Rome in 1860, by Edward Dicey

Transcribed by from the 1861 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected]

ROME IN 1860.
By
EDWARD DICEY.

Cambridge:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN,
London.
1861.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

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Cambridge:
printed by c. j. clay, m.a.
at the university press

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TO
MR. AND MRS ROBERT BROWNING

CHAPTER I.  THE ROME OF REAL LIFE.

My first recollections of Rome date from too long ago, and from too early an age, for me to be able to recall with ease the impression caused by its first aspect.  It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of Rome fairly.  Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’s reverence for the shrine of his worship.  The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery.  A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other.  Heroes and martyrs, sages and saints and sinners, consuls and popes and emperors, people the weird pageant which to our mind’s eye hovers ever mistily amidst the scenes around us.  Here

above all places in God’s earth it is hard to forget the past and think only of the present.  This, however, is what I now want to do.  Laying aside all memory of what Rome has been, I would again describe what Rome is now.  And thus, in my solitary wanderings about the city, I have often sought to picture to myself what would be the feelings of a stranger who, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, should enter Rome with only that listless curiosity which all travellers feel perforce, when for the first time they approach a great capital.  Let me fancy that such a traveller—a very Gallio among travellers—is standing by my side.  Let me try and tell him what, under my mentorship, he would mark and see.

It shall not be on a bright, cloudless day that we enter Rome.  To our northern eyes the rich Italian sun-light gives to everything, even to ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due.  No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull.  The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban

and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance.  It matters little by what gate or from what quarter we enter.  On every side the scene is much the same.  The Campagna surrounds the city.  A wide, waste, broken, hillock-covered plain, half common, half pasture land, and altogether desolate; a few stunted trees, a deserted house or two, here and there a crumbling mass of shapeless brickwork: such is the foreground through which you travel for many a weary mile.  As you approach the city there is no change in the desolation, no sign of life.  Every now and then a string of some half-dozen peasant-carts, laden with wine-barrels or wood faggots, comes jingling by.  The carts so-called, rather by courtesy than right, consist of three rough planks and two high ricketty wheels.  The broken-kneed horses sway to and fro beneath their unwieldy load, and the drivers, clad in their heavy sheepskin jackets, crouch sleepily beneath the clumsy, hide-bound framework, placed so as to shelter them from the chill Tramontana blasts.  A solitary cart is rare, for the neighbourhood of Rome is not the safest of places, and those small piles of stone, with the wooden cross surmounting them, bear witness to the fact that a murder

took place not long ago on the very spot you are passing now.  Then, perhaps, you come across a drove of wild, shaggy buffaloes, or a travelling carriage rattling and jilting along, or a stray priest or so, trudging homewards from some outlying chapel.  That red-bodied funereal-looking two-horse-coach, crawling at a snail’s pace, belongs to his Excellency the Cardinal, whom Papal etiquette forbids to walk on foot within the city, and whom you can see a little further on pottering feebly along the road in his violet stockings, supported by his clerical secretary, and followed at a respectful distance by his two attendant footmen with their threadbare liveries.  At last, out of the dreary waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily.  A few cannon-shot would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too well.  However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor building extension of any kind to be checked; the city has shrunk up until its precincts are a world too wide; and the walls, if they are useless, are harmless also; more, by the way, than you can say for most things here.  There is no stir or bustle at the gates.  Two French soldiers,

striding across a bench, are playing at picquet with a pack of greasy cards.  A pack-horse or two nibble the blades of grass between the stones, while their owners haggle with the solitary guard about the “octroi” duties.  A sentinel on duty stares listlessly at you as you pass,—and you have entered Rome.

You are coming, I will suppose, from Ostia, and enter therefore by the “Porta San Paolo;” the gate where legends tell that Belisarius sat and begged.  I have chosen this out of the dozen entrances as recalling fewest of past memories and leading most directly to the heart of the living, working city.  You stand then within Rome, and look round in vain for the signs of a city.  Hard by a knot of dark cypress-trees waves above the lonely burial-ground where Shelley lies at rest.  A long, straight, pollard-lined road stretches before you between high walls far away; low hills or mounds rise on either side, covered by stunted, straggling vineyards.  You pass on.  A beggar, squatting by the roadside, calls on you for charity; and long after you have passed you can hear the mumbling, droning cry, “Per l’amore di Dio e della Santa Vergine,” dying in your ears.  On the wall, from time to time, you see a rude

painting of Christ upon the cross, and an inscription above the slit beneath bids you contribute alms for the souls in purgatory.  A peasant-woman it may be is kneeling before the shrine, and a troop of priests pass by on the other side.  A string of carts again, drawn by bullocks, another shrine, and another troop of priests, and you are come to the river’s banks.  The dull, muddy Tiber rolls beneath you, and in front, that shapeless mass of dingy, weather-stained, discoloured, plaster-covered, tile-roofed buildings, crowded and jammed together on either side the river, is Rome itself.  You are at the city’s port, the “Ripetta” or quay of Rome.  In the stream there are a dozen vessels, something between barges and coasting smacks, the largest possibly of fifty tons’ burden, which have brought marble from Carrara for the sculptors’ studios.  There is a Gravesend-looking steamer too, lying off the quay, but she belongs to the French government, and is employed to carry troops to and from Civita Vecchia.  This