Encyclicals of a Traveller: Ii

ROME, Tuesday Eve, January 19, 1869.

DEAR PEOPLE: What do you suppose we do with letters ? I ’ll tell you. We read them over and over and over and over, until we know them just as well as we know our alphabets ; and then we put them on our table, where we can see them all the time till we go to bed ; and then, the next day, we read them a great deal more, and carry them in our pockets, and feel every now and then to see if they are there ; and then, the next day— Well, there is no use in going on forever with the story ; but there are Americans who have been seen reading over old letters in the Coliseum ! There now if you don’t all write to me after this, you are the nethermost of millstones ; and, once for all, let me say (because this is my last appeal for letters), do write all the most insignificant details, — what you have for dinner, and the color of your winter bonnet; what was your last ailment, and whether you took aconite or calomel ; if your front gate is off its hinges, or your minister has had a donation-party ; who came in last to see you, and what they had to say. Don’t suppose that anything can be too unimportant to tell. You don’t know anything about it. Wait till you have been hungry yourself. Here ends the “ Complete European LetterWriter.”

And next ? To-night it shall be about ruins. Don’t think I forget your savage injunctions, dear young woman of N—, who said to me, “ Don’t write about ruins, whatever else you do.” For all that, I shall tell you where L— and I went this afternoon. At divers times, thick envelopes had been left at our door, containing the most learned prospectuses of the British Archæological Society, and setting forth in terms which sounded fine the rules and the advantages of being members of the same. We thought we did not know enough, and we did not know anybody who belonged, and so it slipped along and we did n’t join, and yet we had all the while a hankering after it. They have a lecture every Friday night in which some especial ruin is described, and then the members of the society take an excursion on the next fine day to see the ruin. It is the fashion to laugh at this, you know ; therefore very few Americans have anything to do with it, for which they are silly; though I dare say I should have laughed too, if I had got my first impression of it, as one of my friends did, from seeing the whole crowd, one day, rushing pell-mell down a steep place, not into the sea, but nearly into the Tiber, and knocking each other over in their wild eagerness to get down to the lecturer, and hear his explanations ; and perhaps I should have found it a bore if I had begun with a lecture. But we took the excursion first; and it is that from which we came home, cold and tired and hungry, three hours ago, but from which I am rested now, and about which I shall tell you, if I can get to it. I shall have all the names wrong, but you won’t care. I shall not have the first name wrong, though, for that is Trastevere. I love the very sound of the word ; they never mean to live or die out of it, these proud poor souls, who think themselves more Roman than other Romans. I fancy they are all nobler in their looks over there. If I were a man I should certainly go and live in Trastevere and find out some secrets. Painters like to paint the Trastevere women ; but About says people have died who looked too curiously at them : I can easily believe this.

Well, we drove over an old, old bridge (I know the name of that, too, but I won’t tell it) into Trastevere, and wormed our way in and round the lanes and under all the washerwomen’s wet clothes hanging on lines from window to window, and came to the church of San Crisogono, from whose steps the Archæological Society were to get out at precisely two P. M. (Sounds a little bungling for the name of a pleasure excursion, does n’t it ?) There was the church, solemn and still as death. Not a soul to be seen ; we ran round the other side ; worse and worse. There were the empty carriages in which the A. S. had come (lucky there is only one S., for I must really abbreviate it) to Trastevere, but no A. S. ! The coachmen, many of them private, looked at us with the becoming nonchalance of British coachmen who drove the A. S. about, and we thought we would n’t ask them any questions ; so we prowled a little, and presently a sunny Italian face said, " Ecco ! Ecco! ” and pointed to a door. He knew what we were after, and so, for that matter, did the British coachmen.

Into the door we went, and down a winding stair, and plumped right on the A. S. before we knew it. There it was, large as life ; it had about a hundred legs, all pretty badly dressed. I don’t know which were ugliest, the trousers or the petticoats. A grayhaired man in the middle of the group was talking earnestly and showing photographs, and everybody was crowding up to see ; the place they were in was like a great open cellar with high walls, and several other cellars opening out of it. L— and I felt a little dashed at first, but in a moment our friend Signor L— stepped up and took us under his wing, and there we were launched as archæologists.

