The Apollo, where grand opera, sandwiched with moral ballets, is given for the benefit of foreigners, principally, would be a fine house if you could only see it; but when Caper was in Rome, the oil-lamps, showing you where to sit down, did not reveal its proportions, or the dresses of the box-beauties, to any advantage; and as oil-lamps will smoke, there settled a veil over the theatre towards the second act, that draped Comedy like Tragedy, and then set her to coughing.
During Carnival a melancholy ball or two was given there: a few wild foreigners venturing in masked, believed they had mistaken the house, for although many women were wandering around in domino, they found the Roman young men unmasked, walking about dressed in canes and those dress-coats, familiarly known as tail-coats, which cause a man to look like a swallow with the legs of a crane, and wearing on their impassive faces the appearance of men waiting for an oyster-supper—or an earthquake.
The commissionaire at the hotel always recommends strangers to go to the Apollo: 'I will git you lôge, sare, first tier—more noble, sare.'
The Capranica Theatre is next in size and importance; it is beyond the Pantheon, out of the foreign quarter of Rome, and you will find in it a Roman audience—to a limited extent. Salvini acted there in Othello, and filled the character admirably; it is needless to say that Iago received even more applause than Othello; Italians know such men profoundly—they are Figaros turned undertakers. Opera was given at the Capranica when the Apollo was closed.
The Valle is a small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, appearing generally in the Sonnambula.
But the Capranica Theatre was the resort for the Roman minenti, decked in all their bravery. Here came the shoemaker, the tailor, and the small artisan, all with their wives or women, and with them the wealthy peasant who had ten cents to pay for entrance. Here the audience wept and laughed, applauded the actors, and talked to each other from one side of the house to the other. Here the plays represented Roman life in the rough, and were full of words and expressions not down in any dictionary or phrase-book; nor in these local displays were forgotten various Roman peculiarities of accentuation of words, and curious intonations of voice. The Roman people indulge in chest-notes, leaving head-notes to the Neapolitans, who certainly do not possess such smoothness of tongue as would classify them among their brethren in the old proverb: 'When the confusion of tongues happened at the building of the Tower of Babel, if the Italian had been there, Nimrod would have made him a plasterer!'
You will do well, if you want to learn from the stage and audience, the Roman plebs, their customs and language, to attend the Capranica Theatre often; to attend it in 'fatigue-dress,' and in gentle mood, being neither shocked nor astonished if a good-looking Roman youth should call your attention to the fact that there is a beautiful girl in the box to the left hand, and inquire if you know whether she is the daughter of Santi Stefoni, the grocer? And should the man on the other side offer you some pumpkin-seeds to eat, by all means accept a few; you can't tell what they may bring forth, if you will only plant them cheerfully.
Do not think it strange if a doctor on the stage recommends conserve of vipers to a consumptive patient; for these poisonous reptiles are caught in large numbers in the mountains back of Rome, and sold to the city apothecaries, who prepare large quantities of them for their customers.
When you see, perhaps the hero of the play, thrown into a paroxysm of anger and fiery wrath by some untoward event, proceed calmly to cut up two lemons, squeeze into a tumbler their juice, and then drink it down—learn that it is a common Roman remedy for anger.
Or if, when a piece of crockery, or other fragile article, may be broken, you notice one of the actors carefully counting the pieces, do not think it is done in order to reconstruct the article, but to guide him in the purchase of a lottery-ticket.