I was seriously thinking of buying a title while I was in Florence. Without a coronet one is so insignificant in Italy. I counted one hundred and twenty houses in a straight line in Florence, and only eight gates were without a coronet. Go over to the ‘Surrey side’ of the Arno, and it is the same thing. Every ‘slum’ has a dozen palaces, and every palace has a coronet. Prying about, after the manner of my species, in out-of-the-way holes and corners, I became acquainted with the fact that the nobility nearly all sell their own oil and wine. Near the gateway of the palaces there is generally a little hole just large enough to pass a bottle through. Over this is written, in small letters, ‘Cantina,’ and just by the side is hung a board with a tariff of the price of ‘our wine.’
Dukes, marquises, and earls, they all retain the produce of their vineyards and farms. You can buy a bottle of the ordinary for a franc, and my lord’s servant will hand it you with a smile, and take your coin with a condescending ‘Grazie.’ It is very quaint to see a workman come along, stop at a palace about three times the size of Newgate, and suddenly bob his head in—apparently through the stone wall—and presently bob back again with a bottle in his hand.
I was determined to study this phase of noble life myself; so I knocked at the hole in the wall of one of the most magnificent palaces of Florence, and when the little slide was opened I bobbed in my head and asked for a bottle of gingerbeer. ‘Gingebre?’ said the man inside. ‘I do not think that is a wine of our vineyard.’ ‘Oh yes, it is,’ I said. ‘I met an English Duke at the Palazzo Corsini yesterday, and he told me I should get a bottle of gingerbeer here.’ ‘Ah!’ said the ancient servitor, ‘then I will ask the Marquis, my master.’ He was absent for a few minutes, and presently returned with the Marquis, an exquisitely polite old gentleman of the good old school. ‘I fear, illustrious stranger, you have made a mistake. I know not the name of “gingerbeer” as a wine of the country. Certainly I grow it not myself.’ I apologized profusely, and withdrew my head from the aperture just in time to allow an old lady who was waiting, to bob hers in, and ask for two soldis’ worth of the Marquis’s best olive-oil, which she would take in the coffee-cup she held in her hand. And she took it.
CHAPTER XIV.
ROME.
I came, I saw, and I—was conquered. For once I prefer the old to the new, and Rome has exorcised the evil spirit that has taken up its residence within me. I came into Rome from Florence on a day that would have passed without attracting attention in Camden Town, Nunhead, or even the Seven Dials. The rain was pouring in torrents, the streets were rivers, and in the filthy byways, much affected by coachmen as short-cuts, the stucco was peeling from tumble-down tenements, and all was dirt and darkness and desolation. I have come into a good many Continental cities, in the course of a long and virtuous life, depressed and dyspeptic and disappointed, but I have never been made so utterly miserable by anything as by my first introduction to Rome. I jumped at once to the conclusion that travellers and guide-books had grossly deceived me, and that the famous capital of the Roman Catholic faith and United Italy had been made, like Somebody’s pills and ointment, by persistent advertisement.
But with the morrow came the sun; the nightmare was over, and a pleasant dream had begun. Pagan Rome had made me—yea, even me, my brother—a little more respectful in my attitude towards antiquity. I came to scoff, and I remained to pray. I have been in the Forum, and when I sat on the great columns I tried to remember my Roman history, and muddled up the Cæsars, and wished that I had paid more attention to my books at school instead of making surreptitious catapults with the elastic I pulled out of my new spring-side boots. I have roamed—should I say Romed?—up the Appian Way, and lost myself in the mighty Baths of Caracalla; I have been down into the Catacombs and seen the bones of some Early Christians, and I have dreamed dreams, and wandered about in fancy in a toga, and given off Latin orations to the winds, and have only been aroused from my reverie by the voice of a fair creature inquiring, with the choicest American accent, if it was in the Forum that Julius Cæsar used to fight with wild beasts and play the fiddle while Rome was burning.
But all the ancient glories, so far as I am concerned, sink into insignificance beside the Colosseum. In this, the mighty ruin of the greatest arena the world has ever seen, the most ordinary mind—mine, for instance—loses itself. The present fades away; the guardian who follows you to see that you do not put stone and marble pillars in your pocket is lost sight of. You are back again in the year 72 A.D. You hear the cruel whips of their masters cracking merrily over the 12,000 Jewish captives who laid the first stones of the Colosseum, and in the year 80 it is complete, and Titus dedicates it, and the great arena is soaked with the blood of 5,000 wild beasts. The years go on, and human blood alone can satisfy the cruel thirst of the Romans. Over the seats and benches, now mouldering ruins, you see a mighty populace swarming. In the vast arena, where your modern foot, clad in a buttoned kid boot, now stands, thousands of gladiators, their huge muscles standing out like iron bars, fight, and dye the ground with their gore. The fiercest beasts stand at bay, with trembling captured slaves, and the nobles and the people—ay, even the women—shriek with delight as quivering flesh is torn, and the life-blood of man and brute spirts out in crimson jets. You can see it all, if you have a spark of imagination—the whole bloody, revolting scene becomes so real that at last you turn away and hide your eyes, and cry ‘Faugh!'—come to your senses, and thank Heaven that such cruel days are over for ever.
And outside, even as you are expressing your gratitude, you will see a long line of weary, wretched animals dragging their heavy loads, while behind them walks a Roman of to-day lashing their quivering, bleeding sides with brutal fury, even goading their poor starved carcases to further effort by thrusting a sharp stick into their open wounds. I can imagine what the Roman horses and mules and oxen would say if they heard anyone rejoicing that cruelty died out with the Pagans and the decay of the Colosseum. I have seen such cruelty to animals under the shadow of St. Peter’s that I doubt if the Colosseum ever saw worse. Beasts had at least a speedy death there. It is reserved for the modern citizen of Christian Rome to make a dumb brute’s torture last its whole life long.
A Roman is very proud of being a Roman, and he does nothing menial. The fly-drivers are Romans, but they do not groom or attend to their horses. They have Neapolitans to do that. There is a good deal of the old dignity still surviving among the people. At a Roman pastrycook’s a Roman waiter brings me an ice with the air of an emperor. An emperor would have done it more quickly, though, as his time would doubtless have been valuable. A Roman is always wrapping himself in an imaginary toga, and that dress is a much better one to pose in than to bustle about in and perform the vulgar task known as earning one’s daily bread.
Anyone who travels must be struck with the extraordinary way in which the same waiters turn up all over the world. The man who spreads my humble repast of polenta and dried figs in the Hôtel Londra, in Rome, last waited upon me at the hotel at Seaford, in Sussex, a pleasant hamlet, which generally consists of six inhabitants, two visitors, and a pedestrian passing through from Newhaven. In Milan my waiter reminded me that he had often had the honour of waiting upon me at the St. Enoch’s Hotel, at Glasgow, and in a restaurant in Florence I was recognised with a broad grin by the former oberkellner of a pleasant hostelry upon the Rhine, where I sojourned in ’78. Most travellers can multiply instances of this sort of thing, but it is just a little wonderful to meet in Rome your old garçon of sleepy little Seaford, in Sussex.