A Family Party in the Piazza of St. Peter, and other stories

Front matter

■ A FAMILY PARTY IN THE PIAZZA OF ST. PETER, etc. VOL. I. /I Carefully printed on creamy paper, and tastefully bound for the Library, price 6s. each. Mostly with Illustrations— by George Du Maurier, Sir John Gilbert, A. Hopkins, H. Woods, S. L. Fildes, J. Mahoney, Sydney Hall, William Small, and others. The Piccadilly Novels. POPULAR STORIES hy the BEST AUTHORS. Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White. Man and Wife. Antonina. Poor Miss Finch. Basil. Miss or Mrs. P The Dead Secret. The New Magdalen. Queen of Hearts. The Frozen Deep. The Moonstone. My Miscellanies. Hide and Seek. The Law and the Lady. M. BETHAM-EDWARDS— FeUcia. E. Lynn Linton. Patricia Kemball. I The Atonement of Leam Dundas. Katharine S. Macquoid.— The Evu Eye. Henry Kingsley. Number Seventeen. | Oakshott Castle. Florence Marryat.— open! sesame!

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BY T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. IN THREE VOLUMES.— VOL. I Honiron : CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. 1877. {All rights reserved.} Tlie stories in these volumes have been collected from various periodical publications, to the proprietors of which the author tenders his thanks for their kind permission to rt print them. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. I* AGE A FAMILY PARTY IN THE PIAZZA OF ST. PETER ... I GIULIA VARANI ; OR, ST. PETER'S D;\Y AT BELLUNO ... ... ... ... ... ... "7 THE ATKINSES AT ROME .. ... ... THE PIAZZA OF ST. PETER.

Chapter I

It is a lovely morning in June, and Rome is looking beautiful exceedingly, with a beauty tbat is never seen by nine hundred and ninety nine persons out of every thousand of the visitors from every part of the world who yearly throng the Eternal City. The race of tourists are " servum pecus," as Horace calls " imitators," perhaps even more markedly than the rest of our imitative kind. They follow each other over the same gap in the same hedge. They do this year exactly what they did last year. This Roman Pactolus begins to ebb immediately after Easter, and the genuine Roman world is left ;to live and enjoy itself after its own native fashion. ' . VOL. I. B A FAMILY PARTY IN TEE And this it was preparing to do in a special manner on the morning in question ; for that June morning was one of the greatest and highest of Rome's high days and holidays.

On the sixtieth day after Easter in every year, the Roman church celebrates the festival of the " Corpus Domini " — in every year from the thirtieth of the thirteenth century, when a heavenly vision commanded the blessed Gr iuliana of Mont Corneillon, near Liege, to establish the ceremony, till the year 1870, when, after six hundred and forty anniversaries, it took place in Rome for the last time probably for evermore. But matters had not yet come quite to that pass with the city and its eternities ; and on the occasion to which the reader's attention is invited there were yet two or three more Corpus Domini celebrations to come. It was the most delicious hour of all the twenty-four in a Roman June day — the hour after sunrise — on that high festival, that a couple of girls emerged into the vast open space in front of St. Peter's Church, from the street called the Borgo Vecchio.

This space, that lies before the western front of the great church, is divided into two portions — an oblong area on which the Borgo Vecchio opens, and which is farthest from the church, and the much larger circular piazza at the further end of it, immediately in front of the western facade of the Basilica, and surrounded by the two vast semicircular colonnades, which come out from the two angles of the church like huge arms. The first and smaller area is called the Piazza Rusti cucci, the second the Piazza of St. Peter's ; and these two piazze, forming thus one undivided space, are the scene of the great procession which constitutes the principal part of the grand cere monial ofthe day. Already at that early hour of the morning there were many people moving in different directions about either piazza ; and were most of them, after considerable hesitation apparently, taking up the positions which they deemed most favourable for securing a good view of the coming show.

The two girls that have been mentioned, however, seemed to have no doubt upon the subject. Crossing the Piazza Rusti cucci diagonally from the end of the Borgo Vecchio, they pressed forward eagerly with an elertness of step to which a Roman of any class or age is rarely excited, towards the end of the colonnade to the right hand of one approaching the church, and there stationed themselves at A FAMILY PARTY IN TEE the foot of the last of the huge piers. They glanced around for an instant, and then quietly and deliberately sate themselves down on the corners of the pediment of the pier, both of them with the same action .clasping their hands around their knees, prepared to wait. Just as they seated themselves the bells in all the neighbouring belfries began one after another to strike the quarter before five.

