Roman Neighbourhoods

By Henry James

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EText by Ian Hillman

I MADE a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had been talking of the picturesque all my life, but that now for a change I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with it's half-dozen towns shining on it's purple side, like vague sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground, and suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily in a thousand ambiguous lights and shadows in the interval, I find as good entertainment as any in the Roman streets. The walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the neighbouring town of Ariccia,—-neighbouring these twenty years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the valley gorge which divides it from Albano. At the risk of being thought fantastic, I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct—-in this very recent antiquity—-made me linger there in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the Ninths beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we make to vanished powers. An ardent Nero then would have had his own way with me, and obtained an easy admission that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the steep, stone-paved road, at the bottom of which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for the opposite ascent. And, indeed, even an impatient tourist might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations of the little city, plunging into the verdurous flank of the gorge. If I were asked what is the most delectable piece of oddity hereabouts, I should certainly say the way in which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside of it's pretentious old gateway, to see it clutched and stitched, as it were, to the stony hillside, by this rank embroidery of wild weeds and flowers. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between their dusky ruggedness and this tender fringe of yellow and pink and violet, All this you may observe from the viaduct at Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The pillars and arches of pale grey peperino rise in huge tiers, with a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their sturdy bequests, which helps one to drop a sigh over Italy's long, long yesterday. In Ariccia I found a little square with a couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast, dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi, and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice, and is adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this fine old decoration, that preparations were going forward for a local festival, and that the village carpenter was hanging certain mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults, The damask might have been of the seventeenth century, too, and a group of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded it myself with interest: it seemed to me to be the tattered remnant of an old fashion. I thought again of the poor, disinherited Pope, and wondered whether, when that venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy, you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost compassionate sense of it. One finds one's self at last (without fatuity, I hope) pitying the loneliness of the remaining faithful. The churches seem to have been made so for the world, in it's social sense, and the world seems so irrevocably away from them. They are in size out of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the only thing that seems really to occupy their melancholy vacancy is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond Ariccia, rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple, whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the population of a metropolis. But where is the taste of Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome, and a hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions with more profane importunities; or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between Guidos and Caravaggios and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central substance has utterly crumbled away.

I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk constitutional, if I say that I also fell a thinking before the shabby façade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow, in it's grey forlornness, to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the opposite church; and indeed, under any circumstances, what contemplative mind can forbear to do a little romancing in the shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the Chigi Palace seemed to me in the suggestive twilight a very pretty specimen of a haunted house. It's basement walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyramid, and it's lower windows were covered with massive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, and on the roof I beheld a great covered loggia, or belvedere, with a dozen window-panes missing, or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a façade means nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the worst) on the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep, crooked street, with their black, cavernous archways filled with evil smells, with the braying of asses, and with human intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you with hunger-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there are still enough to be effective), the soldiers, the mounted policemen, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark, overgrown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded gateway,—-what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of the dark ages? With the strongest desire to content himself with the picturesqueness of things, the tourist can hardly help wondering whether the picture is not half spoiled for pleasure by all that it suggests of the hardness of human life. At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo Cesarini, separated from it's gardens by a dirty lane. Between peasant and prince the contact is unbroken, and one would say that Italian good-nature must be sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the prince in especial must be trained not to take things too hard. There are no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant against a sunny wall, sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black bread.

I confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the little piazza of Ariccia, it displayed no especial symptoms of a jacquerie. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of “costume” in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls, light-heartedly enough, on the grass outside the town. The egress, on this side, is under a great stone archway, thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms. Nothing could better confirm your fancy that the townsfolk are groaning serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, and I find it vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers which cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with it's hood thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and there, in the duskier places, great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; there are dozens more I know no name for,—-a rich profusion, in especial, of a beautiful, fine-petalled flower with it's white texture pencilled with hair-strokes which certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of it's Anglo-Saxon brothers, but it contrives, in proportion, to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks it's back and twists it's arms and clinches it's hundred fists with the most fantastic extravagance, and wrinkles it's bark into strange rugosities from which it's first scattered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the greatest charm to Northern eyes is the cold, grey-green ilex, whose clear, crepuscular shade is a delicious provision against a Southern sun. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a landscape full of ilexes may still be said to smile—-soberly. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into vaulted corridors, in which, from point to point, as in the niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you encounter mildewed busts, staring at you with a solemnity which the even, grey light makes strangely intense. A humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many of the neighbouring hillsides with it's little smoky puffs of foliage. A piece of picturesqueness I never weary of is the sight of the long blue stretch of the Campagna, making a high horizon, and resting on this vaporous base of olive-tops. A tourist intent upon a metaphor might liken it to the ocean seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand.

