LETTER XLVI.
ITALIAN AND AMERICAN SKIES—FALLS OF TERNI—THE CLITUMNUS—THE TEMPLE—EFFECTS OF AN EARTHQUAKE AT FOLIGNO—LAKE THRASIMENE—JOURNEY FROM ROME—FLORENCE—FLORENTINE SCENERY—PRINCE PONIATOWSKI—JEROME BONAPARTE AND FAMILY—WANT OF A MINISTER IN ITALY.
I left Rome by the magnificent "Porta del Popolo," as the flush of a pearly and spotless Italian sunrise deepened over Soracte. They are so splendid without clouds—these skies of Italy! so deep to the eye, so radiantly clear! Clouds make the glory of an American sky. The "Indian summer" sunsets excepted, our sun goes down in New England, with the extravagance of a theatrical scene. The clouds are massed and heavy, like piles of gold and fire, and day after day, if you observe them, you are literally astonished with the brilliant phenomena of the west. Here, for seven months, we have had no rain. The sun has risen faultlessly clear, with the same gray, and silver, and rose tints succeeding each other as regularly as the colors in a turning prism, and it has set as constantly in orange, gold, and purple, with scarce the variation of a painter's pallet, from one day to another. It is really most delightful to live under such heavens as these; to be depressed never by a gloomy sky, nor ill from a chance exposure to a chill wind, nor out of humor because the rain or damp keeps you a prisoner at home. You feel the delicious climate in a thousand ways. It is a positive blessing, and were worth more than a fortune, if it were bought and sold. I would rather be poor in Italy, than rich in any other country in the world.
We ascended the mountain that shuts in the campagna on the north, and turned, while the horses breathed, to take a last look at Rome. My two friends, the lieutenants, and myself, occupied the interior of the vetturino, in company with a young Roman woman, who was making her first journey from home. She was going to see her husband. I pointed out of the window to the distant dome of St. Peter's, rising above the thin smoke hung over the city, and she looked at it with the tears streaming from her large black eyes in torrents. She might have cried because she was going to her husband, but I could not divest myself of the fact that she was a Roman, and leaving a home that could be very romantically wept for. She was a fine specimen of this finest of the races of woman—amply proportioned without grossness, and with that certain presence or dignity that rises above manners and rank, common to them all.
We saw beautiful scenery at Narni. The town stands on the edge of a precipice, and the valley, a hundred feet or two below, is coursed by a wild stream, that goes foaming along its bed in a long line of froth for miles away. We dined here, and drove afterward to Terni, where the voiturier stopped for the night, to give us an opportunity to see the Falls.
We drove to the mountain base, three miles, in an old post barouche, and made the ascent on foot. A line of precipices extends along from the summit, and from the third or fourth of these leaps the Velino, clear into the valley. We saw it in front as we went on, and then followed the road round, till we reached the bed of the river behind. The fountain of Egeria is not more secludedly beautiful than its current above the fall. Trees overhang and meet, and flowers spring in wonderful variety on its banks, and the ripple against the roots is heard amid the roar of the cataract, like a sweet, clear voice in a chorus. It is a place in which you half expect to startle a fawn, it looks so unvisited and wild. We wound out through the shrubbery, and gained a projecting point, from which we could see the sheet of the cascade. It is "horribly beautiful" to be sure. Childe Harold's description of it is as true as a drawing.
I should think the quantity of water at Niagara would make five hundred such falls as those of Terni, without exaggeration. It is a "hell of waters," however, notwithstanding, and leaps over with a current all turned into foam by the roughness of its bed above—a circumstance that gives the sheet more richness of surface. Two or three lovely little streams steal off on either side of the fall, as if they shrunk from the leap, and drop down, from rock to rock, till they are lost in the rising mist.
The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet spray reminded us that the most romantic people may take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post-house, with a motley group of Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians—a mixture of company universal in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night. The coming and going vetturini stop at the same houses throughout, and the concourse is always amusing. We sat till the fire burned low, and then wishing our chance friends a happy night, had the "priests"[4] taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything but sleep.
Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful scenery was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness.
We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to breakfast. It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in time-worn letters.
At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came to the Clitumnus, a small stream, still, deep, and glassy—the clearest water I ever saw. It looks almost like air. On its bank, facing away from the road, stands the temple, "of small and delicate proportions," mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold.
The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream running still at the base of its façade, just as it did when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson,
"Pass not unblest the genius of the place"
was scarce necessary.[5]
We slept at Foligno. For many miles we had observed that the houses were propped in every direction, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects of an earthquake. For eight or ten miles further, we found every house cracked and deserted, and the people living like the settlers in a new country, half in the open air. The beggars were innumerable.
We stopped the next night on the shores of lake Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time spent at school on the "dull drilled lesson," had not been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal—the "locus aptus insidiis" where the consul Flaminius was snared and beaten by the wily Carthaginian on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy of Livy "much thumbed," that I might sit on the hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his pithy and sententious description, with the reality.