" Five less one quarter. We are a little bit too early, it is true ; but what would you have ; girls are sure to be first at a trysting-place." It was the taller "and most vigorous-looking of the two girls who spoke. Both were remark able for their beauty, even at Rome, where female beauty in all classes is more abundant than perhaps in any other city in the world. But they were markedly and even singularly contrasted in appearance. Lucia Savelli, she who had spoken, was a superb specimen of the grandest type of the Roman " popolana," or woman of the people — a Roman of the Romans, born in the " Traste vere," as that portion of the city is called which stands on the right hand side of the Tiber, and the inhabitants of which have always been deemed to have preserved the purity of their descent from the old Roman stock more unadul terated by mixture with foreign elements than any other part of the population of the city.

The " Trasteverans " are also famed for their beauty of form and feature, always of the grand and magnificent sort ; and Lucia Savelli was an admirable example of the type. She was like Shakespear's Rosalind, "more than common tall," and her robust and vigorous development was perfectly proportioned to her height. An enormous wealth of glossily rip pling but rather coarse raven-black hair was wound around her majestically carried and beautifully shaped small head, with an effect that to any comparing eye must have made the prevailing fashion of chignon behind and mountain atop, appear more stupidly disfiguring and vulgarly tasteless than ever. The superb column of her throat, large and pillar-like in the perfection of its roundness, imparted a noble and proud expression to the general outline of her person, which might have pointed her out to the eye of a sculptor as the very model for a Juno.

Brow, eyes, lips, contour of the face, and colouring were all superb. The brow was specially noble ; not lofty, but very broad, and with well-shaped contours about the temples. Had this brow and the eyes alone been visible, the expression of Lucia's face would have seemed to be even aggressively stern and defiant ; but the not small mouth, lighted up with brilliantly white and small teeth, and formed of lips the exquisite curving of which seemed calculated to express any amount of unspoken eloquence, had a world of sweetness and good-humour about and around it. And to make the presentment perfect and complete in all that an artistic eye could desire, Lucia, unlike her companion, was dressed in the picturesque costume of the true Roman " popolana," with that most becoming of all head-dresses, the flatly folded white ker chief, which a thousand drawings and pictures have made familiar to our eyes, on her head.

Ninetta — have I told you, by the bye, that the name of Lucia's companion was Ninetta Innocenti ? — Ninetta was in her way fully as lovely a girl as Lucia, but her way was a very different one. As to which was the more beau tiful, the question would be as absurd as to ask whether a rose or a violet smells the sweetest. Undoubtedly the one would appeal more strongly to the sympathies of men of one sort, and the other to those of a different kind ; and one might perhaps be able to divine something as to the characteristics of the man, of whom one should know only which of the two girls he admired most, with less fear of mistake than one could attempt to estimate the characters of the girls themselves from their appearance. At all events there could be no doubt as to which of the girls was most artistically adapted to the setting in which her picture has to be presented to the reader.

There was nothing specially or characteristically Roman about Ninetta. Exceeding delicacy of form, of colour, of expression, was the leading characteristic of Ninetta's appearance. She was, though by no means short of stature, less tall by an inch or two than her friend ; but had you seen them apart, instead of side by side, it is probable enough that the impression left upon your eye would have led you to imagine, when both were absent, that Ninetta was the taller — so much has slenderness of figure the effect of increasing apparent height, and Ninetta was very slender. Whether it were that she wore, though it was sadly poverty stricken, the ordinary fashionable style of dress as far as the forms of it went, whereas Lucia was clad in the characteristic cos tume of a Trasteverina, or whether it were due to any more coquettish strain . in the nature of the girl, Ninetta's slender waist was made yet more slender by a certain, not excessive, amount of pressure ; whereas that of Lucia appeared as innocent of compression as the lithe round stem of an oak sapling.

Then, moreover, Ninetta was blonde, with hair of that peculiar Titianesque tint which Italians are apt to think the most beautiful of any possible hue. There was in her face none of the brown-pink colouring which gave to Lucia's cheek the semblance of a sun-ripened peach, and spoke of the very perfection of health and vigour. She was delicately pale, with large violet-coloured liquid eyes, that looked out somewhat mournfully on the world, with an expression that betokened an emotional rather than an intellectual nature. Yet the ordinary observer would have probably judged Ninetta to have a more intellectual expression of face than Lucia. Her fair, beautifully shaped forehead was much higher than her friend's low brow ! but it was also much narrower. It was a dainty, delicate, finely fashioned, and beauti fully cut face — that of Ninetta Innocenti, with a slender, delicate nose, small mouth, and little round chin.

