I.--A Boyhood in Rome
My earliest recollections take me back to my tender youth, when I lived with my widowed mother in a little garret in a Roman square. She supported us by sewing and by the rent of a larger room, sublet to a young painter. On the house opposite there was an image of the Virgin, before which, when the evening bells rang, I and the neighbours' children used to kneel and sing in honour of the Mother of God and the Child Jesus. Once an English family stopped to listen; and the gentleman gave me a silver coin, "because of my fine voice," as my mother told me.
My mother's confessor, Fra Martino, always showed great kindness to me; and I spent many hours with him at the convent. It was through him that I became chorister in the Capuchin church, and was allowed to carry the great censer.
Before I was nine, I was chosen as one of the boys and girls who were to preach between Christmas and the New Year in the church of Ara Croeli, before the image of Jesus. I had no fear, and it seemed decided that I, of all children, gave most delight; but after me came a little girl of exquisitely delicate form, bright countenance, and so melodious a voice that even my mother, with all her pride of me, awarded her the palm, and declared that she was just like an angel. But I had often to repeat my speech at home, and then made up a new one describing the festival in the church, which was considered just as good.
One moonlit evening, on returning with my mother from a visit in Trastevere, we found a crowd in the Piazza di Trevi, listening to a man singing to a guitar--not songs like those which I had so often heard, but about things around him, of what we saw and heard, and we ourselves were in the song. My mother told me he was an improvisatore; and Federigo, our artist lodger, told me I should also improvise, for I was really a poet. And I tried it forthwith--singing about the foodshop over the way, with its attractively set out window and the haggling customers. I gained much applause; and from this time forth I turned everything into song.
My first visit to the country ended in a sad event, which was to shape the whole course of my life. It was in June, and my mother and her friend Mariuccia took me to see the famous flower fête at Genzano. We stayed the night at an inn, and in the morning joined the dense holiday crowd that moved over the carpet of flowers on the pavement of the main street. Suddenly there was a piercing cry--a pair of unmanageable horses rushed through. I was thrown down, and all was blackness. When I awoke, Mother of God, I lay with my head on Mariuccia's lap, beside the lifeless form of my mother, crushed by the carriage wheel! The occupant of the carriage, a gentleman of the Borghese family, had escaped with a shaking, and sent a servant in rich livery with a purse containing twenty scudi for the motherless child.
Mariuccia took me back to Rome; it was decided that her parents, who kept flocks in the Campagna--honest people to whom my twenty scudi would be wealth--should take charge of me. Thus, in the dreary Campagna, with honest Benedetto and kindly Domenica, I spent the summer and the early autumn in the ancient tomb which they had transformed into a hut. The first week it rained incessantly; then, with the sun, came the insufferable heat, increasing in intensity from day to day, from week to week. Even the buffaloes lay like dead masses upon the burnt-up grass, unless, excited to madness by the poison-stings of myriads of flies, that covered them as if they were carrion, they rushed in mad career to the Tiber to roll themselves in the yellow water.
One day, towards sunset, I was just opening the door to leave the hut, when a man darted in so suddenly that I was thrown down. With lightning speed he shut the door, and in a distressed tone uttered the name of the Madonna, when a violent blow shattered the door, and the whole opening was filled with the head of a fierce buffalo, whose body was tightly squeezed into the doorway. The stranger seized a gun from the wall, took aim, and shot the beast. The danger over, he lifted me from the ground, and said: "Blessed be Madonna! You have saved my life." He inquired about me. I was made to show him my abominable sketches upon bits of paper and to sing to him, and caused him astonishment at my improvising about the Madonna and himself and the buffalo. He finally asked Domenica to bring me next morning to see him at the Borghese Palace. He was the powerful prince himself, who had unwittingly been the cause of my poor mother's death!
II.--In the School of Life
The prince, his daughter Francesca, and her fiance Fabiani, overwhelmed me with kindness. The visit had to be frequently repeated; and I became quite accustomed to the splendours of the palazzo. Finally, Eccellenza decided to have me educated in the Jesuits' school; and I had to bid farewell to good Domenica and to enter upon my school life. New occupations engrossed me; new acquaintances presented themselves; the dramatic portion of my life began to unfold itself. Here years compress themselves together.