VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI
Built in 1549 for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Alfonso II., Duke of Ferrara. It passed thence to the heir of this family, the Duke of Modena. See pages [172], [174].
Rome used to be one of the cheapest of European cities to live in; rents were low and food was cheap; meat was three sous the pound, and when it rose to four the Romans were indignant. Heavy taxation under the Italian Government has now changed all this. Beef is seventeen sous the pound, and rents have been almost doubled in the past twenty years. Wages are still very moderate. A woman servant gets from eighteen to thirty francs a month, a man thirty to sixty. If an English mistress engages an Italian servant, even if he or she is said to know their work, she must begin from the rudiments and even then there comes a point beyond which instruction fails to produce any result. The refinements of English service are looked upon as so many curious rites without meaning, and our standard of cleanliness and our fastidiousness are a perpetual source of wonder.
The pride of the Roman prevents her, as a rule, from undertaking domestic service. When she does, she makes the roughest and worst of maids. The natural instinct of every ordinary Italian servant is to throw all refuse out of the window, as she still does in the towns of the campagna, or where her kitchen window gives upon an unfrequented courtyard, and the rest of her service is in keeping with this standard, the restrictions laid upon her by the demands of civilisation being the very thinnest veneer.
She will never clean a floor on her own initiative, and very seldom on yours, and is quite capable of giving you notice should you expect it. Nevertheless if you can bring yourself to compromise with your own standard and put up with some of hers, you will find her on the whole a genial creature to deal with. She is blessed with abundant leisure, and has always time to carry on protracted conversations and even flirtations out of the kitchen window. No event in the street or in the courtyard beneath escapes her attention, yet she manages to do the housework, cook the meals, wait at table, clean the boots, iron and mend the clothes, and buy the provisions. She will, moreover, think nothing of sleeping in a mere cupboard without air or light, only fit to store boxes in, or in one of the passages on a sofa-bed which is folded up in the daytime, such plans being quite usual in a Roman household.
The Italian man-servant is the most domestic of beings and is on the whole the most teachable and efficient; but he also is accustomed to lay a table by placing a knife, fork, and spoon in a bunch before each person, adding a glass, and voilà tout, and a higher ideal than this is a severe tax on memory and intelligence. "He certainly knew how to lay a cloth when he left me," an American lady said of her man-servant who had been with her nine years, "but perhaps he has forgotten"; and he certainly had, though he had only been out of her situation a year. A so-called finished servant, who had been years in a prince's establishment, thought nothing of receiving a basket of linen from the French laundress and depositing it on our dining-room table pending further instructions, and our disapproval only grieved without enlightening him. And no instruction will impress upon an Italian the impropriety of announcing English callers by a description rather than attempting to pronounce their foreign names: "The gentleman from the hotel," or "The young lady who married that old man!" But their charming manners and easy grace disarm criticism and win forgiveness for many shortcomings.
In military households the master's orderly is often turned into a domestic drudge. Yet such situations are eagerly sought by young soldiers, for though they receive no extra pay they are excused military duty after the first ten months of their enrolment, and they compound their rations for a weekly government allowance. It is no uncommon thing to see a young man in uniform doing the whole work of an officer's house, cooking, cleaning, marketing, waiting at table, taking the children to school, wheeling the perambulator, and even doing the family washing and ironing.
A measure of magnificence and pomp still obtains in the great Roman households, but it is combined with a simplicity of life and an informality of relation between employer and employed which rob it of its stiffness. The servants of a great house are not a caste apart, they are part of the family establishment. Their masters give them the familiar tu, and they are treated with far more intimacy and friendliness than is ever the case with us. In return the servants identify themselves with their employers' concerns, and take the greatest interest in all their doings, an interest no doubt fostered by the utter indifference to privacy existing in most households, where conversations on all subjects are carried on with widely open doors regardless of listeners.
Servants and others of the same class will generally abide by an agreement clearly made, though foreigners are always advised to have even the conditions of service in black and white, and it is never safe to trust to precedent or to general rules in one's dealings with them. They are quite unfettered by the existing laws and unwritten obligations which make up their English counterpart's code of respectability, and they will be faithful to you only so long as their interest does not clash with yours. Instances to the contrary are rare. An Italian servant is quite capable of giving you instant notice for a mere whim, and departing the same day without the slightest compunction for the inconvenience he causes.
Woe to the foreigner who seeks redress for conduct of this kind, or who is involved in any dispute however righteous his cause. Such cases are brought up in the district courts before magistrates who are appointed to act in each division of the city as conciliators (save the mark!). No solicitor of any standing likes to appear in these courts, they are beneath the dignity of his position, and he will only do so as a favour. An attorney of an inferior order, who is as often as not a layman masquerading as such, can be hired on the spot like a porter to see you through. Your opponent will certainly engage the services of one of these individuals, and when the case comes on to your no small amazement he will rise and make a fluent speech in favour of his client having little or no reference to the events as they occurred. If considered needful, he will also call several false witnesses who will swear entire falsehoods with perfect sangfroid. When your solicitor attempts to state your case the attorney on the other side interrupts him with indignant denials, and the conciliator joins in with the most injudicial display of temper. The comedy ends by all three talking at once in loud excited voices, without listening to one another, and the conciliator announces the close of the sitting. He then proceeds to give his verdict which is invariably in favour of the servant, and his socialistic tendencies in this particular are assisted by his not having paid the least attention to the evidence before him.