ROME OF THAT DAY
was within the triangle bounded by the Corso, the Tiber, and the Capitol. Our travellers turn their faces towards the St. Angelo Bridge, and approach it by long, narrow, and crooked streets, nearly corresponding with the Via Giulia and the Monserrato which we to-day traverse. This was the Faubourg St. Germain of the period, full of palaces, but stately and silent. The strangers find the activity, movement, display, and exuberant activity of Rome in the street now known as the Banchi, then lined with the residences of wealthy bankers, in the rich Spanish quarter beyond the Piazza Navona, in the Tordinone and Coronari.
From the rising to the setting of the sun, throngs of people fill these badly paved thoroughfares, which are more thickly lined with palaces as they approach the bridge. Our strangers are impressed with the great crowd of people, and are of the opinion that it exceeds that of the Marais in Paris, and is second only to the throngs they saw in Venice. About the Pantheon and the Minerva are the houses already mentioned where travellers and visitors to Rome find furnished suites of apartments—the Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholas Hotels of the period. A few years later (1595), on beholding this, the Venetian ambassador writes that "Rome has reached the apogee of its grandeur and prosperity."
With difficulty a passage through the crowd is effected, and the task is rendered even dangerous by the large number of carriages in circulation.
In 1594, there were eight hundred and eighty-three private carriages in the city. They were almost an essential. The great St. Charles Borromeo said, "There are two things necessary in Rome—save your soul and keep a carriage." And a singular-looking carriage it was to our eyes. In shape resembling a cylinder open at both ends, with doors at either side, knocked and tossed about in a sort of basket on four clumsy wheels. The elegants and beaux of the day usually had an opening in the top of the vehicle through which, as they progressed, they admired fair ladies at their windows. "They make an astrolabe of their carriage," thundered a preacher in denunciation of the practice. The crowd increases as the St. Angelo Bridge is approached, and it equals the human pressure of the period of the jubilee as described by Dante:[94]
Come i Roman, per l'esercito molto,
L'anno del giubbileo, su per lo ponte
Hanno a passar la gente modo tolto;
Che dall' un late tutti hanno la fronte
Verso 'l castello, e vanno a Santo Pietro;
Dall' altra sponda vanno verso 'l monte (Giordano).
Dante, Inferno, ch. xviii.
No ladies are seen. They seldom go out, and then only in carriages. We find the modern Italians highly demonstrative. Their ancestors were more so, as our travellers noticed at every step. Men meeting acquaintances in the street exchanged profound bows. Friends embraced "with effusion." People threw themselves on their knees before those of whom they had favors to ask.