CHAPTER 1

Rome: An Enchantment of the Spirit

Rome was beyond love and hatred, as love and hatred areunderstood in Florence and Venice. It even resisted aproper definition. Paris and London could be defined andlived in for a lifetime without nagging the mind. Rome was elusive,and there was too much of it. The tourist might move through the cityin five days of his allotted time, or pass three weeks there, and still notcomprehend it except as an old persistent rumor given substance by afew images familiar from books or travel folders.

It was said that Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878, liked toinquire of foreigners how long they had been in Rome. If someone toldhim that he had been in Rome less than six months, the pope said, "Soyou've seen it all." He was less cynical with those who had been in thecity a few months longer, remarking casually, "Then you've not seen itall." But when he spoke to someone who had been in Rome a year orlonger, he smiled and said, "So now you know you can never see it all."

What one saw was often a matter of chance and mood and ofknowing. It still is. From a bus, or the double tram of Il CircolareEsterna Destra, which used to run an irregular course around the city,one could see San Giovanni in Laterano rising in postcard grandeurbeyond a dry and dusty and sometimes littered piazza; but with luck orforeknowledge, one could come up on foot from outside the AurelianWall to the russet bricks of Porto Asinaria's round towers in the waningglow of an October afternoon and catch sight through a thicket ofgolden leaves of the figures of Christ and the saints on the basilica'sroof—fifteen white restless figures, twenty-one feet high, looking as ifthey had just fluttered down from heaven.

Knowing was recognition of what the eye was forever findingunexpectedly, so that the distant white daubs seen from the windowof a bus rolling down Via Dandolo on the Janiculum were not vague,meaningless blobs against the Alban Hills, but those same wildlydistraught saints of the Laterano, as comical in their postures as thestatue of Christ dangling irreverently from a helicopter in the openingscene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Rome, as Pio Nono knew, was an endless quest of mind andimagination. It was also a snare. Byron, who may have been the idealtourist, avoided the trap. Although he lived in Italy for seven years,he spent only three weeks in Rome, in May, 1817. The populationthen was 115,000—and Byron, who had little love for ruins anddisliked walking because of his lameness, did most of his sightseeingon horseback.

"I have been some days in Rome the Wonderful," he said in a letter."I am delighted with Rome. As a whole—Ancient and Modern—itbeats Greece, Constantinople, everything—at least, what I have everseen ... As for the Colosseum, Pantheon, St. Peter's, the Vatican,Palatine, etc., they are quite inconceivable and must be seen." It wasthe conventional view, stated by an Englishman through the years ofthe Grand Tour. Later on, in the fourth and last canto of Child Harold,Byron would cry in a spasm of poetic fervor, "Oh, Rome, my country!City of the soul." Quite possibly he was sincere, but he never returned.Stendhal, who was French, confessed he had wept when he stood in theColosseum and heard birds singing in the upper tiers.

No one is likely to weep now, and few of those who see theColosseum today can guess at the lonely majesty of the place whenStendhal's birds twittered and quarreled in the luxuriant vegetationamong the ancient stones.

Two years after Byron, Shelley was enchanted by the birdsongand decay and the shattered splendor of the irrecoverable past. Time,he wrote, had transformed the Colloseum into "an amphitheater ofrocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle and the fig tree,and threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs andimmeasurable galleries: the copsewood overshadows you as you wanderthrough its labyrinths and the wild weed of this climate of flowersblooms under your feet."

Before 1870 and the end of Papal Rome, botanists had collected aherbarium of 420 different species of plants growing in the Collosseum.Goethe, who came to Rome in 1786 at the age of thirty-seven regrettinghe had not known the city in his youth, recorded an evening of spectralbeauty, when a beggar's bonfire glowed in one of the vaults, and thesmoke, drifting softly on the gentle airs, shrouded all but the massivebulk looming above in the moonlight. Nowhere else in the world wasthe moon so highly regarded as it was in Rome when its light bathedthe remnants of the ancient world: the Colosseum, the ghostly Arch ofConstantine, the Arch of Titus, the eerie silent wasteland of the ForumRomanum, the dark rise of the Palatine.

There were drawbacks: the fear of Roman fever from the nightair, the malaria, and the more palpable danger of thieves, pickpockets,and other criminals. Antonio Uggeri, an architect in the service of theliberal Pius VI, related that a great many skeletons of murdered menhad been discovered in the excavations of the Colosseum.

