Italian Journeys

by William Dean Howells

It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith and wonder.

I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate. The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents, who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes.

IV.

In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at by the foreign residents,—who, nevertheless, go out of the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I think this very likely.

Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by a fossé of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont Blanc....

V.

It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the roof of the church below.

The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.

I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression.

The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without or within.