Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The recollection of the artists’ festival brings to my mind some festivals of other times, remembered by very few persons now alive. Next to those connected with the great religious anniversaries, the ones most appreciated by the Romans were, I think, the lavish entertainments given by Prince Borghese in his villa to celebrate the vintage, in October. The Villa Borghese, as every one knows, is a great pleasure park just outside the Porta del Popolo, but those who see it as it is now, exploited for the most vulgar commercial ends, and at the same time sadly neglected, can scarcely form an idea of its original plan and ancient beauty. Even in earlier days the fashionable crowd that drove there in the afternoon knew nothing of the remote dells and glades that lay lost in the great masses of woodland, of the meadows that spread beyond the woods, of statues and fountains shrined in the green and sequestered places that one might pass near a hundred times without becoming aware of their existence. It was one of the playgrounds of my babyhood, but even after I was grown up I sometimes made new discoveries there.

In the very dawn of my recollections there is the memory of one of childhood’s long, long springs—when the days are all blue and silver overhead, and golden haze in the distance, and live emerald underfoot—when my old Maria used to convey me in the morning all the way from Villa Negroni on the Esquiline to Villa Borghese at Porta del Popolo, there to play in the grass till the sun began to sink towards St. Peter’s. I was three years old, and there was as yet no all-important baby brother to whose existence my own was to be subordinated a year later. Nobody had yet started to train and discipline me, and each sun that rose shone through just so many hours of Paradise. To Maria I was sun and moon, and if I was happy she was happy, but there was one occupation that kept her busy hour after hour in the distant villa, while I rolled on the grass—the picking of wild chicory for her supper salad. I can see her now, bent double, her good-natured dark face quite flushed with excitement as she pounced on the tender shoots that cropped up everywhere through the turf, till the red handkerchief in which she tied them up would hold no more, and she would slip it over her wrist, pick me up in her arms, and climb the tiers of the amphitheatre to reach our favourite luncheon room, a clear bubbling fountain in the avenue of ilex trees which crowned the ridge behind it. Here, close to the fountain, we had our midday meal, with the birds singing overhead and the wind dancing through the ilexes so that the ground was all a moving arabesque of sun and shade—the sweet fragrant ground that I could dig my fingers into to bring up handfuls of the gem-like ilex acorns that I loved so much. When the meal was over and my little silver mug had dipped up a drink for me from the fountain, I used to fall asleep in Maria’s arms to her queer lullabies—“Fringa, fringa!” or “Io vorrei ché alla luna ci s’andasse in carretella per védé le donne di lassù!” It always seemed to me that I woke up when she stopped singing, and I could not understand why Maria, with her head against a tree-trunk, was snoring happily and had to be waked up herself. But our sylvan siesta had lasted an hour or two; the sun was no longer overhead, but streaming in floods of level gold through all the lower branches, turning the turf and moss into live velvet, and flushing the statues’ pale cheeks to a semblance of life. Then, with many a halt for gathering anemones and violets, and some running away on my part to hide in the intricacies of the marble grottoes which burrow behind the rococo temple fountain at the first parting of the great avenue, we wandered towards the entrance, avoiding the avenue itself and threading our way through the little woods, till we came out by “Napoleon’s Tomb”—the exact copy of the original one at St. Helena, weeping willow and all—till the great iron gates came in sight, and we had to re-enter the city again. Sometimes Maria was instructed to bring me back to Nazzarri’s, in the Piazza di Spagna, in the middle of the day, for a solid meal; and then, scorning the “filet” which dear old Madame Nazzarri had had specially cooked for me, I used to persuade Maria to “trade” it for her own lunch, which I liked much better—“pane sott’ olio,” pieces of coarse casareccio bread sliced up in oil and vinegar, a favourite dish among the poorer classes to this day. Of course these little vagaries were most reprehensible and were never referred to at home—Maria’s conscience concerning itself with one thing only—my three-year-old will and pleasure! I believe she had a husband and son somewhere, and I know her old age was cosily cared for in the country, whence she used to come at intervals long after I was grown up, with a basket of “ciambelle” in one hand and a huge bunch of pink roses in the other.

