At the foot of the Pincio, which now overtops the other hills of Rome, beside the Porta del Popolo, or People’s Gate, are the convent and church of S. Augustine. In the former, Luther dwelt during his stay in the city of his love and longing. At this gate he prostrated himself and kissed the earth in a passion of delight and thankfulness. In the church he celebrated his first mass in Rome, and just before his departure, soon after the change of feeling and purpose which befell him upon the Sacred Staircase, he performed here his last service as a priest of the Romish Church.
S. Augustine’s was raised upon the site of the tomb of Nero—a spot infested, according to tradition, for hundreds of years, by flocks of crows, who built, roosted, and cawed in the neighboring trees, becoming in time such a nuisance as to set one of the popes to dreaming upon the subject. In a vision, it was revealed to him that these noisy rooks were demons contending for or exulting in the possession of the soul of the wicked tyrant—a point on which there could have been little uncertainty, even in the mind of a middle-ages pope. The trees were leveled, and the birds, or devils, scared away by the hammers of workmen employed upon a church paid for by penny collections among the people. The Gate of the People owes its name to this circumstance. Within the antique gateway, Christina of Sweden was welcomed to Rome after her apostasy from Protestantism, cardinals and bishops and a long line of sub-officials meeting her here in stately procession. It is also known as the Flaminian Gate, opening as it does upon the famous Flaminian Way. A side-road, branching off from this a few rods beyond the walls, leads into and through the beautiful grounds of the Villa Borghese.
Turning to the left, after entering the Porta del Popolo, one ascends by a sinuous road the Pincio, or Hill of Gardens. Below lies the Piazza del Popolo, the twin churches opposite the city-gate marking the burial-place of Sylla. The red sandstone obelisk in the middle of the square is from Heliopolis, and the oldest monument in Rome. The most heedless traveler pauses upon the Pincian terraces to look down upon “the flame-shaped column,” which, Merivale tells us, “was a symbol of the sun, and originally bore a blazing orb upon its summit.” Hawthorne reminds us yet more thrillingly that “this monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert.” And so strong is the chain with which, in his “Marble Faun,” this subtle and delicate genius has united the historical and the imaginative, one recollects, in the same instant, that the parapet by which he is standing is the one over which Kenyon and Hilda watched the enigmatical pantomime of Miriam and the Model beside the “four-fold fountain” at the base of the obelisk. Nowhere else in Rome is the thoughtful traveler more tempted to borrow from this marvelous romance words descriptive of scene and emotion than when he reaches the “broad and stately walk that skirts the brow” of the Pincio. We read and repeated the paragraph that, to this hour, brings the view to us with the clearness and minuteness of a sun-picture, until it arose of itself to our lips whenever we halted upon the outer edge of the semicircular sweep of wall.
“Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, besides here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller, or higher situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the top of the Antonine column, and, near it, the circular roof of the Pantheon, looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.”
“The very dust of Rome,” he writes again, “is historic, and inevitably settles on our page and mingles with our ink.”
Thus, the Pincio—the gayest place in Rome on “music-afternoon,” and one of the loveliest at all seasons and every day;—a modern garden, with parterres of ever-green and ever-blooming roses; with modern fountains and plantations, rustic summer-houses and play-grounds, all erected and laid out—if Hare is to be credited—within twenty years, in the “deserted waste where the ghost of Nero was believed to wander” in the dark ages, had its story and its tragedy antedating the bloody death and post-mortem peregrinations of him over whose grave the crows quarrelled at the bottom of the hill. Other gardens smiled here when Lucullus supped in the Hall of Apollo in his Pincian Villa with Cicero and Pompey, and was served with more than imperial luxury. Here, Asiaticus, condemned to die through the machinations of the wickedest woman in Rome, who coveted ground and house, bled himself to death after “he had inspected the pyre prepared for him in his own gardens, and ordered it to be removed to another spot that an umbrageous plantation which overhung it might not be injured by the flames.”
Here grew the tree up which climbed Messalina’s creature on the night of her last and wildest orgy with her lover, and flung down the warning—“I see an awful storm coming from Ostia!” The approaching tempest was the injured husband, Claudius, the Emperor, whose swift advance drove Messalina, half-drunken and half-clad, to a hiding-place “in the shade of her gardens on the Pincio, the price of the blood of the murdered Asiaticus.” There she died. “The hot blood of the wanton smoked on the pavement of his garden, and stained, with a deeper hue, the variegated marbles of Lucullus.”[B]
At the intersection of the two fashionable drives which constitute “the round,”—a circuit that can be accomplished with ease in five minutes—is an obelisk, also Egyptian, erected, primarily, upon the Nile, by Hadrian and his Empress, in memory of the drowned Antinöus.
Urban VIII. left his mark and a memento of the inevitable Bernini on the Pincio, in the Moses Fountain. It commands, through an artful opening in the overhanging trees, an exquisitely lovely view of St. Peter’s, framed in an arch of green. The fountain consists of a circular basin, and, in the middle of this, Jochebed, the mother of Moses, upon an island. She looks heavenward while she stoops to extricate a hydrocephalus babe from a basket much too small for his trunk and limbs, not to say the big head.
Caput’s criticism was professionally indignant.