"Far away on the left lay the Apennines; the aspect of the foreground was exceedingly unpleasant to the eye, hilly, with every here and there deep marshes... the country ...open, barren, and altogether destitute of trees, and almost equally so of houses[665]."
The Protestant Milton casts upon the Roman Campagna a look as dry and barren as his faith. Lalande and the Président De Brosses are as blind as Milton. Only in M. de Bonstetten's Voyage sur la scène des six derniers livres de l'Énéide, published at Geneva in 1804, one year after my Letter to M. de Fontanes (printed in the Mercure at the end of the year 1803), do we find any true sensations of that admirable solitude, and even they are mingled with objurgations:
"What a pleasure to read Virgil under the sky of Æneas and, so to speak, in the presence of the gods of Homer!" says M. de Bonstetten. "What a profound solitude in these deserts in which we behold only the sea, ruined woods, trees, great meadows, and not one inhabitant! In a vast extent of country, I saw but a single house, and that house was near me, on the summit of a hill. I went to it, it had no door; I climbed a stair-case, I entered a sort of chamber, a bird of prey had built its nest there....
"I stood some time at the window of that abandoned house. I saw at my feet that declivity, so rich and so magnificent in Pliny's day, now uncultivated."
Since my description of the Roman Campagna, they have passed from disparagement to enthusiasm. The English and French travellers who have followed me have marked all their steps from the Storta to Rome by ecstasies. M. de Tournon[666], in his Études statistiques, enters the road of admiration which I had the happiness to open:
"The Roman Campagna," he says, "unfolds more distinctly, at each step, the serious beauty of its immense lines, its numerous plains and its fine frame of mountains. Its monotonous grandeur impresses and elevates the thought."
I have no need to mention M. Simond[667], whose journey reads like a wager, so much does he amuse himself by looking at Rome upside down. I was at Geneva when he died almost suddenly. A farmer, he had just cut his hay and gaily reaped his first grain, when he went to join his mown grass and his gathered harvest.
We have a few letters of the great landscape painters; Poussin and Claude Lorraine do not say a word about the Roman Campagna. But, if their pen is silent, their brush speaks; the Agro Romano was a mysterious source of beauty, at which they drew, while hiding it by a sort of avarice of genius and as it were in fear, lest it should be profaned by the vulgar. Strange that it should be French eyes that best saw the light of Italy.
Vandalism in the Campagna.
I have read again my Letter to M. de Fontanes on Rome, written five and twenty years ago, and I confess that I have found it so exact that it would be impossible for me to take away or add a word to it. A foreign company has come this winter (1829) to propose to clear the Roman Campagna: ah, gentlemen, spare us your cottages and your English gardens on the Janiculum! If ever they were to disfigure the waste lands against which the ploughshare of Cincinnatus struck, on which all the grasses bend before the breath of the centuries, I should fly Rome, never to set foot in it again. Go to drag your improved ploughs elsewhere; here the earth grows and must grow only tombs. The cardinals have closed their ears to the calculations of the commercial adventurers hastening to demolish the ruins of Tusculum, which they mistake for the castles of aristocrats: they would have made lime with the marble of the sarcophagus of Æmilius Paulus, even as they have made water-shoots with the lead of the coffins of our ancestors. The Sacred College clings to the past; besides, it has been proved, to the great confusion of the economists, that the Roman Campagna paid the owners five per cent, as pasture-land and that it would not yield more than one and a half in corn. It is not through idleness, but through practical interest, that the cultivator of the plains gives the preference to pastorizia over maggesi. The produce of an acre in the Roman territory is almost equal to the produce of the same measure in the best French departments: to convince one's self of that, one has but to read the work of Monsignore Nicolaï[668].
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