summer bill of fare, fresh filberts in their jackets, green almonds and English walnuts as much nicer fresh than dried as fresh figs are better than dry, or grapes than raisins.
Ignazio, our gardener, handsome, sympathetic, with a timid laugh, a hesitating manner, a real passion for his calling, was recommended to us as knowing more about roses than any man in Rome. The burthen of caring for our beloved flowers had become too great. The improvement since the expert took hold and properly grafted our roses is astonishing. Ignazio has to be restrained from quite ruining us. To him the natural order would be to spend the greater part of one’s income upon one’s flowers—I am not so sure he is not right! For weeks he has been talking about a new rare flower—just the thing for the terrace—whose name he could not remember. When I asked him he took off his old cap, rubbed his head in a puzzled way, and complained that the English names were “too difficult.” I caught his enthusiasm, ordered some of these rare exotics, though the price was high. To-day arrived six fine specimens of the wild American purple aster, which overruns the fields and roadsides at home!
Signor Giacomo Boni, the architect in charge of the public buildings of ancient Rome, has a rival terrace on the roof of his house: we went to see his Japanese lilies the other day. Fancy, he has a cherry tree with ripe cherries on it, a peach tree with peaches, a tame starling in a cage, and quite the most wonderful collection of plants and flowers I ever saw in so small a space. Signor Boni has planted on the Palatine, in the Forum, and in the Baths of Caracalla, the flowers and shrubs mentioned in the classics as growing in those places. The good work is beginning to tell already; now there are roses and fleur-de-lis growing in the Forum. The vandalism which stripped the Colosseum of its glorious robe of flowered green and exposed its gaunt skeleton to view, is at an end, but the havoc it wrought is irreparable—at least in my lifetime. Fancy, there were five hundred different varieties of wild-flowers growing on that splendid old ruin. Many of these are unknown in other parts of Europe and are supposed to have sprung from seeds that were mixed in the various kinds of fodder imported from Africa to feed the wild beasts which fought in the old blood-soaked arena.
Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, August 3, 1899.
It was too hot for sleep last night, a rare thing in Rome. At half-past four this morning, when I went out on the terrace to water the plants, the smooth red tiles were still warm to bare feet. The Piazza of St. Peter’s was a sea of fog, out of which loomed the lantern of Angelo’s dome; no other part of the great church was visible. A white mist from the Tiber rose like a wall between us and Mt. Soracte; the river and the mountain Horace loved are still the dearest things in the wide view of the Roman landscape. When the plants had been watered it was half-past five, just the right time for bicycling, so we set out. At this hour few people are about, save the drivers of the heavy wains of hay—drawn by big, soft-eyed gray oxen with magnificent branching horns. These wagons of fragrant hay are not allowed in the streets after eight o’clock in the morning. Though the Forum was reached before six, Signor Boni and his aids were already hard at work. Swarms of men, like so many busy ants, were passing to and from the excavations, wheeling barrows full of earth, returning a little later with empty barrows.
“Where do you put the rubbish that you take out?” I asked. The capo smiled indulgently. “Every particle of the earth of the Forum is sacred,” he said. “We skim it off carefully in layers, keeping each layer quite separate from the others. Then we sift it layer by layer, sort whatever it contains, examine each bit of broken glass, metal, pottery, and, where it is possible, piece the fragments together.”
In a sacrificial layer, composed chiefly of the ashes and bones of victims offered at the altars of the gods, the capo lately found the jaw bones of several large dogs. These did not properly belong here, among the bones of beeves, sheep, and goats, the regulation sacrificial animals. The layer in which they were found proved to be of the time of Marcellus. Now, what were the bones of these big dogs doing there?
One dark night—it was in the days of Marcellus—the Goths descended for the first time upon Rome, the citadel came within an ace of being taken—would have been, but for the cackling of the silly geese which roused the sleeping guards. The silly geese became sacred geese, and the faithless watch-dogs, who had failed to bark and give the alarm, were slaughtered at the altar,—and that is how the big canine jaw bones turn up to-day in the sacrificial layer of Marcellus! The capo’s dreamy blue eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, glowed with an inner light as he unfolded this theory. Imagination, you see, is as important to the successful archæologist as it is to any other discoverer. He must have other things as well—a thorough knowledge of the classics, for instance. Did not Mme. Schlieman learn the whole of Homer by heart, to aid her husband in his search for the tomb of Agamemnon?
If in reading Tacitus or Livy the capo finds mention of a missing building or statue, he goes and looks for it in the place where according to the historians it ought to be—and where, nine times out of ten, he finds it! While he talked to us his eyes never left the skilful hands of a workman patiently matching together pieces of brown terra-cotta from a large pile of shards.