Cities of Italy

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Rome .....

Venice .....

Naples .....

II

Looking at Antinous, or at a young Roman model who lies on those spectacular steps of the Trinita de' Monti to-day, you realise that the Romans were born without a soul, and that in all these centuries of Christendom they have never acquired one. It has been the genius of the Catholic religion, whose temporal seat, so appropriately, has always been at Rome, to divine and to respond to this temperamental tendency of the people who have given it power. At Rome it is natural to found empires; the seven hills await them. Religion never could be mystical at Rome; it must have its part in the world, with all the power of the world, and all the world's hold on temporal felicity, and it is by an appeal to after all largely the Pagan sentiment in life and thought that the Popes have been able to succeed the C^sars. Never was any "mystical city of God" so solidly based on the stable powers of the earth. Church has succeeded temple, and you find the church superincumbent, quite literall}^, as in San Clemente, stratum above stratum, the chapel of Mithra under the apse of the Christian basilica; or, as in San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, where church after church, built over and into one another, is supported by columns, crowded with friezes, set together without design or order, out of ancient temples or palaces. Just as the theatre, dancing, music, were a part or appendage of the State religion, so the Church has

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taken to itself all that is finest in spectacle, all that is rarest in singing. Those perfumed and golden gifts of the three old Magi to the young Christ, the gift of the world and its delicacies, were not given in vain. All the churches in Rome are full of incense and gold.

To see St. Peter's is to realise all that is strongest, most Roman, nothing that is subtle or spiritual, in the power of the Church. This vast building, the largest church in the world, imposes itself upon you, whereever you are in Rome; you see the dome from the Alban or the Sabine hills, from which the whole city seems dwindled to a white shadow upon a green plain. Before it lies all Rome, behind it the vague desolation of fruitless fields, ruinous houses, a mouldering wall, a few ragged trees. I climbed one evening, about sunset, on a day when the sky itself had the desolation of brooding storms, to the strip of narrow, untrodden ground behind it, which rises from the Via Scaccia, going down on the other side to the Via della Zecca. It stood there hiding the whole city and half the sky, a vast grey bulk; now and again the moon, looking through a rift in the clouds, touched the leaden roof with a finger of light; the cypresses, seeming to lean against the white walls at the base, turned blacker; a few gas lamps shone about it like gold candles about the high altar; and gradually, as I watched, light after light sprang up out of the deep streets and precipitous houses, the hills grew darker, and more lo ROME

vague, and the solid mass itself, now a looming greyness, seemed to float like a great shadow into the depths of the night. And always, by day, looked at from within or without, it is by its immensity, its spectacular qualities, that it is impressive. To walk across the floor is like taking a journey; voices chanting in a side chapel can only just be heard from the opposite aisle; and, looking at the four piers which support the dome, one remembers that the church of San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, by no means a small church, is exactly the size of one of those four piers. Everything, the whole decoration, in order that it may be in proportion to the scale of the building, is exaggerated, and almost no detail bears an intimate examination, or can give one a separate sensation of pleasure; for the few lovely things, like Michelangelo's Pieta, are lost in little chapels, where they exist quietly, in their corners, like a fine, silent criticism of all this display, these florid Popes and angels, this noisy architectural rhetoric. And St. Peter's, impressing you, as it certainly does, with its tremendous size, strength, wealth, and the tireless, enduring power which has called it into being, holds you at a distance, with the true ecclesiastical frigidity. You learn here how to distinguish between what is emotional and what is properly ecclesiastical in the Catholic Church. St. Peter's is entirely positive, dogmatic, the assertion of the supremacy of the Church over the world ; never mystic, as in one of those dim Spanish cathe-

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drals, that of Barcelona, for instance; nor yet fantastic, full of strange, precious wonders of the world, brought from far off, as in St. Mark's. It is florid, spectacular, but never profane; suggesting, as it does, what is the strength, and what are also the metaphysical limitations of the Church, it never suggests, as St. Mark's does, the human curiosities which may become a strange vice, as easily as a singular virtue. Nor is it, like St. Mark's, in the midst of the city, where the heart of the city beats, where one sees a homely crowd wandering in and out all day long, looking in on the way home from market, as one might look in for a moment at a friend's house.

