastai-Ferretti was no sooner elected than the Romans asked him for a
constitution, a parliament, the substitution of laymen for clerks in
various departments of the executive. Pius IX. accorded a constitution
and a parliament of laymen. He did more. Against the suffrages of his
cardinals he granted a general amnesty to political offenders, and the
story runs that when he saw the rows of forbidding black balls which
the cardinals had cast, he lifted his little white skull cap and
covering the balls with it, said "I will make them all white," and so
the amnesty was granted.
It is often said that the liberal impulses of Pius IX. and his ready
response to popular clamour were repaid by outrageous ingratitude, and
that his Romans made him fly from Rome at the risk of his life to
ponder in solitude at Gaeta the futility of liberal pretences on the
part of popes. But the Romans were not simply ungrateful, they wanted
more, they thought they had a right to more--and what they wanted was
more than any pope could concede. They asked for modern civilisation
and the papacy represented ancient civilisation. The original demands
had not been demands made in _bona fides_ of a prince who has power to
give and to withhold what is asked. They were part of a political
campaign, the end of which was to be the destruction of the temporal
power. Mazzini's instructions to Young Italy to make one demonstration
after another under the windows of the Quirinal, when one liberty was
accorded to return the next day and demand another, until the Pope's
position was rendered intolerable and impossible, are not pleasant
reading; what is to be said in their favour is that the revolutionary
annals of no other people afford any better.
The time had come when men who lived in contact with the Italy outside
the walls of Rome, in contact with the ideas which were the conquest
of the nineteenth century, could not admit that the governed had only
duties and the ruler only rights, or reconcile with the modern ideal
of civil life the notion of a prince-bishop governing a subject people
in virtue of a theocratic idea, the abstract idea that certain
temporal rights fell--_mal gré bon gré_ of all concerned--to the vicar
of Jehovah on earth. The time will come when the existence of such a
pretension, the existence of such a government one moment after it
responded to the universal sentiment, will appear the strangest fable.
Will they be better or worse times? The future alone knows what it has
in store, but we can only say that they cannot ever be worse times
than some of those which the papacy created for the Romans. This
consideration would have sufficed at any time to make the tenure of
temporal power on the part of the Roman bishops, precarious--but it
did not by any means stand alone. We have to add to it the rise of
Italian patriotism, the passionate call for a united Italy, for the
country to issue once and for all from the tyrannies, the
immoralities, the crushing canker of pettiness which clung to the
princely and ducal governments, and rise to its place among the
nations.
Thus in September 1870 the feeling was very mixed in Rome. A large
part of the population had helped to prepare the _dénouement_, knew
its advent was only a question of time; others, members of faithful
Roman houses, had used voice and influence to induce the Pope to
institute necessary reforms and had fallen into despondency when Pius
on his return from Gaeta issued his _non possumus_ and settled down to
a morose implacable reactionism. There remained the large army of
priests, of papal functionaries and retainers, the cardinals and their
numerous personnel, the religious orders and congregations of both
sexes and the hundreds upon hundreds of persons dependent on them, the
papal police and soldiery with their families. There were the great
families which owed their titles and their fortunes to the popes,
those whom common gratitude or honour kept at his side. And lastly
there was the _popolino_, the ignorant poor, untouched by modern
aspirations, by socialistic theories, living from day to day, from
hand to mouth in the strictest sense, with no ambitions, no "standard
of comfort" or of human dignity--ready to fall on their knees at any
hour of the day when the Pope "_Dio in terra_" passed, agape at the
latest royal visitor to the palace of their pontiff, content to
encounter injustice with cunning fraud, to sweeten the hard buffets of
life by the _finesse_ required for some small scheme of peculation,
some dastardly scheme of revenge. Such human passions as lay outside
the gratification of hunger and the greed for spectacles were
satisfied by the periodical uprising and savage disloyalty habitual to
the turbulent Roman people. And what applied to the populace applied
in some sense also to the small _bourgeoisie_. There are always those
who find it easier and pleasanter to keep within the pale of small
joys and small miseries, small achievements and small risks. There
were thousands of such people who stood well with the papacy, and who
could only lose by a competition with the outsider for which they
were, by training and talent, unprepared.
[Illustration: ISLAND OF THE TIBER--THE ISOLA SACRA
To the right is the Fabrician bridge, to the left the _pons Cestius_
which joins the island to Trastevere. See pages 7, 229, 240.]
These then were "for the Pope." Not because he had a divine right to
be in Rome but because they individually and collectively flourished
under his rule. They flourished because there was no hunger, because
though there were unsanitary hovels there were no haunts of starving
people who could obtain neither bread nor work--if any were in need
of bread they threw a _supplica_ into the Pope's carriage and he sent
it to them when he got home. They flourished, because "where ignorance
is bliss 'tis folly to be wise" and no wave of unrest, few of the
ignobilities and none of the nobilities of a more strenuous life had
passed over them. The papal government compared to a modern European
government was like a blunderbuss in a modern arsenal, but though it
was entirely ineffectual, though the people under its care merely
lived out their lives with enough to eat and generation succeeded
generation neither better nor worse than the men who went before
them--it was an honest government in the financial sense. The people
were not taxed, prices indeed were kept low as a means of humouring
them, and the Pope's subjects were not exploited to fill his
exchequer. In the strange medley of Roman ideas it seemed better to
accomplish this end by the methods of the Jubilee year which exploited
the soul of the foreigner. The papal government did not peculate, but
the hated _sbirri_--the papal police--were often responsible for a
missing bale of cloth or a burglary, and a child who had been left a
fortune by her aunt only learnt when she was grown up that the
_curato_ of the Pantheon who had been made _erede fiduciario_
(trustee) and executor of the testament had not thereby been
constituted sole beneficiary. The administration in all departments
was simpler than now, and the evils of the present bureaucracy were
not known, but it was a government of privilege and patronage; "one
under which a gentleman could live" said an Irishman, but the
unprivileged person might find himself in prison for not kneeling when
the Pope passed. A resident English sculptor who remembered the days
of Gregory XVI. told me that Rome was the paradise of artists, who in
their velvet jackets and squash felt hats did what seemed good in
their own eyes, no man hindering them. The curious traveller of family
and fortune--it was before the day of Cook's tourists--enjoyed every
liberty under the hospitable papal government save only the liberty to
speak or write about politics and religion, and suffered nothing save
the occasional loss of a newspaper or book which the paternal
government stopped at the frontier as likely to imperil the peace of
mind of the Romans. They lived in a picturesque world, which recalled
the middle ages at every step, where the prosaic dead level to which
justice and civilisation had reduced the rest of Europe, did not
penetrate, and they admired in Rome and for the Romans what they would
have exposed in Parliament or the _Times_ as intolerable abuses in
their own country. From 1848 onwards political rigours unworthy of the
Holy See were resorted to, though these were relaxed before 1870. Some
art students who had prepared Bengal fireworks to celebrate the
anniversary of the victory over the French at Porta San Pancrazio,
were sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. A similar sentence was
passed on a "non-smoker" (not to smoke was a protest against the
papacy at the expense of its tobacco trade) who came to words with a
"smoker" and this barbarous sentence was enthusiastically upheld by
such a journal as the _Civiltà Cattolica_. Commendatore Silvagni who
cites these and similar instances in his _Corte e Società romana_
writes indeed like a man too sore at what he has seen and too near to
what he describes to present it in perspective, and he seems to the
present writer a prejudiced guide to Rome before 1870. Sedition and
conspiracy have met with scant ceremony at the hands of every nation
and every prince in turn, and the way in which Pius IX. treated "the
patriots" does not differ from that which may be read of in the
history of any other country.
What was peculiar to the papal states was the confusion of the
spiritual and the temporal; the special scandal came from the union of
these two powers in one authority, the temporal being used to enforce
the "spiritual" and the spiritual being abused to assist the temporal.
The spectacle of priests, your "fathers in God," your spiritual
directors, ordering the public floggings, nay the public torture, of
men and women could hardly edify or civilise; Gregory XVI. had
abolished these public castigations which used to be suffered in the
_Campo de' fiori_ (under an archway which may still be seen), but
Antonelli strove to revive them in the _Piazza del Popolo_ in 1856.
Other mediæval barbarisms ceased the day the Italians entered Rome,
among them the _Ghetto_.
The people as we see were not taxed, but neither were they taught.
Some subjects were altogether taboo--modern history was among them.
Obscurantism reigned supreme. Girls were taught to read in order that
they might read their prayers, but they did not learn to write lest
they should indite love letters. This was typical of the papal system.
You took away the light lest the child should ever happen to burn
itself, and you pursued the same policy with the adult. No instruction
was vouchsafed, no information given, no education whatever of the
intellectual or moral man. Girls were often destined from birth to the
nunnery, and the veil was the never-failing remedy against a marriage
distasteful to the parents or even the brothers, grand-parents, or
uncles of the victim. No one denies that this compulsory enclosure was
commonly practised in Rome. "Are you not ashamed to be reading, go and
knit stockings" shouted a Jesuit to a poor lady who sat reading in her
carriage in the Corso as the worthy father, who had been preaching a
retreat to women, crossed the street. Many of the poor ladies in
convents became imbecile so void were their minds, so vacuous their
lives, and in our own day a Roman community of thirty nuns required
the services of no fewer than thirty-one confessors. The education
received by the boys of good families sent them home with the airs and
gestures of so many little _abbés_. The children's games were tarred
with the same brush, the same universal insipidity. The little boys
dressed up as priests and said sham masses or moved about pieces of
white cardboard which represented the host; explaining to their little
sisters that such solemn fooling was not for "wicked girls."
Occasionally, the natural talent, the natural wit and moral courage of
a girl might provide her with a rôle and allow her to dominate
instead of being the sport of circumstances. But the young men as a
rule fell victims to that weak-kneedness which makes them the prey of
the fear of derision in their school-days, intensified by a training
which made self-dependence and self-development impossible. Thus one
of the Doria, a family which had given heroes to its country, the
younger brother of that Doria whose English wife's name _Mary_ is cut
in a box hedge in the Villa Pamfili, broke the heart of the noble
Vittoria Savorelli because his uncle, of whom he was independent,
objected to their engagement. A Roman _marchese_ having been struck in
the face by another Roman in the middle of the Corso at midday rushed
off to consult his confessor as to what steps he should take, and we
are not surprised to learn that he was able to follow the advice
proffered, and "bear it patiently." There is a story of a _frate_ who
could have taught him differently. As he was crossing a bridge a man
struck him on the cheek; the good _frate_ immediately turned the
other, then he picked up his man and pitched him into the river; for,
as he explained, the Gospel bid him turn the other cheek to the
smiter, but it did not tell him what he was to do afterwards.
[Illustration: THE STEPS OF ARA COELI
The church which occupies the site of the Sabine arx. See pages 6,
86, 230-31.]
The fierce light of publicity has transformed the lives of the Roman
clergy and religious since 1870. Those Roman priests who live without
reproach themselves, confess that "the revolution" has brought about
this signal benefit. The _Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici_ which
received impoverished nobles, ordained them, and sent them _at
twenty-five years old_ to rule as prefects over the papal provinces
was the fertile nursing-ground of a corrupt prelacy. The proud and
affectionate interest with which the Romans, despite many lapses,
regarded the popes, was not extended to the great papal officers who
from the _Governatore di Roma_ downwards did not cease to provide a
scandalous example to the people until the moment when "the Italians"
entered the city.
It will be said: these people at least were taught their religion?
