LETTER LVI.
ANNUAL DOWRIES TO TWELVE GIRLS—VESPERS IN THE CONVENT OF SANTA TRINITA—RUINS OF ROMAN BATHS—A MAGNIFICENT MODERN CHURCH WITHIN TWO ANCIENT HALLS—GARDENS OF MECÆNAS—TOWER WHENCE NERO SAW ROME ON FIRE—HOUSES OF HORACE AND VIRGIL—BATHS OF TITUS AND CARACALLA.
The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve girls, was performed by the Pope, this morning, in the church built over the ancient temple of Minerva. His Holiness arrived, in state, from the Vatican, at ten, followed by his red troop of cardinals, and preceded by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, and the body-guard of nobles. He blessed the crowd, right and left, with his three fingers (precisely as a Parisian dandy salutes his friend across the street), and, descending from his carriage (which is like a good-sized glass boudoir upon wheels), he was received in the papal sedan, and carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My legation button carried me through the guard, and I found an excellent place under a cardinal's wing, in the penetralia within the railing of the altar. Mass commenced presently, with a chant from the celebrated choir of St. Peter's. Room was then made through the crowd, the cardinals put on their red caps, and the small procession of twelve young girls entered from a side chapel, bearing each a taper in her hand, and robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet of flowers round the forehead. I could form no judgment of anything but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently, there was but one satin slipper in the group that a man might not have worn, and every eye I could see from my position, might have graced an improvisatrice. They stopped in front of the throne, and, giving their long tapers to the servitors, mounted in couples, hand in hand, and kissed the foot of his Holiness, who, at the same time, leaned over and blessed them, and then turning about, walked off again behind the altar in the same order in which they had entered.
The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chant (a music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce know whether the sensation is pleasure or pain), the Pope was led from his throne to his sedan, and his mitre changed for a richly jewelled crown, the bearers lifted their burden, the guard presented arms, the cardinals summoned their officious servants to unrobe, and the crowd poured out as it came.
This ceremony, I found upon inquiry, is performed every year, on the day of the annunciation—just nine months before Christmas, and is intended to commemorate the incarnation of our Saviour.
As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the Pincian hill this evening, the bells of the convent of Santa Trinita rung to vespers. I had heard of the singing of the nuns in the service at the convent chapel, but the misbehavior of a party of English had excluded foreigners, of late, and it was thought impossible to get admittance. I mounted the steps, however, and rung at the door. It was opened by a pale nun, of thirty, who hesitated a moment, and let me pass. In a small, plain chapel within, the service of the altar was just commencing, and, before I reached a seat, a low plaintive chant commenced, in female voices from the choir. It went on with occasional interruptions from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I can not describe the excessive mournfulness of the music. One or two familiar hymns occurred in the course of it, like airs in a recitative, the same sung in our churches, but the effect was totally different. The neat, white caps of the nuns were just visible over the railing before the organ, and, as I looked up at them and listened to their melancholy notes, they seemed, to me, mourning over their exclusion from the world. The small white cloud from the censer mounted to the ceiling, and creeping away through the arches, hung over the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of that tranquilizing resignation, one would think so necessary to keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters.
The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are those of the Baths. The Emperors Titus, Caracalla, Nero, and Agrippa, constructed these immense places of luxury, and the remains of them are among the most interesting and beautiful relics to be found in the world. It is possible that my readers have as imperfect an idea of the extent of a Roman bath as I have had, and I may as well quote from the information given by writers on antiquities. "They were open every day, to both sexes. In each of the great baths, there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, for the convenience of the bathers, and three thousand two hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There were splendid porticoes in front for promenade, arcades with shops, in which was found every kind of luxury for the bath, and halls for corporeal exercises, and for the discussion of philosophy; and here the poets read their productions and rhetoricians harangued, and sculptors and painters exhibited their works to the public. The baths were distributed into grand halls, with ceilings enormously high and painted with admirable frescoes, supported on columns of the rarest marble, and the basins were of oriental alabaster, porphyry, and jasper. There were in the centre vast reservoirs, for the swimmers, and crowds of slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should come."
The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to-day), covered an enormous space. They occupied seven years in building, and were the work of forty thousand Christian slaves, two thirds of whom died of fatigue and misery! Mounting one of the seven hills of Rome, we come to some half-ruined arches, of enormous size, extending a long distance, in the sides of which were built two modern churches. One was the work of Michael Angelo, and one of his happiest efforts. He has turned two of the ancient halls into a magnificent church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving in their places eight gigantic columns of granite. After St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in Rome.
We drove thence to the baths of Titus, passing the site of the ancient gardens of Mecænas, in which still stands the tower from which Nero beheld the conflagration of Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil communicated with this garden, but they are now undistinguishable. We turned up from the Coliseum to the left, and entered a gate leading to the baths of Titus. Five or six immense arches presented their front to us, in a state of picturesque ruin. We took a guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at the extremity, and descended to the subterranean halls, to see the still inimitable frescoes upon the ceilings. Passing through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which still clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-colored stucco of the ancients, we entered a suite of long galleries, some forty feet high, the arched roofs of which were painted with the most exquisite art, in a kind of fanciful border-work, enclosing figures and landscapes, in as bright colors as if done yesterday. Farther on was the niche in which was found the famous group of Laocoon, in a room belonging to a subterranean palace of the emperor, communicating with the baths. The Belvedere Meleager was also found here. The imagination loses itself in attempting to conceive the splendor of these under-ground palaces, blazing with artificial light, ornamented with works of art, never equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which an emperor of Rome, in the days when the wealth of the world flowed into her treasury, could command for his pleasure. How short life must have seemed to them, and what a tenfold curse became death and the common ills of existence, interrupting or taking away pleasures so varied and inexhaustible.
These baths were built in the last great days of Rome, and one reads the last stages of national corruption and, perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the character of these ornamented walls. They breathe the very spirit of voluptuousness. Naked female figures fill every plafond, and fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious passions in their faces, support the festoons and hold together the intricate ornament of the frescoes. The statues, the pictures, the object of the place itself, inspired the wish for indulgence, and the history of the private lives of the emperors and wealthier Romans shows the effect in its deepest colors.
We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest ruins of Rome. They are just below the palaces of the Cesars, and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum. It is one labyrinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls, the ivy growing and clinging wherever it can fasten its root, and the whole as fine a picture of decay as imagination could create. This was the favorite haunt of Shelley, and here he wrote his fine tragedy of Prometheus. He could not have selected a more fitting spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats were climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who tended them lay asleep in the sun, and every footstep echoed loud through the place. We passed two or three hours rambling about, and regained the populous streets of Rome in the last light of the sunset.