No Lovelier Architectural Effect Was Ever
Realized From A Happy Fancy; But, Of Course, The Pictorial Effect Is
Richer From Below, Especially From The Via Dei Condotti, Where It Opens
Into The Piazza Di Spagna.
I suppose there must be hours of the day, and
certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the Steps
have not the sunset on them.
But most of the time they have the sunset
on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the banks of daffodils
and lilies and anemones and carnations and roses and almond blossoms,
keeping the downpour of the marble cascades from flooding the piazza,
and mounts, mellowing and yellowing, up their gray stone, until it
reaches the Church of Trinita de' Monti at the top.
There it lingers, I should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown
facade in an effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once
it has blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart
ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can
bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling
yourself so. It is a charm that imparts itself more in detail and is
less exclusively the effect of perpetual sunset. From the parapet
against which you lean you have a perfecter conception of the
architectural form than you get from below, and you are never tired of
seeing the successive falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then
coming together on the broad landings and again parting and coming
together.
If there were once many models, male, female, and infant, brigands,
peasants, sages, and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems
to me there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there
for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and transfer
them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in noticeable
number. I saw some small boys in steeple-crowned soft hats and short
jackets, with their little legs wound round with the favorite bandaging
of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes
at the breast; there was a patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to
pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons;
but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls,
fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below
those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds
in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there
is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of
alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied
escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he
joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are
capable; he wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our
species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.
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