They were taught their religion as they were taught everything
else--that is, not at all. They knew that you must obey the pope and
obey the priest, that you would be damned if you did not go to
confession and hear mass. But they thought one Madonna would hear
their petitions better than another ("_Non andate da quella, non vale
niente_" "don't go to that one, she is no good") and that exorcism was
a surer remedy for a plague of bugs than cleanliness. They never heard
a single verse of the Gospel explained to them, and young men of the
higher _bourgeoisie_ learnt their religion if they learnt it at all,
after 1870, when they were grown up and thought and read for
themselves. Such men, many of whom belong to the _Circolo San Pietro_,
are to-day the mainstay of intelligent and faithful religion in the
city. Before 1870 there was in Rome a real ignorance of the doctrines,
the beauties, and the duties, of Christianity. The one moment chosen
for a great religious impression was of course the first Communion.
Boys and girls were then enclosed and eight days were spent in pious
exercises and instruction. The sons of the poor went to the
_Cappellette di San Luigi_ at Ponte Rotto, the well to do to the same
institution near Santa Maria Maggiore. On the other side of the
basilica the girls of well to do families were prepared at the Bambin
Gesù, the poor at San Pasquale. I am assured that at Ponte Rotto the
effect of these eight days shut up in a religious house frequently
changed the lives of boys with vicious tendencies. In other classes
the appeal to unreal emotions was not always so successful, and the
girls at the Bambin Gesù, dressed up in the stiff unaccustomed habit
of the religious, often communicated with the one dread filling their
minds that they might inadvertently commit "the sin" of touching the
host with their teeth. Not less mistaken was the custom of the "Six
Sundays," the girls and boys alike for the next six weeks
communicating "in honour of the chastity of S. Lewis Gonzaga." And
then _buon viaggio_, as the Italians say; they probably never
communicated again except as "paschal lambs" at Easter. They
communicated then of course. At the rails, the moment they had
received the host, a ticket was handed to them with the name of the
parish and some pious Latin verse inscribed on it. To this the
communicant appended his name and address, and no succour was given,
no "grazia" accorded except to those provided with this ticket. The
names of those who had not communicated were posted at the church
doors. Thus not only did all who could in conscience do so communicate
once a year, but those who could not and would not procured the
services of some woman who made it her business to communicate every
day, or several times a day, during Easter tide, selling the tickets
thus received for a franc or two francs each.
Here was one of the inevitable degradations of a theocracy. Another
was this--people found working at their trade, in their back shop, in
their private room, on _festas_ were arrested and imprisoned sometimes
for several days. Respectable citizens who found themselves compelled
to finish a piece of work, behind closed doors, in this way, were
subjected to the ignominious and futile punishment, which was
certainly not calculated to educate their own religious sense or that
of their families and children. Spies, under such a government, were
always easy to find, and this and similar laws gave fine scope to the
purveyors of private revenge. You could not ostentatiously abstain
from going to mass, if you were poor you could not abstain at all, for
the Roman parish priests were so many civil magistrates with definite
powers, and if the answers to their numerous questions were not
satisfactory it was the worse for the householder and his prospects.
One means of finding out people's private affairs was through the
servants who acted as spies reporting everything to the _parocco_.
Pinelli the famous designer and engraver, whose bust to-day adorns the
Pincio, who had never been pious or even respectable, repaid the old
woman who reported his habitual absence from mass by ringing up the
neighbourhood between half past four and five every morning, and in
reply to the usual "_Chi è?_" calling out "_è Pinelli che va a
messa_"; nor did he desist ringing at his enemy's door till she got
out of bed to hear his announcement. The carabineers of the theocracy
also had a mixed service. A room had to be set apart for the
temerarious folk who required meat on a Friday or a fast day, and the
carabineers entered the restaurants and eating houses, sequestrating
the dish which smoked before the customer if this regulation was not
observed. Moreover, at the head of every department was a cardinal;
the Roman wife of a political exile once described to me what a _via
crucis_ it was for a young woman to run the gauntlet of these clerical
departments if she had to ask some favour for the exiled husband.
[Illustration: STEPS OF THE CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO
Above the steps of _Magnanapoli_ which lead from the Forum of Trajan
to the Quirinal hill. Their architect was Bernini. See page 231.]
But if they were unlettered and superstitious were the people in those
days better than now? The comparisons we sometimes hear urged are not
really fair for two reasons. There is to be found in Rome to-day among
the lower and the half educated classes all that want of moral
equilibrium which a revolution of ideas brings with it. Moral Italy
has yet to be made, as the moral unity of Italy is also as yet only in
the making. Before 1870, on the other hand, those who were faithful to
the standard then put before them, were faithful to what was never
better than a poor and low ideal of conduct, sentiment, and religious
duty. The papal standard required no refinement of feeling, no
education of the conscience: no one was scandalised that a shop should
display the barbarous notice "_Qui si castrono per la cappella
papale_," or that the popular story ran that when Guido Reni was
painting his picture of the Crucifixion before a living model attached
to a cross, he killed him at the last moment in his frenzy to see and
seize the death struggle, and fled the city; but that the holy father
had absolved him because, as you who go may see, it is a _capo
d'opera_. And the poor man killed to make a fine picture of Him who
endured death to teach us pity for each other? _Ebbene, poveretto_....
The pope is like Nemesis, like the blind forces of nature, like an
avalanche, a falling mountain, or an earthquake--not a moral force,
but a weight of authority. As you can see for yourself if you go to
San Lorenzo in Lucina the work is a _capo d'opera_ and the pope knows
better than you. Moral judgment is silent before the weight of
authority.
My narrator, who only wished to magnify a great picture, not to raise
a moral problem, always carried with him a paper blest by the pope,
and of extraordinary efficacy, that is it was Spanish and was covered
with writing, every corner had something pious in it, and no one who
carried it could die unabsolved. The proof was set forth in the blest
paper itself, for one man _did_ die unabsolved, they cut off his head
in fact; but the head was not to be brow-beaten, it simply went off to
the nearest town--and in these cases, as the witty Marquise du Deffand
said to Gibbon, _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte_--and found a
priest (what priest ever shows himself the least _dérouté_ in such
circumstances?) who at once confessed the head, and there the matter
ended.
Rome before 1870 was not even externally what we see it now. An old
world city of tall palaces, the windows in the lower story grated, of
monasteries and churches, of ruins in unconscious beauty, of fountains
of waters, of cabbage gardens and _orti_, of orange and lemon gardens
which at every turn surprised and delighted the eye. The main streets
straight as Roman roads, the piazzas, in contrast to these, full of
sun, intolerable from May onwards at noonday. A city of narrow squalid
streets huddled together, in which the domesticities are carried on
unrebuked and unabashed--in the poorer quarters every third house
appeared to be a washerwoman's, the linen hung across the road on
lines stretched from window to window. And everywhere an unpromising
door, an open gate, may reveal a little picture, a cool garden and
fountain, orange and lemon trees, a bend of the river, a view of the
Janiculum or the Aventine. A Roman smell pervading everything and
sufficiently characteristic to make you sure, if you were suddenly set
down in any part of the town, that you were in Rome: and at night
another smell, the smell of the ages, unwholesome, penetrating, coming
up from the soil, or the freshly turned earth, and making one shut the
windows hastily on the loveliest of moonlit evenings. A wealth of
street cries, varying with the season, and the nocturnal serenades,
assist that atmosphere of noise for noise' sake and movement which are
essential to the Italian, the noise of the shabby two-horsed carriages
grinding along on the paved streets and driven by the bad Roman
drivers with a continual cracking of the whip and a constant
application of the squeaking break, of wine carts lazily winding their
way across the streets of the eternal city with that sense of infinite
time and space born of long colloquies with the sun by day and the
moon by night across a deserted _campagna_, a score of little brazen
bells, perhaps, clanging and jingling at the driver's ear--the
constant noise by day and night of a life-loving, loquacious,
complaining, gesticulating, rebellious and keenly observant people. A
city of priests and dependents of priests, here there are no
industries, no great machines are set in motion every day, no
factories open with daylight to give employment to hundreds of skilled
workmen. Every one who is not a priest works for priests or for the
monasteries. The little workshops may be seen in the Borgo of S.
Peter's, in Campo Marzo, in the arches of the theatre of
Marcellus--every little doorway contains a cobbler, the _piazze_ which
lead to the big churches are crowded on _festas_ with vendors of
religious pictures and rosaries. The convents of women make their own
habits, but there is a great industry for providing the thousands of
priests, the seminarists, canons, monsignori, cardinals and cardinals'
retainers, and Vatican functionaries with cassocks, robes, uniforms,
hats, berrettas, stocks and pumps. In the centre of this life, which
is ecclesiastical even for the layman, it seems right that when we
notice a stir and turn round with the rest, we should see the papal
_cortège_ and the Pope round whom all this life revolves; the centre
of this city of churches and cassocks, because he is the centre of a
far larger world. For Rome is what it is because its sovereign bishop
is the cynosure for the eyes of that Christendom which counts the
largest number of adherents on the face of the globe, and their Mecca
is his city, Rome.
Let us follow a pedestrian who is starting on his afternoon walk, one
bright day in April, from the neighbourhood of Santa Maria dell' Orto
on the other side of the Tiber, and see Rome before 1870 with his
eyes. Like all good Italians he is curious, and he crosses the street
when he sees a man with a large oblong box covered with some black
waterproof stuff ring at what is apparently a convent door--and the
meanest door in Rome may give access to the scene of busiest monastic
life. The door is opened by the convent porteress, and when the lid is
removed our friend sees the _ostie_, the hosts for the use of the
convent, which are brought round every week or every fortnight to the
monasteries and churches, a hundred here, twenty there, according to
the need. As he passes the convent of Santa Maria in Capella he gets a
glimpse of the beautiful cool cloister garden with its lemon trees and
sees the _cornette_ of the "Daughter of France" whose application for
permission to remain and work on French soil was immediately granted
at a time when so many companies of priests monks and friars applied
in vain. While crossing the river by the island of the Tiber, he meets
a procession from the church hard by with its Franciscan friars who
walk next after the confraternity of the quarter in their well-known
red "sacks" or gowns; the priest in his short surplice and stole is
followed by the men bearing the bier, all carry lighted torches and
chant the _Miserere_ or the Gradual psalms. Leaving the Ghetto well to
the left he takes the street which passes the famous Roman house of
the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, and crosses in front of the Capitol
and the steps of Ara Coeli. He meets many priests, monks, and friars,
but the numerous _suore_ to be seen in the modern city are conspicuous
by their absence. The nuns, of course, are never seen, the Oblates
occasionally drive in large closed landaus like those in which the
cardinals progress to-day; but new communities of women find it
difficult to obtain authorisation, and a constant supervision, no
longer feasible, checks the mushroom growth of "active" congregations.
Just beyond he hears a bell and guesses, rightly enough, that the
Viaticum is being brought from the neighbouring parish church of San
Marco to some sick or dying parishioner--in a moment he sees the
little familiar procession, the acolytes with incense and bell, the
priest carrying the host enveloped in the humeral veil under the
_ombrellino_, the women and men who were in or near the church at the
time following with lighted candles, and stopping beneath the windows
of the sick man while his Lord visits him--if it were wet a little
dark knot of people under umbrellas would be waiting, and would
accompany the host with candle and umbrella just the same. Is it for
the same sick person, he wonders, that the gala carriage of Duca
Torlonia next passes him carrying the _Bambin Gesù_, the little wooden
painted doll from Ara Coeli. If the person whom it visits is to
live the _Bambino_ will turn red, if he is to die he will turn pale.
