SAN SABA.
San Saba to-day, for the second time this year, with those pleasant English people the P.s. It was Thursday, and we were not admitted into the garden (though we were very kindly allowed into the loggia) because the pupils of the Germanic College were having their weekly recreation, a hundred of them. We saw their gowns, like geraniums or capsicums, moving between the columns and under the blossoming orange-trees. And a party of them sat among the fallen pillars and broken friezes outside the little churches singing—and what?—the Lorelei in chorus, "Sie kämmt sich mit goldenem Kamme und singt ein Lied dabei." Oh, friendly romance of Germany, lurking even in the house of the Lord, and cheek-by-jowl with De Propaganda Fide!
Pal. Sciarra, April 16.
V.
A CONVENT.
This morning with Antonia at S. Cecilia in Trastevere, having a special permission from Minister to see the Cavalieri frescoes in the nuns' choir gallery (like poorer, clumsier, jowlier Duccio; Byzantine, with antique braided hair and "Greek" features). The impression of the convent clausura—little vestibule, a strongly grated small window inside it, apparently ending only in darkness; the "Ruota," behind which a voice spoke mysteriously as through a telephone, the wooden shelf turning on itself and offering us a key—key opening (by instructions of mysterious voice) an adjacent small room: two straw chairs on either side of small table before a thick black grating; another grating behind that, and a kind of perforated shutter between. The latter rattled away, a nun's face uncertainly seen—faded cheeks, immense eyes, white dress, behind the black double bars; the key restored to the Ruota, and engulfed after directions from the mysterious voice; another door, sound of keys and bolts. In all this a predominant and lugubrious impression of keys and bolts. The little portress, Donna Maria Geltude (for these nuns are Benedictines, and have the handle to their names), a wizen, very ugly little woman, in incredibly shabby but spotless dress, white wool washed threadbare to an appearance of linen, voluminous skirts and black veil. A glazed cloister (with twelfth-century columns), a few pictures, seventeenth-century tables and chairs, as in a passage; more passages similar, with prie Dieu and scant peasant furniture. The little library, a smallish glass press with nothing but Filotea, Fr. de Sales, Vite dei Santi, &c. Might they read them? Yes, but only on asking the Abbess. Terror of nun lest Antonia and I should go on or into anything not mentioned in our permit—the impression that in this life all can be done, but done only by permission. "Men allowed to visit?" Only by permission of Cardinal Segretario di Stato. "Men working in garden, masons, &c.?" Yes, but always with special permission; permission and bars!
In all these corridors and stairs not a creature; only at one moment a door stirred, Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden, are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order.
The gilt box of the choir, looking down into church; the stalls; the Abbess's gold-headed crozier stuck into her stall (St. Cecilia with harp in it), two lecterns with Latin lessons of the day—the day's martyrology.
April 22.