On Friday, the day of Santa Lucia, we were bidden to the festa of Signora Villegas. Here they celebrate your saint’s day instead of your birthday. At dinner I sat between Villegas and Adolfo Apolloni, the sculptor. The Signora is Italian, but Villegas is an Andalusian from Seville. There were Spanish guests, Spanish wine and viands, much talk and merriment.
Our home between 1894 and 1900 was the old Palazzo Accoramboni, or, as we called it, the Palazzo Rusticucci. The agent who let us our apartment was an ignorant man, and when we asked the name of the palace he told us it was the Rusticucci. It was only after we had had the name engraved upon our note paper and visiting cards, and had lived there two years, that Crawford told us of our mistake. It seemed too late to correct it, so we kept the name, and now it is a source of satisfaction to me to remember that we are the only people who ever lived in Palazzo Rusticucci! The quarter, properly called the Leonine City, is more familiarly spoken of as the Borgo, and is inhabited chiefly by people connected with the Vatican. Our apartment was both picturesque and comfortable. Our terrace, transformed by J. into a sort of hanging garden of Babylon, where we cut roses every month of the year, became one of the sights of Rome, and strangers often rang our doorbell and asked to see it.
Rome is the most hospitable place I have ever known. From the time of the Empire the chief business of the city has been to entertain strangers; it never had any other business and it has never lost the habit of making strangers feel at home. The society is most amusing, for one only has to “sit tight” and sooner or later every important personage in the world passes your way!
[To my Mother.]
July 5, 1894. Yesterday the Ambassador gave a Fourth of July reception with lots of champagne, American flags and a band playing the Star Spangled Banner. There were one hundred and ten Americans present, so you see we are not the only ones left in Rome. I am brisk and well. If one has to be in any city in summer, Rome is the best. Tuesday night Mariano Benlliure came to dine. He is called the first living Spanish sculptor. He has a strong dash of the Moor, as his genius and his name show; all the Bens are of Moorish descent. We also had Mrs. Taylor, a clever newspaper woman, correspondent of the London Standard, sister of Mrs. Augustus Trollope, and Joe Hunt. He has grown a beard and is not quite so cherubic.
I have had two bright letters from William Henry Hurlburt, who is at Cadennabbia on the Lake of Como. He wrote for homeopathic medicines which I sent him. The poor old fellow isn’t long for this world. He has an insight into spiritual truths as keen and as fine as when he was an associate of the Transcendentalists at Cambridge; one hears he has another side, but I have never seen it.
You ask me how I pass my days. Up at five and out for a spin on my bicycle. The other day I rode to Ostia and back before lunch. After my ride I get out stores and linen and settle accounts; everything is under lock and key and every centesimo accounted for. Out again for errands and at my writing by half-past ten or eleven. In the morning I write and read the papers in the salotto. The Paris edition of the New York Herald has much home news. Lunch at one. After lunch to bed for a siesta.
I make a rule to be indoors by eleven in the morning and not to go out again till five in the afternoon. After the siesta, I go up to my workroom on the terrace where there is a thorough draft and no sun, and work there till six, when I go over to the studio to see how J.’s painting goes on. For a little stroll, and then dinner on the terrace at eight. We sit there till bedtime—so nice and cool, the stars very homelike and pleasant, the same constellations that you see, and just now many falling stars.
During the years of our life in Rome we spent most of the summers there. As the heat increased, one by one the English and American friends and the more well-to-do Roman friends departed, until our circle narrowed down to a few artists, two or three of the younger diplomats left in charge of the embassies, and certain friendly priests, who found our house a convenient stopping place on the way to the Vatican. I learned more of Rome in these lonely summer months than during the gay season. One August I heard of the death of an elderly American woman whom I had never seen. As I knew her niece, I felt impelled to drive out to the Protestant cemetery to the funeral, for I did not know of any other American in Rome who could be there. The Ambassador, the Consul, the clergymen of both the English and American churches were out of town. When I reached the little chapel, I found a strange clergyman getting into his surplice. The coffin was already there, and a carriage had just stopped containing the niece and the doctor who had attended the dead woman.
“I am a stranger. I only arrived this morning,” said the clergyman. “I do not speak the language, I do not know for whom I am to read the service.”