It must, in truth, be confessed, that it is a sad and melancholy business to prick and track out ancient Rome in new Rome; however, it must be done, and we may hope at least for an incalculable gratification. We meet with traces both of majesty and of ruin, which alike surpass all conception; what the barbarians spared, the builders of new Rome made havoc of.
Rome—Its present aspect.
When one thus beholds an object two thousand years old and more, but so manifoldly and thoroughly altered by the changes of time, but, sees nevertheless, the same soil, the same mountains, and often indeed the same walls and columns, one becomes, as it were, a contemporary of the great counsels of Fortune, and thus it becomes difficult for the observer to trace from the beginning Rome following Rome, and not only new Rome succeeding to the old, but also the several epochs of both old and new in succession. I endeavour, first of all, to grope my way alone through the obscurer parts, for this is the only plan by which one can hope fully and completely to perfect by the excellent introductory works which have been written from the fifteenth century to the present day. The first artists and scholars have occupied their whole lives with these objects.
And this vastness has a strangely tranquillizing effect upon you in Rome, while you pass from place to place, in order to visit the most remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is important; here one is oppressed, and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape,—forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins, gardens and statuary, distant views of villas, cottages and stables, triumphal arches and columns, often crowding so close together, that they might all be sketched on a single sheet of paper. He ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can a single pen do here; and, besides, by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring.
Rome, November 7, 1786.
Pardon me, my friends, if for the future you find me rather chary of my words. On one's travels one usually rakes together all that we meet on one's way; every day brings something new, and one then hastens to think upon and to judge of it. Here, however, we come into a very great school indeed, where every day says so much, that we cannot venture to say anything of the day itself. Indeed, people would do well if, tarrying here for years together, they observed awhile a Pythagorean silence.
Nov. 1786.
I am quite well. The weather, as the Romans say, is brutto. The south wind, the scirocco, is blowing, and brings with it every day more or less of rain; for my part, I do not find the weather disagreeable; such as it is, it is warmer than the rainy days of summer are with us.