For Instance, In A Statuary's
Shop In The Via Sistina There Is A Large Yellow Cat, Which I One Day Saw
Dressing The Hair Of The Statuary's Boy.
It performed this office with a
very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where
ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to
time, as it licked the boy's thick, black locks, to get the effect of
its labors.
On other days or at other hours it slept under the
table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even in
Rome, where cats are so abundant, it was a notable cat.
If you visit the Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be
hurried home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my
case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way hotelward
at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier time, but which, is
now superseded by the more authentic temple in the Forum. I had long
revered the first in its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute
of unwilling renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient
Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle,
than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the
owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the
world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud
of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as
it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the _Popolo
Romano_ into the cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how
deep it was. He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the
traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee, and it
seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near lunch-time, let the
traveller look well about him in the dusty little piazza there, for the
Temple of Fortune, with its bruised but beautiful facade, is hard by, as
much in the form that Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected
after all this time.
Perhaps the Circus of Marcellus is on the traveller's way home to lunch;
but he will always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in
with mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his
cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the circus. A
glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to the Campidoglio,
with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate
accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for
him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true
through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of
their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto. It is hardly possible that his
glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he
sits his bronze charger - an extremely fat one - so majestically in the
piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble
equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.
A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of
chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the
monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the
nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of
Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out
where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving
through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I
looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty
antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with
their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal
grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my
veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no
arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. 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. One that suffers as little as any,
if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch you are
apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside it or across
its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with post-card boys and their
bargains.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 36 of 95
Words from 35822 to 36864
of 97259