Had the cheeks been a little fuller and the jaw-bone and chin a little less narrow the face would have been a perfect oval. As it was, the lower part of it was slenderer than the upper. There was none of the strength in the face which was so marked a characteristic in that of Lucia. It was very fair, very lovely, very excellently well fitted to conciliate love. But there was weakness in the delicacy of it, — weakness in the high and narrow, though not unintellectual forehead, and in the mobile, sensi tive, and uncertain mouth ancl little chin. " Ah ! that comes from making appointments with them," said Ninetta in reply to the words that had fallen from Lucia, with a little, half demure, half arch casting down of the eyes, evidently intended not for hypocrisy, but for acting as a provocation to her friend.

But Lucia's nature was too simply straightforward for any such little comedy to be effective. " If I did not know for sure," she said, " that my damo (sweetheart) was quite as anxious to see me as I to see him, I should not come at all ! And being sure, I don't mind waiting. Besides, the grand point is to get our places ; and to judge by the way the people are coming into the piazza, we are none too early for that." " All the same, I had rather be waited for than wait," returned Ninetta, with a charming little toss of her head. " Then why didn't you make your grand damo join our party here, and see if he would have been here by cock-crow ? " said Lucia, with a laugh in her eye, but without the slightest shade of malice or even of pique in her heart. " Were you afraid ? " she added, with a sly wink and a broad frank smile that showed all the range of her regular and bril liantly white teeth.

" Davvero, no ! " replied Ninetta, with a moue and a shrug of her shoulders; "but, che! vi pare ! How can you dream of such a thing ! Why, I should not wonder if he was obliged to be in attendance on the Holy Father, to-day too, of all the days in the year. Don't you know, Lucia, that he is one of the great officers, a captain. And I shall be a contessa when he takes me to his own country." "His own country!" exclaimed Lucia, staring at her friend, " why what is his country ? I thought your friend was one of our own people." " Not at all," said the other, with a toss of the head, which showed that characteristic readiness of the Italians to imagine that a foreign thing or person must, as a matter of course, be better and finer than the person or thing of home growth. " Not at all ! He is a great French officer, sent here by the Emperor to protect our Holy Father from his enemies."

" Oh ! a Frenchman ; I did not know it," said Lucia ; and then there was silence for a minute or two between the two girls, while Ninetta's eyes scanned the new comers, who continued to throng into the piazza, and Lucia seemed to be busy with her own thoughts. From these she was aroused by a greeting from one who was evidently an acquaintance, but whose appearance would have made it seem to any onlooker exceedingly unlikely that he should have been such. No human being would have supposed the new comer to be an Italian, even before he opened his lips. After he had done so, none could have doubted that he be longed to one of the branches of the great Anglo- Saxon family, either cis or trans Atlantic. He was a tall, spare, middle-aged man, with a shrewd grey eye, aquiline nose, brown weather-beaten healthy-looking complexion, good-humoured and even sweet mouth, and strong, resolute jaw and chin ; a handsome man certainly, though with none of the manners or bearing of one ; for men can give themselves beauty airs as well as women.

His dress seemed to be a decided protest against the rule that bids one do at Rome as Romans do. He had a plaid shawl wrapped around his shoulders over his grey shooting jacket, not withstanding the season, an extra broad-leaved straw hat, trousers such as those which the cari caturists in Punch used always to attribute to Lord Brougham, and thick shoes with buff cloth gaiters over them. And over all this costume there was a spick-and-span cleanness and new ness that, joined to his clear eye and cheery look, seemed almost to deserve the epithet of brightness. " What, you here, Signorina Lucia ! Come to see the show, and go in for a share in tbe bene diction, eh ! " said the new arrival, in that language so wonderfully spoken by old Anglo- Italians, and so yet more wonderfully understood by the quick wits and ears of the Italians trained by long use to acquaintance with the peculiarities of Anglo-Italian speech.

" Sissignore ! One sees that even your worship does not keep the studio open to-day." " Of course not. I must see the sight as well as the rest. But I mean to go into the church, and to look at the folk streaming in ; I had better be going at once. All alone, eh ? — that is, I mean, so — no cavaliere, eh ? " he added, glancing at Ninetta as he spoke. " Not seen Carlo, eh ? " " Carlo will be here presently ; he promised to meet us here," replied Lucia, with an open-eyed straight look into the speaker's eyes, which seemed to protest against any possible idea that she was meeting her lover on the sly, or was ashamed of doing so, or wanted to conceal the fact from anybody. " Oh, he will — will he ? Well I suppose that I shall see you to-morrow, and perhaps him too. A rivederci. And so saying, he walked alertly across the piazza towards the great steps leading to the church.

