Rome

by M. A. R. Tuker; Hope Malleson

The pride of the Roman is his chief characteristic; it keeps him from some of the pettinesses of his neighbours and is occasionally the idol to which self-interest is sacrificed. But the same people who are too proud to work are not too proud to beg. This kind of pride, indeed, is to be found a little everywhere in Italy, and I have known a distinguished Italian with a starving family who would consent to give lessons in "Italian literature" but not in "Italian grammar." In France where there is the maximum of self-respect this kind of pride is unknown. The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed, is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as an Italian from another province might do. But the Roman pride is a disease; it clamours for its own license and respects no one else's liberty; it plays into the hands of the Latin lawlessness, and the Roman spirit of revolt has tormented the popes ever since Constantine deserted the capital of the West. The Roman resents what he calls prepotenza, but a self-disciplined law-abiding people can hardly understand the stupid prepotenza say of the cabmen in Rome—a majority of whom are Romans. The Roman lad or the Roman man takes it into his head to make a bee-line in your direction, to walk over that particular piece of road or pavement, and the feeble sense of righteous indignation he possesses is only kindled if you attempt to thwart him. The satyr-like—half-childish, half-malignant—cult of the dispetto, the miserable pleasure taken in deliberately inconveniencing you, are so many proofs of an undisciplined nature—and where shall we see so many undisciplined faces as in Rome?—albeit that here it masquerades as the just orgoglio of a people descended from gods and heroes. "Non me lo dica, perchè io sono romano" (Do not say it to me, for I am a Roman), is a warning phrase repeated in perfect good faith, as who should say: "Do not provoke this son of a god."

GIRL SELLING BIRDS IN THE VIA DEL CAMPIDOGLIO
The Forum in the background. The road marks the old Clivus Capitolinus. See page [30].

The Roman's most pleasing characteristic is his genuineness; that, and a certain magnanimity, a certain nobleness of mind. The Roman has no "jesuitry," and he will not say behind your back what he dare not say to your face. In contrast to other Italians is his roughness—a legacy of old Rome—a rudeness of spirit which is a curious compound of pride in the past, of age-long absence of mental cultivation—of a moral quality, brutal sincerity, and of a mental quality, a terrific realism. They are also, perhaps, the best hearted people in Italy; and a dear old Roman friend used to declare that the Romans and the English were the kindest hearted people in the world.

Intellectually, no people in Italy have more talent: it is a key which opens many doors to say that the Roman is talented but not cultured. There is no real culture in any class, but there is a facility unmatched even in this land of natural gifts. The one exception to the general ignorance which exists by the side of an extraordinary quickness is an interesting one: every Roman is an archaeologist; to be unable to take your part in an archaeological discussion would be to write yourself down as an impossible ignoramus. On this subject every Roman is alert, and I was present when the foundations for the first houses which now lead to Porta Salara were being dug, and a marble relief was found which the workmen at once told me was "the rape of Lucretia." Imagine a bricklayer in London proffering a similar observation! With the general ignorance there is also in the upper class a widespread intellectual apathy; many of the Roman aristocracy have never visited the Palatine, and when it was suggested to a young Roman that she had never seen the Capitol, she answered: "Oh yes, I saw it the day I was married." Part of the Capitol buildings are the registry offices of Rome where the obligatory civil marriage takes place. The drive on the Pincio, which is not larger than the tract of the park from Hyde Park corner to the Marble Arch, satisfies the most exacting ambition; and the fussy foreigner who spends his time in museums and galleries is regarded as a harmless and well-meaning lunatic.

Every human being is the product of contrasts; but the Roman is more so than other men: to explain, not what he is, but what he is not we have, I think, only to look at the contradictions, the inconsequence of a character which in the expressive Italian phrase is sconclusionato, it comes to no conclusion. For the Roman though he is turbulent is easily led; he is at once obstinate and teachable; he is not fin but he throws a terrible light on all things; without being "finto" (feigned) he puts self-interest first. He is both ingenuous and suspicious; to his overweening pride he joins considerable diffidence; and the tongue which babbles of his personal affairs is the tongue of a man who has a profound distrust of his neighbour.

A fine critic with a child's simplicity, he is sceptical and superstitious, credulous and incredulous, seeing the works of the oracle but allowing it to deceive him. Joined to his indifference is a faculty for staking his all on some absurd punctilio: his interest in ideas is greater than in many parts of Italy, his ambitions and pleasures more materialist. The changes which the Roman has witnessed in unchanging Rome are met in himself by changeableness and fickleness of purpose, though the conception of the majestic, the grandiose, the eternal is always there. What are we to say of a people who can unite the pettiest spite with a magnanimous tolerance?

The denizen of the eternal city is proverbially campanilista, which may be translated "attached to the village pump"; and while on the other hand he has a sense of public decorum unequalled in Europe, the blasé Roman fritters time and talents in petty preoccupations, in distractions which are neither dignified nor stately, and eats and gambles to show his distrust of human effort in general, of all human achievement since the incomparable days when his heroes walked the earth.

The Roman does not merge in you, and he no longer imposes himself on you. He is not free of obsequiousness; and such customs as the baciamano (hand-kissing) are said to derive from the fact that the Romans have been "the hosts of Europe" and have learnt to depend on its bounty. A readier explanation is certainly afforded in that aspect of Catholic Christianity which has always encouraged personal humiliations and servilism in the inferior clergy and the laity: but perhaps the real explanation is to be found in the fact that the present day Roman is the descendant of the Empire, not of the Republic, and Christianity, as we know, easily adopted as its own the servilisms of the later Empire, with those Byzantine proclivities for despotism and adulation which at last led the independent Roman to burn his incense before the "genius" of the most infamous of the Caesars.