I started to speak of the villa and not of myself, but it was one of those places so inextricably entwined with the web of my own life that I cannot even now set it apart from personal associations and memories. I think it must have been there that I first made friends with trees—as trees. In our enchanted garden on the Esquiline we had cypresses—the most perfect in all Italy—orange trees and ilexes, and one or two flowering junipers, but no shade trees or bits of woodland like those in the Borghese, where the ancient oaks and chestnuts and beeches meet high overhead along avenues so extensive that to make the round twice in an afternoon was as much as most people ever did. As one drove through those avenues one looked down on the unexplored and ever varied fields and woods within the circle, and, whether in winter or summer, at morning or at evening, one could always catch some new and lovely aspect of light and shade; it might be of mossed foliage, all bronze and velvet, thinning off into a copse of saplings unfurling their veil of feathery green in some breath of wind that left the giants calm and unruffled; or it might be a screen of bare tracery rising from some ridge, in cool, neutral tints into the chastened blue of an autumn sky; or again the fervid umber of slender trunks and branches cast up against the pale lemon and chrysoprase of a winter sunset; the blessed trees sounded every note, clothed themselves in every tint that human love and passion know, from the fresh unconscious caress of childhood to the pomegranate outburst of first love—and on to the gathered changeless riches of the heart’s maturity—beyond which there lies nothing but dissolution and re-birth. I cannot explain these things; those who know them as I do admit the mystic relationship of some of us to the trees; they can suffer, as I do, when murderers slay them ruthlessly, can kneel beside the fallen monarch and touch his pitiful wounds, and murmur all our love and veneration to the great heart that never will feel the sap leap and surge again. One poet said it for us all, when he wept in the woods before dawn and cried:

“Great man-bodied tree,

That mine arms in the dark are embracing,

What magic of sympathy lies

Between dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?”

It was in the Villa Borghese, driving round and round during the balmy afternoons of the spring before I was married, that my mother and I read William Morris’s “Jason” aloud to each other, and never did a perfect poem have a more perfect setting. Where the lie of the land mounts a little towards the Pincio side of the Borghese, four avenues converge on a circle, in the centre of which is one of those broad lake fountains only to be seen in Rome, marble-rimmed and guarded by a group of marble sea-horses rearing and pawing round the tall shaft of water that bursts up from their midst. The carriage way is broad around the fountain, for here all the vehicles must pass, and the Roman world of my day prided itself on its shining equipages and thoroughbred horses. But all its pomp and brilliancy pales, at a certain moment of the spring, before the pink forest of juniper trees that thrust their thick-set branches out, from the darker foliage behind, to smother the marble seats below them in one enormous wreath of rose-coloured bloom, a carnival of loveliness only to be matched by the cherry blossoms in Japan. Here we used to leave the carriage and make our way into the vast enclosures of meadow under the stone-pines, where the wild anemone hid all the grass under a mantle of vivid pink. The Borghese anemone was a real wild thing, very like the English wind-flower that shimmers all along the landslip and the undercliff where the spring tides are flinging the Channel surf in thunder against the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. Only the English wind-flower is pale and fragile, white or lavender for choice, and the Roman one is of a flaunting purple-pink, with a strong stem the colour of brown madder—as is fitting for a self-respecting flower sprung from a soil that has been steeped in sun and soaked in blood. And it has this peculiarity, unique, so far as I know, among wild flowers, that if you bring it home, in handfuls, as we used to do, and set it in water overnight, it will have grown many inches by the morning, every stalk stiff and proud, as if saying: “You thought I belonged in the fields, didn’t you? No, indeed, my place is in a palace!”

Very different is the anemone of Villa Doria, far away across the city, on the Janiculum. It too nestles beneath the stone-pines, in the fine short grass, but it is a patrician bloom, each flower perfect, with broad polished petals of pure ivory or vivid scarlet or monsignore purple, diverging from a heart as black as jet. It is chary of growth and keeps close to the ground, and you must tread delicately or you will crush some yet unopened buds. It meant a good deal to some of us—I wonder if the others remember? One did. Far away in China, just before my eldest boy was born, there blew to me across the world a film of Honiton lace, and when I spread it out, there was a garland of Villa Doria anemones worked in the red West Country that is the Italy of England, and sent as a greeting by a comrade of the vanished Roman days. Why don’t we all die when we are young and sweet and true?

But to return—(for the —th time?)—to my very much strayed sheep—the old October entertainments in the Villa Borghese. Those who have not lived in them would find it hard to understand what that month means to the children of the grape countries. It is the very crown of the year in Romagna, indeed all over Italy. The heats of summer, the stifling languors of scirocco, are over and gone; the air is divinely cool and bright, and everything sparkles in a sun that warms but no longer scorches; the wind comes dancing over the mountains, like a song, rustling the trees and shaking little showers of bronzed leaves down on one’s head. In the vineyards the vines were stripped of most of their leaves in August to let the grapes bake in the sun till their hearts are like syrup in the black tight-drawn skins. Now, if the year is a good one, the rain came after the Feast of the Assumption to soften and swell the purple covering to all but bursting point, and the few leaves that hang on the vines have turned scarlet and yellow, so that they look like huge gaudy butterflies hovering round the long pear-shaped clusters of fruit. The strong wilful “ceps” is like fretted gold in the sunshine; every bunch that is brought to one’s table must be of perfect shape and have two or three inches of that corrugated stem to carry it by and two leaves at its head for wings; but by the first day of October the mere cutting for market is over, and the real business of the vintage begins, when the great wains go lumbering down the alleys of the vineyard, drawn by meek white oxen who move slowly but plunge into the rich loose soil up to the fetlock at every step.