The American pilgrims are teaching the Romans a thing or two. Among them are Bishop Ireland, his sister and a large group of “sisters”, traveling together. They take cabs every day and drive about with the Bishop, and nobody seems shocked!
Rome, Palm Sunday, 1908. Isn’t it wonderful that the winter is really over and that we are again going to have summer? It is a new mystery every year and how the things in nature go regularly on, and the acorns swell, the grain germinates, the coral insects toil and only this silly fool’s work does not grow and finish itself! Man’s a blur and a blot on the whole scheme, on account, I suppose, of his free will.
I hope to go down to Sorrento on Thursday for Eleanor Crawford’s wedding. I shall be better perhaps for a little sea air and change, as I have been pretty steadily at it since I returned to Rome nearly a year ago. I am by nature what the Arabs call “a son of the way”! If there are female tramps among them, I suppose it would be called a daughter of the way.
The first great Woman’s Congress will be held here soon at the new Palace of Justice. Etta de Viti and Cora Brazza (two American girls married to Italian noblemen) have worked so hard for it they are on the verge of breaking down. Last night we had an interesting man for dinner, Wilfranc Hubbard, the new correspondent of the London Times, who takes the place of Wickham Steed, who has been sent to Berlin. The position of the Times correspondent here is almost an official one, and ten times as important as most official appointments. Carl Federn came too, the man who, I am told, first gave Emerson to Germany through his translation. He is a little flame of a creature like zigzag lightning; he is a friend of Elizabeth Fairchild and the defender of Linda Murri, whom he believes was falsely accused of murdering her husband. Most interesting of all our guests was Cunninghame Graham. He is a writer and a lovely person of exquisite charm. Of an old Scotch family, he has inherited much from a Spanish grandfather. He is a liberal if not a socialist. He has comforted much, for I get so confused with the pressure on my mind of Rome’s conservatism. You see almost all artists are naturally conservatives. They say there has never been a great art without great art patrons. The argument that neither republicanism or socialism makes for art is hard to refute. “The greatest good of the greatest number may be a high ideal, for a state to strive for,” they say, “but it is leveling! Every man will be his own poet and painter.”
Rome, December 28, 1908. I reached home safely at six o’clock in the evening of Christmas Day. The great Christmas present was the fact that the picture (Diana of the Tides) was finished. Just as J. was signing his name to the big canvas the telegram announcing my arrival was slipped under his door. Rather a neat coincidence!
Towards the close of the year 1908 there occurred the most stupendous disaster that, until that time, had come within my ken; this was more than five years before that fatal day when Germany let fall the mask and the World War was declared. During the night of December twenty-eighth, Sicily and Calabria were visited by one of the greatest earthquakes in history, the cities of Reggio and Messina were destroyed and two hundred thousand people were killed, among others the American Consul and his wife. For the next six months my husband and I threw ourselves into relief work for the survivors. He played a really important part, being one of the volunteers who under the gallant leadership of Commander Reginald R. Belknap, the naval attaché of the American Embassy, sailed on the relief ship Bayern for the stricken region with a cargo of food, clothing, tools, and medicines. The expedition was organized by an American Committee headed by our Ambassador, Mr. Griscom.
The report of conditions brought back from the devastated country was so terrific that our government, acting in conjunction with the American Red Cross, followed it up with a relief expedition on a much larger scale. This undertook and accomplished nothing less than the building of a whole series of villages to shelter the survivors. They established headquarters at Messina, where a complete village was erected in record time, with a large church, a comfortable hotel, schools, offices and dwellings for twelve thousand people. The story of this unique undertaking has been well told by Commander (now Captain) Belknap in his interesting book, “American House Building at Messina.” In my “Sicily in Shadow and in Sun” I have given some description of the American village on the plain of the Mosella at Messina and of what our people contributed to the Villaggio Regina Elena, where a modern, up-to-date hospital was erected and named for the wife of our ambassador. In all this work my husband had the privilege of acting as architect, designer, and general helper to his intrepid and resourceful chief Belknap, who in his report to the Secretary of the Navy, in 1909, pays Mr. Elliott the following tribute:
“Thanks are due in a measure that I cannot express to Mr. John Elliott, who shared every hardship with unfailing good humor, and left his beautifying touch on every part of our work. He was the first volunteer, and the most devoted worker; rendering service that can be appreciated only by one who enjoyed his close companionship and discerning counsel throughout a long period of pressing occupation.”
Rome, January 12, 1909. Friday J. sailed bravely away from Civitavecchia for Messina with the American Relief Expedition. Last night I had a message from the Embassy saying he was well and doing splendid work on the Bayern, the ship fitted out by the American Committee to go to the smaller desolated Calabrian villages that have as yet had little or no help. The Bayern is a North German Lloyd steamer our committee chartered and loaded with food, clothes, tools, nails, household and field utensils, coffee, medicines and tobacco. One dear American sent ten thousand cigars and five hundred boxes of cigarettes. He said:
“The poor devils will need a little luxury!”