To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from Ariccia, I ought to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull, dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only hope it was the nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more than once, in places so charming that his song would have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty; but I have never heard anything but a provoking snatch or two,—-a prelude that came to nothing. But in spite of a natural grudge, I generously believe him a great artist, or at least a great genius,—-a creature who despises any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the prodigal spirit of picturesqueness. The wind was ringing with sound, because it was twilight, spring, and Italy. It was also because of these good things and various others beside, that I relished so keenly my visit to the Capuchin convent, upon which I emerged after half an hour in the wood. It stands above the town, on the slope of the Alban Mount, and it's wild garden climbs away behind it and extends it's melancholy influence. Before it is a stiff little avenue of trimmed ilexes which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near you behold, behind the grating of the shrine, the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors, you murmur; is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy, and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand entertainment at their convent, you declare that the Capuchins are very vulgar fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to my knock, and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting me at so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning, he would be most happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was the very hour of my desire, and that the garish morning light would do no justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his good-nature (of which he had plenty), and not his imagination, that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the scene, I ventured to doubt that he knew he was picturesque amid picturesqueness. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was reason in my fancy for seeing the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was supremely enchanting. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light mists of evening. This beautiful pool—-it is hardly more—-occupies the crater of a prehistoric volcano,—-a perfect cup, moulded and smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup rises high and densely wooded around the placid, stone-blue water, with a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it has a sinister look which betrays it's dangerous antecedents. The winds never reach it, and it's surface is never ruffled; but it's deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. It's very colour has a kind of joyless beauty,—-a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of it's own; it seemed the very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave it's sullen flood and beckon to me with irresistible arms. Is it because it's shores are haunted with these vague Pagan influences, that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less picturesque certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which, in these hard days, are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden if there ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with it's steep, grassy vistas struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed, crumbling pavilions, which rise from the corners of the farther wall, and give you a wider and lovelier view of the lake and hills and sky.

I have perhaps justified to the reader the declaration with which I started, and helped him to fancy—-and possibly to remember—-that one's walks at Albano are entertaining. They may be various, too, and have little in common but the merit of keeping in the shade. “Galleries” the roads are prettily called, and with a great deal of justice; for they are vaulted and draped overhead and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the long road from Genzano to Frascati, you have perpetual views of the Campagna, framed by clusters of trees, and it's vast, iridescent expanse completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same fantastic lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have seen it at moments—-chiefly in the misty twilight—-when it seemed less like the positive ocean than like something more portentous,—-the land in a state of dissolution. I could fancy that the fields were dimly surging and tossing, and melting away into quicksands, and that the last “effect” was being presented to the eyes of imaginative tourists. A view, however, which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake of Nemi, which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare with it's sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly odious; for in order to prefer one lake to the other, you have to discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but she lies in a deeper cup; and if she has no grey Franciscan convent to guard her woody shores, she has, in quite the same position, the little, high-perched, black town to which she gives her name, and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite shore, as Palazzuola contemplates Castel Gandolfo. The walk from Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at Genzano,—-I mentioned it just now,—-whose gardens overhang the lake; but he has also a porter, in a faded, rakish-looking livery, who shakes his head at your proffered franc, unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is justly to be denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed, light-chequered corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town with a little more rustic coquetry than Genzano possesses. It seemed to me to have more than the usual portion of mouldering disrepair; to look dismally as if it's best families had all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great, dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken windowpanes. It was apropos of this drear Genzano that I had a difference of opinion with a friend, who maintained that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New England village. The proposition, to a sentimental tourist, seemed at first inacceptable; but calmly considered, it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of white clapboards, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I confess I am sensible of the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to brush your cheek.

“I prefer Siena to Lowell,” said my friend; “but I prefer Northampton to Genzano.” In fact, an Italian village is simply a miniature Italian city, and it's various parts imply a town of fifty times the size. At Genzano there are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. Flowers and perfumes are all confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The houses, on the other hand, would generally lodge a New England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a fashion, denoting more generous social needs than any they serve nowadays. They seem to speak of better days, and of a fabulous time, when Italy was not shabby. For what follies are they doing penance? Through what melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street, and watch the hot sun glaring upon the dust-coloured walls, and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors.

I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a cliff high above the lake, on the opposite side; but after all, when I had climbed up into it from the water-side, and passed beneath a great arch which, I suppose, once topped a gateway, and counted it's twenty or thirty apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared that it was all queer, queer, extremely queer, I had said all that is worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of it's lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on the only freshness they find in these dusky human hives,—-the blooming seam, as one may call it, of strong wild-flowers which binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little. It kept generally what I had fancied the picturesque promise of it's name; but the only object I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in it's face setting forth that Massimo d'Azeglio had dwelt there. The story of his sojourn is not the least entertaining episode in his delightful Memoirs. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that the modern Passionist convent which occupies this admirable site was erected by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II.) on the demolished ruins of an immemorial temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish race. For me, I confess, this fully spoiled the convent, and the convent all but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge of the Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site,—-that of early Alba Longa,—-it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a meagre little church and the usual impossible Perugino with a couple of tinsel crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and it has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who accompanied me, that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal! But my peculiar pleasure was the little, thick-shaded garden which adjoins the convent and commands from it's massive artificial foundations an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skull-cap and greet me with the unsophisticated, sweet-humoured smile which every now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the uncleanness of monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain, black with water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone seats, where you may lean on your elbows and gaze away a sunny half-hour and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare that the best mission of Italy in the world has been to produce this sort of thing. If I wished a single word for the whole place and it's suggestions, I should talk of their exquisite mildness. Mild it all seemed to me as a dream, as resignation, as one's thoughts of another life. I could have fancied that my lingering there was not an experience of the irritable flesh, but a deep reverie on a summer's day, over a passage in a picturesque poem.

