The silence and desolation of the Campagna on the February day of our excursion to Tre Fontane, or Aquas Salvias,—the Tyburn of the Romans under the Emperors, were as depressing as the seen shadow of Death. The sunlight brought out warm umber tints upon the gray sides of the pyramid. Children, ragged and happy, rolled in the dust and basked in the sun before the mean houses on the wayside. Women in short, russet skirts, blue or red bodices, with gay handkerchiefs, folded square, laid upon the top of the head and hanging down the back of the neck, nursed brown babies and spun flax in open doors, or sitting flat upon the ground. Men drank and smoked in and about the wine-shops, talking with such vehemence of gesticulation as would frighten those who did not know that the subject of debate was no more important than the price of macaroni, or the effect of yesterday’s rain upon the growing artichokes.
But, from the moment our short procession of three carriages emerged from the city-gate and took the road to Ostia, the most mercurial spirit amongst us felt the weight as of a remembered sorrow. We had seen the opening in the floor of the lower chapel of S. Pietro in Montorio, where S. Peter’s cross had stood, and the golden sand in which the foot of it was imbedded; groped down the steps of the Mamertine Prison, and felt our way by torchlight around the confines of the cell in which both of the Great Apostles, it is said, perhaps truly, were incarcerated up to the day of their martyrdom. We had surveyed the magnificence, without parallel even in Rome, of the Basilica of St Paul’s Without the Walls; the very sepulchre of St Paul, the ostensible reason for this affluence of ecclesiastical grandeur, and believed exactly as much and as little as we pleased of what the Church told us of localities, and authorities in support of the authenticity of these. But the evidence that St. Paul was beheaded near Rome, in Via Ostiensis, was irrefragable. There was no ground for cavil in the statement, sustained by venerable traditions, that he perished at Tre Fontane.
Half-way between the Gate of St. Paul and the Basilica, is a squalid chapel, the entrance rather lower than the street, with an indifferent bas-relief over the door, of two men locked in one another’s arms. Here—according to the apocryphal epistle of St. Dionysius the Areopagite to Timothy—Peter and Paul, who, Jerome states, were executed upon the same day, parted. Besides the bas-relief, the tablet over the lintel records their farewell words:
“And Paul said unto Peter,—‘Peace be with thee, Foundation of the Church, Shepherd of the Flock of Christ!’”
“And Peter said unto Paul,—‘Go in peace, Preacher of Good Tidings, and Guide of the Salvation of the Just!’”
We were in no mood to make this one of the stations of our pious journey. Nor did we stop at the Basilica, the dingy outside of which offers no promise of the superb interior. Beyond the church spread the sad-colored Campagna, irresponsive to the sunshine, unbroken save by leafless coppices and undulations where the surface rolled into hillocks that caught no light, and into hollows of deeper gloom. A few peasants’ huts upon the edge of a common, and mounds of shapeless ruins, are all the signs of human habitation, past or present. It is unutterably mournful—this “wilderness that moans at the gates” of the seven-hilled city. The sun was oppressive in the unshaded road, although the sky was filmy, and the horses moved sluggishly. Ours was a funeral cortége, following the figure loving fancies set before us in the lonely highway. An old man, enfeebled by imprisonment, by “weariness and painfulness, by watchings often, by hunger and thirst, by fastings often, by cold and nakedness,” yet pressing forward, ready and joyful to be offered. We had read, last night, in anticipation of this pilgrimage, his farewell letter to his adopted son; noted, as we had not in previous perusals, his confident expectation of this event; and the yearning of the great, tender heart over this dearest of earthly friends,—his desire to see him once more before his departure breaking in upon his clearest views of Heaven and the Risen Lord. It was the backward glance of a father from the top of the hill that will hide the group of watching children from his eyes.
“Henceforth, there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord—the righteous Judge—shall give me at that day.”
(This was after he had been brought before Nero the first time, where—“no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.”)
“And not unto me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.
“Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me!”