Views and Opinions

by Ouida

The director of the Gaddi gardens bore the delightful name of Messer Giuseppe Benincasa Fiammingo; and a contented life indeed this worthy and accomplished student must have led, working for such a patron, and passing the peaceful seasons and fruitful years amidst the cedar-shadows and the lemon-flower fragrance of this abode of the Muses and of Flora and Pomona.

We dwell too much upon the strife and storm, the bloodshed and the internecine feuds of the passed centuries; we forget too often the many happy and useful lives led in them, which were spent untroubled and consecrated to fair studies and pursuits, and which let the clangour of battle go by unheard, and mingled not with camp or court or council.

We forget too often the placid life of Gui Patin under his cherry trees by the river, or of the Etiennes, in the learned and happy seclusion of their classic studies and noble work, even their women speaking Latin as their daily and most natural tongue; we only have ear for the fusillades of the Fronde, or the war-cries of Valois and Guise. In like manner we are too apt only to dwell upon the daggers and poison powders, the factions and feuds, the conspiracies and the city riots of the Moyenage and Renaissance, and forget the many quiet, useful, happy persons clad in doublet and hose, like Messer Benincasa, and the many learned and noble gentlemen clothed in velvet and satin, like Niccolo Gaddi, his master, who passed peacefully from their cradle to their grave.

In the fifteenth century, according to Benedetto Varchi, who himself saw them, there were no less than a hundred and thirty of these magnificent demesnes in the city; and whatever may have been the sins of the earlier and the follies of the later Medici, that family, one and all, loved flowers, woods and lawns, and fostered tenderly ‘il gusto del giardinaggio’ in their contemporaries. This taste in their descendants has entirely disappeared. They are bored by such of the magnificent gardens of old as still exist in their towns and around their villas; they abandon them without regret, grudging the care of keeping them up, and letting them out to nursery gardeners or to mere peasants whose only thought is, of course, to make profit out of them.

The Latins were at all times celebrated for their beautiful gardens; all classic records and all archæological discoveries prove it. The Romans and the Tuscans, the Venetians and the Lombards, in later mediæval times, inherited this elegant taste, this art, which is twin child itself with Nature; but in our immediate epoch it has vanished; the glorious legacies of it are supported with indifference or done away with without regret. How is this to be explained? I know not unless the reason be that there has come from without a contagion of vulgarity, avarice and bad taste which the Italian temperament has been too weak to resist, and with which it has become saturated and debased. The modern Italian will throw money away recklessly on the Bourses or at the gaming-tables; he will spend it frivolously at foreign baths and fashionable seaports; he will let himself be ruined by a pack of idle and good-for-nothing hangers-on whom he has not the courage to shake off; but he grudges every penny which is required for the maintenance of woodland and garden, and he will allow his trees to be felled, his myrtles, bays and laurels to vanish, his fountains to be choked up by sand or weed, and his lawns to degenerate into rough pasture, without shame or remorse.

Almost all these noble gardens enumerated by Varchi still existed in Florence before 1859. Now but few remain. Even the Torrigiani gardens (which for many reasons one would have supposed would have been kept intact by that family) have been almost entirely destroyed within the last year, and the site of them is being rapidly covered with mean and ugly habitations. The magnificent Capponi garden, so dear to the blind statesman and scholar, Gino Capponi, has been more than half broken up by his heirs. The renowned Serristori garden was cut in two and shorn of half of its beauty when the first half of the Via dei Bardi was destroyed. The Guadagni garden is advertised as building ground. The Guicciardini gardens are still standing, but as they and their palace have been given over to amalgamated railway companies, the respite accorded to them will probably be of brief duration. The bead roll of these devastated pleasure-grounds and historic groves could be continued in an almost endless succession of names and memories, and the immensity of their irreparable loss to the city is scarcely to be estimated. When we reflect, moreover, that before 1859 the whole of the ground from the Carraia Bridge westward was pasture and garden and avenue, where now there are only bricks and mortar and a network of ugly streets, we shall more completely comprehend the senseless folly which built over such green places, or, where it did not build, made in their stead such barren, dusty, featureless, blank spaces as the Piazza degli Zuavi and its congeners.

Ubaldino Peruzzi (who has been buried with pomp in Santa Croce!) was the chief promoter and leader of this mania of demolition. It was at his instigation that the Ponte alle Grazie and the chapel of the Alberti were pulled down; that the Tetto dei Pisani was destroyed to make way for an ugly bank; that the noble trees at the end of the Cascine were felled to make way for a gaudy, gingerbread bust and a hideous guardhouse; that the beautiful Stations of the Cross leading to San Miniato al Monte were destroyed to give place to vulgar eating-houses and trumpery villas; and that old palaces, old gardens and old churches were laid waste to create the bald and monotonous quays called severally the Lung Arno Serristori and Torrigiani. Peruzzi began, and for many years directed, the destruction of the beauties of the city, and only stopped when, having brought the town to the verge of bankruptcy, funds failed him, and he retired perforce from municipal office.

But if it may be feared that the good we do does perish with us, it is certain that the evil we do does long survive us, and flourishes and multiplies when we are dust. The lessons which Peruzzi taught his fellow-citizens in speculation and spoliation will long remain, whilst his bones crumble beneath a lying epitaph. His dead hand still directs the scrambling haste with which the historic centre of the city is being torn down, in order that glass galleries, brummagem shops, miserable statues, and a general reign of stucco and shoddy, may, as far as in them lies, bring the Athens of Italy to a level with some third-rate American township.

Except with a few rare exceptions, Italians are wholly unable to comprehend the indignation with which their callousness fills the cultured observer of every other nationality. Anxiety to get ready-money, an ignorance of their true interests, and a babyish love of new things, however vulgar or barbarous, have completely extinguished, in the aristocracy and bureaucracy, all sentiment for the arts and all reverence for their inheritance and for the beauty of Nature. It would seem as if a kind of paralysis of all perception had fallen on the whole nation. A prince of great culture, refinement and reputed taste having occasion this year to repair his palace, has stuccoed and coloured it all over a light ochre yellow! A great noble sold his ancestral gardens last year to a building company, and his family clapped their hands with delight as the first ilex trees fell beneath the axe! To make a paven street in Venice, unneeded, incongruous, vulgar, abhorrent to every educated eye and mind, Byzantine windows, Renaissance doorways, admirable scrollworks, enchanting façades, marbles, and mosaics, of hues like the sea-shell and the sea-mouse, are ruthlessly torn down and pushed out of sight for ever. Ruskin in vain protests, his tears scorched up by his rage, and both alike powerless. Gregorovius died recently, his last years embittered and tortured by the daily destruction of the Rome so sublime and sacred to him. I remember well the day when the axe was first laid to the immemorial groves of the Farnesina: a barbarous and venal act, done to gratify private spleen and greed, leaving a mere mass of mud and dirt where so late had been the gracious gardens which had seen Raffaelle and Petrarca pace beneath their shade. The Spanish Duke, Ripalda, whose passionate love for his Farnesina was known to all Rome, died of the sorrow and fever brought on by seeing its desecration, died actually of a broken heart. ‘I shall not long survive them,’ he said to me, the tears standing in his proud eyes, as he looked on the ruin of his avenues and lawns, which had so late been the chief beauty of the Tiber, facing their sponsor and neighbour, the majestic Farnese Palace.

To the student, the artist, the archæologist, to live in Rome now is to suffer inexpressibly every hour, in mind and heart.