This story is interesting and well told. One such incident, or one page in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris, and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and converted a barren waste into the regions of romance!
CHAPTER XXI
We had some thoughts of taking a lodging at L’Ariccia, at the Caffé del Piazza, for a month, but the deep sandy roads, the centinels posted every half-mile on this, which is the route for Naples (which shewed that it was not very safe to leave them), the loose, straggling woods sloping down to the dreary marshes, and the story of Hippolitus painted on the walls of the inn (who, it seems, was ‘native to the manner here’), deterred us. L’Ariccia, besides being, after Cortona, the oldest place in Italy, is also one step towards Naples, which I had a strong desire to see—its brimming shores, its sky which glows like one entire sun, Vesuvius, the mouth of Hell, and Sorrentum, like the Islands of the Blest—yet here again the reports of robbers, exaggerated alike by foreigners and natives, who wish to keep you where you are, the accounts of hogs without hair, and children without clothes to their backs, the vermin (animal as well as human), the gilded hams and legs of mutton that Forsyth speaks of, gave me a distaste to the journey, and I turned back to put an end to the question. I am fond of the sun, though I do not like to see him and the assassin’s knife glaring over my head together. As to the real amount of the danger of travelling this road, as far as I can learn, it is this—there is at present a possibility but no probability of your being robbed or kidnapped, if you go in the day-time and by the common method of a Vetturino, stopping two nights on the road. If you go alone, and with a determination to set time, place, and circumstances at defiance, like a personified representation of John Bull, maintaining the character of your countrymen for sturdiness and independence of spirit, you stand a very good chance of being shot through the head: the same thing might happen to you, if you refused your money to an English footpad; but if you give it freely, like a gentleman, and do not stand too nicely upon a punctilio, they let you pass like one. If you have no money about you, you must up into the mountain, and wait till you can get it. For myself, my remittances have not been very regular even in walled towns; how I should fare in this respect upon the forked mountain, I cannot tell, and certainly I have no wish to try. A friend of mine said that he thought it the only romantic thing going, this of being carried off by the banditti; that life was become too tame and insipid without such accidents, and that it would not be amiss to put one’s-self in the way of such an adventure, like putting in for the grand prize in the lottery. Assuredly, one is not likely to go to sleep in such circumstances: one person who was detained in this manner, and threatened every hour with being despatched, went mad in consequence. A French Artist was laid hold of by a gang of the outlaws, as he was sketching in the neighbourhood of their haunts, about a year ago; he did not think their mode of life at all agreeable. As he had no money, they employed him in making sketches of their heads, with which they were exceedingly delighted. Their vanity kept him continually on the alert when they had a moment’s leisure; and, besides, he was fatigued almost to death, for they made long marches of from forty to fifty miles a day, and scarcely ever rested more than one night in the same place. They travelled through bye-roads (in constant apprehension of the military) in parties of five or six, and met at some common rendezvous at night-fall. He was in no danger from them in the day-time; but at night they sat up drinking and carousing, and when they were in this state of excitement, he was in considerable jeopardy from their violence or sportive freaks: they amused themselves with presenting their loaded pieces at his breast, or threatened to dispatch him if he did not promise to procure ransom. At last he effected his escape in one of their drunken bouts. Their seizure of the Austrian officer last year was singular enough: they crept for above a mile on their hands and knees, from the foot of the mountain which was their place of retreat, and carried off their prize in the same manner, so as to escape the notice of the sentinels who were stationed at short distances on the road side. Some years since a plan was laid to carry off Lucien Buonaparte from his villa at Frascati, about eleven miles from Rome, on the Albano side, where the same range of Apennines begins: he was walking in his garden and saw them approaching through some trees, for his glance is quick and furtive; he retired into the house, his valet came out to meet them, who passed himself off for his master, they were delighted with their sham-prize, and glad to take 4,000 crowns to release him. Since then Lucien Buonaparte has lived in Rome. I remember once meeting this celebrated character in the streets of Paris, walking arm in arm with Maria Cosway, with whom I had drunk tea the evening before. He was dressed in a light drab-coloured great-coat, and was then a spirited, dashing-looking young man. I believe I am the only person in England who ever read his Charlemagne. It is as clever a poem as can be written by a man who is not a poet. It came out in two volumes quarto, and several individuals were applied to by the publishers to translate it; among others Sir Walter Scott, who gave for answer, ‘that as to Mister Buonaparte’s poem, he should have nothing to do with it.’ Such was the petty spite of this understrapper of greatness and of titles, himself since titled, the scale of whose intellect can be equalled by nothing but the pitifulness and rancour of his prejudices! The last account I have heard of the exploits of Neapolitan banditti is, that they had seized upon two out of three Englishmen, who had determined upon passing through Calabria on their way to Sicily, and were proceeding beyond Pæstum for this purpose. They were told by the Commandant there, that this was running into the lion’s mouth, that there were no patrols to protect them farther, and that they were sure to be intercepted; but an Englishman’s will is his law—they went forward—and succeeded in getting themselves into the only remaining romantic situation. I have not heard whether they have yet got out of it. The national propensity to contend with difficulty and to resist obstacles is curious, perhaps praiseworthy. A young Englishman returned the other day to Italy with a horse that he had brought with him for more than two thousand miles on the other side of Grand Cairo; and poor Bowdich gave up the ghost in a second attempt to penetrate to the source of the Niger, the encouragement to persevere being in proportion to the impossibility of success! I am myself somewhat effeminate, and would rather ‘the primrose path of dalliance tread;’ or the height of my ambition in this line would be to track the ancient route up the valley of the Simplon, leaving the modern road (much as I admire the work and the workman), and clambering up the ledges of rocks, and over broken bridges, at the risk of a sprained ankle or a broken limb, to return to a late, but excellent dinner at the post-house at Brigg!
What increases the alarm of robbers in the South of Italy, is the reviving of old stories, like the multiplication of echoes, and shifting their dates indefinitely, so as to excite the fears of the listener, or answer the purposes of the speaker. About three years ago, a desperate gang of ruffians infested the passes of the Abruzzi, and committed a number of atrocities; but this gang, to the amount of about thirty, were seized and broken up, their ringleaders beheaded in the Square di Popolo at Rome, and their wives or mistresses now live there by sitting for their pictures to English artists. The remainder figure as convicts in striped yellow and brown dresses in the streets of Rome, and very civilly pull off their hats to strangers as they pass. By the way, I cannot help reprobating this practice of employing felons as common labourers in places of public resort. Either you must be supposed to keep up your feelings of dislike and indignation against them while thus mixing with the throng and innocently employed, which is a disagreeable and forced operation of the sense of justice; or if you retain no such feelings towards these victims of the law, then why do they retain the chains on their feet and ugly badges on their shoulders? If the thing is to be treated seriously, it is painful: if lightly and good-humouredly, it turns the whole affair into a farce or drama, with as little of the useful as the pleasant in it. I know nothing of these people that I see manacled and branded, but that they are labouring in a broiling sun for my convenience; if one of them were to break loose, I should not care to stop him. When we witness the punishments of individuals, we should know their crimes; or at least their punishment and their delinquency should not be mixed up indiscriminately with the ordinary gaieties and business of human life. It is a chapter of the volume that should be read apart! About six months ago, twenty-two brigands came down from the mountains at Velletri, and carried off four young women from the village. A Vetturino, who wished me to return with him to Florence, spoke of this as having happened the week before. There is a band of about ninety banditti scattered through the mountains near Naples. Some years ago they were the terror of travellers: at present they are more occupied in escaping from the police themselves. But by thus confounding dates and names, all parts of the road are easily filled all the year round with nothing but robbers and rumours of robbers. In short, any one I believe can pass with proper precaution from Rome to Naples and back again, with tolerable, if not with absolute security. If he can guard equally against petty thieving and constant imposition for the rest of his route, it will be well.
