A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

The Two Types of Religion in Rome.

The Cappuccini Cemetery.

Only three or four blocks from our hotel stands the Church of the Cappuccini, which contains one of the most gruesome sights in Rome, the celebrated cemetery of the Cappuccini monks, the soil of which was brought from Jerusalem. All Roman Catholic cemeteries have a peculiarly melancholy aspect. They have none of that gentle beauty which is so characteristic of our cemeteries, where the grass grows green under the open sky or great trees cast their peaceful shade over "God's acre." But this is the most weird and ghastly of them all. There are four recesses or chapels underneath the church, the pillars and pilasters of which are made of thigh-bones and skulls, the architectural ornaments being represented by the joints of the spine, and the more delicate tracery by the smaller bones of the human frame. "The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skillfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect.... On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular head-piece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are piled up undistinguishably into the architectural design.... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life.... Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so unexceptionably." So Hawthorne says, and I have spared my readers the most disagreeable parts of his description.

The allusion in his last sentence is one which is justified by the olfactory organs of every visitor to Rome. The vices which were encouraged in the magnificent baths of the emperors, and which have given the word bagnio an evil signification the world over, "found their reaction in the impression of the early Christians that uncleanliness was a virtue, an impression which is retained by several of the monastic orders to the present day." We sometimes weary of the superabundant advertisements of the different kinds of soap in the advertising pages of our monthly magazines. But what a wholesome sign it is! And what a difference it marks between us and the average Italian! And what a field for their business would be opened to Mr. Pears and the rest if only the monks would adopt the view that "cleanliness is next to godliness," and that, therefore, soap might be regarded as a sort of means of grace!

Some Differences between America and Italy.

Mark Twain once described what he would say, if he were a native of Italy, and had been on a visit to the United States, and had come back to the Campagna for the purpose of telling his Italian countrymen what he had seen in America: "One hardly ever sees a minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a basket, begging for subsistence. In that country the preachers are not like our mendicant orders of friars—they have two or three suits of clothing, and they wash sometimes."... "I saw common men and common women who could read; I even saw small children of common country people reading from books; if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also.... I saw real glass windows in the houses of even the commonest people. Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of bricks; I solemnly swear they are made of wood. Houses there will take fire and burn, sometimes—actually burn entirely down, and not leave a single vestige behind. I could state that for a truth upon my death-bed. And, as a proof that the circumstance is not rare, I aver that they have a thing which they call a fire-engine, which vomits forth great streams of water, and is kept always in readiness, by night and by day, to rush to houses that are burning. You would think one engine would be sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred; they keep men hired, and pay them by the month to do nothing but put out fires. [20]... In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is damned; he cannot buy salvation with money for masses. There is really not much use in being rich there. Not much use as far as the other world is concerned, but much, very much, use as concerns this; because there, if a man be rich, he is very greatly honored, and can become a legislator, a governor, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an ass he is—just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great places, even though sometimes they are born noble idiots. There, if a man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in debt, they require him to do that which they term to 'settle.'... In that country you might fall from a third-story window three several times and not mash either a soldier or a priest.... Jews there are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.... They never have had to run races naked through the public streets against jackasses to please the people in carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their religion especially and particularly cursed." [21]

The Playful Inquisition.

While I have Mark Twain in hand, I will make two more quotations from him, and then dismiss him for good. Looking from the dome of St. Peter's upon the building which was once the Inquisition, he says: "How times are changed, between the older ages and the new! Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show. It was for a lesson as well. It was to teach the people to abhor and fear the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching. The beasts tore the victims limb from limb, and made poor mangled corpses of them in the twinkling of an eye. But when the Christians came into power, when the holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their ways by no such means. No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisition, and pointed to the blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him—first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public. They always convinced those barbarians. The true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to administer it, is very, very soothing. It is wonderfully persuasive, also. There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized people. It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more."

The Relative Rank of the Deities Worshipped in Rome.

Speaking of a mosaic group at the side of the Scala Santa which represents the Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne, he says: "Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne. The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to Constantine. No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of little importance anywhere in Rome; but an inscription below says, 'Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to King Charles.' It does not say, 'Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father, for this boon,' but 'Blessed Peter, give it us.'