But Possibly, Since
The Temporal Power Was Overthrown, The Seasons Are Neglected And
Indifferent.
Certainly man seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent.
Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice
Look vacant, and the high
wall which encloses it is plastered and painted with huge advertisements
of clothiers and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and
other events out of keeping with its character and tradition.
The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the Northern lands will
tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which has
sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with
the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I, who am a
sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share them. No doubt
the Newer Rome has made mistakes, but, without defending her
indiscriminately, I am a Newer-Roman to the core, perhaps because I knew
the Older Rome and what it was like; and not all my brother and sister
sentimentalists can say as much.
II
A PRAISE OF NEW ROME
Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she
seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed.
Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no
one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864
as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I
should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting,
in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in
others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so
many good things. At the same time I must own that I heard no other
foreigner praising her for her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian,
who had seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the
Ghetto should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had
perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a shame, and
an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also thought the Tiber
Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks
of other days invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters
of the town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that
overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an effect of
disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown to the lover of
the picturesque. There used to be a particular type of typhoid known as
Roman fever, but now quite unknown, thanks to the Tiber Embankments and
to the light and air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for
which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect municipal
housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley
unswept; every morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces
formerly almost impassable to the foot and quite impossible to the nose.
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