Roman Holidays, and Others Part 9

In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had known in some anterior life. They were so familiar that I felt no need to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in several cases given them new names. I should have known certain of them by traits which remain in the memory long after names have dropped out of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic upper-lip, still looked like the finer sort of Irish-American politician; Tiberius again surprised me with the sort of racial sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious personality from his mother's blood; but the too Neronian head of Nero, which seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant when trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those imperialities, which of course must have been done in their lifetimes, was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly and evil but that the artists were apparently safe in showing them so. The men might not have minded that, but how had the sculptors managed to portray the women as they did and live? Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are a forgotten tribe, and no one can say what became of any given artist after executing the bust of an empress; his own execution may have immediately followed. But what is certain is that those ladies are no lovelier in their looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in their rank they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the lower cla.s.s. The most touching face as well as the most dignified and beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which used to be known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as that of a Roman matron, does not relieve the imperial average of plainness. The rest could rival the average American society woman only in the prevailing modernity of their expression; imperial Rome was very modern, as we all know, and nothing in our own time could be more up to date than the lives and looks of its smart people.

The general impression of the other marbles of the Capitoline Museum remains a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures, of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can be definite about some such delightful presence as that old River dozing over his fountain in the little cold court you see first and last as you come and go, it is more than your reader, if he is as wise as you wish him, can ask of you. I have been wondering whether he could profitably ask of me some record of my experiences in the official and scientific company with which I was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I should have to offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of objects printed one upon another and hardly separable in their succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would not obey Michelangelo when he bade it "Go," not because it was not lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their vantage would be the statues on the bal.u.s.trated roof of the museum.

There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden s.p.a.ces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their munic.i.p.al labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the Conservatori, where in the n.o.blest of its splendid halls the present company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can suggest for them.

In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or without to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be, beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long, velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.

But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of a.s.sociations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy people wandering between their correctly balanced pa.s.sages of box; the blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on these parterres; a young girl vanis.h.i.+ng up an aisle of the grove beside the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if he likes. I cannot do more for him without doing less, and yet I know it is a palette rather than a picture I am giving him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 43 IN THE VILLA MEDICI]

All the while I was there, the guest of the French nation by the payment of fifty centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of a place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Republic with so much other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the magnanimous Third Republic is going to restore it to the people rightfully its owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the Villa Medici will remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world, even in the very capital of it, are without some touch of abatement. I could not so much as visit the Catacombs of Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As we drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one of those domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy alone. Three peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in controversy which, on his side, the man supported with both hands flapping wildly at the heads of the women, who alertly dodged and circled around him in the endeavor to close in upon him. It was instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that they were his wife and daughter, and that he was the worse for the vintage of their home acre, and would be the better for being got into the house and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts of the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in no hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was about to tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end of that pa.s.sage of real life.

It was impossible to bid the cabman drive back for the close of the scene; the abrupt conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof of the charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery that for the moment my bitter sense of loss was a.s.suaged, and it only returns now at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in this brief scene were some early Christians might have been, and it must have been the stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving in the husband and father. He was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive the emperor's gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned to found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of course, under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five levels below the surface. I will not follow the reader with that kind guide who will cheer his wanderings through those sunless corridors of death, where many of the sleepers still lie sealed within their tombs on either hand, and show him by the smoky taper's light the frescos which adorn the cramped chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance and ask him if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance, putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah.

Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek G.o.d as good as a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be converted, having a presentiment of the dark and b.l.o.o.d.y themes the new religion would give it to deal with.

The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are among the cheerfulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where they suffered death for their faith, under the Pa.s.sionist church named for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman n.o.bles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.

The young Pa.s.sionist father who showed us through the church and the house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch, but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both, radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow him he said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in it, joined with other friends in his a.s.sa.s.sination. The s.e.x has indeed had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has been rendered fearless in the a.s.sertion of its rights. With poor women one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.

A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and distinguis.h.i.+ng for the moment in favor of their respective churches above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio's, which is indeed for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its a.s.sociations with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 44 THE BATHS OF CARACALLA]

Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St.

Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them kneeling among the people who then thronged the genially irregular piazza, but as we came up some ecclesiastical students were playing ball there, their robes tucked into their girdles for their greater convenience, and we made our way at once into the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life. Of these miracles, of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art, standing in the garden called St. Silvia's, after the mother of St.

Gregory. As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking to the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and swung unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.

We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning aside for the Coliseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve weeks that had pa.s.sed, but a bewildering notion of something like this obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in shapeless ma.s.ses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches flinging themselves across the s.p.a.ces between the beetling crags, in the monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous apertures of its t.i.tanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of the mult.i.tudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and suns.h.i.+ne, and the innocent beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely advent.i.tious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick.

Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they stared or simpered, and said, "Oh!" That was not all we could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave way under her, and she fell down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.

It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard trees were in bloom--peach and plum, cherry and pear--whenever you chose to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of the two days' strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything they asked.

When we emerged from the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we pa.s.sed through many fields of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the gra.s.sy waste, but there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle in pastures. Now and then we pa.s.sed a wretched hut which seemed to be the dwelling of the shepherds we saw tending the flocks, and here and there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of straw, whether for man or beast, set within a sort of squalid court, with a frowzy suggestion of old women and children about the doors of the cottages. We saw no men, though there must have been men off at work in the fields with the younger women.

As we drew near Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a wind that seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in 1865 when, after looking at the tossing s.h.i.+ps in the harbor, we decided to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little steamer we had meant to take. From our pleasant train we now patronized Civita Vecchia with a recognition of its picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that then insisted on itself, though the harbor was as full of s.h.i.+pping as of old. There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station buffet, where there had been neither station nor buffet in our young time: but doubtless then as now there had been the lonely graveyard outside the town, with its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the last of our Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to gray since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward in the malarial Maremma.

If the Maremma is as malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There were stretches of hopeless mora.s.s, with wide acreages under water, but mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then we ran by a stony old town on a distant summit like the outcropping of granite or marble, and there were frequent breadths of woodland, oak and pine and, I dare say, walnut and chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts to reclaim the Maremma from its evil air and make it safely habitable, and the farther we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were.

There were many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as stone; when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our diligence to pa.s.s its flood, we were aware, in the evening light, of a prosperity which, if not excessive for the twoscore years that had pa.s.sed, was still very noticeable. I should not quite say that the brick wall of the city had been sc.r.a.ped and scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new, and there was a pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been, and people were coming and going who had almost the effect of commuters; at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes by trolley. We resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the inn in the heart of the town where we had spent that "night of memory and of sighs."

But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but, so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway. We began to have our doubts of what we had always believed had happened, and remained as snugly as we could in our compartment, where, to tell the truth, we were not very snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the Italian government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it, and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our rugs and cus.h.i.+ons; but, if we had known what we were coming to in Leghorn, we should have thought ourselves very enviable.

I do not know exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the hotel where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least one of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a hundred miles as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus, through long, straight streets, after ten o'clock at night. The streets and houses were mostly dark, as houses of good habits should be at that hour, but, after pa.s.sing through a wide, lonely piazza, we struck into a street longer and straighter than the others, and drew up at our hotel door opposite an hilarious cafe, where there seemed a general rejoicing of some sort. We were unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it without knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of our one porcelain stove and leave us to perish of cold.

In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this sweeping verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our apartment. We had our landlord's company at supper, and had learned from him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn, of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a millionaire of that princely quality. After that we were not so much surprised as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited by our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two _scaldini,_ which were bristling before her where she knelt when we opened the door upon her. She apologized, but still she carried away the coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of our stove as best we could. It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to the office of taking the chill off that vast, dim room, where it cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of its pipe lost in s.p.a.ce before it reached the lowermost G.o.ddess in the allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that imparted no more cheer than warmth.

We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day!

But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we s.h.i.+vered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as sensible--the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago.

It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.

It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for the pa.s.sing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing us with such sweet and rea.s.suring civility for any sum of money! Those gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.

The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant s.p.a.ces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and other evergreens, and with flower-beds where the annuals were beginning to show the gardener's designs in their sprouting seeds. Beyond these ample villa bounds a tram-car murmured to and from the well-removed city, and beyond its track lay a line of open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing establishments, as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring masonry instead of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 45 PIAZZA VICTOR EMANUEL, LEGHORN]

This festive preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which Leghorn enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the season glisten and twitter and flutter with the vivid national life. The preparation includes a delightful drive by the seash.o.r.e, with groves and gardens, to the city gate and indefinitely beyond it, which we one day followed as far as an old fort, where a little hotel had nestled with every promise of simple comfort. There was a neighboring village of no very exciting interest, and I do not know that the Italian Naval Academy, which we pa.s.sed on the way, was very exciting, though with its villa grounds it had a pleasing rural effect. Hard by our hotel, in a piazza that seemed to have nothing to do but surround it, was the colossal bust of an Italian admiral, or the like, which had not the impressiveness of a colossal full-length figure, but which rendered the original with the faithful realism of the Genoese Campo Santo sculpture.