High Mass at St. Peter's, as I saw it on Christmas Day, said by Cardinal RampoUa, was an impressive ceremony, indeed, but it was said mainly to a crowd of curious strangers. The large, rigid figure in the red robes and the gold mitre, who sat there under his golden vestments, lifting a white- gloved hand on whose third finger shone the emerald ring set with diamonds, performed the sacred functions with a dignity which was a little weary, and in the priest's expressionless way, with that air of fixed meditation (as of a continual commerce with heaven) which is the Church's manner of expressing disapproval of the world. Where I seemed to see a real devotion was in the peasants from the Campagna, who passed with their rough cloaks rolled round them, and kissed St. Peter's foot devoutly, leaning their fore-

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heads against it; the women carefully rubbing the toe with their handkerchiefs before kissing it. I saw the same deep feeling in a fifteenth-century church into which I went that afternoon, S. Agostino, a church famed for its devotion. A whole wall was covered mth little gilt-framed votive offerings, silver hearts, and pious vows, and in front of them many poor old women sat and knelt, praying with closed eyes; others lifted their children to kiss the foot of Sansovino's patrician Virgin, the compassionate Madonna del Parto. I found a different, but perhaps not less sincere, company of worshippers in San Luigi dei Francesi, before that screen of candles, like burning gold, gold light rising flamelike out of gilt candlesticks, which enshrined for their devotion the unseen presence of the Sacrament. But at the midnight Mass in the same church, which was attended by a special permission, I was once more in that atmosphere of positive, unspiritual things which I had breathed in St. Peter's, and which seemed to me so typical of Rome. The church was filled to its farthest corner by a brilliant crowd ; the music, played by organ, harp, and strings, and sung by somewhat uncertain voices, was florid and brilliant; and far off, at the golden end of the church, white against the gold light, seven rows of candles rising like an arch of pure gold, the priests moved through the sacred ritual. Near me were some Italians, two of them women of the finest aristocratic type, with faces carved like cameos, a

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touch of cruelty in their dark, vivid, reticent dignity; and these faces, looking on as at a show, and prepared to look away the moment it was no longer amusing, seemed to bring all the strength of the world's hold on one into the perfumed atmosphere of the place. Looking, as I could not but look, at these beautiful Pagan faces, perfect as Roman medals, I felt that they were Rome, and that Rome was at least sure of this world, whatever her admiration, her curiosity, her possible dreams, of another.

Ill

"The grandeur that was Rome": that phrase of Poe's sums up perfectly the impression which Rome, even now, makes upon the observer. The secret of what is most impressive there is the choice (miraculous, we are led to suppose, and can well believe) of its site. A city built upon seven hills, hills which have arranged themselves, naturally, with such an art of impressive composition, can have no rival among the cities of the world in its appeal to the sense of material grandeur. That the Senate should throne itself upon the Capitol, that the palaces of the Cassars should have been on the Palatine or the Esquiline, was an almost incalculable aid to the pomp of State. St. Peter's, seen in the sky from all Rome, thrones Catholicism on a similar eminence. Everything in Rome impresses by its

14 ROME

height, by an amplitude of adjusted proportions, which is far more than the mere equivalent of vast spaces covered, as in London, invisible for its very size. The pride of looking down, the pride of having something to look up to, are alike satisfied for the Romans, by what nature and art have done for Rome.

