Last night Madame Bompiani invited us to tea with her. She lives at the Hilda’s tower palace, celebrated by Hawthorne, in the “Marble Faun.” Her husband is a well-known Roman lawyer, and she herself writes interesting letters to the Chicago Interior. We learned much about things in Rome direct from him, and after the supper we were taken up to the tower.
One of the guests was Madame Guyani, a sister of the hostess. She was a fine conversationalist and interested us much. Only a few months ago she was a sufferer in the terrible earthquake at Ischia. She is still lame as a result of the experiences of that fearful night. She told us all about the earthquake. The night of the disaster she wandered or crept about the fields till morning. The parts of the island which were nothing short of an earthly paradise in the evening were only piles of ruins and dead people in the morning. It was as if Eden had been struck by a thunderbolt, only here there was a happy, unsuspecting people to be suddenly hurled out of existence.
Sunday.--Instead of going to church I stay in Mr. Franklin Simmons’ studio and watch him making a bust of Marion Crawford, the novelist. He has a good subject, for Marion Crawford is a large, handsome man with a fine figure and a genial face. There was a joking dialogue going on as to whether it is the great novelist now sitting to the sculptor Simmons or the great sculptor Simmons doing the face of a novelist, each modestly insisting the other only had claims on immortality. I liked Crawford and his genial ways. I had just finished reading his “Roman Singer.”
Frank Simmons seems to me to be the best sculptor in Rome, though he is not yet the most celebrated. He does not seem to try to seek fame; but lets it seek him, which it is doing. Marion Crawford, too, I know, regarded Simmons as the best sculptor living, and some day he will make him the hero of a great novel.
Italy is called the land of art and yet curiously there are few great Italian artists. Its galleries sometimes seem to me like opened coffins, where one beholds among the bones the jewel work of some dead age. I feel here much as I felt in Berlin when looking on the golden necklaces of Helen of Troy, dug up by Schliemann. All the fine paintings and marbles here in Rome seem like the ruins, relics of another time. Foreign artists by the hundred, live and work here for the inspiration they get from the fragments of the past. They taste the wine made good with age and mix some of it in the bottles of new wine of their own making. There are more imitators in Rome than anywhere else in the world.
*****
The duties of the consulate here are nothing compared with Zurich or with any other commercial consulate. The office is often full of callers, but their errands are visits of courtesy or to have passports issued and the like. The trade of Rome with America is insignificant.
There are two regular consular clerks here, burdened with nothing to do. The laws provide for some thirteen of these “regulars” in the consular service, who hold their places for life. They are rarely promoted, and grow gray doing little. One good, hired clerk whose staying in depends on his zeal and fitness and not on his self-importance, is worth a dozen of them. They should be made responsible to somebody. The salary of the Consul General does not pay his expenses in Rome.
Palazzo Mariani, where we live, is a very magnificent structure outside, with great white marble stairways within, leading from floor to floor. But it is cold as a sepulcher. No stoves and no fire-places save one little niche in the wall, where a few burning fagots scarcely change the temperature.
At night we come home (very late, as parties only begin at nine or so), and go to bed in a big cold bedroom with a brick floor. Our so-called cook stove is a little iron box heated with charcoal, in a kitchen about five feet square, but Antoinette seems to know how to broil a kid on it every day.