At last we came in sight of Rome, but there was nothing imposing to be seen. The chief object was what I afterwards knew to be one of the aqueducts, but which I then, in the vagueness of my conceptions, guessed to be the ruins of baths. The railway station where we alighted looked remote and countrified; only the omnibuses and one family carriage were waiting, so that we were obliged to take our chance in one of the omnibuses—that is, the chance of finding no place left for us in the hotels. And so it was. Every one wanted to go to the Hotel d'Angleterre, and every one was disappointed. We, at last, by help of some fellow-travellers, got a small room au troisième at the Hotel d'Amérique; and as soon as that business was settled we walked out to look at Rome—not without a rather heavy load of disappointment on our minds from the vision we had of it from the omnibus windows. A weary length of dirty, uninteresting streets had brought us within sight of the dome of St. Peter's, which was not impressive, seen in a peeping, makeshift manner, just rising above the houses; and the Castle of St. Angelo seemed but a shabby likeness of the engravings. Not one iota had I seen that corresponded with my preconceptions.
Our hotel was in the Strada Babuino, which leads directly from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna. We went to the latter for our first walk, and arriving opposite the high, broad flights of stone steps which lead up to the Trinità di Monte, stopped for the first time with a sense that here was something not quite common and ugly. But I think we got hardly any farther, that evening, than the tall column at the end of the piazza, which celebrates the final settlement by Pius IX. of the Virgin's Immaculate Conception. Oh, yes; I think we wandered farther among narrow and ugly streets, and came into our hotel again still with some dejection at the probable relation our "Rome visited" was to bear to our "Rome unvisited."
Discontented with our little room at an extravagant height of stairs and price, we found and took lodgings the next day in the Corso opposite St. Carlo, with a well-mannered Frenchman named Peureux and his little, dark, Italian wife—and so felt ourselves settled for a month. By this time we were in better spirits; for in the morning we had been to the Capitol (Campidoglio, the modern variant for Capitolium), had ascended the tower, and had driven to the Coliseum. The scene, looking along the Forum to the Arch of Titus, resembled strongly that mixture of ruined grandeur with modern life which I had always had in my imagination at the mention of Rome. The approach to the Capitol from the opposite side is also impressive: on the right hand the broad, steep flight of steps leading up to the Church and Monastery of Ara Cœli, placed, some say, on the site of the Arx; in the front a less steep flight of steps à cordon leading to that lower, flatter portion of the hill which was called the Intermontium, and which now forms a sort of piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre, and on three sides buildings designed, or rather modified, by Michael Angelo—on the left the Museum, on the right the Museo dei Conservatori, and, on the side opposite the steps, the building devoted to public offices (Palazzo dei Senatori), in the centre of which stands the tower. On each hand, at the summit of the steps, are the two Colossi, less celebrated but hardly less imposing in their calm grandeur than the Colossi of the Quirinal. They are strangely streaked and disfigured by the blackening weather; but their large-eyed, mild might gives one a thrill of awe, half like what might have been felt by the men of old who saw the divine twins watering their steeds when they brought the news of victory.
Perhaps the world can hardly offer a more interesting outlook than that from the tower of the Capitol. The eye leaps first to the mountains that bound the Campagna—the Sabine and Alban Hills and the solitary Soracte farther on to the left. Then, wandering back across the Campagna, it searches for the Sister Hills, hardly distinguishable now as hills. The Palatine is conspicuous enough, marked by the ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, and rising up beyond the extremity of the Forum. And now, once resting on the Forum, the eye will not readily quit the long area that begins with the Clivus Capitolinus and extends to the Coliseum—an area that was once the very focus of the world. The Campo Vaccino, the site probably of the Comitium, was this first morning covered with carts and animals, mingling a simple form of actual life with those signs of the highly artificial life that had been crowded here in ages gone by: the three Corinthian pillars at the extremity of the Forum, said to have belonged to the Temple of Jupiter Stator; the grand temple of Antoninus and Faustina; the white arch of Titus; the Basilica of Constantine; the temple built by Adrian, with its great, broken granite columns scattered around on the green, rising ground; the huge arc of the Coliseum and the arch of Constantine.