This Roman grandeur began by being colossally simple. I find all the grandeur of Rome in even so late a work as the Aurelian Wall, and that is nothing but a bare, brown, precipitous line of masonry, patched with the mendings of all the ages. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, for all their original splendour of decoration, still exist with such potency, now that they are reduced to the bare elements of their construction, because the simplicity of that construction was the primary concern of Vespasian and Titus, of Agrippa and Hadrian, in building them. Effect is aimed at, and the effect is always that of impressing by size; but the effect is sought legitimately, with the finest materials, their most natural, however sumptuous, arrangement, and that Roman way of going straight to an end, like their roads, though at the cost of an army of men, a treasury of gold. In the work of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth century, we find the same effect aimed at, but with a sumptuousness not duly subordinated, and turning frequently (as in the extravagances of the typical Bernini) into colossal bad taste. Yet still, to this

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moment, Rome is the most pompous, the most magnificent, of Western cities. Was there ever a more imposing public square than that vast, florid Piazza del Popolo, by which, before the days of the railway, strangers entered Rome? almost nowhere entirely commendable in detail, but with what an art of effect in its remote corners, into which no crowd can stretch, its three long, straight, narrow vistas into the city, its terraced and columned heights, its great gateway. The square in which St. Peter's stands, with that colonnade which Bernini set up in his one moment of genius; the dark irregular, half-concealed palace of the Vatican holding on to a corner of the great church; the square itself, with its obelisk, the two fountains, the stones worn by all the pilgrims of the world ; no other square makes quite the same appeal to one, or suggests so much of the world's history. And how impressive, certainly how sumptuous, are all these immense, never quite architecturally satisfying churches, heaped against the sky at the corner of every square, dignifying the poverty of even the humblest streets, leaving, like San Paolo fuori le Mura, infinite riches run to waste in the unpopulated Campagna! You can scarcely walk for five minutes in any direction without coming on something, perhaps incongruous where it is, like the eleven Corinthian columns of Hadrian's Temple of Neptune, forty feet high, now filled up with modern brick-work, and made into the Exchange ; something absolutely startling, somei6 ROME

thing vast and sudden, it may be only the Trevi Fountain, it may be the Theatre of Marcellus, the Capitol itself. And the appropriate d^cor of life awaits every occasion, ready set; for what occasion is there in life which was not anticipated and prepared for, with learned, foreseeing taste, centuries ago, in those times when Rome had perfected the arts of life as now only the Eastern races ever dream of perfecting them? Think, in the baths of Caracalla or of Diocletian, among the trees and ruins of the Palatine; or, with less of the historic effort, in the gardens of the Villa Albani, with their alleys of shaven box, carved into niches for statues; of the Villa Borghese, with their avenues of ilex, their grassy amphitheatre; of the Villa Doria-Pamphili, which is like an English park, laid out by a French gardener; in the Bosco of the Villa Medici, wild and delicate, with its staircase going up between the trees to the sky; think what a decor lies before one, gone to waste, or at least wasted, for a life of the most triumphant pleasure! To live in Rome is to understand all the coloured and spectacular vices of the C^sars, all the elaborate sins of the Renaissance. Occasions so great as these have gone, but the possibilities remain, awaiting only their opportunity.

IV Rome is a sea in which many worlds have gone

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down, and its very pavement is all in waves; so that to drive through these narrow streets, and across these broad squares, in which there is no footway over which a wheel may not drive, is like rocking in a boat on slightly uneasy water. The soil everywhere heaves over still buried ruins, which may hold (who knows?) another Apoxyomenos. And, as no other great city in the world is, the whole of Rome is one vast museum, in which the very galleries, palaces, churches, which contain the finest of its treasures, are themselves but single items in that museum w^hich is Rome. And what gives to all this precisely its special charm, and also its special value to the student, is that Rome is still a living city, the capital of a nation, and with an actual life of its own, which, often enough, can be seen in its direct descent from antiquity. The Roman people have always had a sense of the continuity of their national life, of their literal part in the inheritance of their ancestors. One sees it, sometimes with a quaint grotesqueness, in the simple-minded way in which, just as they Christianised Pagan temples, so they have always taken to themselves and turned to their own uses the monuments of all the ages: Pasquino, Marforio, Madama Lucrezia, the Bocca della Verita; the religion of one age becoming the mouthpiece for the satire or criticism of the next, as the Pagan gods in exile, in the Christian Middle Ages, became demons, haunting the souls of men with their perilous beauty. One sees it, at the present day, in that i8 ROME

