If we swept by a ruined bridge, he told me to what period of history it pertained, and to what event it owed its smashed condition; if we came to a hillside town, I heard from him its name, and for what it had been famed. So, as if school itself had become a delicious holiday, we passed by Perugia and Assisi and Terni, and other of these storied towns.
Italians tell one what they are. He was a Jesuit; he had found shelter among the nobles of Florence, who loved their old Government and hated their new, and who were generous to the clergy who had been turned out of their monasteries, then all empty. But a few months of employment awaited him; the libraries had been removed from the monasteries to the capital, and he had been summoned to assist in their arrangement.
“Non mi piace la vostra Roma,” said Victor Emmanuel, after his first session there as king. It gave great offence; yet must I humbly repeat his words on my own account.
I have imagined ancient Rome; I have seen a picture of it restored in all its grandeur. What does it look like now? A grand city that had been lifted bodily from the seven hills and valleys into the air, and let to fall, smashed in pieces, like a service of crockery.
“… Non mi piace la vostra Roma” were the words of the king, so I may venture to repeat them.
The place is very disappointing at first, but they say it grows upon you. The misfortune is that it is called Rome instead of Popesburg—ancient Rome is squeezed out; but Popesburg is a picturesque old Italian town, interspersed scantily with remains yet older. The Pantheon stands up complete on its old pillars, only stripped of all its outside marble; then, near Santa Maria in Cosmedia, there is a lovely little temple of Vesta, encircled by its Corinthian marble columns, but its surroundings are of mud and slush at this hour.
These interspersed antiquities, of which there are many in the form of columns, with a pediment sadly bruised and broken through age and fight, are the most picturesque of the remains. Where they turn up as forums, the wreck is exhibited some twelve or twenty feet deep in large walled-in pits, like outdoor museums—bits of columns arranged in old order, like skittles, ready to be bowled over again. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is to see modern Rome from the bridges, itself decaying and crumbling, when the ancient city has already crumbled and decayed.
During the last eight hundred years there has been a sort of rebuilding, but it is not the urbs recondita of Augustus, whose Pantheon is still standing to connect the present with the past. Why, the columns of that temple, as I paced them, measured a diameter of eight feet! Where other temples had stood, churches have sprung up; and where the sherds of foundations remained, there are palaces now; but the palace of the Cæsars is empty space; the Forum is a skeleton exhumed for show. The gaps will never be filled again; Rome will remain a ruin; its architectural condition only such as one might conceive of Hades, where Hercules wanders still in disaffection. How unlike its later contemporary, Venice, that has been preserved, perfect, under a blue-glass sky!