The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again, in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found. We have bought our linen, blankets, batterie de cuisine, and other beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday—am I not my mother’s own child?—I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had much tea, more talk, and most panettone—half bread, half cake, with pignoli and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it is better.
My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse. Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in midsummer chiefly,—has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau—cheerful person that, by the way—says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is hysterical!
Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear the music. At the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of the Blind Institution furnished the music—a good band, though not equal to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took the heavy youngster, the mother took the new-born, and, squatting down, calmly suckled it. The music was marred by the wailing of this and other infants, but no one seemed to mind. After all, it was the only way the women could have heard mass; the little ones were too young to be left alone at home.
The Romans are devoted to their children, although their ways are not our ways; no woman of the upper class nurses her child, baby carriages are unknown, and swaddling is still in vogue, at least with the lower classes. I know a young American lady, married to a Roman, who imported a perambulator for her first baby. The balia (wet-nurse), a superb cow of a woman, refused to trundle it, saying she was not strong enough, although I saw her carry a heavy trunk upstairs on her head while I was calling at the house! The baby is now a big eighteen-months-old boy; every day the balia goes out to give him an airing, carrying him in her arms! Here, leading-strings are facts, not symbols. In Trastavere, where I went sightseeing yesterday with Helen—peering, as she calls it,—the best sight we saw was a darling red-haired baby in leading-strings stumbling along in front of its grandmother. In the division of labor, the care of the children falls upon the grandmother; the mother’s time is too valuable; if she is not actually employed in earning money, there is the heavier work of the household to do. To use the pet phrase of the boarders, “things are different here from what they are at home.”
Palazzo Rusticucci, July 10, 1894.
Here we are in a home of our own! One moonlight night J. came in with the news that he had found the very apartment he had been looking for; if I didn’t mind, we would go and see it at once. Naturally, I didn’t “mind.” We took a botte and threaded the network of narrow streets that lead down to the Tiber. We crossed the river, a huge brown flood, silver where it swirled about the piers; drove past the Castle of St. Angelo to the dingy old palace at the junction of the Borgo Nuovo and the Piazza San Pietro. He would not let me stop to look at anything, but hurried me through the entrance, along the corridor, past a courtyard with orange trees and a fountain where the nightingales were singing, up a high, wide stairway guarded by recumbent statues of terra-cotta Etruscan ladies, to a rusty old green door. We pulled a bell-rope and set a bell jangling inside. The door was opened by the esattore (agent), a brisk young man, who carried a three-beaked brass lamp by whose light we explored the apartment. They hurried me so that I could only see that the high ceilings were of carved wood, that the windows were large, and that I liked the shape of the rooms. J. kept saying, “Wait till you see the terrace.” The terrace, or house-top, is a flat roof; it covers the whole length and breadth of the apartment, and belongs exclusively to it. A parapet three feet high runs around it; at one end is a small room with a second smaller terrace on its roof, reached by a flight of stone steps; at the other end is a high wall with a little, open belfry on top. The view is sublime; you look down into the Square of St. Peter’s with the Egyptian obelisk in the middle, Bernini’s great colonnades on either side, the Church of St. Peter’s at the end, with the Vatican, a big, awkward mass of a building, behind it, and in the foreground the twin fountains sending up their columns of powdered spray. On the left loomed the Castle of St. Angelo; it was light enough to see the time by the clock. You can imagine all the rest,—the city spread out like a map, the dark masses of trees marking the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, the Campagna, the Sabine and the Alban hills beyond, Mt. Soracte, our familiar friend, on the left, over and under all the soft deep notes of the big bell of St. Peter’s throbbing out the Angelus.
The bargain was struck that very night! But when we went over the next day J. let the cat out of the bag by saying, “I was afraid if you went by daylight, and saw what an old ruin it was, you would never consent to our taking it!”
It did look discouraging. The last tenant, a monsignore, who lived here thirty years, never allowed the owners to make any repairs; he said he could not be bothered with workmen. He died a short time ago, leaving a red rose growing in a wooden half-barrel on the terrace. The owner of the palace, Signor Mazzocchi, armorer to the Pope, waited till the new tenant should turn up before making any changes. The palace was built in 1661. It has gone to wrack and ruin, but it is a magnificent old wreck. It stands on the site of the house the great architect Bramante built for Raphael, one pier of which is still standing, built into our walls. It once belonged to a Cardinal Rusticucci, whose arms are cut in stone over one of the doors; he was of the same family as the gentleman Dante met in one of the lower circles of the Inferno.
“Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce, Jacopo Rusticucci fui; e certo la fiera moglie più ch’altro mi nuoce.”
“And I who am placed on the cross with these was Jacob Rusticucci. It is certain my proud wife harmed me more than another!”