From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities to Frascati, a rival centre of villeggiatura, the road following the hillside for a long morning's walk and passing through alternations of denser and clearer shade,—-the dark, vaulted alleys of ilex and the brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna lies beneath you continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the sun upon it's chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and twisted cordon; and I confess that I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a sort of rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati, I necessarily revert to my first impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March, and is celebrated by a peasants fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and measured, in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the half-hours interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives, and through a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women's fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only creatures who were not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, over-beaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods), and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of dust and distance, and filling the air with that childlike jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd, surely, at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside, and nothing to charm the tourist but it's situation and it's old fortified abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes, and pork, I was glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical, citadel is a very picturesque affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging foundations which bury themselves among the olive-trees. It has massive round towers at the corners, and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church and monastery. The outer court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves as the public square of the village, and in fair time, of course, witnessed the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was being freely dispensed from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos, shady trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, under which a prodigious guzzling went forward. All this was very curious, and I was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Camacho. The banquet was far less substantial, of course, but it had an air of Old World revelry which could not fail to suggest romantic analogies to an ascetic American. There was a feast of reason close at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescos of Domenichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, I found the peasants swilling down their sour wine more picturesque than the masterpieces (Murray calls them so) of the famous Bolognese. It amounts, after all, to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino, which I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive statement on this point was, like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort are dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones adorned with calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, with their dusky tresses garnished with nothing more pictorial than lustrous pomatum. The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings, may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found a delightful nook,—-a queer little terrace before a more retired and tranquil drinking-shop,—-where I called for a bottle of wine to help me to guess why I liked Domenichino no better.

This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of the piazza, which was itself simply a great terrace; and one reached it, picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen, through whose narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond was twinkling on old earthen pots. The terrace was oblong, and so narrow that it held but a single small table, placed lengthwise; but nothing could be pleasanter than to place one's bottle on the polished parapet. Here, by the time you had emptied it, you seemed to be swinging forward into immensity,—-hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don't know that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it was perhaps because the view was perfection, that he seemed to me more than ever to be mediocrity. And yet I don't think it was my bottle of wine, either, that made me feel half sentimental about him; it was the sense of there being something cruelly feeble in his tenure of fame, something derisive in his exaggerated honours. It is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him to have Murray assuring ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner that his Communion of St. Jerome is “the second finest picture in the world.” If this were so, I should certainly, here in Rome, where such institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with such a world I should have a standing quarrel. And yet Domenichino is an interesting painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from inspiration, and school-merit divorced from spontaneity that one of his fine, frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every academy of design. Few pictures contain more urgent lessons or point a more precious moral; and I would have the headmaster in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl, and make him some such little speech as this: “This great picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must never paint; to give you a perfect specimen of what in it's boundless generosity the providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge,—-an artist whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino had great talent, and here and there he is an excellent model; he was devoted, conscientious, observant, industrious, but now that we've seen pretty well what can simply be learned do it's best, these things help him little with us, because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, it's efforts never gave it the heart-ache. It went about trying this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the second-hand and the ready-made, and putting into it's performances a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a picture, you might fancy that among them all charm might be born, but they are really but the hundred mouths through which you may hear the picture murmur, 'I'm dead!' It's in the simplest thing it has that a picture lives,—-in it's temper! Look at all the great talents, at Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true.” This is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined might say; and after all we are all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one upon any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescos in the chapel at Grotta Ferrata leave one a memory the more of what man has done for man, and mingle harmoniously enough with one's multifold impressions of Italy. It was, perhaps, an ungracious thing to be critical, among all the appealing old Italianisms round me, and to treat poor exploded Domenichino more harshly than, when I walked back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa Aldobrandini. I should like to confound these various products of antiquated art in a genial absolution; and I should like especially to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down it's channel of mouldy rock-work, through it's magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue, and the ilexes themselves incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the trees, you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like, furthermore, to expatiate on the Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive of Italian villas. The great Casino is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna. Everything, somehow, seemed immense and solemn; there was nothing small, but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near. The place has been for some time lost to private uses, for it figures fantastically in a novel of Madame Sand (La Daniella), and now—-in quite another way—-as a Jesuit college for boys. The afternoon was perfect, and, as it waned, it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little collegians, with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their heels. We all know the monstrous practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and receive their crooked teachings, for the sake of the other memories,—-the avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere of antiquity. But, doubtless, when a sense of the picturesque has brought one to this, it is time one should pause.