Rome in 1860

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Rome in 1860

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Title: Rome in 1860
Author: Edward Dicey

Release Date: December 11, 2005 [eBook #17284]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROME IN
1860***

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.]
* * * * *
Cambridge: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY
PRESS
* * * * *
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,