Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

These fluctuations account for the many transportations of the relics of the chief martyrs to different hiding-places during those early centuries. For some hundred and fifty years the bodies of the Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, reposed in the tombs where they had been first placed, and where they now lie, but soon after the accession of Heliogabalus to the throne, the reigning Pope, St. Calixtus, found it necessary to remove them to a distant and secret spot in order to protect them from the most revolting sacrilege. Heliogabalus, the maddest of all the mad Emperors, suddenly decreed that no god but himself should be worshipped in Rome. He built a gorgeous temple to himself on the Palatine, and as the pagan historian, Lampridius, tells us, made arrangements to transfer to this temple not only all the objects of worship most sacred in the eyes of the Romans, and regarded by them as talismans upon the safeguarding of which the destinies of the Empire depended—the fire of Vesta, the statue of Cybele, the Palladium, the Ancilia—but also “the religions of the Jews and Samaritans, and the Christian objects of devotion, in order that the priests of Heliogabalus should hold the secrets of every worship.”

It was well known that the objects most dear to Christian devotion were the bodies of the glorious Apostles, and a hundred and fifty years of continuous pilgrimage to their tombs had marked the way fairly clearly to those once secluded spots. St. Calixtus, it seems, was already preparing to remove the bodies when a new whim of the maniac Emperor caused him to do so with extreme haste. Heliogabalus issued orders for a great exhibition of harnessed elephants on the Vatican plain, and, to procure sufficient space for the show, commanded that all inequalities should be levelled and all the sepulchres, pagan or Christian, should be destroyed.

In fear and haste, St. Calixtus transported the holy remains to the Appian Way, already by that time honey-combed with subterranean vaults and passages. Above ground, the place was marked by the monuments of the Cæcilii, whose illustrious daughter was soon to lie below; but St. Calixtus feared that the existing vaults, now for the first time called “Catacombs,” were already too widely known to offer complete protection to the precious relics; so he caused a new chamber to be dug deep in the rock, to the right of the way, disposing the only entrance to it through a well; and there he laid the Apostles, each in a separate tomb, to abide the hour of the triumph of the Church.

The Appian Way, with its miles of magnificent pagan monuments on the surface, and its far-reaching secret sanctuaries below, has in the course of time taken on something like a personality of its own. It is like a ribbon of marble laid across a sea of beauty even now, when the famous villas and gardens, overflowing with blooms gathered from every clime and shaded by groves of ilex and cedar, of palm and sycamore and cypress, have all been swept into the rich, soft mould; there you can look across twenty miles of waving grasses and wild flowers, broken only by some fragment still majestic in ruin and guarded by the dark, slender watch-towers—memories of a later age, when the few scared shepherds had to fly from Hun or Saracen—that rise at intervals all the way to the sea. The solitude seems boundless, yet gentle and familiar; little blind winds come wandering across from the south and lose their way among the flowers; for the Via Appia leads due south, and one knows that it goes on into the war-ploughed Kingdom of Naples, that “hothouse of Saints and Sinners,” with its fierce suns burning down on castles whose very stones cry tragedy, on scorching hillsides where the black grapes ripen into fiery wine, on flats seething in the heat under the man-high crops of maize. But near Rome, looking towards the soft green outline of the Alban Hills, all that seems illusion; this is reality, this empty space, untroubled by past or future, this sweep of dun gold and fading purple; its surrounding hills that all look towards Rome have seen the place unpeopled, seen it swarming with life; have seen it flaring with pomp and then submerged in blood; now they are guardians of that which modern cataclysms have failed to rend—the peace of a place whence even the memory of humanity is banished and Nature smiles and broods alone over her lovely handiwork.

Often I have longed to withdraw for a time to one of those lonely watch-towers to “think things out.” We Crawfords have never been able to see a really solitary spot without wanting it for our own. A certain empty tomb lost among the Umbrian hills, with the sun turning the red rock to gold and the wild camomile swaying its yellow blossoms in the breeze over the doorway, has been a haven of my spirit through many a breathless, over-peopled hour. I could fly there in mind, for days at a time, into an atmosphere of such still liberty as is only granted to disembodied souls. My dear brother Marion could never resist the call of fortressed solitudes. The story of how he became the master of San Niccola in Calabria is too characteristic not to be told in this connection. San Niccola is an Angevin castle, with walls twenty feet thick in places, perched on the rocks over an inhospitable little bay on the coast of Calabria, a bay too small and shallow to permit of sailing vessels being anchored inside its natural breakwater of tumbled stones. Marion often sailed thither, and, leaving the yacht outside, would scramble on shore and linger for hours in the shade of the huge pile, weaving new stories and calling up pictures of the days when the cry would ring along the coast that a Saracen sail was in sight, and the inhabitants, snatching up whatever they could carry, raced for the nearest tower of refuge. San Niccola looks like a huge dark monolith, wide at the base and tapering slightly towards its truncated summit. It contained but two apartments, a vast square space, without windows, for animals below, and one great hall, as sparsely windowed as possible, above. In this it resembles most of its fellows along the coast, where “Carlo d’Angiò,” still almost a living personality to the people, planted them, at short distances from one another, for this very purpose.

It was a roasting hot day in August; the felucca (this was before my brother bought the Alda) was swinging at anchor in deep water, and the “padroni,” Marion and my sister-in-law, were sitting on the rocks in the shade, after lunch—the hour when most people go to sleep, but always a particularly inspiring one to him and responsible for many of his quaint whims. Suddenly he jumped up and announced that he needed a walk—he would go to the town—a tiny hamlet some miles distant—and buy—I forget what—fresh eggs for the morrow’s breakfast, I think. Would Bessie like to come?

Bessie, dozing over a novel under the shelter of a huge pink parasol, scarcely thought it necessary to reply audibly to such a crazy proposition, but as Marion turned and walked away she signalled to the faithful Luigi to follow and look after him, which Luigi—with what groans one can imagine, just after the midday macaroni and in that blazing heat—obediently did.

The day wore on, the sun began to sink, and the evening breeze ruffled the water. The parasol had long been closed, the novel thrown aside, and Bessie was beginning to look anxiously landward, when the truants reappeared in the distance. As they drew nearer she could see that Marion carried in his hand a huge iron key, while Luigi, directly behind him, was flinging his arms up in the air in gestures of despair. As they came close, the gestures became those of beseeching deprecation, and she realised that he was trying to say, unbeknown to the “padrone,” “It was not my fault, Signora mia, oh indeed, not my fault!” while Marion, a little in doubt as to his reception, stopped before her and held up the great rusty key, saying, “It’s mine, mine, my dear, for the next thirty years!”

“What—this awful place? Oh, why did I let you go away without me?” she wailed. “What on earth are you going to do with it?—and what have you paid for it?”

He mentioned the sum—not a very large one, it is true—but Luigi, hovering near, pale and scared, whispered, with every appearance of sincere grief: “He could have had it for the hundredth part of that, Signora! Alas, for the good money! But it was not my fault—there was no holding the Signore, and those assassins at the Municipio took advantage of him!”