Our pedestrian crosses the Forum of Trajan and as he mounts the steps
he encounters a man of the people who tells him as he hurries
breathless along that he is going to fetch Monsignor B., one of the
episcopal canons of Santa Maria Maggiore, to _cresimare_ his baby,
three weeks old, who is dying. He and the mother are bent on their
baby going to paradise with all the glory of the added sacrament. A
baby of three weeks old "confirmed" will sound strange in English
ears. It must be borne in mind therefore that the rite of confirmation
in the English Church is a new rite unlike that in use in any ancient
Christian Communion. In the Roman Church the rite of chrism is the
ancient sacramental rite complementary to baptism, which always
included the imposition by the bishop of the sign of the cross on the
forehead of the newly baptized, "for a type of the spiritual baptism."
As such it is not properly a separate ceremony at all from the baptism
with water. Our friend turns to the left and as he reaches the piazza
before the Quirinal palace he sees the papal _cortège_ approach. The
Pope (it is Pius IX.) is coming--not in his state carriage with the
gilt angels, which we may still see at the papal stables on the way to
the Vatican museum of sculpture or the papal garden--but in the
carriage he uses every day. Every one kneels, and a mother who holds
up her baby for the apostolic blessing secretly "makes the horns" with
her free hand, for Pius IX. is reputed to have the evil eye and to
cast the _jettatura_.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE
The great façade of the Liberian basilica, the first church in the
city to be dedicated to the Madonna. To the right is the Military
Hospital of Sant' Antonio. The house was until 1870 the residence of
the Camaldolese nuns, and here S. Francis of Assisi was received
when he first arrived in Rome. The site is presumed to be that of
the Temple of Diana. The column facing the basilica is one of the
eight Corinthian columns which supported the vault of the basilica
of Constantine. See pages 34, 60, 145, 231, and interleaf, page
252.]
But it is drawing towards the _Ave Maria_, the sunset hour, and it is
rather free and easy even in a monsignore's servant to be abroad after
that late hour. We will therefore leave our pedestrian in the Via del
Quirinale, first noticing with him a group of seminarists on their way
to pay their evening visit at the church of the _Santi Apostoli_; they
raise their hats as they pass the door of the _Sacramentate_, opposite
the palace, where the host is constantly exposed, and then hurry on to
see the Pope and receive his paternal blessing. We, however, will turn
down at the Four Fountains, and follow a priest who mounts a narrow
staircase to the apartment occupied by a canon of the basilica of
_Santa Maria in Trastevere_ in an old granary of Palazzo Barberini,
which has been converted into dwellings for faithful retainers of the
princely house. It contains all that is necessary for his wants--a
chapel where he says his daily mass, the kitchen regions and some
slips of rooms where his food is prepared and eaten in company with
the two orphan relatives who, at his invitation, arrived at his door
hand in hand one winter's evening many years ago, two little girls of
ten and fifteen, who had come alone all the way from a northern town.
They communicate at his daily mass, but their generous guardian, who
sees to their moral training, carefully hides away his copy of the
Scriptures as a perilous work for two young souls. The sisters enjoy
an incredible distinction among their _commari_ and _compari_--their
neighbours and gossips--for in the canon's chapel there is a _corpo di
santo sano_. Besides the chapel he has a bedroom and sitting-room,
communicating--they are decorated with full length Magdalenes grasping
skulls in evident deprecation of their want of apparel, of crucifixes
painted on canvas, and of pictorial compositions consisting of a
crucifix hung with a rosary, flanked by a couple of guttering church
candles and enlivened with a book, a death's head, or an hour glass.
These are his own handiwork, and no intimacy with the works of art in
the eternal city enlighten him as to their relative merits. The priest
enters the sitting-room first, and finds six or seven men, all
priests, on their knees, in the various corners of the room. Presently
the door beyond opens, and a priest comes in and kneels down by a
vacant chair. Another rises enters the bedroom and shuts the door
carefully behind him. Our canon is a favourite confessor among his
brother clergy, and it is the general custom for priests to be
confessed at the houses of the religious or secular clergy they select
as confessors, the rule about the use of the public confessionals in
the churches applying especially to the confessions of women. The men
kneeling in the first room are preparing for their weekly confession
or making their thanksgiving after it.
When the poor canon died, leaving his orphan kinswomen unprovided for,
the _corpo di santo sano_, which might have fetched something, was
taken away at once because it was against ecclesiastical rules for
them to keep it, but the pictures, which could fetch nothing,
continued to gaze on the struggles of the little sisters, reminding
them of the poor canon and also of the fickleness of the public taste
in _articles de virtu_--for during his lifetime these pictures had
received their full meed of respectful admiration.
As our pedestrian enters his own house door, which is covered with
_immagini_ and texts serving as charms--among which S. Anna the mother
of the Madonna is not absent as a house-patron, and the faded rose
brought from the festa of the _Divin Amore_ figures conspicuously--he
may indeed have a vague sense that the _annus Domini_ will soon be too
strong for the life he has just been witnessing, but he will hardly be
disturbed by any speculation as to the elements which have conspired
to form the atmosphere surrounding the first Bishop of Christendom in
this his capital once the capital of the world. He will not think of
the apotheosis of the emperor in ancient Rome, of the orientalism
which crept into Western Christendom through Byzantium, imposing
things which especially here in Rome were alien to its religious
genius; he will scarcely remember that the Pope's temporal sovereignty
added a diadem to his tiara, for he has never distinguished the
temporal from the spiritual arm, or discerned the part which the
former has played in determining the manifestations of the latter.
[Illustration: ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
Erected by the Senate in his honour A.D. 312. Eighteen years later
he retired to Byzantium, leaving the Roman Bishops in virtual
possession of the eternal city. See pages 32, 42, 237.]
CHAPTER XII
THE ROMAN QUESTION
I. _Before 1870_
The "Roman Question" represents the only "religious" question in
Italy. The problems which agitate other lands leave the Italian
unaffected, uninterested. He has no genius for reforming, and no
genius for sect-making, he is as tolerant of abuses as of diversities.
So it comes about that the one and only "religious" question in Italy
is a political question--the rights and wrongs of the situation
created for the papacy when it was despoiled of its temporalities.
It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great
future for Italy were not confined in the "forties" to the Italian
_unità_ men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's "_Speranze d'Italia_"
and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free
herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by
Gioberti's "_Primato morale e civile degli Italiani_" in which "the
majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy" were set forth as
mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the
Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil.
There he read that "Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the
religious metropolis of the world," and there he gained his notion of
an Italian federation under the civil headship of the Pope. That this
idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault
of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an
obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist.
He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political
arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found
opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own
papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of
the _Syllabus_. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never
intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not
have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation
would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a
theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the
"forties" and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the
civil headship of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough
to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a
complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and
has not been undertaken since.
Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of
the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the
protection and free development of the Kingdom of God on
earth--self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception
does not correspond to facts. We all know that the "Donation" of Rome
to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor
Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth
retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the
pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the
great European states with the absorption of the small principalities
and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them
in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the
territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an
Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and
southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a
history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of
Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to
establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil
power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their
rights--efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The
modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the "pre-eminent
domain" which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of
civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into
flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed
between the final destruction of all "home rule" in the papal states
and the loss of the temporal power.
When we speak of the servitude of the Pope in the King of Italy's
dominions, we forget that Catholic princes have always found
themselves obliged to restrain the papal arm, and to propound from
time to time laws protecting the minor against the major clergy, the
prelates against the pretensions of the papacy, the people against the
publication of obnoxious Bulls, and the public peace by subjecting the
correspondence between the Pope and the bishops to scrutiny. Thus the
disciplinary canons of the Council of Trent were not published--and
were never accepted--in many Catholic states. Canon law has been the
constant butt of civil legislation which has denied one by one the
immunities of ecclesiastics and abolished the existence of
ecclesiastical courts for the trial of clerical offenders. The
abstract question of the popes' relation to civil rights and to
temporal power cannot be viewed apart from the sober teaching of
history.
[Illustration: CASTEL AND PONTE SANT' ANGELO
The castle of S. Angelo, fortified in the time of the popes, was
built by Hadrian as his mausoleum. The bridge is the ancient _pons
Aelius_ of which the parapet is modern, and the statues of SS. Peter
and Paul and of angels bearing the instruments of the Passion were
added by Clements VII. and IX. It was built by Hadrian to reach his
mausoleum. In the middle ages it was lined by a double row of
booths, and two hundred people were crushed to death here in the
Jubilee of 1450. See pages 32, 239, 242.]
Already in the reign of Pius VI. the Romans had imbibed from the
French some of the doctrines of the Revolution, among them that of the
sovereignty of the people. From that time onwards the papal power
could never have been upheld except by foreign arms; and the spirit in
which the great Napoleon offered his services should be sufficient
evidence that the task of preserving the patrimony of Peter was not
undertaken by those whom we ought to regard as having understood
better than the Italians the things which belonged to Catholic peace.
Every one will admit that the pontifical states were not really
independent during these foreign occupations: what appears to be
less clear is that a pope-king is not necessarily more free to
exercise his high office than a pope who does not rule or who may even
be the subject of another government. There is a covered way from the
Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo which is itself a parable of the
history of the Roman popes. It was constructed as a means of fleeing
in secrecy and safety from the Vatican when the turbulent Romans or
foreign invaders made the pope's life insecure and placed his city at
the mercy of vandals. The "Pope's own city of Rome" should never be
thought of without a mental picture of the covered passage from the
episcopal palace to the fortified castle, along which popes young and
old, bad and good, have hurried praying or cursing. Let us look upon
some of these fugitive popes, and realise from their trembling steps,
their impotent objurgations, the hunted look in their eyes, how much
of dignity and liberty the possession of Rome secured to them in the
exercise of their divine mission. There is a type of Catholic whose
favourite theme is Canossa, as his adversary's favourite theme is the
Copernican system. An emperor standing outside the Pope's castle in a
penitent's shirt through weary days and icy nights beseeching him to
withdraw the decree of excommunication strikes the imagination to the
exclusion of the sequel of the story. Four years after the experience
of Canossa, the "penitent" emperor, accompanied by his antipope,
brought an army to Rome and made Gregory fly to Castel Sant' Angelo.
The people abandoned the cause of the great Hildebrand, betrayed Rome
to the enemy at its gates and deposed their lawful pope. But imperial
vengeance for a humiliation which had been undertaken to satisfy the
superstition of the vulgar did not end there. Henry V. exacted from
Paschal II. a further penalty, and while Europe looked on in apathy,
the Pope and his cardinals were made prisoners and a number of priests
were drawn through the mud at the horses' tails as the imperial troops
rode off. Gelasius II. was seized in the conclave which elected him,
trampled underfoot and chained in a tower belonging to the Frangipani.
Rescued by the Romans of Trastevere and the Island, he is next found
hiding in the _Borgo_ from the emperor, who pursued him in his flight
to Gaeta, annulled his election and proclaimed an antipope. On the
Pope's return to Rome he was entrapped at a mass in S. Prassede, but
escaping to the meadows by S. Paul's where he was found weeping with
the women of the neighbourhood, he died an exile in a Cluniac convent
in France.
[Illustration: BRONZE STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS ON THE CAPITOL
Placed here by Michael Angelo in 1538, who removed it from the
Lateran Piazza. It owed its preservation to the belief that it
represented Constantine. To the right and left are the museums of
the Capitol. In the rear is the Palace of the Senator overlooking
the Forum. See pages 13-15, 57, 58, 241.]
In 1144 the Romans determined to restore their free Senate and
demanded, under Arnold of Brescia's influence, the abolition of the
temporal power. Lucius II. stormed the Capitol and died defending his
rights, but his successor was forced to fly the eternal city. Our one
English Pope, who possessed the fine old English sounding name of
Nicholas Breakspear, declared on his death bed that the Pope of Rome
must find means to content the sordid soul of the Roman people or quit
his throne and his city a fugitive. Indeed nothing is more
noticeable than the strict impartiality with which the Romans meted
out violence to popes good and bad; and exactly a century before they
were deposing the great Hildebrand, they could have been seen
outraging the body of the infamous Boniface VII., surnamed "Francone,"
whose bleeding corpse was kicked and rolled down the streets of Rome
to the foot of the statue of the good Marcus Aurelius. In the same
century which saw the English Hadrian IV. reigning in Rome, two German
archbishops led troops against a pope. The Romans, as usual, required
the vanquished pope to abdicate, and accepted Barbarossa as their
ruler, who gave them an antipope. Of one emperor at this time it could
be truthfully said that he had "the whole College of Cardinals in his
pay" which affords some notion of the spiritual dignity of conclaves,
while the ups and downs to which the papal rulers of Rome were subject
is illustrated in the case of Pope Alexander who in the same twelfth
century was received with open arms after ten years' exile by the
fickle people, who however duly stoned his coffin when he died.
Clement III., himself a Roman, was obliged to sanction once more the
powers of the Roman Senate, and to hand over to the people part of the
tolls. Innocent IV. fled to Genoa, this time from fear of the emperor,
who afterwards kept him a prisoner in his own Lateran palace. Even a
Boniface VIII. narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the French King and
died most miserably in the Vatican. Benedict XI., the saintly Venetian
pope, attempted to punish the perpetrators of this outrage, but had
to withdraw his Bulls, and retire himself to Perugia. The election of
his successor the French Pope Clement V. was followed by the exile of
the popes in Avignon, and since their return to Rome in 1377 the popes
have not belied their character for alternately inspiring and flying
from violence foreign and internecine.
That mute but eloquent parable in stone is the real synthesis of the
history of the papacy--the episcopal palace by the tomb of the
Apostle, in the first Christian church, at one end, and at the other
the fortress which was once a pagan emperor's mausoleum, with its
dungeons and its history, secret and open, of crime and bloodshed; and
between these the covered way along which the popes pass and repass
from one to the other, symbol not of the separation but of the fateful
conjunction of spiritual and temporal which has haunted their history.
It would, indeed, be strange if ages of barbarism could have secured
to the first Christian bishop the honour and safety which can now be
assured to him by that civilisation and tolerance which we have
substituted for "the ages of faith"; and United Italy must have a long
future ahead of it before it can have heaped on the popes one
hundredth part of the indignities and sufferings which they underwent
when nominally masters of Rome. But such modern conditions have not
always prevailed, and those who in all ages have waged war against the
theory of the temporal power--saints and philosophers--ought to have
recognised that at one period of European history territorial
lordship, feudal rank and power, were a necessity. The Church did not
create and did not choose the feudal system, which was indeed opposed
in principle to the spirit and teaching of Christ's Gospel, and the
days have long since gone by when "secular grandeur guaranteed to the
Church her religious integrity"--nevertheless these days once existed,
and then the Catholic Church was as a strong man armed _cap à pie_
fighting for life, and leaving to the individual--the saintly bishop,
the saintly clerk or layman--the task of softening the rigours and
planing the roughnesses of a Christian system which was also at war
with itself. Although it is true that no form of the popes' temporal
sway has at any time secured to the papacy the benefits that have been
alleged for it by ultramontane writers since 1870, and conversely true
that the events of 1870 did not deprive the pope of those benefits,
yet it is also perfectly true that the papacy has been, through the
centuries, the means of preserving for Italy its ancient character of
a world power, and of preserving for Rome, abandoned by Constantine
and his successors to the fate of a small provincial town, cowering in
its own ruins and filth, the prestige and significance of the city
which ruled the world. It is the successors of Peter who have
perpetuated the meaning of its title "the Eternal City," and have
carried on, through fine weather and foul, the immortality of
Augustus. This surely constitutes the papacy's chief claim on Italy's
consideration.
There is, moreover, a curious and subtile, but perfectly
comprehensible, tie between Italy and the popes, to which expression
was given by the priest-philosopher Gioberti in his book on "The
Primacy" already quoted. The Italian who never goes to church, nay the
Italian who believes in no Church--and in Italy he is not at all
necessarily the same person--contemplates the papal primacy with
pleasure and pride, and considers with approval the phenomenon which
brings the rest of Europe to kiss the foot of an Italian. He is
perfectly aware, on the one side, that the Christian primacy--which is
an Italian primacy--adds lustre and a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the
city and the land which was the cradle of modern civilisation; and in
some undefinable, yet I think definite, way he sees in it a
compensation for the glory which has departed from his land of
glories, a tangible pledge and earnest of that world-mastery whose
sceptre is now wrenched from his hands.
[Illustration: S. PETER'S FROM THE PINCIAN GARDENS
See pages 16, 100, 135.]
The modern ultramontane has accustomed the modern simple faithful to
an historical picture which has had, as we see, no existence in fact:
the Vatican standing solemn and decorous, at its Bronze Gate the Swiss
Guard; the papal sovereignty and the papal troops--disbanded, these
latter, by evil men in 1870--guaranteeing to pope and cardinal the
freedom of their sacred ministry both within and without the papal
confines. It is only since 1870 that such a picture can be seen, in
miniature, and within the walls of the Vatican, under the respectful
tutelage of a united Italy which now surrounds the solemn and decorous
palace, certainly not the least turbulent centre of Europe before
1870.
II. _Since 1870_
The pretension of the popes to wield "the two swords" had ever been a
fruitful cause of friction in Europe; but in Rome the immense
spiritual claims of the papacy joined to the claim that the Pope was
_de jure divino_ monarch of monarchs, and could command the sword of
princes in carrying out his ecclesiastical behests, wore a unique
aspect, for here the Pope was in actual possession of the temporal
sword, and ruled the bodies as well as the souls of men. The civil
supremacy of the State is, indeed, a permanent conquest of the age in
which we live, and the last European stronghold of the opposing theory
was to be seen in Rome itself.
It is interesting therefore to notice that it was for internal civil
reform that the Romans were agitating during the last years before
1870. The interference of the clergy in municipal administration was
an intolerable grievance, and municipal reforms were still being urged
on the Pope in 1857. The agitators were chiefly to be found among the
lawyers and doctors, the educated _bourgeoisie_--always a minority in
Rome--who were joined by a few heads and scions of great families. But
in the previous pontificate "demonstrations" in favour of the falling
papacy had still been engineered in Rome. Incited by a cardinal the
people would take the horses out of Gregory XVI.'s carriage, and drag
the Pope in procession; but the venal demonstrators had each his own
personal petition to present, and when, shortly afterwards, one of
the principal demonstrators assassinated his wife and aggravated the
murder by brutally locking her in a room so that she might expire
without assistance, the tender conscience of his comrades was outraged
to find that Gregory sent him to the gallows without hesitation. The
mercenary troops--the recruited refuse of all nations--described by an
eye witness as "a drunken rabble," were also a thorn in the side of
the Romans. The character of these papal supporters was in general so
infamous that _soldato del papa_ was a proverbial contumely: they were
the defenders of Rome in September 1870, under a German Swiss colonel,
appointed general for the occasion, whose opponent, Cadorna, an
officer of very different standing, wrote the history of the siege.
In the thirty-four years that have since elapsed, the millennium has
certainly not come in Italy, nor is everything better than it was
before. But at least everything has a chance of being better. Some of
the things which the popes were asked to concede, especially as
regards penal procedure, are not bettered to-day, for the Italian laws
though in certain departments they are ideal schemes of legislation
are in practice very frequently dead letters--and some of the crimes
which made old Rome hideous have ceased owing to the very simple
expedient of lighting the streets at night.
The _Statuto_, the constitution of united Italy, begins with a
declaration that the religion of the State is the Catholic religion.
The Pope's relation to the State was defined by "the Law of
Guarantees" in 1871. His status is not that of a subject, but of a
sovereign, though of a sovereign without territorial possessions. He
is, however, sovereign in his palaces of the Vatican, Lateran, and
Cancelleria, which with the papal country seat of Castel Gandolfo
still belong to him. Within the Vatican he can and does maintain certain
companies of soldiers and guards, and _extraterritorialisation_
applies to the Vatican precinct, no Italian official having any right
to enter there unless invited to do so. Foreign nations can accredit
ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary to the Pope's court, and he
can maintain ambassadors, or nunzios, at foreign courts. The
archbasilicas of S. Peter's, S. John Lateran, and S. Maria Maggiore,
also belong to the Pope, and their possession enabled Leo XIII. to
refuse any one of the great basilicas for the marriage of the present
King of Italy. The palace of Santa Maria Maggiore was confirmed to the
popes in compensation for the loss of the Quirinal, and this
territory, like all the other palaces churches and villas named, is
_papal_ territory, not Italian territory. In addition, the Law of
Guarantees provides that a sum of £130,000 (three and a quarter
million francs) should be paid annually to the popes as a compensation
for their revenue. This has never been accepted. The Law was intended
to secure the Pope's complete independence of the Italian Crown, a
matter which it was felt would be jealously watched over by other
Catholic States; it guarantees his complete personal and
administrative independence in the government of the Church, and in
his and his agents' communication with countries outside Italy. That
the popes have never been satisfied with it their continued protest
and invocation of the liberty and dignity of temporal sovereignty
amply proves.
The relation of Church and State in Italy is like that in other
Catholic countries. The entire revenue of the papal States passed of
course into the hands of the Italian Government, which also took over
the revenues of such institutions as _Propaganda Fide_. A _Fondo
Culto_ was created, and the nation continued to administer the
ecclesiastical revenues of the country for the same objects as did the
Pope. It pays the stipends of the parish priests, and a project has
just been matured for increasing these in parishes where they are less
than 1000 francs (£40) a year. Only in May of last year (1904) the
_Camera_ had under discussion the relief of the lower and unbeneficed
clergy, and of the poorer provincial seminaries for training priests.
Bishops and canons cannot become possessed of their "temporalities"
without the royal _exequatur_, and all public religious fabrics
throughout the country belong to the State. Where the ecclesiastical
face of Italy has been changed is in the suppression and expropriation
of its monasteries and religious houses--the historical sites (with
their treasures) have been declared national monuments, the gradual
suppression of the communities which inhabited them has been provided
for by a law forbidding the profession of new members, and the
monastic revenues have been partly converted into insignificant
pensions--varying from two francs to fifty centimes a day--paid to
each individual of the suppressed communities. That the law has not
been pressed with great severity by the tolerant Italian Government is
evidenced in the fact that communities still exist who have escaped
final confiscation for thirty-eight years by silently adding to their
number so that it might never fall below the fatal six which spelt
dissolution. At the end of the century there were still 13,875
religious who under this law were in receipt of 176,000 pounds. As to
Rome itself, the Religious Congregations have proved that it has not
been made an insupportable place of residence for them. The historic
houses are national monuments, and the ancient communities are only
recruited _sub rosa_, but new "Mother Houses" of all the great orders
are taking possession of commanding sites in Rome, the illegal
"professions" take place every day, and the number of monks, friars,
and religious of both sexes is considerably larger than it was before
1870. So true is it that no district, hardly a street, in Rome is
without its convent, that it has been wittily declared that the
"temporal power" is in fact returning in this way--and Rome is again
in roods and acres becoming ecclesiastical property.
