Because They Are So Convenient, The Modern Romans
Have Turned Their Cavernous Immensity To Account In The Trades And
Industries,
And have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and
plumbers' shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging
Much
better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In
color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the
eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine, which at any distance great
enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive
nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of
that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised
Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of
fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All
round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than
tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills
about it - a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the
varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and
Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in
their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of
local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.
If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the
chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the
Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats
along the shore, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must
not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will
naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as
the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their
dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the
orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven
hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church,
covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the
world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a
bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book,
with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back
on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light,
whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his
devotions.
It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could,
follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the
Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and
finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French
Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so
vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the
easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last
seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the
order's privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions
which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers.
Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor
Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the
unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the
key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled.
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