To Make The
Reader The Greatest Possible Confidence, I Will Own That I Passed Five
Times Through The Piazza Colonna
To my tailor's in the next piazza (at
Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost
Worn your new
clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus
Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a
strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round
from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having
a general effect in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the
dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune,
or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives
having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent
ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the
Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life
Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the
Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it is
housed on the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is
that I believe the Temple of Neptune would have been superior to either
fate; though I may be mistaken.
Ruin, nearly everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the
environment; and even the monuments of the past which are in
comparatively good repair have not always the keeping that the past
would probably have chosen for them.
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