The battle ground, the scene of the principal slaughter, was beyond the albergo, and the increasing darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a departed sunset over the other shore, was reflected glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The heavens seem "dyed" and steeped in the glory of the sunset.
We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape plucked from the battle ground; and if it was not better for the Roman blood that had manured its ancestor, it was better for some other reason.
Early the next morning we were on our way, and wound down into the narrow pass between the lake and the hill, as the sun rose. We crossed the Sanguinetto, a little stream which took its name from the battle. The principal slaughter was just on its banks, and the hills are so steep above it, that everybody who fell near must have rolled into its bed. It crawls on very quietly across the road, its clear stream scarce interrupted by the wheels of the vetturino, which in crossing it, passes from the Roman states into Tuscany. I ran a little up the stream, knelt and drank at a small gurgling fall. The blood of the old Flaminian Cohort spoiled very delicious water, when it mingled with that brook.
We were six days and a half accomplishing the hundred and eighty miles from Rome to Florence—slow travelling—but not too slow in Italy, where every stone has its story, and every ascent of a hill its twenty matchless pictures, sprinkled with ruins, as a painter's eye could not imagine them. We looked down on the Eden-like valley of the Arno at sunrise, and again my heart leaped to see the tall dome of Florence, and the hills all about the queenly city, sparkling with palaces and bright in a sun that shines nowhere so kindly. If there is a spot in the world that could wean one from his native home, it is Florence! "Florence the fair," they call her! I have passed four of the seven months I have been in Italy, here—and I think I shall pass here as great a proportion of the rest of my life. There is nothing that can contribute to comfort and pleasure, that is not within the reach of the smallest means in Florence. I never saw a place where wealth made less distinction. The choicest galleries of art in the world, are open to all comers. The palace of the monarch may be entered and visited, and enjoyed by all. The ducal gardens of the Boboli, rich in everything that can refine nature, and commanding views that no land can equal, cooled by fountains, haunted in every grove by statuary, are the property of the stranger and the citizen alike. Museums, laboratories, libraries, grounds, palaces, are all free as Utopia. You may take any pleasure that others can command, and have any means of instruction, as free as the common air. Where else would one live so pleasantly—so profitably—so wisely.
The society of Florence is of a very fascinating description. The Florentine nobles have a casino, or club-house, to which most of the respectable strangers are invited, and balls are given there once a week, frequently by the duke and his court, and the best society of the place. I attended one on my first arrival from Rome, at which I saw a proportion of beauty which astonished me. The female descendants of the great names in Italian history, seem to me to have almost without exception the mark of noble beauty by nature. The loveliest woman in Florence is a Medici. The two daughters of Capponi, the patriot and the descendant of patriots, are of the finest order of beauty. I could instance many others, the mention of whose names, when I have first seen them, has made my blood start. I think if Italy is ever to be redeemed, she must owe it to her daughters. The men, the brothers of these women, with very rare exceptions, look like the slaves they are, from one end of Italy to the other.
One of the most hospitable houses here, is that of Prince Poniatowski, the brother of the hero of Poland. He has a large family, and his soirées are thronged with all that is fair and distinguished. He is a venerable, grayheaded old man, of perhaps seventy, very fond of speaking English, of which rare acquisition abroad he seems a little vain. He gave me the heartiest welcome as an American, and said he loved the nation.
I had the honor of dining, a day or two since, with the Ex-King of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. He lives here with the title of Prince Montfort, conferred on him by his father-in-law, the king of Wurtemburg. Americans are well received at this house also; and his queen, as the prince still calls her, can never say enough in praise of the family of Mr. H., our former secretary of legation at Paris. It is a constantly recurring theme, and ends always with "J'aime beaucoup les Americains." The prince resembles his brother, but has a milder face, and his mouth is less firm and less beautiful than Napoleon's. His second son is most remarkably like the emperor. He is about ten years of age; but except his youth, you can detect no difference between his head and the busts of his uncle. He has a daughter of about twelve, and an elder son at the university of Sienna. His family is large as his queen still keeps up her state, with the ladies of honor and suite. He never goes out, but his house is open every night, and the best society of Florence may be met there almost at the prima sera, or early part of the evening.
The Grand Duke is about to be married, and the court is to be unusually gay in the carnival. Our countryman, Mr. Thorn, was presented some time since, and I am to have that honor in two or three days. By the way, we feel exceedingly in Italy the want of a minister. There is no accredited agent of our government in Tuscany, and there are rarely less than three hundred Americans within its dominions. Fortunately the Marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain of the duke, offers to act in the capacity of an ambassador, and neglects nothing for our advantage in such matters, but he never fails to express his regret that we should not have some chargé d'affaires at his court. We have officers in many parts of the world where they are much less needed.