It is difficult to suppose that we are near a conciliation between the
Pope and Italy, or that there is still time for a satisfactory
coalition between the conservative forces of law and order in the
country and the moral forces of Catholicism against the inrush of the
subversive forces of socialism and political radicalism. Many of the
best men on the Italian side would indeed deplore any reconciliation
with the Pope at present on the ground that it would involve a check
to the civil progress of the Italian people. Meanwhile the Italians
are certainly not becoming more religious under a system which assumes
that if you are a good citizen you cannot be "a good Catholic," and it
is for the popes to determine whether the irreligion of the people is
or is not too heavy a price to pay for the upkeep of their protest
against the events of 1870. The consequent alienation of some of the
better religious elements in the country is, at least, doing serious
harm in that it makes the abler men outside doubt whether the
religious elements which remain are worthy to be regarded as in any
sense a moral force which could be invoked to co-operate with the best
modern secular forces.
Meanwhile the opposing factions have been face to face for thirty-four
years. How have they behaved, and how have they altered since then?
The official Vatican behaviour never varied until Pius X. ascended the
Chair of Peter. Pius IX. had set the example of violent public
utterances, and had permitted the subsidised clerical newspapers to
attack Victor Emmanuel both in his private and public character. On
the other hand he would never tolerate in his presence a word against
the King, and his own letters to him were not only friendly but
affectionate. This little comedy scandalised the Italian's sense of
decorum, and as a policy has succeeded in alienating Italian sympathy.
The general tendency on the secular side has been conciliatory; the
Italians, indeed, began with a farce on the morrow of their entry into
Rome, a farce duly recorded in the name of the street which runs past
the church of the _Gesù_. The _plébiscite_ registered the will of the
"whites" but not the will of the "blacks," none of whom voted; and the
forty-six votes against the new _régime_ which appeared in the total,
had been cast by the "whites" themselves. Nevertheless the Catholics
in Rome who do not make a _politica_ of their religion, willingly
allow that they enjoy a large measure of liberty. Not long since at
the request of the visiting chaplain the authorities arranged for a
man to be brought back to the prison where his wife was still
undergoing sentence, in order that their civil marriage might be
completed with the religious rite. For some years past the present
Cardinal Vicar of Rome has administered the Easter Communion to the
inmates of the _Regina Coeli_ prison to the joy of the prison
officials and the reciprocal consolation of the cardinal and the black
sheep whom he that day bears home on his shoulder rejoicing. It is
well known that the officers encourage the men to attend to their
religious duties at Easter, and remind them of these as the seasons
come round. Every soldier may then have leave of absence for
confession and communion, and a rule is made requiring all men out on
leave in this way to bring back with them the Communion ticket which
is given at the rails to each Easter communicant. Many of the soldiers
choose to go to S. Peter's, and the carabineers in their sober black
uniforms may always be seen there during Holy Week.
It will readily be understood that both incongruities and
accommodations are rife in such a condition of affairs as the
existence of a State Church by the side of a hostile papacy. The King
wants a regimental banner blest, or the Pope wants to have the roads
kept while fifty thousand pilgrims flock to S. Peter's. During the
latter years of Leo XIII.'s pontificate the Italian police were
invited into the basilica, and headed a procession with all the
decorum of its traditional vergers, the _Sampietrini_. These
reciprocal interests even require telephonic communication between the
Quirinal and the Vatican. In theory, the House of Savoy, the members
of the Government and every person in its pay down to the _custodi_ of
the ruins and museums of Rome with their families are excommunicated.
In practice the Pope provides a chaplain for the Royal palace, the
parish priest has of late years entered the Quirinal and penetrated to
the royal bedrooms for the customary blessing of houses on Easter eve,
Italian officials and their families receive absolution like any one
else, and the irony of history required that the "excommunicated"
Queen Margaret of Savoy was the only princely personage to fulfil the
conditions of the last Jubilee year in Rome.
[Illustration: FROM THE TERRACE OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN
Before us is the church built on the site of the Temple of Venus and
Rome and dedicated to S. Francesca Romana, the greatest of Roman
saints. To the left the huge ruins of the basilica of the first
Christian emperor, while to the right is the Arch of Titus,
commemorating the fall of Jerusalem, and the road with its _via
crucis_ which leads to the church of S. Bonaventura, the biographer
of S. Francis, built against the Stadium of Domitian.
The view is taken from the terrace outside that domestic basilica of
the Flavian House which still retains more of the form of a
Christian basilica than any other pagan building. Here are brought
together the old and the new, Christian and pagan, papal and
imperial--the shock of the two world empires. See interleaf, pages
44, 50.]
And the "blacks and the whites"? In the "eighties" the distinction
between those who clung to the old _régime_ and those who adopted the
new was still sufficiently marked, but in the last decade of the
century the "blacks" became "gray" or as they themselves liked to
express it _caffè-latte_, neither black nor white. The acceptance
of invitations to the Quirinal has, up to now, entailed the forfeiture
of those official invitations to the Vatican which are extended to the
Roman aristocracy for every great papal function. Many of its older
members still absent themselves from all official "white" receptions,
and a daughter is still presented not at the Court but to the Pope,
with her _fiancé_, on her engagement. But in private society the great
"black" ladies now know and meet the "white" society with which many
of the Roman families are related by marriage; and it is not
infrequently the case that one branch of an old Roman house clings to
the Pope while another attaches itself to the King. But everywhere,
even where the parents absent themselves from official "white"
society, their children now go to the Quirinal. Thus we are very far
from the time when no member of the Roman aristocracy met the King or
Queen, when the Court was entirely composed of new men, or the
Piedmontese whom the King brought with him. The day has gone by when
even in a ball-room the "blacks" took care to label themselves by
wearing a yellow (papal) rose, and only priests and the English
converts still make a point of not saluting the sovereign. One Roman
prince, however, has kept up a picturesque protest--and the great door
of Prince Lancellotti's palace has never been opened since the day the
King of Italy entered the Pope's capital. Even when, quite recently,
invitations to a ball were issued from the great silent house, all the
guests crowded through the postern door.
When one asks any of the old school now whether the old Government did
well or ill, the best, and the wisest, answer that they can give us is
"They were _altri tempi_, other times." And this is the reason why it
is impossible that the two parties should continue to exist after the
present generation. The cleavage has really been due to the fact that
the Vatican and Quirinal parties live in two different epochs; they
live in different worlds and speak a different language. The old
fashioned "blacks" can only think in a circle of ideas and sentiments,
political and moral, to which they were born but which has no present
point of contact with reality, with the living world around them, with
"things as they are." The old has its beauty and the new has its
uglinesses, as always; but also they frequently change these
positions. Fifteen years ago one of the most distinguished Italian
diocesans wrote a pamphlet entitled "_Roma e l'Italia, e la realtà
delle cose, pensieri di un prelato italiano_"--"Rome, Italy, and
things as they are; thoughts of an Italian Prelate." As soon as his
name was discovered, he was told to withdraw the pamphlet, publicly
from his own pulpit. This was not encouraging to others who thought as
he in a country where secular public opinion still counts for so
little, the individual "courage of your opinions" counts for still
less, and where a public opinion among ecclesiastics is simply
non-existent. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a
Cardinal Secretary of State had the courage of his opinions as the
following passages from his Memoirs will prove. He is known for his
protection of the Jesuits against the Jansenists during his sojourn in
Paris as papal Envoy Extraordinary, and by the Pacca law, which is
called after him, prohibiting private owners from disposing of great