singular deification of Vittorio Emanuele, which is really an apotheosis, after the manner of the apotheoses of the Roman emperors; and quite after their ruthless manner is that waste of thousands of pounds in the destruction of certain old streets, which were beautiful, for the proper view of an equestrian statue, which will be hideous. And then, in the actual museums, the palace of the Vatican, the palace of the Conservator!, the baths of Diocletian, what a prepared atmosphere one finds and how much more at home in these courts, frescoed halls, papal summer-houses, Carthusian cloisters, is all this white, chosen humanity of statues, which, if they ** remember their august abodes," must certainly pine less for Greece, which they left so early, than any other marble beings in the world. Since 1 have been in Rome I have realised, for myself, many things about Greek art, which not all the study of sculpture in London, Paris, and Berlin has taught me; and I have been able to see it, not only as the greatest, the most "classic" art of the world, but as the most living, responsive, intimately delightful. And this is certainly because I have seen it where it could be seen more like something" in its natural place, less like something on show, than an3rwhere out of Greece.

And in painting, too, one has the opportunity of making certain not unsimilar discoveries. Rome is not rich in easel-pictures, nor yet in altar-pieces, but it is only in Rome that it is possible to realise, to

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the full extent of their gifts and limitations, the pictorial genius of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Pinturicchio. Michelangelo in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael in the decoration of the Stanze and Logge, Pinturicchio in the decoration of the Appartamento Borgia, of the Vatican, is seen working as the painter loves to work, in the one really satisfying way in which he can work, architecturally, for the adornment of a given space, which is part of the essential life of a building. And so these frescoes, as no picture in a museum could ever be, are an actual part of Rome, precisely as much a part of it as the Vatican itself.

In the Sistine Chapel there are admirable paintings by Botticelli, by Signorelli, by Perugino, but one can see nothing there but Michelangelo. And the emotion of first seeing this immense world created by Michelangelo seized me with a delighted awe, such as I could imagine to have stirred in the soul of Adam when he awoke and beheld the world. Other things are beautiful, exquisite, subtle, but these seem to contain all beautiful and exquisite and subtle things, and to disregard them. In the passion of this overwhelming life which burns through every line, there is for once the creating joy of the artist, flawless, unimpaired, unchecked, fulfilling its desire as not even the Greeks have done; for desire, in them, was restrained by a sense of delicate harmony, to which it was the triumphant self-sacrifice of their art to conform. Here we have

20 ROME

no sense of even so much of mortal concession to the demands of immortality; but the unbounded spirit seems to revel in the absoluteness of its freedom. Here, at last, here indeed for the first time is all that can be meant by sublimity; a sublimity which attains its pre-eminence through no sacrifice of other qualities; a sublimity which (let us say it frankly) is amusing. I find the magnificent and extreme life of these figures as touching, intimate, and direct in its appeal as the most vivid and gracious realism of any easel-picture: God, the Father and the Son, the Virgin, the men and women of the Old Testament, the Sibyls, the risen dead of the Last Judgment, all these tremendous symbols of whatever has been divined by the spirit or sought out by the wisdom of the ages crowd upon one with the palpable, irresistible nearness of the people who throng one in one's passage through the actual world. It seemed to me then, it still seems to me, strange that I should have felt it, but never before had I felt so much at home among paintings, so little of a mere spectator. One seems to be of the same vivid and eternal world as these joyous and meditative beings, joyous and meditative even in hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture of God in creation, of the woman in disobedience, or of Isaiah in vision. They are close to one, I think, partly because they are so far away; because no subtlety in the eyes or lips, no delicacy in the fold

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of garments, none of the curious and discoverable ways by which art imitates and beautifies nature, can distract one from the immediate impress of such passionate and obsessing Hf e. Art ceases to approach one directly, through this sense or that, through colour, or suggested motion, or some fancied outlook of the soul; it comes straight to one, boldly, seizing one at once by that instinct of immediate recognition, by which, except here, only perhaps the direct works of God have ever approached and revealed themselves to the soul of man.