I must tell you about Signor L— Miss C— had a letter to him, and we were told that he had charge of government excavations, and could do more than any one else to show us curious old ruins, was a distinguished archæologist, etc., etc. So the letter was sent, and we waited patiently for the first visit from the archæologist. We thought he would be middle aged, rather stout, wear gold spectacles, and be a little bald. Ha ! the bell rang one night, and in skipped a slender figure in full evening dress, lavender kids, and a violet in his button-hole ; he sank down with a mixture of timidity and vivacity perfectly overwhelming on the tip of a chair, and with a burst of infantile laughter said, “ I do not speak any Eenglis but a leettle.” This was Signor L—, and we had hard work that first night to keep grave faces. Now we know him very well, and find him entertaining and clever ; but he has still the same infantile way, and I begin to doubt if Italian young men ever grow up. He told us the other day, with perfect gravity and evident sincerity, that his mother “would not permit him to leap in riding ! ”

But I forget that I left you “ in a cellar.” In this cellar, too, were hidden secrets ; it was the old barracks of a Roman cohort in the time of the Emperors. In the court-yard the soldiers had lounged and scribbled on the walls. There they were still, the uncouth faces and figures they had drawn ; names and dates ; the name of the consul at that time ; and, best of all, the date of the Emperor’s birthday; and that, Signor L— said, was the only record of that Emperor’s age.

In a little niche on one side were figures of Mercury in rough fresco ; this was a little chapel dedicated to his worship. In the middle of the courtyard was a stone rim of a fountain, starshaped. On this lay bits of all sorts of old marbles which had been dug up in the different rooms ; and the grayheaded man laid his photographs on them : so the years met !

I am quite sure that we were the only Americans there, except Professor G—. Everybody else was as British as British could be. We did not stay long in the cellar, of which I was glad, for it was colder than any place ought to be into which the sun shone. I felt as if ghostly breaths blew on us from every corner. Then we climbed up the stairs again, and the A. S. which drove got into its coaches, and the A. S. which walked took to its very strong legs, and the procession moved off. It was a little like a funeral, but we did not drive far; the first carriage stopped, and then all the others stopped, and the gray-headed man, who had on a cloak with a pointed hood and kept the hood over his head, led us down on the banks of the Tiber, to what looked to me like the mouth of a drain, if I might be so bold. I gave most irreverent inattention to all he said here ; I gathered only that he believed that the priests used to wash their knives at that particular spot. I did n't believe it for all that, and I looked at the Tiber while he talked. “ Yellow Tiber ” sounds well; Macaulay never could have got on without that adjective; but it is such a license, no poet any nearer than England would have ventured on it. The water looks just like the water in the puddles in brickyards, dirty, thick, dead, drab ; as for “shaking its tawny mane,” it does not look as if it ever stirred so much as a drop, and all the craft that are on it look as if they had roots like pondlilies and would n’t come up. They are all tipped a little to one side, and seem to lean on the banks, and I don’t believe one has been in or out for five thousand years. I have looked and looked in vain to see even a little boat in motion there ; and the longer you look, the thicker and the stickier the water seems, and the more lifeless and useless the ships and the two or three hulking steamboats look, and the more real and intent the old bits of stone ruins become, till it would not astonish you to see Julius Cæsar himself step out from under one of the gray lion’s heads and knock all the sham of modern shipping into a cocked hat, before you could say Jack Robinson. Surely it takes quite a long time to say Jack Robinson ; so if any of you know how this bit of slang came about, please tell me when you write. But, I forget! you never write ; so It ’s no use asking you questions.

Presently I found that the A. S. was moving off again ; dear me, they did look as if they knew all about that drain (it was n’t the Cloaca Maxima though, I took care to find out that much); but I made up for not having attended to the drain when we reached the Emporium. This really did thrill my insensible soul; here were the old wharves, in the old days, and here lay the blocks of marble which were brought and unloaded and never carried away; who knows why? Like pebbles under your feet were strewn bits of old red pottery, where the unlucky or the thriftless broke the jars in which had come oil or dates to be sold. Ah, this was really worth looking at !

From a hole in the side of the bank stuck out a huge column of dark marble, only half unburied ; this is the largest column known of its kind, and when the great council meets next year, they are to set it up on some hill in Rome; then the A. S. said the other end of the column could be seen by going into another hole, farther back. Why we all wanted to see the other end of it, Heaven only knows ; but we all ran like sheep; hopped up and down over the great blocks of marble, and then, when we got to the hole, only one could go in at a time, and nobody could see anything after getting in. This seemed to make everybody more anxious to go in ; and when you saw that you had to bend yourself nearly double, and poke in head foremost down a slope, with every chance of falling on your nose, it became irresistible. Everybody said breathlessly to those coming out, “ Did you see it ? ” and the come-outers said deprecatingly, “ Why no, I can’t say I did exactly ; it’s pretty dark.” And so we all asked, and so we all replied, and that was the end of that.

Then the Baron V— arrived who was to give some explanations of these ruins ; he came running, with the light of joy on his old face, and a little bit of stone in a white paper, which he showed to the gray-headed man in the hooded cloak ; and they both gloated ; and everybody crowded up and looked over, and after all it was rather worth while. A bit of stone they had just found, yellow jasper from Sicily ; very, very old, and very, very rare. Then the Baron put it into his mouth and wet it, as if it were a small jewel, and held it up again, rubbing it in the sun to bring out the colors. And then the British A. S. stretched up its fifty necks to see. Then the Baron began to talk, and dear me, what should it be but French ! So being of an ingenuous and just turn, I slipped off, and gave up my good place at his elbow to somebody who could understand modern French on the subject of Roman ruins, spoken by an aged Baron without many teeth ; and that was about the last of the archæological excursion.