works of art out of Italy. "Providence," he writes, "has taken away
the temporal power from the Holy See and prepared those changes in
States and Governments which shall once more render it possible for
the Pope, although a subject, to rule over and govern the whole body
of the faithful." "The popes, relieved from the burden of the temporal
power which obliged them to devote a great part of their time to
secular affairs, may now turn all their attention and all their care
to the spiritual government of the Church; and when the Roman Church
lacks the pomp and magnificence which temporal sovereignty has given
her, then there will be numbered among her clergy only those who
_bonum opus desiderant_."
That pathetic combatant for papal rights in the twelfth century
Gelasius II., exclaimed to his cardinals "We must leave Rome, where it
is impossible to stay." That plaintive cry need, we trust, have no
further echo: the ages of which Gregorovius writes that popes "were
obliged to leave Rome to realise in foreign countries that they were
still actually reverenced as representatives of Christ" closed, we
hope, with the entry of the Italians into Rome and the consequent
creation--in lieu of the elusive "_Roma intangibile_"--of what
Bismarck happily called an "intangible Vatican."
Index
Abruzzi, Abruzzese, 153, 155, 188
Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, 221
Accoramboni, Vittoria, 167
Acilii Glabriones, 45
Adelbert, S., 8
Adonis, 90
_Aedes publica_, 31
Aeneas, 2, 130
Aesculapius, 7, 8
Agapê, 46
Ager (agro), 1, 15, 70-1, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90
Agricultural colonies, 11, 76
Agrippa, 20, 22, 30
Alabaster, 27
Alaric, 37
Alba Longa, 1, 2, 15
Alban hills, 17, 23, 70, 78
Albani, 171
Alexander III., 241
Alexander Severus, 22, 32, 63
_Alta Semita_, 55
Altar, 19, 20, 35, 186;
position of priest at, 36, 186
Altieri, 172
_Ambarvalia_, 15
Amphitheatre, 22, 31, 33, 163
Anacletus II., 161
Ancus Martius, 5, 26
Anguillara, 60, 162, 168
Animals, cruelty to, 81, 88, 129, 147-8, 155;
Leo XIII. and, 148
Anio, 24
Annibaldi, 168
Anselm, S., 5
Antonelli, Cardinal, 202, 219
Antonines, 11
Antoninus Pius, 32, 197
Antony, S., 68, 148
Apostles, 42, 48, 199
Appian Way, 30, 41, 45, 70, 168
Appius Claudius, 21
Apprentice, 67
Apse, 19, 35, 36
Aqueducts, 21, 22, 30, 31, 37, 39, 73
Arabesques, 29
Arcadians, 2
Arch, 36;
of Janus, 162
Arches, triumphal, 33;
of Constantine, 32, 162;
of Septimius Severus, 32;
of Titus, 31, 162;
of Trajan, 31
Architraves, 19, 36
Arenula, 56
Aristocracy, 94, 99, 109, 132, 135, 159, 160, 170, 172, 173, 174,
178, 215, 221, 245, 253
Arnold of Brescia, 240
Augustus, 4, 10, 12, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 53, 54, 55, 57, 74, 164, 243;
house of, 10, 30;
mausoleum of, 30, 164, 242
Aurelian, Emperor, 6, 32;
wall, 32, 38, 43, 163
Aurelii, 45
Aurelius, Marcus, 32, 46, 55, 63, 197, 241
_Ave Maria_, 232
Aventine, 26, 30, 160, 202, 227
Avignon, exile in, 6, 14, 57, 242
_Baioccho_, 105
Balbo, Cesare, 235
_Baldacchino_, 10, 177, 211
_Balnae_, 20
Bambin Gesù, image in Ara Coeli, 230;
convent of the, 223
Banners, regional, 55, 57, 58, 59
Baptism, 231
Barbarossa, 241
Barberini, 9, 10, 171
Barbers, street, 101
Baronial towers. _See_ Towers
Bartholomew, S., 7
Basilica, Christian, 33, 34, 36, 50, 67, 186, 209;
domestic, 34, 35;
Flavian, 35;
forensic, 19, 20, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37;
Julia, 20, 30;
Ulpian, 31
Baths, public, 19-21, 24, 30, 31, 39, 54, 61, 99
Beggars, 11-12, 54, 99
Belli, Gioacchino, 140
Bell towers. _See_ Towers
Benedict XI., 241
Benedict XIII., 167
Benedict XIV., 59, 178
Benedict, S., 78
Beneficent clubs, 68
Beneventum, 7
_Berretta_, 204, 205, 209
Bibulus, 29
Bismarck, 255
"Blacks" and "Whites," 252-4
Boatmen's guild, 63
Bombardment of Rome, 212
Bonaparte, 171
Boncompagni, 170
Boniface VII., 241
Boniface VIII., 164, 165, 167, 168, 201, 241
"Book of the Art," 84, 86
Borghese, 123, 170, 171, 174
Borgo, 55, 90, 228, 240
Bracciano, 17, 168;
duke of, 167
Braschi, 173
Breakspear, Nicholas, 240
_Breccias_, 27
Bricks, 23, 25, 37
Brigands, 11, 54, 89, 96, 150
Buffalo Bill, 89
Building crisis, 12
Burial guilds, 8, 42, 63, 77
_Butteri_, 89, 90
_Buzzuri_, 138
Byzantium, Byzantine, 42, 137, 234
Cadorna, General, 246
Caecilia Metella, 29, 168
Caecilii, 45, 46
Caelian hill, 5, 31, 53, 202
Caesar, Julius, 29, 30
Caesarius, S., 74
Caetani, 164, 168, 177
Café, 101, 142
_Cafoni_, 138
Calabria, Calabrese, 126, 139, 155
Caligula, 31
Callistus, catacomb of, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46;
Pope, 42 _n._;
Callistus III. 60
_Camorra_, 139, 139 _n._
Campagna, 17, 21, 38, 69-80, 83, 89-92, 107, 228;
cattle in, 77;
cities, ancient, of, 72;
deaths in the, 77, 90, 143;
malaria in, 74-5;
towns of, 78, 107
Campitelli, _rione_, 56
Campo de' Fiori, 219
Campo Marzo (Campus Martius), 18, 22, 30, 33, 37, 55, 59, 60, 163, 228
Campo Vaccino, 61, 62
_Cancellum_, 19, 35
Candelabra, 36
Canon law, 238
Canon, a, of S. M. in Trastevere, 232
Canonisation, 50
Canossa, 239
Capitol, 4, 18, 28, 30, 31, 38, 56, 57, 58, 130, 135, 161, 169,
172, 173, 240
_Capo d'arte_, 66
_Capo rione_, 57, 58
_Cappa magna_, 209
Captains, regional, 54, 55, 56, 58
Carabineers, 150, 151, 151 _n._, 225
Caracalla, 20, 21, 32
Cardinal, Bishops, 201, 205;
Chamberlain, 210;
deacons, 201, 202, 205;
priests, 201, 202, 205;
vicar, 201, 251
Cardinal's dress, 204, 206, 209, 210;
hat, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209;
vicar, 201
Cardinals, 15, 58, 159, 175, 200-211, 225, 228, 240, 241
Cardinals, College of, 15, 201, 202, 205, 210, 241, 252
Carnival, 58
Carrara marble, 25
Carters, carts, 63, 72, 88, 90, 96, 228
Caserta, 168, 177
Cassandrino, 141
Castel Gandolfo, 171, 247
Castel Sant' Angelo, 56, 239, 242
_Castelli Romani_, 71, 78, 79
Catacombs, 196;
art in 46;
number of, 43;
prayers for dead in, 48-9;
testimony of the, 47-8
Catholicism and the Catholic Church, 45, 47, 137, 181, 184, 195,
199, 236, 243;
and Catholic clergy, 137, 248, 254
Celestine III., 167
_Cella_, 18, 19
Cement, use of, 24, 27, 37
Cenci, Cencius, 168, 169;
Beatrice, 160;
Bolognetti, 169;
Johannes, 169;
Marcus, 169;
Virginius, 169
Centurion, 54
Cestian bridge. _See pons_
Chapter of S. Peter's, 67, 209
Charioteers, 33, 63
Charities, Roman, 11, 56, 66, 174, 217, 223
Charlemagne, 14, 237
Chigi, 170;
Agostino, 171
Chivalry, 5, 112
Chrism ("confirmation"), 231
Christians, early, 34, 42, 47
Church and State, 248
Churches--
S. Adriano, 202;
S. Anastasia, 2;
SS. Andrea and Gregorio, 161, 202;
S. Angelo in Pescheria, 56;
SS. Apostoli, 232;
Ara Coeli, 57, 86, 161, 230;
S. Barbara, 66;
S. Bartholomew, 8;
SS. Bonifacio and Alessio, 202;
S. Caterina de' Funari, 66;
Chiesa Nuova, 56;
S. Clemente, 202;
SS. Cosma and Damiano, 32;
S. Croce, 35;
S. Domitilla (catacomb), 187;
S. Eligio dei Ferrai, 68;
S. Eusebio, 202;
S. Eustachio, 56;
S. Francesca Romana, 32;
S. Giorgio in Velabro, 202;
S. Giovanni Calibita, 7;
S. Giuseppe degli Falegnami, 66;
S. John Beheaded, 86;
S. John Lateran, 35, 36, 247;
S. Lorenzo in Lucina, 226;
S. Lorenzo in Miranda, 32, 66;
S. Luigi, 173;
S. Marcello, 161;
S. Marco, 230;
S. Maria degli Angeli, 21;
S. Maria in Aquiro, 202;
S. Maria Aventinense (_see_ Priory of Malta);
S. Maria in Cosmedin, 7, 31, 186;
S. Maria in Capella, 229;
S. Maria in Domnica, 187;
S. Maria Maggiore, 23, 34, 60, 171, 187, 223, 231, 247;
S. Maria dell' Orto, 66, 229;
SS. Nereo and Achilleo, 187;
S. Paul's-without-the-Walls, 36, 240;
S. Peter's, 10, 16, 32, 38, 41, 42, 67, 196, 247, 251, 252;
S. Prassede, 240;
S. Prisca, 202;
S. Sabina, 186;
S. Silvestro in Capite, 166;
S. Stefano, Via Latina, 187;
S. Tommaso a' Cenci, 66, 169
Cippolino, 27
Circolo San Pietro, 76, 222
Circus, 19, 26, 33;
Maximus, 30
_Civis romanus_, 181, 199
Claudius, 26, 31, 181
Clement, Pope, 14
Clement III., 241
Clement V., 242
Clement IX., 172
Clement XI., 171
Clement XII., 171
Clement XIII., 146
Clementi, 156 _n._
_Clivus capitolinus_, 30
_Cloacae_, 18, 39
Cloisters, 36, 38
Cluilian Ditch, 15
Coaches, bambino's, 230;
pope's, 217, 231, 245;
cardinal's and prince's, 173, 207, 208, 210
Cohorts, 54
_Collegio_, 63, 64, 65, 66
_Colles_, 53
_Collina_, 53
Colonies, agricultural, 11, 76
Colonna, 55, 162, 163, 164-7, 170, 172;
Lorenzo, 165;
Marc' Antonio, 165;
Sciarra, 164;
Stephen, 165;
Vittoria, 165
Colosseum, 11, 22, 32, 39, 162
Coltello, 145
Columns, 33, 38;
of Marcus Aurelius, 32;
of Trajan, 31, 142
_Comitium_, 4
Commemorative banquets, 63
Communes, Roman, 13, 59, 64;
Italian, 14, 179
Communion, Easter, 223, 251;
first, 222, 223;
tickets, 223, 224, 251
Conciliation. _See_ Pope and Italy
_Conciliatore_, 110-111
Conclave, 58, 210-11, 241
Concrete, use of, 24, 25, 27, 28, 37
_Confessio_, 36, 50
Confession, 222, 223, 251
Confraternities, 67, 68
Confraternity of Prayer and Death, 67, 143;
red, 8, 229
Congregations, Roman, 203, 249;
of women in Rome, 220, 228, 230
Consistory, secret, 204;
public, 204
Constantine, 31, 32, 34, 37, 42, 162, 237, 243
Consular families, 13, 34, 63
Conti, 160
Corinthian pillars, 19
Cornelius, pope, 45
Corporations, 62, 63
Corte Savella, 160
Corsi, 161
Corsini, 171
Corso, 9, 59, 93, 100, 101, 115, 141, 161, 172, 220, 221;
Vittorio Emanuele, 169
Cosmati, 36
Courtship, 152-3
Crime, 81, 139, 145-6, 149, 246
_Croce Rossa_, 75
Crostarosa, Mons., 34 _n._
Curatii and Horatii, 15
Curator, regional, 53, 54, 64
