Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 | Page 4

counsels of Fortune, and thus it becomes difficult for the
observer to trace from the beginning Rome following Rome, and not
only new Rome succeeding to the old, but also the several epochs of
both old and new in succession. I endeavor, first of all, to grope my
way alone through the obscurer parts, for this is the only plan by which
one can hope fully and completely to perfect by the excellent
introductory works which have been written from the fifteenth century
to the present day. The first artists and scholars have occupied their
whole lives with these objects.
And this vastness has a strangely tranquilizing effect upon you in Rome,
while you pass from place to place, in order to visit the most
remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is
important; here one is opprest, and borne down with numberless

phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at
once struck with some landscape--forms of every kind and style;
palaces and ruins, gardens and statuary, distant views of villas, cottages
and stables, triumphal arches and columns, often crowding so close
together, that they might all be sketched on a single sheet of paper. He
ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can a single pen do
here; and, besides, by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted
with the day's seeing and admiring.
My strange, and perhaps whimsical, incognito proves useful to me in
many ways that I never should have thought of. As every one thinks
himself in duty bound to ignore who I am, and consequently never
ventures to speak to me of myself and my works,[2] they have no
alternative left them but to speak of themselves, or of the matters in
which they are most interested, and in this way I become
circumstantially informed of the occupations of each, and of everything
remarkable that is either taken in hand or produced. Hofrath
Reiffenstein good-naturedly humors this whim of mine; as, however,
for special reasons, he could not bear the name which I had assumed,
he immediately made a Baron of me, and I am now called the "Baron
gegen Rondanini über" (the Baron who lives opposite to the Palace
Rondanini). This designation is sufficiently precise, especially as the
Italians are accustomed to speak of people either by their Christian
names, or else by some nickname. Enough; I have gained my object;
and I escape the dreadful annoyance of having to give to everybody an
account of myself and my works....
In Rome, the Rotunda,[3] both by its exterior and interior, has moved
me to offer a willing homage to its magnificence. In St. Peter's I
learned to understand how art, no less than nature, annihilates the
artificial measures and dimensions of man. And in the same way the
Apollo Belvidere also has again drawn me out of reality. For as even
the most correct engravings furnish no adequate idea of these buildings,
so the case is the same with respect to the marble original of this statue,
as compared with the plaster models of it, which, however, I formerly
used to look upon as beautiful.

Here I am now living with a calmness and tranquility to which I have
for a long while been a stranger. My practise to see and take all things
as they are, my fidelity in letting the eye be my light, my perfect
renunciation of all pretension, have again come to my aid, and make
me calmly, but most intensely, happy. Every day has its fresh
remarkable object--every day its new grand unequaled paintings, and a
whole which a man may long think of, and dream of, but which with all
his power of imagination he can never reach.
Yesterday I was at the Pyramid of Cestius, and in the evening on the
Palatine, on the top of which are the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars,
which stand there like walls of rock. Of all this, however, no idea can
be conveyed! In truth, there is nothing little here; altho, indeed,
occasionally something to find fault with--something more or less
absurd in taste, and yet even this partakes of the universal grandeur of
all around....
Yesterday I visited the nymph Egeria, and then the Hippodrome of
Caracalla, the ruined tombs along the Via Appia, and the tomb of
Metella, which is the first to give one a true idea of what solid masonry
really is. These men worked for eternity--all causes of decay were
calculated, except the rage of the spoiler, which nothing can resist. The
remains of the principal aqueduct are highly venerable. How beautiful
and grand a design, to supply a whole people with water by so vast a
structure! In the evening we