"There is no doubt," he wrote, "that the Colosseum has been forcenturies the safest den of Roman outlaws. This is what happenedto me there in 1790. I was engaged at that time in correcting somemeasurements which I had taken of the building on former occasions.I arrived at the spot one afternoon an hour before sunset, climbed up,not without danger, taking advantage of the walls, and entered themain corridor on my way to the upper galleries. I had walked scarcely ahundred paces when, all of a sudden, a man sprang at me from a corner,a man very tall, entirely naked, with rags around his head and ankles,black in the face, bearded, and absolutely repulsive to look at. He caughtme at the wrist, shook me violently, asking me at the same time who Iwas, what business I had there, and other such questions. I answered,trembling, that I was an architect, and showed him my measure and mycompass as an evidence of the purpose of my expedition among thoseruins. In the meanwhile, I heard a more gentle voice close by, begginghim to leave me in peace; and proceding a few steps farther I discoveredthe rest of the company under the vault of one of the staircases. It wascomposed of two more men and one woman, to whose interference Imost likely owed my life; all three were entirely naked, as the seasonwas very warm. One of the men was standing; the other was cookingsomething at the farther end of the passage. The poor woman croucheddown to conceal her nudity as well as she could."

Rodolfo Lanciani, the archeologist, wrote that in 1874, when thenew Via Claudia was first opened between the Colosseum and theNavicella, he came upon a whole family nested, thirty-six feet below thelevel of the Temple of Claudius, in a corridor or channel six feet wide, afew yards long, with little air or light. One of the family was lying deadon some straw; the others were praying and sobbing round the corpse.

Two decades later a daring pickpocket turned up living in the atticof the Arch of Titus.

The ruins of the city had been a refuge for brigands and assassinsin the Middle Ages—Rome's population had dropped to seventeenthousand in 1377 when the papacy returned from Avignon—and theperils of attack by malviventi (criminals) had not disappeared as thenineteenth century advanced; but travelers who had endured the tediumand sometimes the hardships and dangers of coming to Rome were notto be denied the city at any hour. Sunset and twilight and night itselfdeepened the strange pain and joy of the impenetrable mystery the oldplaces imparted. The past was not merely intrusive; it had a habit ofdisplacing the present. Reality easily slipped into the shadows.

Francis Wey, a Frenchman, brooding at the summit of theColosseum one evening in the 1860s, heard a confusion of voicesand sacred music somewhere in the depths of the arena and, like aman roused from deep sleep, was uncertain for a moment where hewas. When his mind cleared, he gazed below and saw a procession ofshrouded penitents carrying lighted tapers, preceded by a figure witha banner, and followed by peasants and shepherds making the Stationsof the Cross in the dying day. Was the scene real? He knew it must beso, but after a while, when he had descended to the ground, the placewas deserted and dark.

An enchantment of the spirit. Stendhal, burning with love ofRome, had no need of darkness. "I could clearly see Frascati andCastel Gandolfo four leagues away, and the Villa Aldobrandini whereDomenichino's sublime fresco of Judith is," he wrote of a sunny Octoberday. "A good deal farther away I could see the rock of Palestrina andthe white building of Castel San Pietro which was once its fortress.Below the wall against which I am leaning are the big orange trees ofthe Capuchins' orchard, then the Tiber and the Maltese Priory (onthe Aventine), a little beyond them on the right the Tomb of CeceliaMetella, San Paolo and the Pyramid of Cestius. Opposite me I seeSanta Maria Maggiore and the long lines of the Palazzo di MonteCavallo (the Quirinal Palace). The whole of ancient and modern Rome,from the ancient Appian Way with its ruined tombs and aqueducts tothe magnificent gardens of the Pincio built by the French, lies spreadbefore me. There is no place like this in the world, I mused, and againstmy will ancient Rome prevailed over modern Rome; memories of theRoman historian Livy crowded into my mind. On Monte Albano, tothe left of the convent, I could see the fields of Hannibal."

Coming down to Rome from his native Venice to work and study,Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the eighteenth-century etcher and engraver,was filled with joy as he prowled through the streets examining thechurches and palaces of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Theplace dazzled him. For him, too, it was enchanting—most of all, theruins.

Here were the raw materials for the creation of a city of his own,and that, in fact, is what Piranesi did—make a city of his own, realyet fantastic, ugliness mixed with beauty, with gigantic facades andthe shrunken figures of men without purpose, and everywhere clutter,dirt, and neglect. From Tiepolo, Piranesi seems to have learned the usesof theatrics. He instinctively bent toward the dramatic. The plate hemade of the Tomb of Cestius revealed its degradation and desolation,and its nobility as well.