Curia, 201, 203
_Curiae_, 154
Curule chairs, 197
Customs officers, 64, 103
Dante, 9
Deacons of Rome, 55, 200, 201, 202
Decimal system, 105
Decoration, 25, 28, 29
Deffand, Marquise du, 226
Democracy, 114, 115, 194
De Rossi, 44
Destruction of city. _See_ Rome
Diaconate, the, 200
Diocletian, 20, 21, 32, 33, 61;
museum, 29
_Dio in terra_, 216
_Dispetto_, 134
District courts, 110
_Divin amore_ festa, 234
Doctors, guild of, 63
Dogma, 47, 50, 56, 64
Domitian, 30, 31;
house of, 31, 35
_Domui_, 23
Donation of Constantine, 237
Don, 178
Donna, 178
Door charms, 234
Doria Pamphili, 68, 172, 221
Doric columns, 19
Dowries, 12, 56, 66, 67
Dress of Romans, 141
Dyers, guild of, 63
Easter. _See_ Communion
Egypt, 7, 25, 180, 183
Esquilina, 55
Esquiline, 5, 53, 55, 202
Etruscans, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 18, 70, 181, 182, 197
Eucharist, 46, 47, 49, 196, 197
Eugenius IV., 165
Evander, 2
Evil eye, 231
Exarchate, 13, 14, 42
_Excubitoria_, 56
_Exequatur_, 248
Exorcism, 81, 82-3, 187, 222
Extraterritorialisation, 247
Extreme unction, 192
Fabrician bridge. _See pons_
Family life in Italy, 116-17, 155;
Rome, 97, 154, 155
Farms in the campagna, 33, 71, 72, 73, 77
Fattore, 77
Faustulus, 2
_Fedeli_, 59
_Festa_, 100, 102, 156, 204, 224, 228
Feudalism, 112, 160, 162, 243
Fever, goddess, 74
"Field of Cows," 38, 61, 62
Firemen, 54
Flavian house, 12, 31, 35, 45
Florence. _See_ Tuscany
Fluor-spar, 27
_Fondo culto_, 248
Fortress, military, 23, 38
_Fortuna Virilis_. _See_ Temples
Forum, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 56, 59, 61, 66, 147, 231
_Forum Romanum_, 4, 15, 18, 20, 30, 31, 147
Fountains, street, 21, 33, 39, 93, 175
Francis, S., 8, 189, 195
Franciscans, 8, 189, 229
Frangipani, 161, 240
Franks, 65
Frascati, 171
French kings, 14, 241;
Revolution, 146, 238
Fresco painting, 29, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47
Friezes, 19, 28, 37, 61
Gaeta, 202, 214, 215, 236
Gaetani, 164, 168, 177
Galera, 168
Gardens, 33, 39, 93
Garibaldi, 118, 123
Gates of Rome, 100, 207
Gelasius II., 168, 240, 255
Genazzano, 79, 83, 166;
madonna of, 83
Genseric, 37
_Gentes_, 13, 14, 45, 70
_Gentiluomo_, 208, 209
Genzano, 79
George, S., 74
Germanicus, house of, 29, 157
Geta, 32
Ghetto, 7, 11, 56, 219, 230
Ghibellines, 60, 162, 163
_Giallo Antico_, 27
Gioberti, 235, 236, 244
_Giulio_, 105
Giustiniani, 173
Gladiators, 22, 63
Goat herd, 38
Goatskin breeches, 90
"Golden book," 172
Golden house of Nero, 29
Governor of Rome, 222
_Graffiti_, 44
Gratian, 37
Grazioli, 172
Greece, 3, 7, 8, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, 45, 129, 130, 182, 183,
186, 197
Gregory the Great, 11
Gregory VII., 239
Gregory XI., 57
Gregory XIII., 170
Gregory XVI., 213, 218, 219, 245
_Grosso_, 105
Grotta Ferrata, 166
Grotto of Lupercus, 2
_Guardia_, 144, 149, 150, 151
Guelphs, 60, 162, 163
Guilds, trade, 52, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68;
conditions of membership, 64, 66;
funds, 65;
patrons, 63, 64;
religious, 63;
under State control, 64;
statutes, 66
Guiscard, Robert, 37
Gymnasia, Greek, 20
Hadrian, Emperor, 23, 31, 32, 37
Hadrian's mausoleum, 23, 32, 37
Hadrian IV., pope, 78, 240, 241
Handicrafts, 52, 58, 63
Hannibal, 168
Heliogabalus, 32
Henry IV., 239
Henry V., 240
Heraldic Commission, 179
Hildebrand, 240, 241
"Hill of goats," 38
Hill villages, 71, 78
Holidays, Roman, 100
Holy See, the, 201, 207, 218, 255;
vacancy of, 210
Honorius I., 32
Honorius IV., 160, 161
Horatii and Curatii, 15
House of Savoy, 115, 252
Humbert, King, 115
Hymettan marble, 27
Industrial classes, 62, 63, 66, 141, 228
Innkeepers, guild of the, 63
Innocent III., 160
Innocent IV., 241
Innocent XI., 172
Inn of the Bear, 9
_In petto_, 204
_Insulae_, 23
Ionic columns, 19
Ironworkers' guild, 58, 68
Isis, 183
Island of the Tiber, 240
_Isola sacra_, 240
Italian art, 123-5, 127, 191;
Catholicism, 81, 91, 188-196;
characteristics, 112-122;
crowds, 121;
cruelty, 81, 146-7, 155;
democracy, 114, 115, 193-5;
garden, 73;
"individualism," 115-116, 183;
women, 153-55
Italians and English, 112-124, 132, 145, 146, 151, 153-155, 157,
190, 191, 194-196;
and French, 112, 119-122, 133, 145, 146;
and Germans, 112, 117, 122, 123, 131, 145, 146, 153, 157, 190,
196;
and Irish, 120, 126
Janiculum, the, 5, 16, 17, 171, 207, 227
Jasper, 27
Jerome, S., 37, 200
_Jettatura_, 231
Jews, in Rome, 5, 7, 45, 46, 160, 161, 180, 181-2, 183, 188,
198, 199;
bonnet, 46;
of the dispersion, 45;
quarter, 7, 56, 169
John X., 168
Jubilee year, 217, 252
Jupiter (Jove), 18, 28, 30, 37, 78, 130, 131, 181, 182
Justin Martyr, 46
Kitchens, Roman, 54, 94, 98, 99, 101, 108
Kitchen range, 98
La Marmora, General, 123
Lancellotti, Prince, 253
_Lapis lazuli_, 27
_Lares compitales_, 53
Larva, 27
Latin league, 69, 78;
religion, 91, 92, 181, 182, 183, 193, 194, 196, 197
Latium, 1, 2, 70, 71, 146, 147 _n._, 181, 196
Law of guarantees, 247
Laws, Italian, 149, 246
Leo IV., 6
Leo IX., 161
Leo X., 13
Leo XIII., 148, 203, 247, 248, 252
Leonine city, 55, 56
Letter-writers, public, 102
Lewis Gonzaga, S., 102, 223
Lewis the Bavarian, 164
Libraries, 21, 31, 35, 174, 175
Lime-kilns, 37
Livy, 25
Lombardy, Lombards, 14, 65, 77, 125, 126, 188
Lottery, the, 84-87
Lucina, crypts of, 46
Lucius Crassus, 28
Lucius II., 240
_Lucomones_, 197
Lucullus, 28
Ludovisi, 170
_Lumachella_ marble, 27
Luna marble, 25
Lupercus, 2, 91, 196
_Lupetto Romano_, 90
Macaroni, 97, 98, 100, 103
Madonna di S. Agostino, 86
Madonna, cult of the, 83, 87, 89, 91, 99
_Mafia_, 139, 139 _n._
Magistrates, 53, 110
Malaria, 74
Malta, order of, 5
Mamertine prisons, 18, 147
Manfred, 168
Marbles, 25, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 54, 61, 98;
workers, 27, 36, 37, 39
Marcellus, theatre of, 30, 160, 168, 228
_Marchesi di baldacchino_, 177, 178
Marcia, acqua, 22, 73
Marcus Aurelius, 32, 46, 55, 63, 197, 241
Marforio, 140
Margherita, queen, 115, 252
Marino, 166
_Marmoratum_, 26
Mars, 3, 59, 74;
spears of, 3;
Ultor, 30
Marshall of Conclave, 170, 211;
of the Pope's Horse, 170
Martin V., 166
Martyrs, 41, 42, 43, 51
Mass, 3, 184, 191, 224, 232;
in the Campagna, 76;
commemorations in the, 49
Massimo family, 168
Master of Ceremonies, 205;
of Sant'Ospizio, 170;
workers, 67
Mausolea. _See_ Tombs
Maxentius, 32
Maximi Caecilii, 45
Mazzini, 214
Meals, Roman, 97
Ménage, Roman, 93
Merchants, 63
_Mercanti di Campagna_, 77
_Mesata secca_, 106
Michael Angelo, 165
Michael, S., 74
Middle ages, 23, 36, 55, 65, 67, 161
Militia, Roman, 56, 64
Minerva, 18, 80, 181
Misericordia, 77
Mithras, 183
Mixed marriages, 122
Monasteries, 38, 66, 67, 96;
number of, 249;
suppression of, 248-9
Monastic professions, 249
Monks and nuns, 215, 220, 228, 229, 230, 249
Monopolies, 67
Monsignore of the papal wardrobe, 205;
of roads and streets, 9
_Mons Saturninus_, 30
Monte Cassino, 179
Monte Cavo, 17, 78
Monte Giordano, 163
_Montes_, 53
Monti, 55, 59, 60
Monticiani, 60, 61, 62
_Morra_, 101
Mortar, 22, 23, 24
Mosaic, 36, 37, 39, 174;
pavement, 27, 28, 33;
sectile, 28
Moses, 45, 181;
and Peter, 42
Mother houses, 249
Municipalities, Italian, 14, 15
Municipality, Roman, 13-16, 59
Municipal liberties, 14-16, 56, 64, 237, 245
Naples (Neapolitans), 72, 89, 126, 132, 138-9, 147, 166, 168,
187, 188, 237
Napoleon, 61, 141, 171, 238
Navicella, 61
Nero, 20, 22, 29, 31
Nicholas III., 167
Nobility, Roman, 63, 159, 160, 172, 173, 174, 178, 253
Numa, King, 52, 62, 181
Numidia, 27
Obelisks, 26, 28, 33, 38
Obsession, 82
_Octroi_, 103
Odescalchi, 168, 172
Olevano, 79
Olive, 80
Olive harvest, 80
_Ombrellino_, 230
Opus incertum, 25;
mixtum, 25;
reticulatum, 25
Orderlies, 107
Oreglia, Cardinal, 203
Orsini family, 60, 160, 162, 163, 165;
Filippo, 167-168;
Giordino, 167, 168
Osteria, 100
Ostia, 26, 33, 63
Ostian Way, 70
Ostie, 229
Otho III., 7, 8
Oxen, 24, 26, 68, 77, 96
Pacca, Cardinal, 255
Pacca law, 255
Palaces of Caesars, 30, 33
Palaces, 38, 39, 93, 94, 172, 174, 175;
Aldobrandini, 6, 50;
Antici Mattei, 172;
Balestra, 172;
Barberini, 171, 232;
Bolognetti-Cenci, 169;
Bolognetti, 169;
Bonaparte, 172;
Borghese, 172;
Braschi, 173;
Cancelleria, 173, 247;
Cenci, 169;
Chigi, 172;
Colonna, 166, 172;
Corsini, 171;
Costaguti, 172;
Doria Pamphili, 172, 175;
Falconieri, 173;
Farnese, 173;
Farnesina, 171;
Ferraiolo, 172;
Fiano, 140, 172;
Gabrielli, 163;
Gaetani, 172;
Giustiniani, 173;
Grazioli, 173;
Lancellotti, 253;
Lateran, 36, 247;
Longhi, 172;
Massimo, 169;
Odescalchi, 172;
Orsini, 168;
Patrizi, 173;
Piombino, 172;
Quirinale, 208, 214, 231, 247, 251, 252, 253, 254;
Ruffo, 172;
Ruspoli, 172;
Rinuccini, 172;
Salviati, 172;
Sciarra, 172;
Simonetti, 173;
Theodoli, 172;
Venezia, 172
Palatine, 2, 4, 5, 13, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 53, 56, 135, 157, 162
Pales, 91
Palestrina, 164, 165, 166
Palestrina, Pier-Luigi, 156
Paliano, 166
_Palladium_, 2
Pallas, 2, 13
Pamphili-Doria, 172
Pan, 2, 91, 92
Pantheon, 10, 19, 30, 56
Paola aqueduct, 22
_Paolo_, 105
Papacy, 16, 57, 162, 167
Papal government and theocracy, 214, 217, 218, 219, 224, 225,
236, 245, 254
Papal titles, 177, 179
_Papetto_, 105
Parian marble, 26
Parione, 56
Parishes, Roman, 53, 56, 200, 201, 206
Parliament House, 101
Paros, 27
Paschal II., 166, 240
"Paschal lambs," 223
Pasquale, convent of S., 223
Pasquinades, 140
_Pastor Bonus_, 197
_Patres conscripti_, 178
Patriarchal ménage, 175, 176
Patricians, Roman, 45, 70, 159, 170, 178
Patrimony of Peter, 237, 238;
extent, 257
Patrizi, 177
Paul II., 172