The scenes of these great relics remained our favorite haunt during our stay at Rome; and one day, near the end of it, we entered the enclosure of the Clivus Capitolinus and the excavated space of the Forum. The ruins on the Clivus—the façade of massive columns on the right, called the temple of Vespasian; the two Corinthian columns, called the temple of Saturn, in the centre; and the arch of Septimius Severus on the left—have their rich color set off by the luxuriant green, clothing the lower masonry, which formed the foundations of the crowded buildings on this narrow space, and, as a background to them all, the rough solidity of the ancient wall forming the back of the central building on the Intermontium, and regarded as one of the few remains of Republican constructions. On either hand, at another angle from the arch, the ancient road forming the double ascent of the Clivus is seen, firm and level, with its great blocks of pavement. The arch of Septimius Severus is particularly rich in color; and the poorly executed bas-reliefs of military groups still look out in the grotesque completeness of attitude and expression, even on the sides exposed to the weather. From the Clivus a passage, underneath the present road, leads into the Forum, whose immense pinkish granite columns lie on the weather-worn white marble pavement. The column of Phocas, with its base no longer "buried," stands at the extreme corner nearest the Clivus; and the three elegant columns of the temple (say some) of Jupiter Stator, mark the opposite extremity; between lie traces, utterly confused to all but erudite eyes, of marble steps and of pedestals stripped of their marble.
Let me see what I most delighted in, in Rome. Certainly this drive from the Clivus to the Coliseum was, from first to last, one of the chief things; but there are many objects and many impressions of various kinds which I can reckon up as of almost equal interest: the Coliseum itself, with the view from it; the drive along the Appian Way to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the view from thence of the Campagna bridged by the aqueduct; the baths of Titus, with the remnants of their arabesques, seen by the light of torches, in the now damp and gloomy spaces; the glimpse of the Tarpeian rock, with its growth of cactus and rough herbage; the grand, bare arch brickwork of the Palace of the Cæsars rising in huge masses on the Palatine; the theatre of Marcellus bursting suddenly into view from among the crowded mean houses of the modern city, and still more the Temple of Minerva and Temple of Nerva, also set in the crowded city of the present; and the exterior of the Pantheon, if it were not marred by the Papal belfries—these are the traces of ancient Rome that have left the strongest image of themselves in my mind. I ought not to leave out Trajan's column, and the forum in which it stands; though the severe cold tint of the gray granite columns, or fragments of columns, gave this forum rather a dreary effect to me. For vastness there is perhaps nothing more impressive in Rome than the Baths of Caracalla, except the Coliseum; and I remember that it was among them that I first noticed the lovely effect of the giant fennel, luxuriant among the crumbling brickwork.
Among the ancient sculptures I think I must place on a level the Apollo, the Dying Gladiator, and the Lateran Antinous: they affected me equally in different ways. After these I delighted in the Venus of the Capitol, and the Kissing Children in the same room; the Sophocles at the Lateran Museum; the Nile; the black, laughing Centaur at the Capitol; the Laughing Faun in the Vatican; and the Sauroktonos, or Boy with the Lizard, and the sitting statue called Menander. The Faun of Praxiteles, and the old Faun with the infant Bacchus, I had already seen at Munich, else I should have mentioned them among my first favorites. Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight—all the more impressive because it was our first sight of the Vatican. Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls, with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. Wonderfully grand these halls of the Vatican are; and there is but one complaint to be made against the home provided for this richest collection of antiquities—it is that there is no historical arrangement of them, and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a system of helter-skelter.
Of Christian Rome, St. Peter's is, of course, the supreme wonder. The piazza, with Bernini's colonnades, and the gradual slope upward to the mighty temple, gave me always a sense of having entered some millennial new Jerusalem, where all small and shabby things were unknown. But the exterior of the cathedral itself is even ugly; it causes a constant irritation by its partial concealment of the dome. The first impression from the interior was, perhaps, at a higher pitch than any subsequent impression, either of its beauty or vastness; but then, on later visits, the lovely marble, which has a tone at once subdued and warm, was half-covered with hideous red drapery. There is hardly any detail one cares to dwell on in St. Peter's. It is interesting, for once, to look at the mosaic altar-pieces, some of which render with marvellous success such famous pictures as the Transfiguration, the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Entombment or Disentombment of St. Petronilla. And some of the monuments are worth looking at more than once, the chief glory of that kind being Canova's Lions. I was pleased one day to watch a group of poor people looking with an admiration that had a half-childish terror in it at the sleeping lion, and with a sort of daring air thrusting their fingers against the teeth of the waking "mane-bearer."
We ascended the dome near the end of our stay, but the cloudy horizon was not friendly to our distant view, and Rome itself is ugly to a bird's-eye contemplation. The chief interest of the ascent was the vivid realization it gave of the building's enormous size, and after that the sight of the inner courts and garden of the Vatican.
Our most beautiful view of Rome and the Campagna was one we had much earlier in our stay, before the snow had vanished from the mountains; it was from the terrace of the Villa Pamfili Doria.