In compensation there was, toward the city, near the s.h.i.+p-yards where the great Italian battle-s.h.i.+ps are built, the statue of their builder--a man who looked it--standing at large ease, with one hand in his pantaloons pocket, and not apparently conscious of the pa.s.ser's gaze.

Beyond the s.h.i.+p-yard, in which a battle-s.h.i.+p was then receiving the last touches, was a statue for which I could not claim an equal unconsciousness. In fact, it challenged the public attention and even homage as it extended the baton of command and triumphed over the four Moorish or Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained to the several corners of the monument and owned themselves galley-slaves. The Medicean grand-duke who lords it over them, and who erected this monument in honor of himself for the victories his admirals had gained in sweeping the pirates from the seas, is a very proud presence, and is certainly worthy of the admiration which his bronze requires from the spectator. I instantly suspected this monument of being the chief sculpture of Leghorn, and I did not wonder that a _valet de place_ was lying in wait for me there to make me observe that from a certain point I could get all four of the galley-slaves' noses in perspective at once. Upon experiment I did not find that I could do this, but I imputed my failure to want of merit in myself and not the monument, and I willingly paid half a franc for the suggestion; if all one's failures cost so little, one could save money. I was going then to view at close quarters the port of Leghorn, which is famous for its mole and lighthouse and quarantine, the first of their kind in their time.

The old port, with the fortifications, was the work of a natural son of Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, whose n.o.ble origin was so constantly recognized by the Tuscan grand-dukes that he came at last to be accepted as Lord Dudley by the English. From his day, if not from his work, the prosperity of Leghorn began, and the English have always had a great part in it. Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of great British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and the trade with America has always been such that American merchants and captains have fully shared in the commerce directly or indirectly. Both the old and the new port were a scene of pleasant activity the pleasant afternoon when I visited them, and were full of varied sail as well as many steamers, loading or unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports, east and west, and the Hanseatic cities and the far coasts of Norway.

Any seaport is charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian port has always a prime picturesqueness. Its sailors are the most ancient mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any nascent Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do not deny that there was one. Leghorn is still in her l.u.s.ty youth, being not much older than our Boston in the prosperity which has not failed her since the Medici divined her importance toward the close of the sixteenth century, and fortified her harbor till she was one of the strongest places on the Mediterranean. With a hazy general consciousness of her modernity in mind, I had imagined her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook called _Su e Giu per Livorno_ (or _Up and Down Leghorn),_ that the place was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. The author records this with a smile, and then, by a leap over some forty centuries, he finds firm footing in the fact that the great Countess Matilde, then much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan neighbors everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans, confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and embellished the port. A century after, Charles of Anjou demolished it, and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then, in the last years of the thirteenth century, the Florentines, Lucchese, and Genoese devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and left Leghorn only one poor little church. Well throughout the fourteenth century there were wars between these republics, and Leghorn suffered the consequences, being, as our author says, "according to custom, a.s.sailed, taken, wasted, and destroyed." But before that century was out she seems to have flourished up again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning from Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long exile to the Eternal City.

The Genoese now sold Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to France for twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole city. But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite time now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and that, having pa.s.sed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have been ceded without a blow to Charles VIII. of France. But in a year she was once more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of Germany.

More fortifying, embellis.h.i.+ng, and pestilence followed, and in 1429 Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered.

The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de' Medici, who came in master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her harbor, dug ca.n.a.ls, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn, and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was now time for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652 they were defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five years later the grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent earthquake shook down many buildings and killed many women and children; but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing on it.

No disaster worth recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the Rights of Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs.

The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi, invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and a Spanish s.h.i.+p brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn, which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.

In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored by the Austrians. He was sentenced to fifteen years' prison with hard labor, but later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return and take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led the movement against making peace with Austria unless all her Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873, and is remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a whole, but singularly interesting in certain details.

I have omitted from this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest, such as visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have got in all the plagues and earthquakes. Perhaps I have the more willingly suppressed a few war-like facts, in the interest of the superst.i.tion I had cherished that Leghorn was without a history, or that it had no more history than, most American cities of equal date with its commercial importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the Medici to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races, settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in great numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you had as well strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn. Greeks, Turks, Armenians were protected equally with English and Dutch, and infidel and heretic were alike free in their wors.h.i.+p. It was the great prison of the galley-slaves, who were chiefly the pirates and corsairs taken on the high seas by the duke's s.h.i.+ps. These captives not only served as models for the Moors at the base of his monument, but they must have been very useful in the different public works which he and his successors carried out. Now they and their like are gone, and though the Greeks, the Armenians, the English, and the Scotch still have their churches, I do not suppose there is a mosque in all Leghorn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 46 THE Ca.n.a.l AT LEGHORN]

