But in proportion to its GRANDEUR then is its DESOLATION now. From the sea to the mountains it lies silent, waste, unploughed, unsown,—a houseless, treeless, blackened wilderness. "Where," you exclaim, "are its highways?" They are blotted out. "Where are its temples, its palaces, its vineyards?" All swept away. Scarce a heap remains, to tell of its numerous and magnificent structures. Their very ruins are ruined. The land looks as if the foot of man had never trodden it, and the hand of man never cultivated it. Here it rises into melancholy mounds; there it sinks into hollows and pits: like that plain which God overthrew, it neither is sown nor beareth. It is inhabited by the fox, haunted by the brigand, and frequented in spring and autumn by a few herdsmen, clad in goats'-skins, and living in caves and wigwams, and reminding one, by their savage appearance, of the satyrs of ancient mythology. It is silent as a sepulchre. John Bunyan might have painted it for his "Valley of the Shadow of Death."
I shall suppose that you are approaching Rome from the north. You have disengaged yourself from the Apennines,—the picturesque Apennines,—in whose sunny vales the vine still ripens, and on whose sides the olive still lingers. You are advancing along a high plateau which rises here and there into conical mounts, on which sits some ancient and renowned city, dwindled now into a poor village, whose inhabitants are husbandmen, and who move about oppressed by the languor that weighs upon this whole land. Beneath your feet are subterranean chambers, in which mailed warriors sleep,—for it is the ancient land of Etruria over which your track lies. Before the wolf suckled Romulus, this soil had nourished a race of heroes. The road, so filled in former times by a never-failing concourse of legions going forth to battle or returning in triumph,—of consuls and legates bearing the high behests of the senate to the subject provinces,—and of ambassadors and princes coming to sue for peace, or to lay their tributary gifts at the feet of Rome,—is now solitary and untrodden, save by the traveller from a far country, or the cowled and corded pilgrim whose vow brings him to the shrine of the apostles. Stacks of mouldering brickwork attract the eye by the wayside,—the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on the milestones; but you cannot persuade yourself that Rome you shall find in the heart of a desert like this. You have gained the brow of a low hill; you have passed the summit, and got half-way down the declivity; when suddenly a vision bursts on your sight that rivets you to the spot. There is the Tiber rolling its yellow floods at your feet; and there, spread out in funereal gloom between the mountains and the sea, is the Campagna di Roma. The spectacle is sublime, despite its desolation. There is but one object in the vast expanse, but that is truly a majestic one. Alone, on the silent plain, judgment-stricken and sackcloth-clad, occupying the same spot where she "glorified herself and lived deliciously," and said in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow," is Rome.
You are to cross the Tiber. Already your steps are on the Pons Milvius, where Christianity triumphed over Paganism in the person of Constantine, and over the parapet of which Maxentius, in his flight, flung the seven-branched golden candlestick, which Titus brought from the temple of Jerusalem. The Flaminian way, which you are now to traverse, runs straight to the gate of Rome. In front is the long line of the city walls, within which you can descry the proud dome of St Peter's, the huge rotundity of St Angelo, or "Hadrian's Mole," and a host of inferior cupolas and towers, which in any other city would suffice to give a character to the place, but are here thrown into the shade by the two unrivalled structures I have named. You are not less than two miles from the gate; yet such are the purity and transparency of an Italian sky, that every stone almost in the old wall,—every scar which the hand of time or the ravages of war have made in it,—is visible. As you advance, Monte Mario rises on the right, with a temple on its crest, and rows of pine-trees and cypresses on its sides. On the left, at a goodly distance, are seen the purple hills of Frascati and Albano, with their delicate chequering of light and shadow, and the Tiber, appearing to burst like a river of gold from their azure bosom. The beauty of these objects is much heightened by the blackness of the plain around.