Before leaving Rome, we went to Tivoli, of which so much has been said. The morning was bright and cloudless; but a thick mist rose from the low, rank, marshy grounds of the Campagna, and enveloped a number of curious objects to the right and left, till we approached the sulphurous stream of Solfatara, which we could distinguish at some distance by its noise and smell, and which crossing the road like a blue ugly snake, infects the air in its hasty progress to the sea. The bituminous lake from which it springs is about a mile distant, and has the remains of an ancient temple on its borders. Farther on is a round brick tower, the tomb of the Plautian family, and Adrian’s villa glimmers with its vernal groves and nodding arches to the right. In Rome, around it nothing strikes the eye, nothing rivets the attention but ruins, the fragments of what has been; the past is like a halo forever surrounding and obscuring the present! Ruins should be seen in a desert, like those of Palmyra, and a pilgrimage should be made to them; but who would take up his abode among tombs? Or if there be a country and men in it, why have they nothing to shew but the relics of antiquity, or why are the living contented to crawl about like worms, or to hover like shadows in the monuments of the dead? Every object he sees reminds the modern Roman that he is nothing—the spirits of former times overshadow him, and dwarf his pigmy efforts: every object he sees reminds the traveller that greatness is its own grave. Glory cannot last; for when a thing is once done, it need not be done again, and with the energy to act, a people lose the privilege to be. They repose upon the achievements of their ancestors; and because every thing has been done for them, sink into torpor, and dwindle into the counterfeits of what they were. The Greeks will not recover their freedom till they forget that they had ancestors, for nothing is twice because it was once. The Americans will perhaps lose theirs, when they begin fully to reap all the fruits of it; for the energy necessary to acquire freedom, and the ease that follows the enjoyment of it, are almost incompatible. If Italy should ever be any thing again, it will be when the tokens of her former glory, pictures, statues, triumphal arches are mouldered in the dust, and she has to re-tread the gradual stages of civilization, from primeval barbarism to the topmost round of luxury and refinement; or when some new light gives her a new impulse; or when the last oppression (such as in all probability impends over her) equally contrary to former independence, to modern apathy, stinging her to the quick, once more kindles the fire in her eye, and twines the deadly terrors on her brow. Then she might have music in her streets, the dance beneath her vines, inhabitants in her houses, business in her shops, passengers in her roads, commerce on her shores, honesty in her dealings, openness in her looks, books for the censorship, the love of right for the fear of power, and a calculation of consequences from a knowledge of principles—and England, like the waning moon, would grow pale in the rising dawn of liberty, that she had in vain tried to tarnish and obscure! Mais assez des reflexions pour un voyageur.
Tivoli is an enchanting—a fairy spot. Its rocks, its grottos, its temples, its waterfalls, and the rainbows reflected on them, answer to the description, and make a perfect play upon the imagination. Every object is light and fanciful, yet steeped in classic recollections. The whole is a fine net-work—a rare assemblage of intricate and high-wrought beauties. To do justice to the scene would require the pen of Mr. Moore, minute and striking as it is, sportive yet romantic, displaying all the fascinations of sense, and unfolding the mysteries of sentiment,
‘Where all is strength below, and all above is grace,’—
glittering like a sun-beam on the Sybil’s Temple at top, or darting on a rapid antithesis to the dark grotto of the God beneath, loading the prismatic spray with epithets, linking the meeting beauties on each side the abrupt, yawning chasm by an alliteration, painting the flowers, pointing the rocks, passing the narrow bridge on a dubious metaphor, and blending the natural and artificial, the modern and the antique, the simple and the quaint, the glimmer and the gloom in an exquisite profusion of fluttering conceits. He would be able to describe it much better, with its tiny cascades and jagged precipices, than his friend Lord Byron has described the Fall of Terni, who makes it, without any reason that I can find, tortuous, dark, and boiling like a witch’s cauldron. On the contrary, it is simple and majestic in its character, a clear mountain-stream that pours an uninterrupted, lengthened sheet of water over a precipice of eight hundred feet, in perpendicular descent, and gracefully winding its way to the channel beyond, while on one side the stained rock rises bare and stately the whole height, and on the other, the gradual green woods ascend, moistened by the ceaseless spray, and lulled by the roar of the waterfall, as the ear enjoys the sound of famous poet’s verse. If this noble and interesting object have a fault, it is that it is too slender, straight, and accompanied with too few wild or grotesque ornaments. It is the Doric, or at any rate the Ionic, among water-falls. It has nothing of the texture of Lord Byron’s terzains, twisted, zigzag, pent up and struggling for a vent, broken off at the end of a line, or point of a rock, diving under ground, or out of the reader’s comprehension, and pieced on to another stanza or shelving rock.—Nature has
‘Poured it out as plain
As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne.’