The King of Italy has 35 million subjects, but in Rome lives another mighty prince, the Pope, though his kingdom is not of this world. His throne is the chair of St. Peter, his arms the triple tiara and the crossed keys which open and close the gates of the kingdom of heaven. He has 270 million subjects, the Roman Catholics. For political reasons he is a voluntary prisoner in the Vatican, a collection of great palaces containing more than 10,000 halls and apartments. There also are installed museums, libraries, and collections of manuscripts of vast extent and value. The Vatican museum of sculpture is the richest in the world. In the Sistine Chapel, a sanctuary 450 years old, Michael Angelo adorned the roof with great pictures of the creation of the world and man, of the Fall and the Flood, and at the end wall an immense picture of the Last Judgment. To the west of the palace stands the Pope's gardens and park, and to the south the Church of St. Peter, the largest temple in Christendom. The whole forms a small town of itself; and this town is one of the greatest in the world, a seat of art and learning, and, above all, the focus of a great religion. For from here the Pope sends forth his bulls of excommunication against heretics and sinners, and here he watches over his flock, the Catholics, in accordance with the Saviour's thrice repeated injunction to Peter: "Feed my sheep."
A drive through Rome is intensely interesting. The streets are mostly narrow and crooked, and we are always turning corners, driving across small triangular open places and in lanes where it is ticklish work to pass a vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Yet no boulevards, no great streets in the world, can rival in beauty the streets of Rome. They are skirted by old grey palaces built thousands of years ago rather than centuries, decorated with the most splendid window frames, friezes, and colonnades. Every portal is a work of art; round every corner comes a new surprise, a fountain with sea-horses and deities, a mediæval well, a moss-grown ruin of Imperial times, or a church with a tower whence bells have rung for centuries over Rome.
And what a commotion there is in all these narrow streets! Here comes a peasant driving his asses weighed down with baskets of melons and grapes. There a boy draws a handcart piled up with apricots, oranges, and nuts. Here we see men and women from the Campagna outside Rome, clad in their national costume, in which dirty white and red predominate, the men with black slouched hats, the women with white kerchiefs over their hair. They are of dark complexion, but on the cheeks of the younger ones the roses appear through the bronze. The patricians, the noble Romans who roll by lazily in fine carriages, are much fairer, and indeed the ladies are often as pale as if they had just left the cloister or were ready for the bier. Boys run begging after the carriage, and poor mothers with small infants in their arms beseech only a small coin. There are many in Rome who live from hand to mouth. But all are cheerful, all are comely.
Now we reach the bridge of St. Angelo over the muddy Tiber, and before us stands the massive round tower of the castle of St. Angelo, which the Emperor Hadrian built 1800 years ago as a mausoleum for himself. On the left is the piazza of St. Peter, which, with its surrounding buildings, its curved arcades, St. Peter's Church and the Vatican, is one of the grandest in the world. Between its constantly playing fountains has stood for 300 years an obelisk which the Emperor Caligula brought from Egypt to adorn Rome. It witnessed wonderful events long before the time of Moses. At its foot the children of Israel sang the melodies of their country during their servitude. It was a decoration of Nero's circus, and saw thousands of Christian martyrs torn to pieces by Gallic hounds and African lions; and still it lifts itself 80 feet into the air in a single block, untouched by time and the strife of men.
At the north side of the piazza is the gate of the Vatican, where the Swiss Guards keep watch in antique red and yellow uniforms. Before us are the great steps of St. Peter's Church. We enter the grand portico and pass through one of the bronze doors into the church. All the dimensions are so immensely great that we stop in astonishment. Now our eyes lose themselves in sky-high vaulting, glittering with colour, and now we admire the columns and their capitals, pictures in mosaic or monuments in marble. Rome was not built in a day, says the proverb, and St. Peter's Church alone was the work of 120 years and twenty Popes. Italy's foremost artists, including Raphael and Michael Angelo, put the best of their energies into the building of this temple, where is the tomb of the Apostle Peter. The great church contains a bronze statue of the Apostle Peter in a sitting position, and the right foot is worn and polished by the kisses of the faithful. High above in the vaulting over his head is to be seen the following inscription in Latin:—"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven."
Paul has also a worthy memorial church in Rome, St. Paul's, which stands outside the walls. On the way thither we pass a small chapel where, it is said, Peter and Paul took leave of each other before they went to suffer martyrdom. On the façade the final words are inscribed. Paul said: "Peace be with you, thou foundation of the church and shepherd of Christ's lambs." And Peter: "Go forth in peace, thou preacher of the gospel, righteous guide to salvation." Paul's tomb is under the high altar of St. Paul's Church. In the interior of the church we notice portraits in mosaic of all the Popes from St. Peter to Leo XIII.
Rome is inexhaustible. It has grown up during 2600 years, and each age has built on the ruins of the preceding. The city is piled up in strata like a geological deposit. What lies hidden at the bottom is scarcely known at all; that is from the time of the early kings of Rome. Then follows the city of the Republic, and upon it the Rome of the Emperors, the cosmopolitan city, where the Cæsars from their palace on the Palatine stretched their sceptre over all the known world from foggy Britain and the dark forests of Germany to the burning deserts of Africa, from the mountains of Spain to Galilee and Judæa. Many stately remains of this time of greatness are still preserved among the modern streets and houses. Vandals, Goths, and other barbarians have sacked Rome, monsters of the Imperial house have devastated the city to wipe out the remembrance of their predecessors and glorify themselves; but if Rome was not built in a day, so two thousand years have not sufficed to blot out its magnificence.
Then follow new strata, the Christian age, the Middle Ages, and modern times, with their innumerable churches, monasteries, and massive solemn palaces. Christianity built on the ruins of paganism. Ancient and modern times are inextricably mixed. Up there on the Capitoline hill rides a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in bronze. Look round, and there on the farther bank of the Tiber another horseman looks over the eternal city, the brave champion of young Italy's liberty, Garibaldi. You ride through a street lined with grand shops in new buildings, and in a couple of minutes you are at the Forum Romanum, the Roman market-place, the heart of the world empire, the square for markets, popular assemblies, and judicial courts, a marble hall in the open air. Over its flags, victors, accompanied by their comrades in arms and their prisoners, marched up to the Capitol to sacrifice in the temple of Jupiter, where now only a few pillars and ruins remain of all the splendour Julius Cæsar and Augustus lavished upon it.