Paul V., 170
Paul, S., 192, 199
Paulinus of Nola, S., 8
Pavements, mosaic, 27, 28, 33
_Pavonazzo_, 27
_Pax Romana_, 198
"Peace of the Church," the, 12, 34, 43, 198
Pensions of monks and nuns, 248-249
Pentelic marble, 27
_Peperino_, 23, 73
Pepin, 14
Peretti Francesco, 167
Peruzzi, B., 168
Persecutions, 20, 42, 51
Peter, S., 16, 42, 50, 166, 199, 200, 243;
chair of, 46;
and Moses, 42;
primacy of, 42;
statue of, 11
Petrarch, 164
Philip Neri, S., 77
_Piano nobile_, 175
Piazza SS. Apostoli, 166, 172;
Colonna, 172, 202;
Lateran, 26;
Montanara, 90, 160;
Navona, 173;
Pantaleoni, 169;
del Popolo, 219;
Tartaruga, 172;
di Venezia, 169, 172
Piedmont, Piedmontese, 126, 132, 139, 155, 171, 253
Pierleoni, 160, 161
Pigna, _rione_, 56
Pilgrims in Rome, 9, 67
Pincian hill, 16, 17, 100, 135, 224, 244
Pinelli, 140, 226
Piombino, 68, 170, 174
Pius VI., 140, 173, 238
Pius IX., 11, 22, 85, 202, 203, 208, 213, 215, 219, 231, 238;
and Italy, 214, 215, 219, 235, 236;
liberal impulses, 213;
and the _non possumus_, 215;
and the people, 222, 245;
and the syllabus, 236;
and Victor Emmanuel, 250
Pius X., 77, 250
Pizzardoni, 151
Plebiscite, the, 251
Plebs, the, 14, 56, 62, 78, 81
Police, 54, 55, 144, 149-151, 215
Pompeii, 29, 45
Pompey, theatre of, 163
Pomponius Grecinus, 45
Pons Aelius, 32;
Fabricius, 7, 29;
Cestius, 7;
Triumphalis, 55
Ponte Margherita, 102;
Quattro Capi, 29;
Rotto, 223;
S. Angelo, 9, 32
Ponte, _rione_, 55
_Pontifex Maximus_, 197
Pontine marshes, 30
Pope, 201, 202, 205;
court of the, 173;
presentation at, 253;
and conciliation, 249;
and the Catholic princes, 237, 238;
election of, 202;
and Italy, 246-250, 252
Popes, fugitive, 239;
Senate of the, 201
Population of Rome, 12, 34
_Populus_, 14
Porphyry, 27, 36
_Porporati_, 204
_Porta Furba_, 72, 73
Porter, house, 94, 95, 110, 175
Porticoes, 33, 35
Portico of Octavia, 30, 168
Porto, 26
Possession, 82
_Pozzolana_, 24
Praetextatus, 45
Praetorian guard, 54
Prelate, Italian, pamphlet by, 254
Prefect, 54, 169
_Prepotenza_, 134
Presbyters, 200, 201
Primacy, papal, 42, 235, 244
Princes, Roman, 108, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 207
Prince Assistant, 167, 170
Priory of the Knights of Malta, 5
Priscilla and Aquila, 5
Processions, 58, 66, 67, 205, 252
_Propaganda Fide_, 248
Prophets, 48, 188
Protestantism in Rome, 47, 189, 190, 193
Provisioning of the city, 65, 103, 105
Pudens, 45, 46
Pumice stone, 24
Puritanism, 112, 188, 189, 194, 196
Quarries, 23, 24, 25
_Questura_, 150
_Questurini_, 150
Quirinal hill, 5, 6, 31, 53, 163, 166, 208
Quirites, 4, 5, 15
Regional devices, 57, 59
Regions, 43, 52-61, 201-2
Regola, _rione_, 56
Religion. _See_ Roman, and Catholicism, Italian
Religious fabrics, laws about, 248
Remus, 5
Renaissance, 36, 38, 58, 124, 172, 237
Republic. _See_ Rome
_Res publica_, the Roman, 180-186
Rhea Silvia, 2
_Rheda_, 72
Rienzo, Cola di, 14, 57
Rignano, duca, 168
_Rioni_. _See_ Regions
Ripa, _rione_, 56
_Roma Quadrata_, 2, 4, 197
Roman art, 18, 127, 156-8, 190, 191;
characteristics, 8, 9, 10, 11, 107, 126-8, 133-7, 146, 147,
150, 156, 183-5, 187, 194, 229, 240, 241;
Church, 14, 41, 42, 50, 126, 184-7, 198-9, 201, 255;
customs, 82-7, 99-103, 140-144, 230, 231;
dialect, 132;
imperialism, 64, 115, 198-9;
marriage, 153-5;
realism, 113-14, 124-5, 185;
religion, 180-88, 192, 196-8;
type, 129-132;
voices, 132, 157
Romans, and agriculture 2-3, 17, 76, 91, 128-9, 147;
ancient, 3-4, 78, 128-9;
and English, 123, 131, 135, 174, 185, 192, 193;
and French, 152, 184, 185, 238;
and Greeks, 129, 130, 180, 182-4, 185, 197;
and Italians, 126, 137-9, 188;
and Jews, _see_ Jews;
modern, 128, 130, 134, 136-7, 138-9, 225, 252-4;
a pastoral people, 3, 17, 91, 182
Rome,
bombardment of, 212;
and Byzantium, _see_ Byzantium;
destruction of city, 9, 11, 37, 39;
and Greece, _see_ Greece;
origin of, 1-5;
imperial, 23, 25, 28, 41, 62, 65, 129, 137;
kingly, 1, 2, 3, 5, 18, 52, 53;
republican, 14, 23, 29, 62, 129, 137, 182, 186;
world empire of, 15, 16, 42, 127, 198-9, 236
Rome before 1870,
appearance of city, 9, 227 _et seq._;
artists in, 210;
clergy in, 217, 219, 221, 224, 245;
education in, 220;
government of, 213-15, 217, 219, 224-5, 246;
moral notions in, 83, 87, 220, 222, 225-6, 230;
people in, 11-12, 215-16, 217;
spies in, 224
Romulus, 1, 2, 3, 32, 154, 198;
and Remus, 2, 3, 198
Rospigliosi, 172
Roviano, _duca_, 168
Ruspoli, 169, 177
Sabine hills, 70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 96, 166, 169, 170;
people, 2, 4, 5, 15, 154
_Sacramentate_, 232
Sacred College, 15
Sacrifices, 19
Sacrifice, eucharistic, 49
Saints, cult of, 43
Salaria, 45;
_porta_, 102, 135
Salviati, 171
Sanctuary of a church, 51
Sanctuaries. _See_ Shrines
Saturn, 30, 91;
hill of, 13
Savelli, 160, 161, 165, 170
Savorelli, Vittoria, 221
Saxons, 65
_Sbirri_, 61, 217
_Schola_, 65
Scholasticism, 112
_Scudo_, 105
Sculptors, guild of, 64
Seamen, guild of, 63
See of Rome. _See_ Holy See
Sees, suburban, 201
Senate, 13-15, 34, 45, 57, 70, 149, 159, 164, 240, 241
Senate and People of Rome, 13, 14, 15
"Senator, the," 14
Senators, 45, 58, 63, 159, 178;
and conservators, 55
September 20th, 11, 212, 213, 215
Septimius Severus, 20, 31, 32
Septizonium, 31
Serenade, the, 141, 144
Serlupi, 170
Sermoneta, _duca_, 168, 177
Serpentine, 27
Servants, 94, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109-111, 224
Servius Tullius, 5, 18, 52, 53
Seven hills, 5, 51, 52, 53
Seven sacraments, 48
Sforza, 170
Shops, Roman, 39, 53, 67, 93, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106
Shrines and sanctuaries, 63, 73, 83, 90
Sibylline oracles, 7
Sicily (Sicilians), 126
Sistine chapel, 205, 211
Sixtus I., 35
Sixtus IV., 165, 173
Sixtus V., 55, 140, 167
Slaves, 11, 21, 25, 34, 64, 75
Soldiers, 151;
papal, 215, 244, 246, 247
_Soldo_, 101, 104, 107
Sora, _duca_, 170
Spoleto, 167, 178
S.P.Q.R., 15, 59, 138
_Stadia_, 33
Staircases, 95, 176
Standard of Rome, 15
Standard-bearer, 55, 64, 66, 170
Statilius Taurus, 22
Statues of women, 154
Statutes of guilds, 66
_Statuto_, 246
Streets, Roman, 93, 105, 152;
refuse in, 9
Stucco, 24, 28, 29
Subiaco, 78
Subterranean Rome. _See_ Catacombs
Suburra, _rione_, 53
Sulmona, _principe_, 170
_Suovetaurilia_, 15
Superstition, 81, 83, 136, 187, 196, 222, 226, 231
Susanna and the Elders, 45
Swiss guard, 210, 244
Sylvester, S., 74
Syndic, 166
_Tablinum_, 28
_Tabularium_, 23, 29
Talbot, Gwendoline, 123, 174
Talbots in Rome, 123
Tanners, guild of, 63
_Tarantella_, 140
Tarquinius Priscus, 18, 30, 52;
Superbus, 18
Tarquins, 29, 30
Taste and art, 157
Taxes, 64, 107, 139, 217, 219
Teano, _principe_, 168
Temples, 18, 19, 30, 33, 37, 39, 163;
of Antoninus and Faustina, 32;
Castor and Pollux, 30;
Ceres, 31;
Concord, 30;
Dii Consentes (portico of), 181;
Fortuna Virilis, 29;
Libertas, 160;
Mars Ultor, 30;
Romulus, 198;
Saturn, 30;
Templum Urbis, 32;
Venus and Rome, 32;
Vespasian, 31
Temporal power, 42, 214, 215, 219, 235-9, 240, 242-3, 245, 255
_Teppa_, 139, 139 _n._
_Terno_, 85, 86
_Testone_, 105
Theodoli, 177
_Thermae_, 20, 21, 32, 33
Throne room, 176, 207
Tiber, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 21, 33, 63, 70, 131, 171, 173
Tiberius, 30
Titles, patrician, 177
_Titulus_, 5, 34, 201, 202
Titus, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 31, 182
Tivoli, 24, 32, 33, 78
Tombs, 33, 36, 72;
Bibulus, 29;
Cecilia Metella, 29, 168;
Latin, 29;
of S. Peter, 16
Tor de' Conti, 160;
di Nona, 163
Tor Sanguigna, 163;
de' Specchi, 102, 230
Torlonia, 169, 230
Towers, 56, 163;
baronial, 23, 38;
bell, 38;
semaphores, 73;
vedette, 38, 73
Trades unions, 68
Tradesmen, 103, 104, 105
Trajan, 5, 20, 22, 31, 77, 142, 231
Transtiburtina, 55
Trastevere, 55, 56, 61, 62, 130, 162, 171, 240
Trasteverini, 60, 130
_Trattoria_, 79
Travertine, 22, 24, 27, 39
Trent, Council of, 238
Trevi, _rione_, 55
Tribune, 19, 36
Tribunes, 54
_Triclinium_, 35
Triumvirate, 123
Troy, 2
Tufa, 18, 23
_Turris Cartularia_, 161
Tuscans (Tuscany), 69, 125, 126, 129, 133, 188, 237
Tusculum, 39, 78, 166
Twelve Tables, 23
Ulpii, 45
Umbria, 148, 188
Unction, extreme, 192
Universities. _See_ Guilds and women, 155
Urban VIII., 9, 140, 171
Vandals, 9
Vatican, 28, 56, 58, 161, 163, 203, 205, 208, 211, 228, 230,
239, 241, 244, 247, 252, 254
Veii, 33, 72
Velabrum, 18
_Vendetta_, 149
Venice, Venetians, 125, 126, 132, 188
Venosa, _principe_, 170
Vespasian, 22, 28, 31, 33, 72, 154
Vesta, 181
Vestals, 2, 72, 154
Vestibulum, 35
Via Botteghe Oscure, 173;
Julia, 173;
Lata, 56;
Monserrato, 160;
Nazionale, 194, 160;
dell' Orso, 9;
Pilotta, 166;
Plebiscito, 172;
Quattro Fontane, 232;
Quirinale, 166;
Strozzi, 6;
Viminale, 6
Viaticum, 12, 193, 230
_Vici_, 53
Vicovaro, 169
Victor Emmanuel II., 10, 169
_Vidua_, 46
_Vigiles_, 26, 54, 59
Villa Aldobrandini 171;
Borghese, 171;
Corsini, 171;
Hadrian's, 32;
Massimo, 6;
Mondragone, 171;
Pamfili-Doria, 73, 231
Villas, 33, 38, 39, 93, 94, 172, 174
Viminal hill, 5, 6, 53, 55
Vintage, 78
_Virgo, aqua_, 22
Vitiges, 37
Voices. _See_ Roman
Volcanic rock, 17, 23, 25
Volcanoes, 17
Vulcan, 80, 88
Wagner and Germans, 190;
and Italians, 124
Walls, 32, 38, 56, 93, 102, 163
Washing tubs, 102
Weavers, Guild of, 63
Windows in temples and churches, 19, 186
Wines, Roman, 79
Wiseman, Cardinal, 208
Wolf, the, 2
Women, Italian, 153, 155
Young Italy, 214, 215, 235, 242, 244, 246
Zagarolo, 166
Zitelle, 67
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
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