It Was A Fortnight Later That We Paid Our Visit To Frascati, Not Proudly
Motoring Now, But Traversing The Campagna On The Roof Of A Populous
Tram-Car, Which In Its Lofty Narrowness Was Of The Likeness Of An
Old-Fashionable Lake Propeller.
The morning was, like most other
mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of;
but
None of us passengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we
gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth
in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the
car. We all did this, whatever our nation - American, English, German, or
Italian - and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and
entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over
our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could
have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not
rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the
morning's warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We
passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar
terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of
wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of
market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the
tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino
had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees
were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we
found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.
There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with
those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and
cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts' tails blowing
picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our
advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near
one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome,
but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk
rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other
pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for
the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl
singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer
Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out
to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these
looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line;
and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for
the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses.
The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating
the forest's broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided
ravine worth any man's American money; and the dead leaves littered the
sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head
to resist.
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