I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded in the cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy, something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped privet and end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.
They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them. Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and to Cook's office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not only colossally vast, but they are singularly noble, as well as so admirably convenient. Because they are so convenient, the modern Romans have turned their cavernous immensity to account in the trades and industries, and have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and plumbers' shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine, which at any distance great enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills about it—a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.
If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats along the shore, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church, covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book, with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light, whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his devotions.
It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could, follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the order's privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers. Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could not manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique character of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the key-hole also commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that the Church of the Priory stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed, being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in favor of his chosen site. The fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of bad luck, but any one may safely visit it now, after the long time that has passed.
I do not, however, advise visiting it above any other place in Rome. What I always say is, take your chances with any or every time or place; you cannot fail of some impression which you will always like recurring to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I once walked home from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival masks frolicking about me through the sun-shotten golden dust of the delicious evening air, and I had a pleasure from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as rich as that I got from the rosy twilight in which I wandered homeward another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself passing the Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not throw my penny into its waters because I knew I could not help coming back to Rome anyhow. Yet another time I was driving through a certain piazza where the peasants stand night long waiting to be hired by the proprietors who come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood before me in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.
In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women, but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.
The performance of ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and the wonder is that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical than it actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded; sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without offence, in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character, exhausted himself before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint's day, which seemed more generally observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and flaunting feathers. The worshippers came and went, and while the monk preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected splendor. The high-altar was canopied and curtained in crimson, fringed with gold, and against this the candle-flames floated like yellow flowers. Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar, where their intoning, like so many
“Silver snarling trumpets 'gan to glide,”
and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.