Now turn to Raphael. Here, on the contrary, we have art so obvious in its concealment of art that it becomes the idol of the crowd, and ceases to interest the more curious dreamer before pictures. Raphael is the instinctively triumphant perfection of the ideal of the average man; he is what scarcely the greatest of painters can be, and what only mediocre painters have desired to be. Here is the simplicity of what is called inspiration: the ease of doing, better than any one else, what the greater number would like, better than anything else, to do. And he is miraculous; yet a miracle which just fails to interest one; because, I think, he is essentially exterior, and his pictures a dream of the hand rather than a dream of the soul. Even that peace which he can convey with so delicate a power seems to me rather the slumber than the ecstasy of peace. His Madonnas have no foresight in their eyes of the seven swords with which the

22 ROME

divine child is to pierce their breasts. His gracious saints have never, before they attained sanctity, suffered all the enlightening ardours of sin. His martyrs have no memory, either of death, by which they have passed, or of heaven, to which they have come. All the pe.'sons of his pictures live, somewhat unthinkingly, in the moment which their gesture perpetuates; they have but that gesture. We see eternity in the moment of fierce meditation which Michelangelo calls up before us, as if thought in the brows and hands were about to relax or resolve itself into some other of the unaccountable moods of so elemental a being. In the painful, intense face of a Velasquez we see the passionate frailties, the morbid, minute hatreds of a long race of just such suffering and reticent beings. And in the smile which wanders, lurking in the imperceptible corner of lip or eyelid, across the faces of Leonardo, we see the enigma of whatever is most secret, alluring, inexplicable, in the mysterious charm of human beauty; that look which seems to remember, and is perhaps only a forgetfulness. But the people of Raphael live in the content of that one gracious moment in which they lift their hands in prayer or benediction, or open their untroubled eyes to that moment's sunlight.

The art of Pinturicchio, which can now, since the opening of the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican, be studied more completely at Rome than even at Siena, is another, a more primitive, but not less

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individual art. Those frescoes, simply as decorations, are as beautiful as any decorations that were ever done; and they are at once an arabesque, in which everything seems to exist simply in order that it may be a moment's beautiful colour on a wall, and a piece of homely realism, in which every figure seems to be a portrait, and every animal, tree, and jewel to be painted for its own sake. There is not a little naivete in the design, a technique in which there is none of the confident sureness of hand of either Raphael or Michelangelo, but a certain hesitation, an almost timid recourse to such expedients as the use of stucco in relief, and even of painted wood, glued upon the flat surface to represent a tower or a gateway. But you feel that the man has something to say, that, to be more accurate, he sees pictures; and that this simple and sumptuous and real and imaginary world, which he has called into being in order that it may remind us of the world about us, and be more beautiful, and so be a delight to the eyes and a repose to the soul, is not only an unsurpassed piece of decoration, but the revelation of a temperament to which beauty was perhaps more beautiful for its own sake than to any other painter. Pinturicchio loves the world, animals, trees, human faces, the elegance of men and women in courtly, coloured dresses, youth with its simple pride of existence, kings for their gold and purple robes, saints for the divine calm of their eyelids and the

24 ROME

plaintive grace of their slim hands, all the world's beauty as it comes up like the flower of the grass, and especially that beauty which takes no thought of itself; and he loves it with so simple and humble and absorbing a love that he paints it just as he sees it, almost without thinking of his own share in the work. That is why this select and coloured world of his, in which there is no passionate or visionary life, as in Michelangelo, nor that composed and conscious presence in time and space of the people of Raphael, lives with such simplicity, as if filled with a calm and joyous sense of its own beauty. To live under the decorations of Michelangelo would be as exhausting as to live in a world in which every person was a person of genius. To live amongst the decorations of Raphael would be to live amongst people of too placid, too amiable disposition, and too limited intelligence; it would become a weariness, But one need never cease to live happily amongst the men and women whom Pinturicchio saw walking in beautiful robes, that were never woven so finely by hands in meadows of gold flowers, that never grew out of the brown earth, always finding heaven, a heaven of chrysoprase and chalcedony, at a turn of the way, and without surprise; for these and their abode have the beauty that we desire to find in the world, in what is most homely, obvious, and frequent in it, the beauty that is there, if we could see it, and the beauty that for the most part we do not see, because we are too

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sophisticated, too conscious of ourselves, and because we discover too thoughtful a consciousness of themselves in natural things.

