Of all the caprices of
art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing
playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through
the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without
bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.
It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian
keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome,
elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded
beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should
be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.
"And the German Emperor owns it now?"
"Yes, they say he has bought it."
"And the Germans will soon be coming?"
"They say."
She would not commit herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew
very well what she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish
now I could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how
far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always guess at
these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded the aged
gatekeeper according to the century of service his generations had
rendered those of the frescos.
We were going now to the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the
courage for the rise of ground where we had failed before, and we
entreated our driver to go round some other way, if he could, and
descend rather than ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when
we came away that we passed through that ilex avenue which we had not
yet penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many
foot-passengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of the
scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to seize its
features, or some of them. I did not see whether she was succeeding so
well as in pity she might and as I knew she did.
In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second
attempt, we can never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri.
I forget what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid,
with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as
reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a
quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately
colonnade following as far round as the reader likes. When he passes
through all this magnificence he will come out on a grassy terrace, with
a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the
Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird sort of barbaric
stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars
that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the
top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches
must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of
these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college
there, where only the sons of noble families are received for education.
As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old
and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with
their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls
a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole
of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing
colder thaa it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup,
and hot, that they could get.
After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing,
in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical
merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming
to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram
back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The roof, which had
been so popular and populous in the morning, was now so little envied
that a fat lady descended from it and wedged herself into a row of the
interior where a sylph would have fitted better but might not have added
so much to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought of getting
up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to
stand. This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the
conductor ask me to Avait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that
wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it
appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we
were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach
of our cities.
XV
A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought
elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in
Hawthorne's romance of _The Marble Faun._ We made that our aesthetic
handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in
it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the
Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese
might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest.
