If I fell instantly in love with the Baptistery, I was equally moved by the Leaning Tower—a perfect thing. If man is wise and thoughtful he can keep the wonders of great beauty by renewing them as they wear; but will he remain wise and thoughtful? So little is thought of true beauty. Think of the guns thundering on the Parthenon and of Napoleon carrying away the horses of St. Mark’s! I mounted the steps of the tower (one hundred and seventy-nine feet, the same height as the Baptistery), walking out on and around each of its six balustrades and surveying the surrounding landscape rich in lovely mountains showing across a plain. The tower tilts fourteen feet out of plumb, and as I walked its circular arcades at different heights I had the feeling that I might topple over and come floundering down to the grass below. As I rose higher the view increased in loveliness; and at the top I found an old bell-man who called my attention by signs to the fact that the heaviest of the seven bells was placed on the side opposite the overhanging wall of the tower to balance it. He also pointed in the different directions which presented lovely views, indicating to the west and southwest the mouth of the Arno, the Mediterranean, Leghorn and the Tuscan Islands, to the north the Alps and Mount Pisani where the Carrara quarries are, and to the south, Rome. Some Italian soldiers from the neighboring barracks came up as I went down and entered the cathedral, which interiorly was as beautiful as any which I saw abroad. The Italian Gothic is so much more perfectly spaced on the interior than the Northern Gothic and the great flat roof, coffered in gold, is so much richer and more soothing in its aspect. The whole church is of pure marble yellowed by age, relieved, however, by black and colored bands.
I came away after a time and entered the Campo Santo, the loveliest thing of its kind that I saw in Europe. I never knew, strange to relate, that graveyards were made, or could be made, into anything so impressively artistic. This particular ground was nothing more than an oblong piece of grass, set with several cypress trees and surrounded with a marble arcade, below the floor and against the walls of which are placed the marbles, tombs and sarcophagi. The outer walls are solid, windowless and decorated on the inside with those naïve, light-colored frescoes of the pupils of Giotto. The inner wall is full of arched, pierced windows with many delicate columns through which you look to the green grass and the cypress trees and the perfectly smooth, ornamented dome at one end. I have paid my tribute to the cypress trees, so I will only say that here, as always, wherever I saw them—one or many—I thrilled with delight. They are as fine artistically as any of the monuments or bronze doors or carved pulpits or perfect baptismal fonts. They belong where the great artistic impulse of Italy has always put them—side by side with perfect things. For me they added the one final, necessary touch to this realm of romantic memory. I see them now and I hear them sigh.
I walked back to my train through highly colored, winding, sidewalkless, quaint-angled streets crowded with houses, the façades of which we in America to-day attempt to imitate on our Fifth Avenues and Michigan Avenues and Rittenhouse Squares. The medieval Italians knew so well what to do with the door and the window and the cornice and the wall space. The size of their window is what they choose to make it, and the door is instinctively put where it will give the last touch of elegance. How often have I mentally applauded that selective artistic discrimination and reserve which will use one panel of colored stone or one niche or one lamp or one window, and no more. There is space—lots of it—unbroken until you have had just enough; and then it will be relieved just enough by a marble plaque framed in the walls, a coat-of-arms, a window, a niche. I would like to run on in my enthusiasm and describe that gem of a palace that is now the Palazzo Communale at Perugia, but I will refrain. Only these streets in Pisa were rich with angles and arcades and wonderful doorways and solid plain fronts which were at once substantial and elegant. Trust the Italian of an older day to do well whatever he did at all; and I for one do not think that this instinct is lost. It will burst into flame again in the future; or save greatly what it already possesses.
CHAPTER XXXI
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ROME
As we approached Rome in the darkness I was on the qui vive for my first glimpse of it; and impatient with wonder as to what the morning would reveal. I was bound for the Hotel Continental—the abode, for the winter at least, of Barfleur’s mother, the widow of an Oxford don. I expected to encounter a severe and conservative lady of great erudition who would eye the foibles of Paris and Monte Carlo with severity.
“My mother,” Barfleur said, “is a very conservative person. She is greatly concerned about me. When you see her, try to cheer her up, and give her a good report of me. I don’t doubt you will find her very interesting; and it is just possible that she will take a fancy to you. She is subject to violent likes and dislikes.”
I fancied Mrs. Barfleur as a rather large woman with a smooth placid countenance, a severe intellectual eye that would see through all my shams and make-believes on the instant.
It was midnight before the train arrived. It was raining; and as I pressed my nose to the window-pane viewing the beginning lamps, I saw streets and houses come into view—apartment houses, if you please, and street cars and electric arc-lights, and asphalt-paved streets, and a general atmosphere of modernity. We might have been entering Cleveland for any particular variation it presented. But just when I was commenting to myself on the strangeness of entering ancient Rome in a modern compartment car and of seeing box cars and engines, coal cars and flat cars loaded with heavy material, gathered on a score of parallel tracks, a touch of the ancient Rome came into view for an instant and was gone again in the dark and rain. It was an immense, desolate tomb, its arches flung heavenward in great curves, its rounded dome rent and jagged by time. Nothing but ancient Rome could have produced so imposing a ruin and it came over me in an instant, fresh and clear like an electric shock, like a dash of cold water, that this was truly all that was left of the might and glory of an older day. I recall now with delight the richness of that sensation. Rome that could build the walls and the baths in far Manchester and London, Rome that could occupy the Ile-St.-Louis in Paris as an outpost, that could erect the immense column to Augustus on the heights above Monte Carlo, Rome that could reach to the uppermost waters of the Nile and the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and rule, was around me. Here it was—the city to which St. Paul had been brought, where St. Peter had sat as the first father of the Church, where the first Latins had set up their shrine to Romulus and Remus, and worshiped the she-wolf that had nourished them. Yes, this was Rome, truly enough, in spite of the apartment houses and the street cars and the electric lights. I came into the great station at five minutes after twelve amid a clamor of Italian porters and a crowd of disembarking passengers. I made my way to the baggage-room, looking for a Cook’s guide to inquire my way to the Continental, when I was seized upon by one.
“Are you Mr. Dreiser?” he said.