Encyclicals of a Traveller: Iii

VENICE, Sunday p. M., May 16, 1869.

DEAR PEOPLE : We came away. It was harder than you could imagine. Rome is a siren of sirens. It was so hot that we could scarcely breathe from ten o’clock till four, and there was nothing to eat except ices and strawberries with no flavor to them, but we clung to the very stones of that city. I went in from the beloved Albano, on Friday, the 7th, supposing that we should set out for Venice on the following Tuesday; but Pand N-were not ready, and we did not get off until Thursday. At first when they told me this I said, “ I will go directly back to Albano. I will never stay in this ill-odored oven five days ! ” But I stayed, and when Wednesday came I privately hoped that some dresses, or marbles, or pictures would not come home at the last minute, so that we should be kept a day or two longer. There are still so many things in Rome that I have not seen. I feel as if I had made only a beginning, though I have been there more than four months ; in those five last days, however, I made good use of the time ; if I had been as industrious all winter, I should have accomplished more. Among other things I did, which had been inexplicably postponed in the winter, was the “Palace of the Cæsars.” I could not tell you how many times the day had been set to go there. Once, as I wrote you, I stood at the gate, with the whole Archæological Society at my back, and could not get in. I had grown superstitious about it; but at last I really did get in, and then, O my countrymen and women, what a fall was there ! I had all along anticipated seeing ruins grander than any other except the Coliseum. As I saw them from the distance they looked imposing, and looked wild and overgrown, like the Baths of Caracalla, and as all ruins ought to look. But what do you think you see when the gate is first opened ? (It is owned, you must know, by Napoleon, sold to him for $40,000 by the king of Naples, “that very stoopid young man,” as Signor L-said, in telling me about it, “for $40,000 this whole grand ruin ; and the water privilege alone is worth more than that.” So the Emperor has walled it in, and is carrying on excavations in a masterly manner, and the public only go in on Thursdays ; but I went in with Signor L-, who has always the right to go anywhere on any day, so far as we can discover ; and we went on a Saturday.) When the gate is opened, you see a broad walk and a sort of café-like building, and very much landscape garden, nice little beds, such as you might see in Brooklyn or Springfield, bushels of roses, and white thorn and box borders ; if you are like me, you stand stock-still and burst out laughing, and say, “ Where is the Palace of the Cæsars ? ” and then your archæologist leads you along, up and up, into great spaces, some of them floored with mosaic, some of them bare earth, but all cleaner and more swept and garnished and scrubbed than any old maid’s parlor you ever saw ; great columns set here and there, and grand bits of marble, fragments of acanthus, and legs and arms, etc., such as you see always in the ruins of Rome ; but here they are all set by so neatly that, upon my word, you don’t feel as if they were ever in any other place in their lives. Then, as I say (if you are like me), you laugh still more, in fact, you get positively irreverent ; and you look round, expecting to see old women with pails and mops in every corner, and there is nobody in sight, except workmen wheeling away things in wheelbarrows, and you think they must be carrying off the old women with pails and mops, for there does not seem to be anything else to carry off! All this time the archæologist is delivering a little lecture by your side ; how this is the old audience chamber, and this was the dining-room, and this circular mosaic at the end is the place where the emperors used to sit, — and very likely lie, if they ever got “ under the table,” — and this is the bath-room, and this is the academy where every day a poet read a poem, or a philosopher or historian an essay, before the emperor ; and at last the archæologist sees that you are shaking with laughter, and, having previously found you more than sentimental enough on other occasions over other ruins, he thinks you are laughing at his English, and stops short and says, “ What are you doing? what have you the matter?” And then you, that is I, sink down into a thicket of purple foxglove, and begin to sneeze violently (for rose cold happens in these days, because Italy is one great garden in blossom. Then I try to explain that I think it the funniest thing in life to see a ruin so scrubbed up and put in such horribly good order ; that there is such an eminently French look about it all, that it seems to belong to the Rue St. Honorè, and to have nothing whatever to do with Rome either ancient or modern ; and that I very much doubt if ever an emperor set his foot in it ! Then the archæologist, being the gentlest little soul in the world, loses his temper, and says, “ You are very provoking ” ; and that completes my nervous amusement, and all is “up” for that day. However, when I was fairly underground, walking along an old street, many feet beneath the landscape garden, and looking into stuccoed room after room, and up steep stone staircases, on one of which it seems to me quite probable that Caligula was killed, I found my usual faith and reverence reviving, and patched up a sort of truce with my archæologist. Cut I shall never forget the comical effect of that first look at the palace of the Cæsars.

