At the Inn of the Bear

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IT is ratlier amusing to COntrast the Lucerne Scliweizerhof or the Roman Quirinal of to-day with a hotel where princes, cardinals, and kings put up two hundred years ago. Even allowing that this has fallen away from its high estate, one can still sec that the nineteenth century may well pride itself on increased decency and amenities, not to speak of luxuries ; though, to tell the truth, perhaps our forefathers had more luxuries than comforts in life. People who quaffed their wine from filmy old Murano and cups wrought by roistering Benvenuto Cellini were not badly off as to the æsthetics, but any one who will look up the ancient Albergo dell’ Orso may have a hint of what their traveling accommodations were.

Leaving behind those modern streets with their most modern titles which give Mr. Augustus Hare such exquisite pain, one still finds a quarter of Rome where the names have a smack of the olden time, and the “ Way of the Golden Lily,” the alleys “of the Lute” and “the Dove,” thrill one with suggestions of a more picturesque age than ours. An Italian author of to-day compares the narrow, dark Via dell’ Orso, which leads from the Torre della Scimmia (Hilda’s tower) to the Tiber, to the dry bed of a once rapid, rushing river. It was a great artery of the city ; now it is a deserted byway. In ancient times, this being a fashionable quarter, and the Inn of the Bear attracting all great and distinguished travelers, the hirers of sedan chairs, and later on of coaches and saddle horses, had established themselves in this street. An inferior rival of the Bear, the Inn of the Lion, long ago disappeared, was likewise in this street, kept by the famous beauty Vanozza Cattanei (painted in the Vatican, by Pinturicchio, as the Virgin, with her papal lover at her feet), the mistress of Alexander VI., and the mother of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia. In a year of scarcity, she and her second husband, Carlo Canale, were allowed to sell their wine free of the general tax, thereby driving a good traffic in the lower rooms of the Lion.

At the point where the street converges with Via Tor di Nona stands our venerable hostelry. Readers of Marion Crawford will remember that it was at this place Anastase Gouache was thrown down by the prince’s carriage. Whether the inn gave its name to the street, or the street to the inn, is lost in the night of time.

It was a brilliantly sunshiny, or, as we who love the old city say, a real Roman day, when I hunted out the spot. As I came to it, the end house of Via dell’ Orso, I craned my neck up to see what antique traces there might be left, but was rewarded only by an expanse of dull red wall with a narrow moulding at its top. At the front, however, is a big, arched doorway leading into a large vaulted ground room which is used as a stable, though the old stone columns which support the massive vaulting have a grimy dignity, and are known to date back to great antiquity. Pausing before the door to pencil down the inscription over it —

ARCI CONFRATERN. B. M. LAVRIETANAE FURNARI ET PRO MEDIETATAE

I was joined by a group of sympathetic idlers, who gazed up at the house with new respect, but lent me the larger share of curious attention. On the Tor di Nona side is the present entrance, a small door with a broken lamp overhead lettered “ Albergo dell’ Orso;” for through the vicissitudes of seven centuries it has been, and remains, an inn. On the second floor, to the left, is a charmingly quaint little arched window with columns and fretwork which, though stuccoed over, preserve their old outlines, like a tiny crest on a visiting-card, to vouch for ancient lineage. From the narrow street door two flights of dingy steps, on opposite sides of the brick-paved entry, lead to a long room, likewise brick-paved, which serves as the hotel office. There a young woman had all the crockery from the chambers set, out in startling array, and the whole place seemed a vortex of virtuous attempts to clean up. Expressing my wish to see the rooms in which Dante, Machiavelli, and Montaigne lodged, I was courteously handed over to mine host and his dame, two fat, slatternly people who took great pride in showing their house.

The bedrooms are ludicrously small, reminding one of ship dimensions, and are now papered with very dashing yellows and blues ; but, imbedded in the walls of several rooms, mine host showed the ancient stone arches of the loggia which once formed the front of the house. In the wee chamber with the bizarre window, the woman announced triumphantly, “Here it was Dante slept when he came to Rome as ambassador of the Argentine Republic,” — a slip smartly snubbed by her spouse, who dilated on the antiquity of everything, and said that as there was “ not another window like it in the world,” it had been copied for the museum in Via Capo le Case, The old houses jutting on the Tiber having been razed to make way for the new embankment, the window commands an extensive view of the tawny river, the Castle of S. Angelo, the bridge, and the “low hills to westward but how was it all when the proud young ambassador came to Pope Boniface, nearly six centuries ago ? The gentle poet face, still rounded with hope and tender dreaming, as his friend Giotto painted it, was not hardened into gloomy sternness by bitter exile and the salt flavor of the stranger’s bread. On the eve of this fourth embassy, when it was proposed in the Florentine Council that he should go as the head of the deputation, he cried, with a youthful arrogance made pathetic by the irony of after events, “ But if I go, who will stay ? If I stay, who will go ? ” And it was during this same Roman stay (protracted, it is said, by the Pope’s machinations) that he waked to find himself a proscribed outcast from beloved Florence. Truly, then, if tradition can be trusted, this little room saw the poet’s awakening to the Stern realities of life and changed fortunes ; it was here that Clotho began to twine in the darker threads of a web which was soon to have no bright ones, and the spot is consecrated by a poet’s chrism of suffering.

Outside in the ever young sunlight, the passing throng is crowding as eagerly over the Ponte S. Angelo as in the jubilee year when Dante saw its double current of humanity. (Inferno xviii. 29.)

How a great personality dwarfs all the lesser shades ! Machiavelli and Montaigne have grown flimsy and unsubstantial to me, here, in the spell of a greater memory, a more breathing, pulsating life and work. Popes have largely lost their power, the greatness of the hustling Florentine republic is like a tale that is told, but the young generations, feeling the throb of a quickbeating heart, yet cry in sympathetic, loving reverence, “ Onorate l’altissimo poeta! ”