Italian Journeys

by William Dean Howells

And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.

Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgotten what her name was.

Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and far below us,—on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,—the Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.

In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother also—an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she said. "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half old (mezzo-vecchia). I am done with these things. But for youth, always kept down, something lively is wanted."

When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time.

II.

Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable little states of the Peninsula,—halted every other mile to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,—the present railroad period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could,—musical, picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving, Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is de rigueur.

After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chapels,—I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which the catacombs were dug.

III.

Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the altars, two pilgrims,—a man and a woman. The latter was habited in a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a species of spiritual valet de place, whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in them.