ON the tenth day of our journey, we reached Genoa, the city of palaces, — the superb city. The writer of an old book, called “Time’s Storehouse,” thus poetically describes its situation:— “This cittie is most proudly built upon the seacoast and the downefall of the Appenines, at the foot of a mountaine; even as if she were descended downe the mount, and come to repose herselfe uppon a plaine.”
It was Christmas eve, — a glorious night! I stood at midnight on the wide terrace of our hotel, which overlooks the sea, and, gazing on the tiny and crisping waves that broke in pearly light beneath the moon, sent back my wandering thoughts far over the sea, to a distant home. The jangling music of church-bells aroused me from my dream. It was the sound of jubilee at the approaching festival of the Nativity, and summoned alike the pious devotee, the curious stranger, and the gallant lover to the church of the Annunziata.
I descended from the terrace, and, groping my way through one of the dark and narrow lanes which intersect the city in all directions, soon found myself in the Strada Nuova. The long line of palaces lay half in shadow, half in light, stretching before me in magical perspective, like the long, vapory opening of a cloud in the summer sky. Following the various groups that were passing onward towards the public square, I entered the church, where midnight mass was to be chanted. A dazzling blaze of light from the high altar shone upon the red marble columns which support the roof, and fell with a solemn effect upon the kneeling crowd that filled the body of the church. All beyond was in darkness; and from that darkness at intervals burst forth the deep voice of the organ and the chanting of the choir, filling the soul with solemnity and awe. And yet, among that prostrate crowd, how many had been drawn thither by unworthy motives, — motives even more unworthy than mere idle curiosity! How many sinful purposes arose in souls unpurified, and mocked at the bended knee! How many a heart beat wild with earthly passion, while the unconscious lip repeated the accustomed prayer! Immortal spirit! canst thou so heedlessly resist the imploring voice that calls thee from thine errors and pollutions? Is not the long day long enough, is not the wide world wide enough, has not society frivolity enough for thee, that thou shouldst seek out this midnight hour, this holy place, this solemn sacrifice, to add irreverence to thy folly?
In the shadow of a column stood a young man wrapped in a cloak, earnestly conversing in a low whisper with a female figure, so veiled as to hide her face from the eyes of all but her companion. At length they separated. The young man continued leaning against the column, and the girl, gliding silently along the dimly lighted aisle, mingled with the crowd, and threw herself upon her knees. Beware, poor girl, thought I, lest thy gentle nature prove thy undoing! Perhaps, alas! thou art already undone! And I almost heard the evil spirit whisper, as in the Faust, “How different was it with thee, Margaret, when, still full of innocence, thou earnest to the altar here, — out of the well worn little book lispedst prayers, half child-sport, half God in the heart! Margaret, where is thy head? What crime in thy heart!”
The city of Genoa is magnificent in parts, but not as a whole. The houses are high, and the streets in general so narrow that in many of them you may almost step across from side to side. They are built to receive the cool sea-breeze, and shut out the burning sun. Only three of them — if my memory serves me — are wide enough to admit the passage of carriages; and these three form but one continuous street, — the street of palaces. They are the Strada Nuova, the Strada Novissima, and the Strada Balbi, which connect the Piazza Amorosa with the Piazza dell’ Annunziata. These palaces, the Doria, the Durazzo, the Ducal Palace, and others of less magnificence, — with their vast halls, their marble staircases, vestibules, and terraces, and the aspect of splendor and munificence they wear, — have given this commercial city the title of Genoa the Superb. And, as if to humble her pride, some envious rival among the Italian cities has launched at her a biting sarcasm in the well known proverb, “Mare senza pesce, uomini senza fede, e donne senza vergogna,” — A sea without fish, men without probity, and women without modesty!
THE road from Genoa to Lucca strongly resembles that from Nice to Genoa. It runs along the seaboard, now dipping to the water’s edge, and now climbing the zigzag mountain-pass, with toppling crags, and yawning chasms, and verdant terraces of vines and olive-trees. Many a sublime and many a picturesque landscape catches the traveller’s eye, now almost weary with gazing; and still brightly painted upon my mind lies a calm evening scene on the borders of the Gulf of Spezia, with its broad sheet of crystal water, — the blue-tinted hills that form its oval basin, — the crimson sky above, and its bright reflection, —
“Where it lay
Deep bosomed in the still and quiet bay,
The sea reflecting all that glowed above,
Till a new sky, softer but not so gay,
Arched in its bosom, trembled like a dove.”
PISA, the melancholy city, with its Leaning Tower, its Campo Santo, its bronze-gated cathedral, and its gloomy palaces, — Florence the Fair, with its magnificent Duomo, its gallery of ancient art, its gardens, its gay society, and its delightful environs, — Fiesole, Camaldoli, Vallombrosa, and the luxuriant Val d’ Arno; — these have been so often and so beautifully described by others, that I need not repeat the twice-told
AT Florence I took lodgings in a house which looks upon the Piazza Novella. In front of my windows was the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella, in whose gloomy aisles Boccaccio has placed the opening scene of his Decamerone. There, when the plague was raging in the city, one Tuesday morning, after mass, the “seven ladies, young and fair,” held counsel together, and resolved to leave the infected city, and flee to their rural villas in the environs, where they might “hear the birds sing, and see the green hills, and the plains, and the fields covered with grain and undulating like the sea, and trees of species manifold.”