The ravaged Forum Romanum and the lesser fora inspired Piranesiand imbued his work with a rich extravagance. When he walked inthe Campagna, he was reminded by every overgrown hillock and aridgully of old Rome's grandeur and glory. The ruins cried out for hisneedle and burin. He made over one thousand plates of Rome—hiscity and, I must say, the Rome that existed for me through much ofmy boyhood, neither the Rome of Caesar, Nero, and Augustus, northe city that grew out of Papal Rome. The ruderi that Piranesi cameupon on the Palatine, the Caelian and the Esquiline hills were thebasic elements of the Piranesian Rome—whole or fragmented marble,porphyry, granite; broken temples and shattered friezes, arches bereft ofornamentation, columns felled among twisting vines and the gnarledbranches of stunted trees, headless nymphs in sunny glades, glimpsesof statuary in the solitude of the hills, the Arch of Titus transformedinto a hideous fortress by the Frangipani, the Arch of Septimus Severusmired to its waist in the filth of the Forum Romanum, the little Templeof Vesta, a dreary scene of impoverishment, and—what easily may bethe most powerful of all his engravings—the gargantuan, menacinghulk of the Castel Sant'Angelo, which he called by its original name,the Mausoleum of Hadrian.

F. Marion Crawford, the novelist and author of Ave RomaImmortalis, who was born in Italy in 1854 and had known Rome before1870, when it came under what the English writer Augustus J. C. Harecontemptuously called "the Sardinian rule," said that an appreciationof Rome was a matter of feeling, though he was as concerned as Hare,who was twenty years older, with knowing the city. Hare was a manof strong opinions, an Englishman born in Rome and educated inEngland.

"Those who come to it [Rome] with the least mental preparationare those best fitted to enjoy it," he wrote in his Walks in Rome in the1880s. The Romans, he complained, didn't know Rome, a charge thathas substance even in these times, as the weekly illustrated magazineEpoca indicated in an issue celebrating a century of Italian unity. Asurvey of the city's elementary and high schools, Epoca said, showedthat half of the pupils had never been inside of St. Peter's nor theColosseum.

"It must not be supposed," said Hare, "that one short residenceat Rome will be sufficient to make a foreigner acquainted with all itsvaried treasures; or even, in most cases, that its attractions will becomeapparent to the passing stranger. The squalid appearance of its modernstreets will in itself go far to neutralize the effect of its ancient buildingsand the grandeur of historic recollections.

"It is only by returning again and again, by allowing the feeling ofRome to gain upon you, when you have constantly revisited the sameview, the same temple, the same picture, under varying circumstances,that Rome engraves itself upon your heart, and changes from adisagreeable, unwholesome acquaintance, into a dear and intimatefriend seldom long absent from your thoughts."

"One might remain here three or four years and still be alwayslearning," said the French philosopher, historian, and critic HippolyteTaine. "It is the greatest museum in the world, all centuries havecontributed to it."

"But," he asked, "what can one see in a month of this grand oldcuriosity shop? What can one do here but study art, history, andarcheology? If I did not thus occupy myself, I am satisfied that theconfusion and dirt of the bric-a-brac, the cobwebs, the mustiness ofso many precious objects, formerly bright and perfect but now faded,mutilated, and despoiled, would give me a fit of the blues."

"The Rome we see today," said Crawford, "owes its mystery, itssadness, and its charm to six and twenty centuries of history, mostlyfilled with battle, murder, and sudden death, deeds terrible in thatlong-past present which we try to call up, but alternately grand,fascinating, and touching now, as we shape our scant knowledge intovisions and fill our broken dreams with the stuff of fancy. In mostminds, perhaps, the charm lies in that very confusion of suggestions,for few indeed know Rome so well as to divide clearly the truth fromthe legend in her composition. Such knowledge is perhaps unattainablein any history; it is most surely so here where city is built on city,monument upon monument, road upon road, from the heart of thesoil upwards—the hardened lava left by many eruptions of life; wherethe tablets of Clio have been shattered again and again, where fire haseaten and sword hacked and hammer bruised ages of records out ofexistence, where even the race and type of humanity have changedand have been forgotten twice and three times over. Therefore, unlessone has half a lifetime to spend in patient study and do research, it isbetter, if one comes to Rome, to feel much than to try to know a little,for in such feelings there is more human truth than in that dangerouslittle knowledge which dulls the heart and hampers the clear instinctsof natural thought. Let him who comes hither be satisfied with a littlehistory and much legend, with rough warp of fact and rich woof ofold-time fancy, and not look too closely for the perfect sum of all,when more than half the parts have vanished forever."

Crawford, the son of Thomas Crawford, one of the first Americansculptors to work in Rome, had childhood memories of the Angelusringing out in Santa Maria Maggiore down the hill from the VillaNegroni, where the Crawford family lived. The villa, adjoining theruins of the Baths of Diocletian, was the estate put together by the poorFranciscan Felice Peretti, Cardinal Montalto, before he was electedpope in April 1585 at the age of sixty-four, taking the name SixtusV. The Crawfords occupied a corner of the cadina, and in a long, lowstudio where the Stazione Termini, Rome's Central railroad station,now stands, Thomas Crawford modeled the statue of Freedom thatcrowns the Capitol in Washington, D.C. and the equestrian statue ofGeorge Washington for the city of Richmond, Virginia.