I do not speak very confidently, because my researches in that sort were not exhaustive. I indeed visited the cathedral, not wholly because Inigo Jones had something to do in planning it, but because I had formed the habit of visiting churches in Rome, and I mechanically went into one wherever I saw it. Generally speaking, I think that they were rather bare in painting or sculpture, but they were such churches as in America one would go a long way to see and think one's self well rewarded by their objects of interest. I do not know what defence to offer for not having visited the galleries of the Museo Civico, where by actual count in the guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art, though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say: probably one out of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much resort to the churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly through its pleasant streets and squares, and by the sh.o.r.es of the ca.n.a.ls which once gave it the name of New Venice, and which still invite the smaller s.h.i.+pping up among its houses in right Venetian fas.h.i.+on. The streets of Leghorn are not so straight as they are long, but many are very straight, and the others are curved rather than crooked. The longest and straight-est were streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where each family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind, and a respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our towns. From the force of the mid-April sun in these streets I realized what they might be in summer, and, if I lived in Leghorn, I would rather live on the sea-front, in one of the comfortable, square, stone villas which border it. But everywhere Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and convenient, with lively shops and cafes and trams and open s.p.a.ces, and statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round, flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most interesting, most touching in two of the bas-reliefs below. One represents him proclaiming the provisional government at Florence in 1849, after the expulsion of the grand-duke, where the fact is studied, with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all its incidents and the costumes of the thronging spectators. The sculptor has hesitated at no top-hat or open umbrella; there are barefooted boys and bareheaded young girls, as well as bearded elders; if my memory serves, the scene is not without a dog or two. But it is the other relief which is so simply and so deeply affecting--the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, _The Siege of Florence,_ and with him standing a little way from it. In spite of the small s.p.a.ce and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past forever.

These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember rightly, face each other over its oblong--cla.s.sic motives, with the figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres, and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of his famous comedy, "La Locandiera." But I was told that the local theatres were not so much frequented by polite people, especially for opera, as the theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its society than its old-time va.s.sal by the sea, and attracts the fas.h.i.+on of Leghorn during the season.

As Pisa has ceased to be the colony of literary English it once was, in the time of Byron and Hunt and Sh.e.l.ley, to name no others, so Leghorn has ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has still a great deal of commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers in the style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities of both colonies are united in the author of a charming book who fills the post of British consul at Leghorn. His _Tuscan Towns_ must not be confused with another book called _Tuscan Cities,_ though, if the traveller chooses to carry both with him about Tuscany, I will not say that he could do better. In _Tuscan Cities_ there is nothing about Leghorn, I believe, but in _Tuscan Towns_ there is a specially delightful chapter about the place, its people, language, and customs which I can commend to the reader as the best corrective of the errors I must have been constantly falling into here.

It was in company no less enviable than this author's that I revisited the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of their line, Alessandro de' Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one Law, one Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.

Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact, that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable reason.

In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder. The afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat, which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we wandered about among the "tall cypresses, myrtles, pines, eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other loveliest of wild flowers." On the forgotten tombs were the touching epitaphs of those who had died in exile, and whose monuments are sometimes here while their ashes lie in Florence or Rome, or wherever else they chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on the graves of "William Magee Seton, merchant of New York," who died at Pisa in 1803, and "Henry De b.u.t.ts, a citizen of Baltimore, N. America,"

who died at Sarzana; with "James M. Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines, Citizen of the United States of America," who died at Leghorn in 1802; and "Thomas Gamble, Late Captain in the Navy of the United States of America," who died at Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other Americans whose tombs I did not see. The memorials of the English were likewise here, whether they died at Leghorn or not; but most of them seem to have ended their lives in that place, where there were once so many English residents, whether for their health or their profit. The youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to find the air specific for their maladies, and doubtless this would account also for the disproportionate number of n.o.ble ladies who rest here, with their hatchments and their coronets and robes of state carven on the stones above them. Among others one reads the t.i.tles of "Lady Catharine Burgess born Beauclerk; Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and daughter of the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of James Murray,... and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his Spouse," with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and naval officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that strenuous spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English fiction of his time than any other novelist of his time, and second only to Richardson in the wide influence of his literary method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who here ended his long fight with consumption and the indifference of his country to his claims upon her official recognition. After many years of narrow circ.u.mstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty years later, was worthily holding. The truest monument to his stay in Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented in _Humphrey Clinker,_ and which has survived the epistolary form into our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.

It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from nature now claiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund for the care of the tomb of Smollett.