It Was A Fortnight Later That We Paid Our Visit To Frascati, Not Proudly
Motoring Now, But Traversing The Campagna On The Roof Of A Populous
Tram-Car, Which In Its Lofty Narrowness Was Of The Likeness Of An
Old-Fashionable Lake Propeller.
The morning was, like most other
mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of;
but
None of us passengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we
gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth
in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the
car. We all did this, whatever our nation - American, English, German, or
Italian - and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and
entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over
our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could
have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not
rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the
morning's warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We
passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar
terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of
wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of
market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the
tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino
had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees
were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we
found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.
There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with
those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and
cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts' tails blowing
picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our
advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near
one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome,
but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk
rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other
pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for
the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl
singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer
Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out
to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these
looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line;
and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for
the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses.
The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating
the forest's broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided
ravine worth any man's American money; and the dead leaves littered the
sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head
to resist.
Elsewhere the tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked,
after it left the Campagna's level, with vineyards as measureless as the
olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of
leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of
canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the
hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied
itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the
Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but
never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we
call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from
the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination,
our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful
square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on
the sidewalks before them.
We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our
eyes from feasting, even at eleven o'clock in the morning, on the
wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more
immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged
about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the
cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we
could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and
still fared well; but we chose the best - a glittering victoria and an
animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of
joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some
others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental
vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse's
headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his
company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition
that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city;
because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they
ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards
of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole
day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he
only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.
We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the
attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and
our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that
concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him
that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable
villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through
the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if
unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.
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