To realise the greatness of Rome, it is not enough to have seen the Colosseum, St. Peter's, the churches, palaces, ruins, squares, fountains, and gardens; you may have seen all these, and yet not have seen the most beautiful possession of Rome: the Campagna. Seen from the Alban hills, Rome is a mere cluster of white houses in a desert, a desert as variable in colour as the sky. Lost in that wilderness, a speck between that wilderness and the sky, it seems a mere accident in a visible infinity. And now remember that this vast Campagna is simply the pleasure park of Rome : that it is left there, feverous and unproductive, the loveliest of ruins, in order that Rome may have the pride of possessing it; and think if any city in the world possesses so costly and magnificent a luxury.

It is one of the many delicate surprises of Rome to come suddenly, at the end of a street which had seemed lost in the entanglements of the city, upon a glimpse of the Campagna or the hills. And those hills, rising up from the plain to the sky, their soft lines, under certain weather, indistinguishable from either, opalescent, changing colour as the wind scatters or heaps the clouds, as sunlight or scirocco

26 ROME

passes over them, have something of the untiring charm, the infinite variety, of the sea. Drive a little way into the Campagna, and you might be on the Pampas, or in the desert which is about the ruins of Thebes. An almost audible silence descends upon you, in which the world seems asleep. A shepherd leans motionless upon his staff; the sheep move drowsily about him ; and you hear the tinkle of the bell.

To see Tivoli, loud and white with waterfalls, a little grey town set upon grey and cloven rocks, fringed with the silvery green of olive trees; to see any one of the castelli, one would willingly cross a whole country; and they lie, Frascati, Albano, Genzano, Marino, Ariccia, Rocca di Papa, at the very gates of Rome, within the compass of one day's drive. These castelli are all fantastic and improbable; white, huddled, perched like flights of white birds that have settled there; hanging over volcanic chasms that have burst into lakes, fertilised into vines and olives; wild trees, their grey trunks leaning this way and that, seeming to face up and down the hillside, like armies meeting in battle; each castello with its own rococo villas, like incrustations upon the rock ; each castello set on its own hill, as if it had drawn up the ladder after having climbed there: a little city of refuge from the perils of the plain. They hold the Alban Lake between them, and Lake Nemi, which sleeps with the deepest sleep of any lake I have ever seen, in the most restful arms of

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land. And each has its own aspect. Frascati, as one turns in and out of its streets, opening suddenly on vague glimpses, as if cut by the sides of a frame, is like a seaside village ; and one cannot help imagining the wash of waves, instead of the grassy plain of the Campagna, at the end of those coiling streets. Rocca di Papa is like an eagle's nest, perched high on the mountain, with its shady square in front of the little church where you hear old women praying aloud. Marino has an air of the country, with its fierce men, its somewhat bold, handsome women, its thronging children. Ariccia hangs picturesquely against the very side of the hill, jutting out into space. Each has its variety of primitive life, of rococo architecture, of running water, of trees, of volcanic rock, of lake scenery. And for those who care greatly for the delicate shading of colours as they change over a sensitive landscape, to look from these heights is to look down, from dawn till sunset, upon a paradise of the daintiest colours in the world, in that jewelled desert which lies about Rome. But the Campagna is most wonderful, most itself, at sunset ; and sunset in Rome should be seen from the Via Appia, as I saw it during a memorable drive in mid-winter. Looking back from the mound beyond the Casal Rotondo, Rome seemed far off, dwindled by distance, all its towers and domes and roofs white, set in the hollow of the hills. Nearer to me, Frascati, a white sparkle upon the dark Alban hills : between, along the sky, the Apennines,