Not A Line Of Its
Proportions Wanting; Not An Angle Blunted; Not An Atom Of Its
Radiance Lost.
The next night--Easter Monday--there was a great display of
fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo.
We hired a room in an
opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time,
through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and
all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which
the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the
rapid Tiber below. There are statues on this bridge (execrable
works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were
placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less
strangely on the stone counterfeits above them.
The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant
sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour,
size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones
or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time. The concluding burst--
the Girandola--was like the blowing up into the air of the whole
massive castle, without smoke or dust.
In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed;
the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the
river; and half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle
in their hands: moving here and there, in search of anything worth
having, that might have been dropped in the press: had the whole
scene to themselves.
By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum. I had seen
it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without
going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past
all telling. The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal
Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruins which were
once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of
ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread
of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their
transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays,
erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of
weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every
gap and broken arch--the shadow of its awful self, immovable!
As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our way
to Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little wooden
cross had been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim Countess
was murdered. So, we piled some loose stones about it, as the
beginning of a mound to her memory, and wondered if we should ever
rest there again, and look back at Rome.
CHAPTER XI--A RAPID DIORAMA
We are bound for Naples! And we cross the threshold of the Eternal
City at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the
two last objects that attract the notice of a departing visitor,
and the two first objects that attract the notice of an arriving
one, are a proud church and a decaying ruin--good emblems of Rome.
Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright
blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of
ruin being plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through the arches
of the broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining
through them in the melancholy distance. When we have traversed
it, and look back from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies
below us like a stagnant lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing
round the walls of Rome, and separating it from all the world! How
often have the Legions, in triumphant march, gone glittering across
that purple waste, so silent and unpeopled now! How often has the
train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant
city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of
their conqueror! What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in
the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What
glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol
unmolested in the sun!
The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy
peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-
skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country
where there are trees. The next day brings us on the Pontine
Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood,
and swamped with water, but with a fine road made across them,
shaded by a long, long avenue. Here and there, we pass a solitary
guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled up. Some
herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes rippling idly
along it. A horseman passes occasionally, carrying a long gun
cross-wise on the saddle before him, and attended by fierce dogs;
but there is nothing else astir save the wind and the shadows,
until we come in sight of Terracina.
How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn
so famous in robber stories! How picturesque the great crags and
points of rock overhanging to-morrow's narrow road, where galley-
slaves are working in the quarries above, and the sentinels who
guard them lounge on the sea-shore! All night there is the murmur
of the sea beneath the stars; and, in the morning, just at
daybreak, the prospect suddenly becoming expanded, as if by a
miracle, reveals--in the far distance, across the sea there!--
Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius spouting fire!
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