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.
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