We now enter Rome. The square in which we find ourselves,—the Porta del Popolo,—is worthy of Rome. It is a clean, neatly-paved quadrangular area, of an hundred and fifty by an hundred yards in extent, edged on all sides by noble mansions. Fronting you as you enter the gate are the domes of two fine churches, in one of which Luther preached when he was in Rome. Between them the Corso is seen shooting out in a long narrow line of lofty façades, traversing the entire length of the city from north to south. On the right is the house of Mr Cass, the United States' consul, behind which rises a series of hanging gardens. There was dug the grave of Nero; but the ashes of the man before whom the world trembled cannot now be found. On the left rises the terraced slope of the Pincian hill, with its galleries, its statues, its stately cypresses, and its noble carriage-drive. On the opposite declivity are the gardens of Sallust, looking down on the campus sceleratus, where the unfaithful vestal-virgins were burned.
In the middle of the spacious area is a fine fountain, whose waters are received into a spacious basin, guarded by marble lions. And there, too, stands the obelisk of Rhamses I., severe and solemn, a stranger, like ourselves, from a far land. This is the same which that monarch erected before the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, the ON of Scripture, and which Augustus transported to Rome. It is a single block of red granite, graven from top to bottom with hieroglyphics, which it is quite possible the eyes of Moses may have scanned. When that column was hewn, not a stone had been laid on the Capitol, and the site of Rome was a mere marsh; yet here it stands, with its mysterious scroll still unread. Speak, stranger, and tell us, with thy deep Coptic voice, the secrets of four thousand years ago. Say, wouldst thou not like to revisit thy native Nile, and spend thine age beside the tombs of the Pharaohs, the companions of thy youth, and amidst the congenial silence of the sands of Egypt?
The traveller who would enjoy the finest view of the modern city must ascend the Pincian hill. In the basin beneath him he beholds spread out a flat expanse of red-tiled roofs, traversed by the long line of the Corso, and bristling with the tops of innumerable domes, columns, and obelisks. Some thirty or forty cupolas give an air of grandeur to the otherwise uninteresting mass of red; and conspicuous amongst these, over against the spectator, is the princely dome of St Peter's, and the huge bulk of the Castle of St Angelo. The Tiber is seen creeping sluggishly at the base of the Janiculum, the sides of which are thinly dotted with villas and gardens, while its summit is surmounted by a long stretch of the old wall.
Standing in the Piazza del Popolo, the person is in a good position for comprehending the arrangement of modern Rome. Here three streets have their rise, which, running off in diverging lines, like spokes from the nave of a wheel, traverse the city, and form, with the cross streets which connect them, the osteology of the Eternal City. This at least is the arrangement which obtains till you reach the region lying around the Capitol, which is an inextricable network of lanes, courts, and streets. The centre one of the three streets we have indicated is the Corso. It is a good mile in length, and runs straight south, extending from the Flaminian gate to almost the foot of the Capitol. To an English eye it is wanting in breadth, though the most spacious street in Rome. It is but indifferently kept in point of cleanliness, though the most fashionable promenade of the Romans. Here only you find anything resembling a flag-pavement: all the other streets are causewayed from side to side with small sharp pieces of lava, which pain the foot at every step. The shops are small and dark, resembling those of our third and fourth-rate towns, and exhibiting in their wares a superabundance of cameos, mosaics, Etruscan vases, and statuary,—these being almost the sole native manufacture of Rome. It is adorned with several truly noble palaces, and with the colonnades and porticos of a great number of churches. It was the boast of the Romans that the Pope could say mass in a different church every day of the year. This, we believe, is true, there being more than three hundred and sixty churches in that city, but not one copy of the Bible that is accessible by the people.
The second street,—that on the right,—is the Via Ripetta, which leads off in the direction of St Peter's and the Vatican. It takes one nigh the tomb of Augustus, now converted into a hippodrome; the Pantheon, whose pristine beauty remains undefaced after twenty centuries; the Collegio Romano; and, towards the foot of the Capitol, the Ghetto,—a series of mean streets, occupied by the Jews. The third street,—that on the left,—is the Via Babuino. It traverses the more aristocratic quarter of Rome,—if we can use such a phrase in reference to a city whose nobles are lodging-house keepers, and live—
"Garreted
In their ancestral palace,"—
running on by the Piazza di Spagna, which the English so much frequent, to the Quirinal, the Pope's summer palace, and the form of Trajan, whose column, after the many copies which have been made of it, still stands unrivalled and unapproached in beauty.