In the Florentine museum is a representation in wax of some of the appalling scenes of the plague which desolated this city about the middle of the fourteenth century, and which Boccaccio has described with such simplicity and power in the introduction of his Decamerone. It is the work of a Sicilian artist, by the name of Zumbo. He must have been a man of the most gloomy and saturnine imagination, and more akin to the worm than most of us, thus to have revelled night and day in the hideous mysteries of death, corruption, and the charnel-house. It is strange how this representation haunts one. It is like a dream of the sepulchre, with its loathsome corses, with “the blackening, the swelling, the bursting of the trunk, — the worm, the rat, and the tarantula at work.” You breathe more freely as you step out into the open air again; and when the bright sunshine and the crowded, busy streets next meet your eye, you are ready to ask, Is this indeed a representation of reality? Can this pure air have been laden with pestilence? Can this gay city have ever been a city of the plague?
The work of the Sicilian artist is admirable as a piece of art; the description of the Florentine prose-poet equally admirable as a piece of eloquence. “How many vast palaces,” he exclaims, “how many beautiful houses, how many noble dwellings, aforetime filled with lords and ladies and trains of servants, were now untenanted even by the lowest menial! How many memorable families, how many ample heritages, how many renowned possessions, were left without an heir! How many valiant men, how many beautiful women, how many gentle youths breakfasted in the morning with their relatives, companions, and friends, and, when the evening came, supped with their ancestors in the other world!”
I MET with an odd character at Florence, — a complete humorist. He was an Englishman of some forty years of age, with a round, good-humored countenance, and a nose that wore the livery of good company. He was making the grand tour through France and Italy, and home again by the way of the Tyrol and the Rhine. He travelled post, with a double-barrelled gun, two pair of pistols, and a violin without a bow. He had been in Rome without seeing St. Peter’s, — he did not care about it; he had seen St. Paul’s in London. He had been in Naples without vi
siting Pompeii, because “they told him it was hardly worth seeing, — nothing but a parcel of dark streets and old walls.” The principal object he seemed to have in view was to complete the grand tour.
I afterward met with his counterpart in a countryman of my own, who made it a point to see every thing which was mentioned in the guidebooks; and boasted how much he could accomplish in a day. He would despatch a city in an incredibly short space of time. A Roman aqueduct, a Gothic cathedral, two or three modern churches, and an ancient ruin or so, were only a breakfast for him. Nothing came amiss; not a stone was left unturned. A city was like a Chinese picture to him, — it had no perspective. Every object seemed of equal magnitude and importance. He saw them all; they were all wonderful.
Life is short, and art is long; yet spare me from thus travelling with the speed of thought, and trotting, from daylight until dark, at the heels of a cicerone, with an umbrella in one hand, and a guide-book and plan of the city in the other.
I COPIED the following singular inscription from a tombstone in the Protestant cemetery at Leghorn. It is the epitaph of a lady, written by herself, and engraven upon her tomb at her own request.
“Under this stone lies the victim of sorrow.
Fly, wandering stranger, from her mouldering dust,
Lest the rude wind, conveying a particle thereof unto thee,
Should communicate that venom melancholy
That has destroyed the strongest frame and liveliest spirit.
With joy of heart has she resigned her breath,
A living martyr to sensibility!”
How inferior in true pathos is this inscription to one in the cemetery of Bologna; —
“Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna pace.”
Lucretia Picini implores eternal peace!
From Florence to Rome I travelled with a vetturino, by the way of Siena. We were six days upon the road, and, like Peter Rugg in the story-book, were followed constantly by clouds and rain. At times, the sun, not all-forgetful of the world, peeped from beneath his cowl of mist, and kissed the swarthy face of his beloved land; and then, like an anchorite, withdrew again from earth, and gave himself to heaven. Day after day the mist and the rain were my fellow-travellers; and as I sat wrapped in the thick folds of my Spanish cloak, and looked out upon the misty landscape and the leaden sky, I was continually saying to myself, “Can this be Italy?” and smiling at the untravelled credulity of those who, amid the storms of a northern winter, give way to the illusions of fancy, and dream of Italy as a sunny land, where no wintry tempest beats, and where, even in January, the pale invalid may go about without his umbrella, or his India-rubber walk-in-the-waters.
Notwithstanding all this, with the help of a good constitution and a thick pair of boots, I contrived to see all that was to be seen upon the road. I walked down the long hillside at San Lorenzo, and along the border of the Lake of Bolsena, which, veiled in the driving mist, stretched like an inland sea beyond my ken; and through the sacred forest of oak, held in superstitious reverence by the peasant, and inviolate from his axe. I passed a night at Montefiascone, renowned for a delicate Muscat wine, which bears the name of Est, and made a midnight pilgrimage to the tomb of the Bishop John Defoucris, who died a martyr to his love of this wine of Montefiascone.
“Propter nimium Est,
Est, Est, Dominus meus mortuus est.”
A marble slab in the pavement, worn by the footsteps of pilgrims like myself, covers the dominie’s ashes. There is a rude figure carved upon it, at whose feet I traced out the cabalistic words, “Est, Est, Est.” The remainder of the inscription was illegible by the flickering light of the sexton’s lantern.
At Baccano I first caught sight of the dome of Saint Peter’s. We had entered the desolate Campagna; we passed the Tomb of Nero, — we approached the Eternal City; but no sound of active life, no thronging crowds, no hum of busy men, announced that we were near the gates of Rome. All was silence, solitude, and desolation.
ROME IN MIDSUMMER.
She who tamed the world seemed to tame herself at last, and, falling under her own weight, grew to be a prey to Time, who with his iron teeth consumes all bodies at last, making all things, both animate and inanimate, which have their being under that changeling, the moon, to be subject unto corruption and desolation.
HOWELL’S SIGNORIE OF VENICE.
THE masks and mummeries of Carnival are over; the imposing ceremonies of Holy Week have become a tale of the times of old; the illumination of St. Peter’s and the Girandola are no longer the theme of gentle and simple; and finally, the barbarians of the North have retreated from the gates of Rome, and left the Eternal City silent and deserted. The cicerone stands at the corner of the street with his hands in his pockets; the artist has shut himself up in his studio to muse upon antiquity,; and the idle facchino lounges in the market-place, and plays at mora by the fountain. Midsummer has come; and you may now hire a palace for what, a few weeks ago, would hardly have paid your night’s lodging in its garret.
I am still lingering in Rome, — a student, not an artist, — and have taken lodgings in the Piazza Navona, the very heart of the city, and one of the largest and most magnificent squares of modern Rome. It occupies the site of the ancient amphitheatre of Alexander Severus; and the churches, palaces, and shops that now surround it are built upon the old foundations of the amphitheatre. At each extremity of the square stands a fountain; the one with a simple jet of crystal water, the other with a triton holding a dolphin by the tail. In the centre rises a nobler work of art; a fountain with a marble basin more than two hundred feet in circumference. From the midst uprises a huge rock, pierced with grottoes, wherein sit a rampant sea-horse, and a lion couchant. On the sides of the rock are four colossal statues, representing the four principal rivers of the world; and from its summit, forty feet from the basin below, shoots up an obelisk of red granite, covered with hieroglyphics, and fifty feet in height, — a relic of the amphitheatre of Caracalla.
In this quarter of the city I have domiciliated myself, in a family of whose many kindnesses I shall always retain the most lively and grateful remembrance. My mornings are spent in visiting the wonders of Rome, in studying the miracles of ancient and modern art, or in reading at the public libraries. We breakfast at noon, and dine at eight in the evening. After dinner comes the conversazione, enlivened with music, and the meeting of travellers, artists, and literary men from every quarter of the globe. At midnight, when the crowd is gone, I retire to my chamber, and, poring over the gloomy pages of Dante, or “Bandello’s laughing tale,” protract my nightly vigil till the morning star is in the sky.
Our windows look out upon the square, which circumstance is a source of infinite enjoyment to me. Directly in front, with its fantastic belfries and swelling dome, rises the church of St. Agnes; and sitting by the open window, I note the busy scene below, enjoy the cool air of morning and evening, and even feel the freshness of the fountain, as its waters leap in mimic cascades down the sides of the rock.
THE Piazza Navona is the chief market-place of Rome; and on market-days is filled with a noisy crowd of the Roman populace, and the peasantry from the neighbouring villages of Albano and Frascati. At such times the square presents an animated and curious scene. The gayly decked stalls, — the piles of fruits and vegetables, — the pyramids of flowers, — the various costumes of the peasantry, — the constant movement of the vast, fluctuating crowd, and the deafening clamor of their discordant voices, that rise louder than the roar of the loud ocean, — all this is better than a play to me, and gives me amusement when naught else has power to amuse.
Every Saturday afternoon in the sultry month of August, this spacious square is converted into a lake, by stopping the conduit-pipes which carry off the water of the fountains. Vehicles of every description, axle-deep, drive to and fro across the mimic lake; a dense crowd gathers around its margin, and a thousand tricks excite the loud laughter of the idle populace. Here is a fellow groping with a st
ick after his seafaring hat; there another splashing in the water in pursuit of a mischievous spaniel, who is swimming away with his shoe; while from a neighbouring balcony a noisy burst of military music fills the air, and gives fresh animation to the scene of mirth. This is one of the popular festivals of midsummer in Rome, and the merriest of them all. It is a kind of carnival unmasked; and many a popular bard, many a poeta di dozzina, invokes this day the plebeian Muse of the marketplace to sing in high-sounding rhyme, “Il Lago di Piazza Navona.”
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 200