Among other good things of those last days in Rome was an illumination of the Venus of the Capitol: daytime too ! It happened on this wise. We went to the room at just that one minute of noon, when the sun flooded in through the upper panes of the window on the right, and lit up the whole statue with a positively supernatural color. Even the custode exclaimed he had never, in all the years before, happened to hit that precise moment and such a sun. The face smiled, and the right arm trembled a little as the sunlight flickered over it. We stood breathless and silent, and it would not have surprised us in that instant to have heard a voice from the lips. On the left of the Venus stands a dear little girl in marble, looking like anybody’s little girl in the next street, only that her gown is all one great square piece of something gathered up in what were folds in those days, but would look uncommonly bunchy, I think, if we were to try them now. She is holding a little bird up in her arms, to keep it safe from a snake which stretches up behind to reach it. We wanted to wait till the sun had come to the little girl’s head, but we had not time ; so we ran to take one more look at the black marble Centaurs, and the Infant Hercules, and then went home.

At the last, the leaving Rome was quite picturesque. We went at night ; for of the two evils, to ride all night seemed less than to get up at four A. M. and ride all day in the heat. Poor little Marianina had haunted the hotel all day; running in and out to see if I did not want something done, and finally standing in the dining-room door while we took our tea, and looking at me with the piteous eyes of a dumb animal. Every now and then she would say, “ Iddio mio ! Iddio mio ! O signora mia ! ” till I could not stand it, and had fairly to pretend to be stern, and send her off, I said to her, though, “If I were rich, Marian ina, I would take you with me.” “ O but you are rich, signora mia !” she said, with the tears in her eyes. Poor soul, I think nobody has ever been very kind to her before, and this one month with me (with good wages and nothing to do !) has been the one festa of her life. Giovanni, the girls’ old courier, went with us to the station, and Marianina, who had insisted on carrying my bundle and bag, appeared with a cousin to carry the bundle ; so we filed up past the little garden and the soldiers and out among the fire-flies, quite a procession. Marianina knelt on the step of the car till the bell struck and the guard pulled her off; then she kissed our hands and walked slowly away, looking over her shoulder at the guard out of one eye, and at me out of the other ! The guard said something to his fellow-guard about her beauty and snapped the door, and we were off,— we three women, good friends, good travellers, —off for Venice, with Rome written on our hearts !

If there be any greater misery short of rheumatic fever than to ride all night in the cars, I do not know what it is. So long as there is daylight, and one can see that there are peace and dry land and homes and human beings to the right and left, railroad riding is bearable; but the minute I am in the dark, every whistle sounds like the shriek of fiends, every jolt and jar seem to me the wrenches of a rack on which I am being torn; and when people sleep on either side of my misery, I am aggravated to that degree that I am dangerous. Each time I spend such a night, I think I will never spend another, come what will; but by the time the next occasion arrives, I buy my ticket, and go on board as docilely as the best sleeper among you. And I dare say, before I see you again, I shall have spent a month, all told, in night railroading. It seems to be considered the thing to do here.

At Foligno the cocks crew, and the passengers got out and ate, and we could see what color the fields were. Then began a royal progress through a garden ; all the way to Ancona, four hours, nothing but wheat-fields and vineyards ; in the wheat-fields, scarlet poppies and purple foxglove, and bright blue something, I don’t know what, but as we dashed by it looked like bachelor’s-buttons flying off in the air. Under the vines, which were trained on trees, were such fields of crimson clover as you would not believe in, it I were to tell you about them. Fields of crimson peonies set close as they could stand would not be more crimson. In Ancona I found some peasant-women who had walked into town with huge loads of this clover on their heads, and were resting by the roadside. I jumped out of the carriage, and asked them for one of the flowers. O, how brown and handsome the women were, and how they laughed when I broke off one blossom and laid it carefully in my book! I shall slip a bit of it in this letter, and you can see for yourself what fields would look like where such clover as this flowered in spikes three inches long! We liked Ancona, but did not see so much of it as we should if we had not gone straight into our beds at nine A. M. and slept till one p. At.! It is enough to make an engineer officer’s mouth water for a war, to see such hills and such fortifications. From Trajan’s day till now it seems somebody or other has always been building forts there, and somebody else firing at them. No wonder. The very sight of the place is a temptation, and the build of it is as much a proof of the divine intent of war, as flesh-teeth in animals. We saw Trajan’s arch, and a statue to Cavour, and a cathedral up in the air at tiptop of hills and forts and town and all, and a gay-looking theatre where Faust was to be played that night, and ever so many nice shops with muslin waists and straw things, which we wanted to buy, and a man peddling boiled dinner round in a big iron pot in a handcart. Yes, really boiled beef and peas and potatoes, and it smelled savorily ; and a poor ragged creature came out of a forlorn house and bought a plateful, while we were looking on. Then we bundled into a little cockle-shell of a boat, we and our five trunks, and were rowed off to the steamer, where we found an American family at dinner in the cabin, as if they had lived there all their lives, — a thin, yellow mamma, with tight hair, which savored of sewing-societies and rigid principles ; a papa who was all gray, grizzled good-nature ; and a miss who did French for them both : and they had been on the Nile all winter, and were just from Corfu ; and were in Madeira the winter before ; and, dear me, for all that, how very inexperienced and uninformed they looked !

