Be Tender Of The Hapless Mendicants
At The Door; They Are Not There For Their Pleasure, Those Blind And Halt
And Old.
Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of
cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can
Save you time, which,
though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving,
and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized
as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly
rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church
of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But
after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the
huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had
left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that
ever wrung the remorseful heart.
His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his
waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his
shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures,
reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the
forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three
days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his
shirt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry
for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated
demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would,
from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church;
but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted
into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look
it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and
believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery.
If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not
because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but
because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing
doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges,
emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses
they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard
their rich harmony would he like not having heard the echo in the
baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.
Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with
every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before
the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that,
but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the
Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly
remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the
modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as
then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations,
but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to
climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that
it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of
that most noble fagade of the church, with its lofty balustraded
entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out
forever to the Alban hills.
XIV
TIVOLI AND FRASCATI
One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation
that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present
themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your
hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my notion of
the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter passed, so
many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly
held aloof from me in my walks abroad, that I began to feel anxious lest
I should miss them altogether. I had, for instance, always had the
friendliest curiosity concerning Tivoli and Frascati as the two most
amiable Roman neighborhoods, and hoped to see both of them in some
informal and casual sort; but they persisted so long in keeping off on
their respective hills that I saw something positive on niy part must be
done. Clearly I must make the advances; and so when, one morning of
mid-March, a friend sent to ask if we would not motor out to Tivoli with
him and his family, I closed eagerly with the chance of a compromise
which would save feeling all round. My friend has never yet known how he
was bringing Tivoli and me together after a mutual diffidence, but, as
he was a poet, I am sure he will be glad to know now.
Our road across the Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside
the tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched rough,
if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between the wide,
lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat. The Campagna is
said to be ploughed only once in five years by the peasants for the
proprietors, who have philosophized its fertility as something that can
be better restored by the activities of nature in that time than by
phosphates in less. As they are mostly Roman patricians, they have
always felt able to wait; but now it is said that northern Italian
capital and enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be
cropped every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the
two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we had the
company of the different aqueducts, but their broken stretches presently
ceased altogether, and then for other human association we had, besides
the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered among
the grassy humps and hollows.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 65 of 95
Words from 65632 to 66666
of 97259