Then L— and I drove home by way of the Piazza Navona, where are more oranges and apples to sell than all Rome could ever eat, one would say. The orange-stalls dazzle you like the setting sun’s light on a great front of glass windows, on a hot day. We wanted some sour apples; Romans don’t know what the word means ; there are no sour apples here; but there are some which are just not sweet, and they are better than nothing. When I begin to stammer out my few substantives at the stalls, the men and women gather round and laugh so good-naturedly, that I don’t mind their cheating me, which of course they will do in spite of all I can say. Once, though, I did make a stand with a little black-eyed rascal who sold oranges, and asked me two soldi apiece for them, when I had that very morning been told by Marianina that I should give but one. I shook my head and said “ Un soldo, un soldo.” How he did asseverate and reiterate, and at last said a soldo and a half; on which I told the driver to “drive on”; and in two seconds my orange-boy had signalled to the driver to stop, and was pouring the oranges into the bottom of the carriage, and laughing just as roguishly at me as if it were the best joke going that I had detected him. “ Sì, sì, signora ; un soldo!” Of course strict morality would have refused to compound felony (or whatever they may call it, to encourage dishonesty) by buying oranges of such a little liar; but I only laughed as hard as he did, and bought two dozen.

Thursday, P. M. — Now something better than ruins ; we have seen the lambs blessed at the church of St. Agnes. Did n’t somebody who did n’t know tell us it would be at 9 A. M. ? and as the church is outside the walls, did n’t we get up at seven, and breakfast shivering at eight, and see icicles in the fountain in the Barberini Piazza as we drove out ? However, the sun was clear and bright, and the mountains looked like clouded sapphire against the sky, and it was only an hour too early.

We had time to see the church thoroughly (it is a cellar, by the way, rather cold on a frosty morning) and get good seats, before the mass began; I have given myself papal absolution from my vow never to sit through another high mass; because, you see, they are so wily, they put the things you do want to see after these tedious masses instead of before them, so you have to sit it out. The crowd grew tremendous, and began to push and scramble long before the lambs came. Luckily a priest had moved a huge Prie-Dieu just in front of us ; so we were sure not only of a barricade, but of something to mount upon in crises.

At last came the servants of the cardinal with their droll long-bodied coats trimmed all over with upholstering gimp, elbowing a passage through the crowd ; behind them two men in uniform, each bearing a good-sized lamb on a red damask cushion, its eyes tied, its head half covered with red and white and green flowers, and bows of red ribbon stuck here and there in the wool. You would n’t have thought they would look pretty, but they did ; it is so hard, I suppose, to spoil a lamb ! But what they did to the lambs after they carried them behind the high altar I don’t know, we could not see ; but they were presently brought out again, and laid, cushions and all, under the great marble dome over the altar, and at the feet of the statue of St. Agnes herself. While they lay here, the cardinal and the priests and the choir, and the sackbuts and the dulcimers and the fiddles, were all chanting and singing and going on, and the lambs once in a while said “Baa, baa,” which was the only thing I understood of it all, and produced the most marked sensation in the crowd.

I had a dear little Italian boy to hold up on the top of the desk; and when the lambs baaed he laughed out, and his nurse from behind, who had consigned him to heretic hands with about equal misgiving and gratitude, reached over and jerked him and told him to be still. But I encouraged him to laugh. One poor little lamb kept lifting up its head and shaking the flowers, and the man who held it pressed its head down again, till you could hardly see that it had a head at all. Then the men cleared a way again through the crowd, and the poor little creatures were carried off; and good Catholics pressed up to touch them, as they were carried by ; and then we came away, only stooping on the staircase to try to read some of the odd inscriptions from the tombs of the early Christians, which are built into the walls, — the inscriptions I mean, not the early Christians. This sentence is about as good as one in Murray where he speaks of this ceremony, and says that the lambs “are afterwards handed over to the nuns of a convent in Rome, by whom they are raised for their wool, which is employed in making the palliums distributed by the Pope to great Church dignitaries, and their mutton eaten ! ” It is true about the wool, but the lambs are never killed. They are usually given to Roman families, and kept as pets; an English priest told me so today.

We are luxuriating now in clear cold weather ; at least I am. There are misguided souls (or bodies) that like the warm days ; but I find them insupportably enervating. As for the sirocco, when that blows all hope forsakes a person of nerves ; you feel as if you were a thousand needles, assorted sizes ! Good by and good by, and God bless you all!

H. H.