Almost as far as we could see the shores of Ancona, we could see the bright patches of the clover - fields. They gradually faded from crimson to claret, and then at last looked like dark woods in the dim distance. I remembered Mrs. Howe’s “ I stake my life on the red ! ” Wonderful color, which makes such road for itself through space.

Think of our not getting up in time to catch the first glimpse of Venice rising from the sea ! It was stupid, but we might as well own up ; we did n’t do it. However, it looked odd and unreal enough when we did get on deck. We were squeezing along in water that felt thick, — piles all about us, as much land as water, and not enough of either to make it seem like anything set down in geographies ; and the bell-towers and domes in sight, like a gray mirage against the sky. Somehow I could not feel as I expected to. Generally you don’t, I find. I felt more like Mrs. Partington than like Rogers, or any other man of them all who has touched bottom in Venetian romance. If I had opened my mouth, I am afraid I should have exclaimed, like the worthy female above named : “ Laws sakes alive ! What an awful freshet they must have had ! And what on airth are these poor people going to do, supposin’ they can get there, which seems no ways likely ? ” Then, when we began to be surrounded by the dismallest black craft I ever saw, uncanny enough to have come straight from the Styx, and I was told exultantly by my companions, “ There are the gondolas ! ” I was still more “ taken down.” I could n’t say either that they looked unlike the photographs of them, and that was the most provoking part of it. I can’t tell you how comical and melancholy they looked to me that morning, — and look still, for that matter. The body of a hearse set down low in the middle of a gigantic peaked snow-shoe, the whole black and sticky, and stamped with sepulchral designs. It is an understood thing now, that I am not to be expected to “ ride in that kind of kerridge” again. Once I tried it, but I wriggled and stumbled out instantly, and told the girls if they were going with me, that hearse-top must be taken off. Rain or shine, I will take my chance with an umbrella. When this top is off, a gondola becomes the most fascinating of boats. I could glide about forever in them ; and you have the feeling all the time here that the next minute the whole city may go under, and perhaps you can pick up a survivor or two. So it seems well to be on hand with your boat. I suppose I shall become accustomed to this miracle of a stone city at anchor. We are to stay a month, and I must begin to do something else besides try to look under the houses, which is all I have done yet. Even the floors seem to me to go up and down like the old “ China ” I came over in. If I were not an uncommonly good sailor, I should be seasick all the time ; and when I am walking in what they call streets (Heaven save the mark; they are just cracks in the walls, that is all: a big soldier and I nearly got wedged trying to pass each other in one yesterday, and I had on no hoop at all), I half expect to “slump through” at every step. As for the Doge’s palace, that’s another blow! It may be imposing ; I suppose Ruskin knows ; but somehow it won’t impose on me, and I can’t get it to ! It looks low and undignified, and the “ edging ” at top is not half so good in effect as I have seen round summer-houses at home. And the windows are not in line, nor sufficiently out of line (like our dear old up-and-down windows in Rome) to be picturesque ; and the colonnades look to me very shoppy; and then, you see, I am, and, like Martin Luther, “ I can no more ” ; and I suppose you will think there is no fun at all in having such an unappreciative friend in Venice, especially if she does not know enough to keep quiet about the sacred things she is too ignorant to admire. I have been up and down the Grand Canal twice, and seen more old palace fronts than I can count. They are fantastic and gorgeous, and it all looks Arabian Nights-ish ; but I cannot make it look to me otherwise than overloaded and mixed. All the time I find myself recalling the stern simplicity and beauty and grandeur of arches and walls and churches in Rome, and Venice seems to me tawdry. This is at end of the second day, however ; so it is premature. We have begun to read aloud the “ Stones of Venice,” and we are going to be praiseworthily conscientious in attention to all that Ruskin tells us is admirable ; so at the end of our month I may be as enthusiastic an admirer of the city as he. But the one thing I expect to be made really happy by, and to bear away with me to keep the rest of my life, is the color of Titian. Michael Angelo is the god of shape ; I think Titian must be of color ; and no wonder, when he fed on such sunsets. Last night, beside all else, we had a rainbow over the sunset. It broke up and floated about in pieces ; and the Doge’s palace looked like amber in the yellow light ; and on the three great scarlet flagstaff’s in St. Marks were three huge flags, which floated from the tops of the staffs to the ground, — green and red and white, so that all things seemed turning to rainbow.

We are most comfortably established at the Hotel Vittoria, not on the Grand Canal, thank Heaven ! When at first N-said that she did not dare to stay on the Grand Canal, because she feared too much sea air, I was quite dismayed. But now I am thankful enough to have dry land ; that is, a stone floor laid on piles, on one side of our house. I look down from my window into one of the cracks called streets ; the people look as if they were being threaded into the Scriptural needle’s eye, and a hand-organ looks like a barricade. Yesterday I threw down four soldi to a man who was grinding at one under my window, and made signs to him to go away, for I was almost frantic with the noise of seven different bells ringing at the same time. I am in mortal terror now to think of my indiscretion, for that man, having discovered the “ vally of peace and quiet ” to me, I presume will become a regular pensioner on my bounty for the rest of my stay.

H. H.