A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

EDWARD VII. OF ENGLAND, AND VICTOR EMMANUEL III. OF ITALY, IN ROME.

Later in the season those members of our party who remained in Rome while we were travelling through Egypt and Palestine, had very satisfactory views of King Edward VII. of England and William II., the Emperor of Germany, on their visits to Rome. As they had seen the Prince of Wales in London, and young Prince Edward, who will also be King of England some day if he lives, and the other royal children at Marlborough House, and as they have repeatedly seen King Victor Emmanuel and Queen Helena, they have had unusual opportunities for seeing for themselves whether the royalties are made of common clay. I must say for them that they are stauncher than ever in their devotion to the republican ideals of our own country. Their opportunities for seeing these royalties were better than those enjoyed by most visitors to Rome, because their rooms overlooked the palace and grounds of the Queen mother, Marguerita, and King Edward and the Kaiser, like other royal visitors to Rome, made it their first business to call on her. She is still the most beloved woman in Italy.

Our Quarters on the Pincian Hill.

The location of our rooms was advantageous in many other respects. They were high up in the southwestern corner of a tall building on the Pincian Hill, so high that we could look clear across the city to the Sabine Mountains. As soon as the sun rose over the eastern hills he looked cheerily into our windows, and continued his genial companionship with us till he sank into the Mediterranean at night. We had selected the rooms with a view to this particularly, remembering the Italian proverb that "When the sun goes out of the window, the doctor comes in at the door." A room on the north side of a building should never be taken. The Roman winter is short but sharp. We could see snow on the mountains during nearly the whole of our stay, which in the case of the majority of us was five months. Then, too, we were close to the city wall, and to the gate which led out into the lovely Borghese Gardens, "whose wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest English park scenery," where "the stone pines lift their dense clumps of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they look like green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the turf so far off that you scarcely know which tree made it"; where there are "avenues of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral candles, which spread dusk and twilight round about them, instead of cheerful radiance"; and where ancient and majestic ilex trees "lean over the green turf in ponderous grace.... Never was there a more venerable quietude than that which sleeps among their sheltering boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that which gladdens the gentle gloom which these leafy patriarchs strive to diffuse over the swelling and subsiding lawns." Moreover, our quarters were within so short a walk of the park on the Pincio (where the band plays every afternoon, and where all Rome drives round and round the little circle at the top), and of the terrace of the Villa Medici, that we were drawn thither day after day to watch the picturesque groups of models lounging in the wintry sun on the great flight of steps that lead from the Church of Trinita de' Monti down to the Piazza di Spagna, to muse over the Eternal City spread out below us, with the dome of St. Peter's, in the distance, standing out against a sky of gold, and, above all, to watch "the light that broods over the fallen sun." Nowhere in the world, at least so far as my observation of it extends, is this wonderful glow which suffuses all the western sky with crimson, orange and violet lights after the sun goes down—nowhere else is this afterglow at once so rich and so delicate as at Rome.

The Sweep of History Seen from the Janiculan.

But it is from the Janiculan Hill, on the other side of the Tiber, that one gets the most comprehensive view of the city. Among other things that take the eye from that commanding point there are three hills which may be said to epitomize the history of Rome: on the east the Palatine, where, as its name intimates, the palaces of the Cæsar's stood, representing the culmination of the glory of pagan Rome; on the west, the Vatican, where, as its name suggests, a prophet ought to dwell, though I fear he does not, and where St. Peter's, with its "insolent opulence of marble" and its colossal apotheosis of the popedom, represents the culmination of the glory of papal Rome; and, immediately in front, in the centre of the city, the Quirinal, where Victor Emmanuel's royal house stands, representing the new government of free and united Italy. From his windows in the Quirinal Palace, the King can look across the intervening city to the windows of that other palace where the relentless foe of his government lives, that vast, luxurious "prison" of the Vatican, with its eleven thousand rooms, the largest palace in the world, with its museums and libraries filled with priceless treasures, and with its extensive gardens and grounds.

Zola has pointed out how persistent, through all these three periods of Rome's history, has been that passion for cyclopean building, the "blossoming of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and ruinous luxury." First, the pagan emperors set the pace, and of their work we may take the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla as specimens.

The Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla.

"The Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone lacework, with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven! There is a world of halls, stairs, landings and passages, a world where one loses one's self amid the death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a mountain side, since it has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the ninety thousand spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilization together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the Baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a frigidarium, where five hundred people could swim together; a tepidarium and a calidarium on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which makes passing visitors look like lost ants; one wonders for what men, for what multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day you would say a mass of rocks in the rough thrown from some height for building the abode of Titans."