Mr. Marsh had followed the Italian court all about Italy--to Turin, Florence, Rome. He stood high in the estimation of the Italian court and foreign diplomats. His genius and scholarship were now casting luster on the American name.
“Don’t tell anybody at home what a palace I live in,” he said to me, jocosely. “They will think me an aristocrat over there, whereas I am the plainest of republicans. Here in Rome a palace is just as cheap as anything. Everybody lives in a palace here.”
In another part of the palace, I saw Guido’s great picture of Aurora. I noticed the mark of the French cannon ball that went through it when Garibaldi was defending Rome.
Bought a copy of Guido’s Cenci, and then went and looked at the Angelo bridge, where they cut off the head of Beatrice.
I went often to Mr. Freeman’s studio. He was the first American painter to live in Rome. He was, too, the first U.S. Consul to Italy, and he it was who protected Margaret Fuller, on a time, from the danger of a mob. It was at the time the French forced their way into Rome. He planted the Stars and Stripes on her balcony, and the mob fell back. That was in 1849.
Freeman painted a picture for me that has inspired a poem by J. Buchanan Read. It was “The Princess.” The model was a blonde, with hair like gold. Freeman corrected my notion that there were no blondes in Italy. There are many, just as there were in the time of the earlier masters. Yellow was Titian’s favorite color.
Freeman told me much of Rome, as it was when he first went there, in 1840. He lived there under three popes, Gregory, Pius IX and Leo XIII.
Rome was entirely different from to-day. The houses had open entrances, or, where there were doors, they swung outward to the street, like American barn doors. There were almost no sidewalks, and the few seen were only wide enough for one person. The streets were dimly lighted by occasional oil lamps, great distances apart. Of course, assassination in such streets was of common occurrence. The water spouts of the houses were so projected as to empty themselves in cataracts on the heads of passers-by.
The pavements were made of cobble stones, that had to be covered with straw or earth when the Pope went abroad in his grandeur.
The city was full of foreign artists, along in the fifties, as now. Among them were Crawford and Greenough, Story and West, whom Byron called “Europe’s worst painter and poor England’s best.”