You
Felt A Racial Intimacy With The Whimsical And Antic Shapes Which Your
Brief Personal Consciousness Denied In Vain; And You Rose Among The
Slopes Around Tivoli With A Sense Of Home-Coming From The Desert Of The
Campagna.
But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they
lost this effect of tricksy familiarity.
They looked like a gray sea
against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar
silence, full of mystery and loneliness.
If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its
wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as
much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls
enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to
Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose _Walks in Rome_ include Tivoli, does
not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that
if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of
Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to
the Villa d'Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the
reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight
of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes
industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as
ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily
passed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish
chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the
long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable
as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent
two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much
more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little
time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold classic
associations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the
cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.
The Villa d'Este is not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the
fancy without cumbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some
neglected pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in
them, but the forgottenness of the Villa d'Este hospitably allured me to
instant and permament occupation, so that when I heard it could now be
bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars, nothing but the
want of the money kept me from making the purchase. I indeed recognized
certain difficulties in living there the year round; but who lives
anywhere the year round if he can help it? The casino, standing among
the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a
little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the
sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the painted and
modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the
former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it
was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and
avenues of the garden which its balustrated terrace looked into.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 129 of 186
Words from 67131 to 67678
of 97259
