The chapel—it is nothing more—of “Domine quo vadis” commemorates the interview. We stepped from the carriage upon the broken threshold, and tried the locked door. A priest as slovenly as the building unclosed it. Directly opposite the entrance is a plaster cast of Michael Angelo’s statue of Our Saviour in the act of addressing Peter. The foot extended in the forward step has been almost kissed away by pilgrims. On the right wall is a fresh and flashy, yet graphic fresco of the Lord, walking swiftly toward Rome; upon the left kneels the conscience-smitten Peter. Between them, upon the floor, secured by a grating from the abrading homage of the vulgar, is a copy of the footprints left upon the rock at the spot where the meeting took place. The original is in the church of San Sebastiano. The marble is stained with yellowish blotches. The impression is coarsely cut; the conception is yet coarser. Two brawny, naked feet, enormous in size, plebeian in shape, are set squarely and straight, side by side, as no living man would stand of his own accord. The impudence of these priestly relics would be contemptible only, were the subjects less sacred. We turned away from the “fac-simile” in sad disgust. The legend had been a favorite with us both. We were sorry we had entered the mouldy little barn. The offer of the sacristan to sell us beads, medals, and photographs was in keeping with the rest of the show. We gave him a franc; plucked from the cracked door-stone a bit of pellitory—herba parietina, the sobriquet given to Trajan in derision of his habit of writing his name upon much which he had not built—and returned to our carriage.
The way is bordered, until one reaches the tomb of Cæcilia Metella by vineyard and meadow walls. Most of the stones used in building these were collected from the ancient pavement, or the débris of fortresses and tombs that encumbered this. Imbedded in the mortar, and often defaced by clots and daubs of it, put in beside common rubble-stones and sherds of tufa, are many sculptured fragments. Here, the corner of a richly-carved capital projects from the surface; there, a cluster of flowers, with a serpent stealing out of sight among the leaves. Now, a baby’s head laughs between lumps of travertine or granite; next comes a part of a gladiator’s arm, or the curve of a woman’s neck. The ivy is luxuriantly aggressive and of a species we had never seen elsewhere, gemmed with glossy, saffron-colored berries. “Wee, crimson-tippéd” daisies mingled with grass that is never sere. In March we found anemones of every hue; pink and white cyclamen; wild violets, at once diffusive and retentive of odor, embalming gloves, handkerchiefs, and the much-thumbed leaves of our guide-books; reddish-brown wall-flowers, and hosts of other “wild” blossoms on this road. The dwelling-houses we passed were rude, slight huts, hovels of reeds and straw, often reared upon the foundation of a tomb.
For this Way of Triumph was also the Street of Tombs. Sepulchres, or their ruins, are scattered on every side. We looked past them, where there occurred a break in the road-wall over the billowing Campagna, the arches of ancient and modern aqueducts dwindling into cobweb-lines in the hazy distance; above them at the Sabine and Alban hills, newly capped with snow, while Spring smiled warmly upon the plains at their base. We alighted at the best-known of these homes of the dead, not many of which hold the ashes that gave them names.
Hawthorne describes it in touches few and masterly. “It is built of great blocks of hewn stone on a vast square foundation of rough, agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other ruinous tombs. But, whatever might be the cause, it is in a far better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rise the battlements of a mediæval fortress, out of the midst of which grow trees, bushes, and thick festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman has become the dungeon-keep of a castle, and all the care that Cæcilia Metella’s husband could bestow to secure endless peace for her belovèd relics only sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles long ages after her death.”
The powerful family of the Gaetani added the battlements that tooth the top of the enormous tower, when they made it their château and fortress in the thirteenth century. The ruins of their church are close to the walls. We paid a trifling fee for the privilege of entering the court-yard of the Tomb where there was nothing to see, and for peeping into the ruinous cellar, once the “cave” where “treasure lay, so locked, so hid”—the sarcophagus about which all these stone swathings were wound as layers of silk and wool about a costly jewel. The empty marble coffin is in a Roman museum. A public-spirited pope ripped off the sculptured casing of the exterior that he might build the Fountain of Trevi. It would be as futile to seek for this woman’s ashes as for those of Wickliffe after the Avon had carried them out to sea.
The dreary road-walls terminate here, but the survey of the tombs diverts the attention from the views of Campagna and mountains. They must have formed an almost continuous block of buildings for miles. The foundations may be traced still, and about these are remnants of the statues and symbolic ornaments that gave them individuality and beauty. The figure which occurred most frequently was that of a man in the dress of a Roman citizen, the arm laid over the breast to hold the toga in place and fold. Most of the heads were missing, and usually the legs, but the torso had always character, sometimes beauty, in it. There were hundreds of them here once, probably mounted sentinel-wise at the doors of the tombs, changeless effigies of men who had been, who were now a pinch of dust, preserved in a sealed urn for fear the wind might take them away.
There is a so-called “restored” tomb near the “fourth mile-stone.” A bas-relief, representing a murder, is let into a brick façade.
“The tomb of Seneca!” said our cocchière, confidently.
“Dubious!” commented the genius of wary common sense upon the front seat. “If he was put to death by Nero’s officers near the fourth mile-stone, is it probable that he was interred on the spot?”
The driver held to his assertion, and I got out to pick daisies and violets growing in the shelter of the ugly red-brick front—there was no back,—souvenirs that lie to-day, faded but fragrant, between the leaves of my Baedeker. Nearly opposite to the round heaps of turf-grown rubbish with solid basement walls, “supposed to be the tombs of the Horatii and Curatii,” across the road and a field, are the ruins of the Villa of Commodus. He wrested this pleasant country-seat from two brothers, who were the Naboths of the coveted possession. Conduits have been dug out from the ruins, stamped with their names, and convicting him mutely but surely of the theft charged upon him by contemporaries. He and his favorite Marcia were sojourning here when the house was “mobbed” by a deputation, several thousand in number, sent from Rome to call him to account for his misdeeds. He pacified them measurably by throwing from an upper window the head of Cleander, his obnoxious premier, and beating out the brains of that official’s child. The Emperor’s Coliseum practice made such an evening’s work a mere bagatelle.