Nor, Is It
Wanting In The Open Air--The Streets And Roads--For, Often As You
Are Walking Along, Thinking
About anything rather than a tin
canister, that object pounces out upon you from a little house by
the wayside;
And on its top is painted, 'For the Souls in
Purgatory;' an appeal which the bearer repeats a great many times,
as he rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles the cracked bell
which his sanguine disposition makes an organ of.
And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar sanctity,
bear the inscription, 'Every Mass performed at this altar frees a
soul from Purgatory.' I have never been able to find out the
charge for one of these services, but they should needs be
expensive. There are several Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of
which, confers indulgences for varying terms. That in the centre
of the Coliseum, is worth a hundred days; and people may be seen
kissing it from morning to night. It is curious that some of these
crosses seem to acquire an arbitrary popularity: this very one
among them. In another part of the Coliseum there is a cross upon
a marble slab, with the inscription, 'Who kisses this cross shall
be entitled to Two hundred and forty days' indulgence.' But I saw
no one person kiss it, though, day after day, I sat in the arena,
and saw scores upon scores of peasants pass it, on their way to
kiss the other.
To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches, would
be the wildest occupation in the world. But St. Stefano Rotondo, a
damp, mildewed vault of an old church in the outskirts of Rome,
will always struggle uppermost in my mind, by reason of the hideous
paintings with which its walls are covered. These represent the
martyrdoms of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of
horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he
were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper. Grey-bearded men being
boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts,
worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up
small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron
pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws
broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the
stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the
mildest subjects. So insisted on, and laboured at, besides, that
every sufferer gives you the same occasion for wonder as poor old
Duncan awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his having so
much blood in him.
There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what is
said to have been--and very possibly may have been--the dungeon of
St. Peter. This chamber is now fitted up as an oratory, dedicated
to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate place, in
my recollection, too. It is very small and low-roofed; and the
dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as
if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor. Hanging on
the walls, among the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at
once strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the
place--rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers instruments of
violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use, and hung up to
propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon them would drain
off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry with. It is all
so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the dungeons below are
so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked; that this little
dark spot becomes a dream within a dream: and in the vision of
great churches which come rolling past me like a sea, it is a small
wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and does not flow on
with the rest.
It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are
entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city. Many
churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which,
in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples,
and what not: but I do not speak of them. Beneath the church of
St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range
of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have another outlet
underneath the Coliseum--tremendous darknesses of vast extent,
half-buried in the earth and unexplorable, where the dull torches,
flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of distant
vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a city of
the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls, drip-
drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and
there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the sun. Some
accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the
amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some,
both. But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the
upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the
wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the
night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon
and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,
their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of
San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs
of Rome--quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places
of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been explored for
twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in
circumference.
A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only
guide, down into this profound and dreadful place.
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