" Why, who in the world is he ? " asked Ninptta, who had been staring at Lucia's acquaintance with open-eyed wonder. " What a very strange-looking man ! And how queerly he talks ! He must be one of those wonderful Milordi Inglesi, that they say are all so rich, and all mad. And I suppose you must have met with him at some of the studios." " E un uomo bizzarro quanto mai ! — Yes, he is an odd fish, if ever there was one," said Lucia ; " but he is not an Englishman. He is an American, which comes to much the same thing it seems. Only they are a new sort discovered quite recently ; and a very good thing too. For I am sure we want them." " Where were they found ? " asked Ninetta with much interest. " Oh, somewhere over the sea. In an island I suppose. Some of our sailors were sailing about, looking for coral most likely, and found them.

And, as I say, a very good thing too, if what I hear old folk say is true, that the Milordi Inglesi have spent nearly all their money, and have not nearly so much as they used to have. This fresh sort always have plenty. I never join in the talk you hear nowadays against the saints. I think the Madonna is very good to us ! And when these Americans have spent all their money, I have no fear that some other Inglesi will be discovered somewhere about, if we are faithful to the Holy Father, and mind what the priests tell us." " I like Frenchmen best for my part," said Ninetta. " It is quite a different thing," returned Lucia thoughtfully. " I don't see that Frenchmen are a bit better than we are ourselves, for that matter." "Why, you don't mean to say, Lucia, that these Inglesi and Americani are any better than we are ? — why, they are barbari !

" exclaimed Ninetta with much indignation. " Yres ; they are barbari I there is no doubt about that ! "' said Lucia, whose brain was evi dently at work ; " but somehow they are of a different sort. And somehow everybody seems to expect that an Englishman, or one of these new sort of English, the Americans, should be able to do things which we can't do. And see now, I don't know how it is, but I myself would believe what one of them said to me, more than I would what any of our people said. Now this Signore Chianquinsi" (the name that Lucetta thus did her best to translate into sounds pronounce able by Italian organs was Jenkins), " I can't tell you how good he is, and Oh ! there is Carlo ! I see him pushing his way through the crowd ; and there is Uncle Tancredi with him ; and cousin Nanni and little Clelia Braschi behind them.

I dare say Carlo was kept waiting in order to come with Uncle Tancredi." " But, Lucia, dear, I never saw your uncle ; he won't be displeased at my being with you, will he ? " said Ninetta. " Displeased ! no : why should he be displeased ? " said Lucia with genuine surprise. " Only if you are all together, a family party, you know, he might not like to find a stranger — — " " Che ! vi pare I Not a bit of it; don't imagine such a thing. Here they come. I am sure you will like Uncle Tancredi, he is such a good, kind man," said Lucia, whose eyes were sparkling with pleasure at the prospect of the meeting with her friends, somewhat more dancingly and joyously perhaps than was altogether due to the approach of Uncle Tancredi, genuine as had been Lucia's eulogy of him.

Chapter II

Though it was not yet six o'clock, the vast circular area enclosed by Bernini's celebrated colonnades had been filling so rapidly since the two girls had taken up their position at the foot of the last of its huge piers on the southern side, that Tancredi and the little party with him had some difficulty in making their way through the throng to the place where the two girls were. They had not to seek them ; for it was evident that the rendezvous had been arranged beforehand. Nor, though some little patience was needed to thread the crowd, was the piazza yet packed nearly as closely as it would be an hour later, when the time for the appearance of the procession should approach. An Italian crowd is always the gentlest crowd in the world, so far as good-humour and the absence of all violence goes.

But it is not an easy crowd to move through, for the same vol. i. c reason that it is not easy to traverse a herd of bullocks. No Italian dreams of moving out of the way of any one wishing to pass him. He stands quiescent. Motion is an evil. Why should he subject himself to this evil, merely to facilitate the movement of a stranger ? If the passenger must needs move on at once, let him accept the onus of moving round the ob stacle. If the burly bulk which stops his way bring him also to a standstill, why it is only so much benefit conferred on him ! And no Italian expects another to move out of his way. And accordingly Uncle Tancredi and his party threaded their devious way through the crowd to the pillar where the girls were now standing, having risen to their feet at the approach of their friends, slowly and perfectly patiently.

