I arrived late and only saw the end of the processions; far more carriages, wilder shouting, more madness,--bacchantic, stormy,--than last time. The whole length of the Corso was one shriek of laughter. And how many lovely faces at the windows, on the balconies and verandas! Large closed carriages with hidden music inside and graceful ladies on the top. As i preti (the Catholic papers) had said that all who took part in the Carnival were paid by the government, a number of men and women, in the handsomest carriages--according to the Nuova Roma for to-day, more than 20,000--had the word pagato (paid) fastened to their caps, which evoked much amusement. Then the lancers cleared the street at full galop for the horse races (barberi), and at once an immense procession of Polichinelli and ridiculous equestrians in Don Quixote armour organised itself and rode down the Corso at a trot in parody. Then came the mad, snorting horses. Then a few minutes,--and night fell over the seven heights of Rome, and the Corso itself lay in darkness. Then the first points of light began to make their appearance. Here below, one little shimmer of light, and up there another, and two there, and six here, and ten down there to the left, and hundreds on the right, and then thousands, and many, many thousands. From one end of the great long street to the other, from the first floor to the roof of every house and every palace, there is one steady twinkling of tiny flames, of torches, of large and small lights; the effect is surprising and peculiar. As soon as the first light appeared, young men and girls ran and tried to blow each other's candles out. Even the children took part in the game; I could see into several houses, where it was going on briskly. Then, from every side-street decorated carriages began to drive on to the Corso again, but this time every person held a candle in his hand. Yes, and that was not all! at least every other of the large waggons--they were like immense boxes of flowers--had, on poles, or made fast, Bengal fire of various colours, which lighted up every house they went past, now with a red, now with a green flare. And then the thousands of small candles, from every one in the throng, from carriages, balconies, verandas, sparkled in the great flame, fighting victoriously with the last glimmer of daylight. People ran like mad down the Corso and fanned out the lights in the carriages. But many a Roman beauty found a better way of lighting up her features without exposing herself to the risk of having her light put out. Opposite me, for instance, on the second floor, a lovely girl was standing in a window. In the shutter by her side she had fixed one of those violent red flares so that she stood in a bright light, like sunlight seen through red glass, and it was impossible not to notice her. Meanwhile, the people on the balconies held long poles in their hands, with which they unexpectedly put out the small candles in the carriages. You heard incessantly, through the confusion, the shouts of individuals one to another, and their jubilation when a long-attempted and cleverly foiled extinguishing was at length successful, and the clapping and shouts of bravo! at an unusually brightly lighted and decorated carriage. The pickpockets meanwhile did splendid business; many of the Danes lost their money.
At eight o'clock I was in bed again, and shortly afterwards the people of the house came home for a moment. Filomena looked splendid, and was very talkative. "Lei é ingrassato," she called in through the door. It is her great pleasure that the hollows in my cheeks are gradually disappearing. She was now ascribing a special efficacy in this direction to Moccoli Eve.
At half-past ten in the morning, there is a curious spectacle in the street here. At that time Domenico comes and the lottery begins. Lotteries are forbidden in Rome, but Domenico earns his ten lire a day by them. He goes about this and the neighbouring streets bawling and shouting until he has disposed of his ninety tickets.
Girls and women lean out through the windows and call out the numbers they wish to have--in this respect they are boundlessly credulous. They do not believe in the Pope; but they believe that there are numbers which they must become possessed of that day, even at the highest price, which is two soldi. The soldi are thrown out through the window, and each one remembers her own number. Then Domenico goes through all the numbers in a loud voice, that there may be no cheating. A child draws a number out of the bag, and Domenico shouts: "Listen, all Purificazione, No. 34 has won, listen, Purificazione, 34 ... 34." The disappointed faces disappear into the houses. All those who have had 33, 35 and 36 rail against unjust Fate, in strong terms.
At the first rattle of the lottery bag, Filomena rushes in here, opens the window, and calls for a certain number. If anyone else wants it, she must manage to find two soldi in her pocket. If I fling a few soldi from my bed towards the window, this facilitates the search. However, we never win. Filomena declares that I have indescribable ill-luck in gambling, and suggests a reason.
She was again singing outside. I called her, wanting to know what it was she kept singing all the time. "They are songs from the mountains," she replied, "all canzone d'amore." "Say them slowly, Filomena. I will write them down." I began, but was so delighted at the way she repeated the verses, her excellent declamatory and rhythmic sense, that I was almost unable to write. And to my surprise, I discovered that they were all what we call ritornellos. But written down, they are dull larvae, compared with what they are with the proper pronunciation and expression. What is it Byron says?:
I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.
I shall really feel a void when Filomena goes away. The unfortunate part of it is that her dialect pronunciation is so difficult to make out, and that she swallows so many syllables in order to make the metre right, as there are generally too many feet, and it is only the delicacy of her declamation that makes up for the incorrectness of the rhymes and the verses. For instance, she constantly says lo instead of il (lo soldato), and she can never tell me how many words there are in a line, since neither she nor Maria knows what a single word, as opposed to several, is, and because it is no use spelling the word to her and asking: "Is that right?" since she cannot spell, and does not recognise the letters. Saredo tells me that a driver who once drove him and his wife about for five days in Tuscany sang all day long like Filomena, and improvised all the time. This is what she, too, does continually; she inserts different words which have about the same meaning, and says: "It is all the same" (c'è la stessa cosa). On the other hand, she always keeps to the metre, and that with the most graceful intonation; never a faulty verse: