Rome

by Matthew Kneale

  Within the walls Rome had, for once, not swelled or shrunk or moved. The abitato had encroached a little on the empty disabitato but not greatly, and a good half of the area inside the city walls was still green. Yet, if the city had not changed much in size, a visitor from the early 1520s would still have found it largely unrecognizable. Most of all they would have been impressed. Rome was vastly transformed for the better.

  It was now a city of fountains, and the tinkling of water could be heard everywhere, flowing from hundreds of street taps and dozens of great fountains, some of which, like the Trevi and the Four Rivers, were great works of art. In the 1840s fresh, clean, drinking water was available to all. Rome was also a city of dazzling architecture. Among numerous new palaces and great houses, the most spectacular was the Quirinal Palace, which overlooked the city from the Quirinal Hill, and which had already been the main home of the popes for 250 years, after they turned their backs on the malaria-ridden Borgo. Vast and with fine gardens, the Quirinal Palace was almost as impressive as the older Vatican Palace. Rome was also filled with new, striking churches with ornate Baroque facades and, inside, ceilings covered with gold leaf, or paintings depicting crowds of saints looking down from heaven. Even the city’s medieval churches had been gaudily refurbished, their ancient columns encased in colourful marble. Rome was now a city of beautiful piazzas of every shape and size, from the small and intimate to St Peter’s Square, with its two vast, curving colonnades.

  A visitor from the early sixteenth century would have had her greatest surprise, though, if she climbed one of Rome’s hills and looked back at the city’s skyline. In 1527 Rome had been a pincushion city bristling with towers. In the 1840s it was a city of domes. It had some six dozen of them, large and small. The greatest, of course, was St Peter’s. A building site in 1527, the cathedral was now complete, having been consecrated in 1626, just a century behind schedule. Rome was also now a city of vistas, with some long straight streets that culminated in an ancient Egyptian obelisk (and, occasionally, a fake new one). These grand views were carefully framed, and nowhere better than in the Piazza del Popolo, whose twin churches (not identical though they seemed so, thanks to an ingenious optical illusion) perfectly set off the mile-long Corso to the Capitoline Hill.

  Looking at this visual feast, a visitor from 1527 would probably have imagined that the Catholic Church had been thriving since his day. In fact much of what they saw had been inspired by the Church’s failures. In the 1550s, as the Council of Trent led Catholicism down the road of purism and intolerance, the papacy belatedly responded to the disaster of the Protestant Reformation, as popes Pius IV and Pius V attempted to renew both Catholicism and its capital. They set in motion long overdue work to clean up the city’s drains and ordered the repair of Rome’s one functioning classical aqueduct, the Acqua Vergine, which produced only a dribble of water. In 1570, for the first time in centuries, it became a torrent, which was used to power fountains that were then built all across the Campo Marzio. More fountains followed when, in 1587, a second ancient aqueduct, the Acqua Felice, was brought back to life. On the other side of the Tiber the Damasiana was repaired and then, in 1612, the ancient Acqua Paola flowed once again, bringing quantities of fresh water to Trastevere and the Borgo. Romans no longer had to drink Tiber water, though some continued anyway, claiming they preferred it.

  Improvements were also made above ground. The Capitoline Hill was slowly remade to Michelangelo’s design, with the Senator’s Palace and two others facing one another around a trapezoid piazza. Seventeenth-century Rome’s transformation accelerated under the influence of two architects in particular. Francesco Borromini produced intense designs that included the twizzle-shaped tower of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza and the intricate pattern work of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. His great rival, the prolific artist and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini produced the Tritone and Four Rivers fountains in Piazza Navona and the immense bronze canopy – the baldacchino – in St Peter’s.

  Yet Rome’s real transformation would require a further dose of Catholic sense of failure. A visitor from 1527 would have been surprised to learn that a great number of the city’s new sights were the work of a single pope, Alexander VII, who reigned for just twelve years from 1665 to 1677. Prior to his election, when he was Cardinal Fabio Chigi, he had worked as a papal negotiator at the peace negotiations at Münster that ended the carnage of the Thirty Years War. The resulting treaty accepted for the first time that Protestant churches were a permanent part of Europe’s religious landscape. Catholicism’s greatest setback, the Reformation, which had lost it a large portion of its European parishioners, was now official. Chigi, who was left traumatized, was determined to restore the Church’s prestige. At the start of his reign the former queen of Sweden, Christina, came to Rome, having renounced her throne and converted to Catholicism. Alexander VII, hopeful that he might win more high-ranking converts, sought to return the city to its former glory so it could become a showcase of Catholicism.

  Alexander had Rome’s most renowned antiquities cleared of detritus, replacing several columns of the Pantheon that had been lost to medieval violence and relandscaping the Piazza della Rotunda to make the building more visible. He tidied up streets and piazzas, forcing owners to rebuild the frontages of their houses so they were properly aligned. He restored old churches and built new ones. He gave Rome new vistas and framed those that existed, as with the twin churches in Piazza del Popolo that set off the Corso. He remade Rome’s squares, from Piazza Collegio Romano to Piazza Venezia and Santa Maria in Trastevere. He gave Rome what became among its most popular sights, such as Bernini’s elephant in Piazza della Minerva. Most of all he and Bernini – his chief collaborator – gave St Peter’s Square its vast curving colonnades.

  Even the disabitato was transformed. In 1527 it had been working countryside, made up of fields and vineyards with the occasional church or country home. In the 1840s it was largely comprised of holiday homes for Rome’s rich: country villas surrounded by ornamental parkland. One of the largest of these, the Villa Borghese, had its own lake. The Villa Doria Pamphili, which lay outside the city walls, just beyond the new fortifications above the Vatican – and through which General Oudinot’s soldiers marched towards Rome – had two lakes, each with a small waterfall.

  If he had been able to look into the future, Alexander VII would have been disappointed. His efforts did not cause a flood of foreign VIPs to convert, and northern Europe remained obstinately Protestant. Yet his beautified Rome succeeded in other ways, becoming a must-see city for Catholics and Protestants alike. So we come to another change that would have surprised a time traveller from 1527. Rome in the 1840s was crowded with a wholly new kind of visitor. These were not pilgrims (though there were still plenty of these as well) but sightseers. The new Grand Tour had arrived.

  It had been building up for some time. As we saw in the last chapter, Emperor Charles V could be considered one of the first cultural tourists. Many more would follow. Barring occasional hiccups, such as when Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, or when French revolutionaries invaded Italy, the Grand Tour became ever more popular with wealthy northern Europeans, for whom it was the accepted way to round off one’s education. When Napoleon’s occupation of Rome ended, tourists poured south, much to the annoyance of Lord Byron, who complained that the Continent was ‘pestilent with English – a parcel of staring boobies who go about gaping, wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. A man is a fool who travels now in France or Italy, till this tribe of wretches is swept home again.’5

  Byron would be in for a long wait. In 1846 Rome had 300,000 visitors, or double the city’s population. Tourists were the most visible foreign element on the city’s streets, as pilgrims stayed for only a week or two while tourists would often remain for a whole season, from October to the spring, when the city was largely malaria free. They came for the culture, for the sunlight, and in some cases to save money. The earl of Shrewsbury boasted
that by spending his summers in Rome – rashly, in view of the malaria risk – he saved himself £2,000 a year. Rome became their home away from home and, as well as seeing the sights, they would call on one another, have their portraits painted by resident artists – who were mostly northern Europeans like themselves – and dabble in a little painting and writing.

  Writers were especially drawn to Rome. Dickens and Byron, Ruskin and Lear, Irving, Cooper, Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne all spent time there. Elizabeth Gaskell claimed her days in Rome were ‘the tip-top point of our lives. The girls may have happier ones – I never shall.’6 The American sculptor and writer William Wetmore Story spent much of his life in the city. Keats, though he was in Rome for just a few months, became a kind of honorary Roman after dying there. He was far from alone. In 1849 the non-Catholic cemetery, just below Cestius’ pyramid, was crowded with the bones of eminent foreigners who had succumbed to typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria or riding accidents.

  Tourists still happily alive set themselves to work on the serious business of sightseeing. As well as the city’s classical ruins, palaces and churches there were its paintings, and it was all but obligatory to see the portrait of Beatrice Cenci – whose authenticity is now questioned – and lament the injustice of her fate (she was abused by her monstrous father and, after she and her siblings killed him, was executed). Though there were numerous guidebooks to the city, John Murray’s, first published in 1843, quickly became the guidebook for English-speakers, causing William Wetmore Story to observe that, ‘Every Englishman carries a Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step.’7

  As well as describing the sights, Murray offered practical advice on where to stay, where to eat and how to avoid being cheated. Most of his suggestions concern the area around Piazza di Spagna. A relatively new neighbourhood – the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain had been built the previous century – its housing was less cramped than that of other districts and its straight streets were wide enough to take a carriage. By the 1840s the area had become a foreign – and especially English – colony; so much so that Romans called it the Ghetto degli Inglesi. Aside from the Anglican Church, which thanks to papal sensibilities had to remain outside the city walls, almost every service that English visitors might need was to be found here, frequently offered by other English people. There was an English livery stable, an English reading room, an English circulating library and an English club (proposal strictly by existing members). Among numerous English tradesmen – whom Murray recommended above locals, ‘as they are more to be relied upon for punctuality, good articles and honesty’ and who refrained from, ‘bribing servants to obtain their masters’ custom’8 – there were English tailors and wine sellers, English bakers, hatters, boot- and shoemakers, English saddlers, dressmakers, hairdressers and booksellers, and even an English greengrocer. The English, together with other resident foreigners, had their own passeggiata on the Spanish Steps. Teams of the English played cricket against one another in the gardens of Villa Pamphili. The English even had their own pack of hounds – maintained by subscription – for hunts outside the city.

  With tourism came souvenir shops. William Wetmore Story found these distasteful, complaining that ‘Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped,’ from the Dying Gladiator to Beatrice Cenci, who ‘haunts one everywhere with her white turban and red eyes’.9 Tourism also brought crowds, especially during Holy Week at Easter when hotels were packed and the price of a city cab doubled or tripled. Dickens, watching the pope convey the sacrament from the Sistine Chapel to the Capella Paolina noted that, of the crowd watching this sombre Catholic ceremony, three-quarters were Protestant English.

  We owe much to the Victorian tourists. The accounts they wrote of their visits provide a far more vivid portrait of the city than those of any previous era. Rome in the 1840s excited strongly partisan responses, as it still does today. Many loathed it. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained of its ‘sour bread … enormous prices for poor living, beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples with filth at the base’, and its ‘shabby population smoking bad cigars’.10 Young John Ruskin both loathed and loved it. He despised ancient Rome, declaring it to be ‘a nasty, rubbishy, dirty hole – I hate it’. But he adored the city’s landscape, observing that there was ‘not a single corner of a street which if studied closely and well would not have been beautiful’. Then he loathed it all again, deciding that it was ‘the bluest place conceivable. Everybody in it looks like a vampyre; the ground is cold and church-like; the churches are full of skeletons; the air is sulphurous; the water is bilge; the sun is pestiferous; and the very plaster of the houses looks as if it had got all the plagues of Leviticus.’11 William Wetmore Story adored it all, even the stink: ‘It was dirty but it was Rome, and to anyone who has long lived in Rome even its very dirt has a charm which the neatness of no other place ever had.’12

  The tourists came, above all, to enjoy a dizzying sense of time past and greatness lost – though it was now much harder to appreciate Rome’s lost glories as a good portion of them had disappeared. A visitor from 1527 would have been disappointed to see how many of the city’s ruins had vanished, their stone recycled and their marble baked to make plaster. The new St Peter’s was the worst culprit and a large part of it had been constructed from the collapsed portion of the Colosseum. But at least what remained was more visible. Thanks to the city’s Napoleonic rulers, who sought to prepare for Napoleon’s triumphal progress through his second capital (which never happened), centuries of detritus had been removed from the Forum and the buildings and market stalls encroaching on the Pantheon were demolished.

  Although there was a little less to see in Rome there were new possibilities outside the city. Adventurous tourists could now explore a quite new kind of ruin: Etruscan cities and tombs. For a century these had fascinated northern Europeans, so much so that English aristocrats had Etruscan rooms installed in their country homes, and Josiah Wedgwood’s copies of Etruscan pottery (most of which were in fact Greek) became so popular that in 1769 he named his new factory Etruria. Etruscomania led to an interesting rediscovery. In 1839 Elizabeth Gray paid a visit to a ruined city north of Rome, whose walls she found were in the process of being eaten away as, ‘every peasant has been at liberty to carry off the stones, destroy the remnants of walls and buildings and dig up the ancient highways, in order to fence round his own sheepfold, or patch of corn land; to build his conical hut’.13 The vanishing city was Rome’s ancient rival, Veii. Rome’s first victim was finally back in the limelight.

  When not describing Rome’s cultural sights, tourists complained – and there was much that annoyed them. Rome may have improved beyond all measure since 1527, yet when compared to other nineteenth-century European cities it was old-fashioned, even bewilderingly so. Visitors were irritated by its antiquated bureaucracy, and by its main post office where they went to collect their letters, and which would close for no reason anyone could understand. They grumbled about the city’s numerous feast days when cafés and restaurants were only permitted to serve plain, light food (though Protestants could sometimes get round the rules). They were confused by the city’s clocks, whose hours were numbered from one to six, and whose hour hand (there was no minute hand) made a full circuit of the clock face four times a day. And they were baffled by Rome’s incomprehensible time system, under which each day began at the Ave Maria (half an hour after sunset) though the exact moment was set officially, with adjustments announced every few weeks in the official papal almanac, the Diario Romano.

  Protestant tourists also loved to complain of what they saw as the strange superstitions of Catholicism. Despite the ravages of Charles V’s Landsknechte, many of these still remained. In St Peter’s, hidden in repositories and shown to the public only on special feast days, were part of Longinus’ lance, with which he had stabbed Jesus’ side, as well as Saint Andrew’s head and even the
Veronica cloth, which had supposedly been burned or sold in an inn in 1527. However, these days the popularity of all three was eclipsed by a new miraculous object: the Bambino of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, which was a wooden figure of Jesus, dressed in satin, gold lace and precious jewels. It was widely believed to have healing powers and was brought to sick patients accompanied by physicians, who – fortunately – were able to give actual medical advice. When the Bambino passed through streets, often in his own carriage, Romans would kneel, cross themselves and women would cover their heads. Dickens described it as ‘a little wooden doll, in face very like General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf’.14

  The greatest number of tourists’ grievances, however, were reserved for their lodgings. Though they might spend a day or two in a hotel on their arrival, most then moved to a rented apartment that was both more spacious and less costly. Yet, living as the Romans did could be a sorry experience. Sir George Head described dirty stairways, poorly fitting doors, badly made locks and draughty windows, observing that many properties were ‘so questionable that, in any other place than Rome, one would think it disreputable to enter’ .15 It did not help that the tourists visited Rome in the autumn and winter, although the buildings they stayed in were designed to keep out the intense summer heat. Nathaniel Hawthorne found himself sitting by a smoking, cheerless fireside wearing more clothes than he had ever worn in his life. Fleas were a constant problem as they infested almost all rented housing, from the poorest to the best.

  There was also the noise. Ceilings were anything but soundproof, while apartments were often reached through a labyrinth of different entrances, so ‘one may hear one’s fellow lodger stamping continuously for weeks or months’, without ever being able to catch him at the door and ask him to be quieter. There was also an infuriating device that was used all over Rome to carry water to upstairs rooms, which involved ‘a copper vessel suspended by a ring to a slanting wire, and drawn up and down to an upper window, which process is an extraordinarily noisy one’. The copper vessel was so small that it had to be hauled up repeatedly; and as there were half a dozen or so such wires in every piazza, ‘the same disagreeable, grating, rattling and splashing disturbance is repeated continually’.16