Yet Tancredi Melitta, to say nothing of the two young men who followed behind him, looked like one who would have bad little difficulty in shoving any shoulders aside, how ever little mobile they might be. Lucia's mother, who had died so few years after her daughter's birth that the latter had no remembrance of her, had been a sister of Tancredi Melitta, who was a buttero of the Campagna, as his father had been before bim, and as he hoped his son Nanni would be after him. And when his sister Drusilla had married, with the re luctant consent of her family, the Roman citizen and cameo-cutter, Alessandro Savelli, each party to the match had been equally persuaded that they were making a mesalliance. An outsider, who had no Roman prejudices or ideas of one sort or the other to blind him, would probably have thought that the countryman's opinion on the subject was the more reasonable of the two.

If the reader has ever visited Rome, he has seen and admired many a buttero — a characteristic figure in the Roman streets, quite unlike any other figure to be met with in any other part of the world. Do you not remember, reader, having been struck (in the Campo Vac cino, perhaps, or in the open space between the Lateran and the neighbouring city gate) by a stalwart yet spare figure riding an exceptionally good black horse, with a long flowing tail down to his heels. The rider sits his steed admirably with a seat rather of the military sort than of our country kind, not rising in his stirrups, but moving easily with the brisk, active amble of his steed, as if they were but one animal, moved by one and the same will. And it may well be so, for the buttero lives mainly in the saddle. He it is to whom is entrusted the supervision of all the horses and horned cattle on some one of the vast properties which stretch over the Roman Campagna.

He has men under him for the care of the horses, others for the horned cattle. The sheep and the pigs are under other and recognisedly inferior administrations. But with the cultivation of the land, such as there is of it, he has nothing to do. This is managed exclu sively by a fattore, whom the buttero, and indeed everybody else, considers to occupy a very inferior position to himself. On a large pro perty the buttero would have three saddle-horses kept for him, and would take their work out of them every day of the week. One would be ready for him to mount at sunrise, a second after the midday meal, while the third would afford one day's rest in three to the stud. Besides his twenty crowns a month, not a calf or a colt is sold on the property without a fee of a crown to the buttero; all the ashes of the large fires used for many purposes on the land are his perquisite, and a more valuable one than might be supposed.

And sundry other rights, customs, and fees make the buttero' s position a very fortunate one. But he is well worth his earnings. It is not every man who has such an eye for the points of a horse or a heifer, or such a knowledge of their habits in health and sickness, as is needed to fit him for his business. The well-to-do buttero therefore rides his hand some and spirited horse with a somewhat cava lier and slightly aggressive air and bearing in the streets of Rome, and sticks his steeple crowned beaver, with its cock's feather in it, jauntily on one side of his head, and sits in the saddle with one hand on the waistband of his closely fitting black leather breeches ; while his well-made legs, clad in leather leggings, made to fit them like his skin, and buckled with a profusion of straps and buckles, hang as only legs more accustomed to the saddle than to walking can hang.

Such was Tancredi Melitta the buttero, the present head of a family who had filled the same position from father to son for many generations on the same property ; not one of the largest on the Campagna, but one of sufficient extent to make him a very well-to-do man. He was per fectly honest ; well-informed as to the things necessary to be known for the satisfactory dis charge of his own functions ; utterly, nay wonderfully, ignorant of all in the world besides ; entirely convinced that what he did know comprised the sum and substance of all human knowledge ; and that all who were not acquainted with that were uneducated block heads, and all who pretended to know anything else impostors and charlatans. And such as was Tancredi Melitta the father, and buttero in presenti, sucb was Giovanni, familiarly Nanni Melitta, the son and buttero in futuro.

Nanni Melitta was really a very handsome fellow, though there was a dash of barbarism about him — about the carriage of his person, the style of his garments, and the expression of his face — which would not have been observed in a Lombard or a Tuscan of similar social position. Perhaps this did not in any degree militate against his claim to be considered a handsome fellow, as certainly it increased his right to be deemed a picturesque one. The latter point of view was of course an impossible one to the girls before whom he was about to present himself. But it may be safely assumed that had that same flavour of barbarism been absent from his appearance he would have seemed less admirable in their eyes. It would have been too much, perhaps, to expect that it should have been altogether indifferent to Nanni whether he appeared admirable in the eyes of his handsome cousin Lucia, and of her, perhaps, even more attractive friend, whom he then saw for the first time, or not ; but we may be quite sure that little Clelia Braschi, who accompanied him and his father, if consulted on the point, would have been found to hold very strongly the opinion that it ought not to have mattered a fig to Nanni what any girl might think of him save one.