Another Typical Wrong To The Old Rome, Or Rather To The Not-Yet Rome,
Was The Building-Up, Beyond The Tiber, Of The Quarter Of The Fields, So
Called, Where Zola In His Novel Of _Rome_ Has Placed Most Of The Squalor
Which He So Lavishly Employs In Its Contrasts.
In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of
himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the
scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati.
When I did so I
found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting
anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third
time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively
lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash
hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and
misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York
I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In
this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere
in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly
as our streets look when they have just been "cleaned," I knew that the
next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best
never have been since the days of Waring.
Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been
bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type,
fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_
standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look
over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them. Like
suburban effects are characteristic of the new wide residential streets
on the hither side of the Tiber, and on both shores the streets expand
from time to time into squares, with more or less tolerable new
monuments - say, of the Boston average - in them. The business streets
where they bear the lines of the frequently recurrent trams are spacious
and straight, and though they are not the Corso, the Corso itself, it
must be remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive,
and is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have no
space to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals betray a
glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether these palaces are
outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from what sight one can get
of them; no, not even the most besotted sentimentalist of those who
bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome when they mean Rome of the
Renaissance. How much of that Rome has been erased by modern Rome I do
not know, but I think not so much as people pretend. Some of the ugly
baroque churches have been pulled down to allow the excavation of
imperial Rome, but there are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is
said the princely proprietors of the old palaces which are let in
apartments along the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are
going to pull them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of
modern rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of
hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately domiciles,
and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they spoke of these
rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices of the sort, and I
should not be surprised if I went back to Rome after another forty-three
years to find most of them standing in 1951 where they now stand in
1908. Rome was not built in a day, and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt
within the brief period that will make me one hundred and fourteen years
old. By that time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I
can say to the few survivors: "There, you see that new Rome never went
half so far as you expected."
But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is
for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of
which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American
pride was flattered by tho sign on a handsome apartment-house going up
in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a
lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied
with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from
the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the
impassioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors.
New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to
whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and
older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or
the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage
peering over them, that now enchant the passer in the street; from the
windows of my electric-ele-vatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look
down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange
espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of
oleanders and of laurels
"Shaking its loosened silver in the sun."
Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against
the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some
sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now
possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down,
while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of
the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its
spreading shade.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 26 of 95
Words from 25547 to 26563
of 97259
