“He looked so happy, this monk. He had been thirty years at Tre Fontane, but there was no sign of age on his face. It was, perhaps, a trifle withered, like a ripe apple that has lain long on a shelf, but that was all. And yet he said that, for the first fifteen years, he had suffered continuously from malarial fever. He had superintended, and even worked at, the planting of the eucalyptus groves which have so purified the district that there has not been one case of the sickness since.
“The other two churches are close to one another. The first is very old and utterly bare, and, in a strange, mournful way, deeply impressive. It dates from the sixth century, and is lofty and vaulted and almost Gothic in its spirit. It has several rose-windows, and there are many round holes in the walls also. These are now either empty or fitted with common glass, but they were once filled with thin slices of alabaster, or other precious transparencies. At present it seems the embodiment in stone of the Trappist order, ‘la piu severa ordine della chiesa Cattolica,’ as our monk described it. The church is as cold as a well.
“The last of the three churches is of a much gayer mood: quite Romanesque, perched on a pretty flight of rounded steps. It has a crypt over the bodies of St. Zeno and two thousand and more companions, martyred Christians, who built the Baths of Diocletian.”
The drive through that eucalyptus wood here described remains one of the most curious impressions of those Roman days. It was like passing through a Dante circle—the first circle of all, of Limbo, where Virgil met the poet; an unsubstantial wraith-like world, full of a perpetual whisper and murmur:
“Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
Non avea pianto, ma che di sospiri,
Che l’aura eterna facevan tremare:
E cio avvenia di duol senza martiri,
Ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi,
E d’infanti, e di femmine e di vivi.”