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25 chapters
ILLUSTRATED
ILLUSTRATED
CONTENTS ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA. II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN III. ASHORE AT GENOA IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE V. POMPEII REVISITED VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST VII. CHANCES IN CHURCHES VIII. A FEW VILLAS IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS X. SEEING ROME AS
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I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.
I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.
No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the theatre
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II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN
II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN
There is nothing strikes the traveller in his approach to the rock of Gibraltar so much as its resemblance to the trade-mark of the Prudential Insurance Company. He cannot help feeling that the famous stronghold is pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of that institution. As the lines change with the ship's course, the resemblance is less remarkable; but it is always remarkable, and I suppose it detracts somewhat from the majesty of the fortress, which we could wish to be more entire
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III. ASHORE AT GENOA
III. ASHORE AT GENOA
The pride of Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to the level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe is the rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the snow-topped Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly rounded, velvety heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard of the Palisades above the point where they have been blasted away for road-making material if one wi
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IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE
IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE
We heard the joyful noise of Naples as soon as our steamer came to anchor within the moles whose rigid lines perhaps disfigure her famous bay, while they render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose to us, hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory of her sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which seemed to have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It was not a largo boat, but it managed to contain two men with mandolins, a mother of a
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V. POMPEII REVISITED
V. POMPEII REVISITED
Because I felt very happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation, and being alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to myself that I would do something that would surprise him, and I gave him his fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was surprised, for he ran after me into the station, as I supposed, to extort more. He was holding out a franc toward me, and I asked the guide who was bothering me to t
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I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS
I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS
“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” the traveller asks rather anxiously than defiantly when he finds himself a stranger in a strange place, and he is apt to add, if he has not written or wired ahead to some specific hotel, “Which of mine inns shall I take mine ease in?” He is the more puzzled to choose the more inns there are to choose from, and his difficulty is enhanced if he has not considered that some of his inns may be full or may be too dear, and yet others undesirable. The run from
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II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME
II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME
Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed. Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864 as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting, in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in othe
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III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM
III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM
As I have told, the first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was at the Colosseum the day after our arrival. For some unknown reason I was going to begin with the Baths of Caracalla, but, as it happened, these were the very last ruins we visited in Rome; and I do not know just what accident diverted us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped because it was on the way to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it. After twoscore years and
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IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS
IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS
It is not every undeserving American who can have the erudition and divination of the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a visit to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be had for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who lead people about the ruins in Rome, and instruct them in the fable, and doubtless in the m
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V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY
V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY
My visit to the Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my ignorance and the intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with whom I sauntered from point to point, preying upon their knowledge for my emotion concerning each. Information is an excellent thing—in others; and but for these f
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VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST
VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST
I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not contemporaries, we wer
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VII. CHANCES IN CHURCHES
VII. CHANCES IN CHURCHES
If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was none. Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the instinct of imperial Rome for ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in the innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other. This position will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I may be driven in, especially
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VIII. A FEW VILLAS
VIII. A FEW VILLAS
It was but a few minutes' walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana, and, if you took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you knew it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had hurried,
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IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS
IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS
If the joke of the door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in any sense as some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being voluntary. In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember hearing in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I had always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of jokes, good,
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X. SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US
X. SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US
Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column o
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XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN
XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN
It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it w
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XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to en
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XIII. CASUAL IMPRESSIONS
XIII. CASUAL IMPRESSIONS
The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a municipal watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties. He may see through his
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XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI
XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI
One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter passed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad, that I began to feel anxious lest I
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XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in Hawthorne's romance of The Marble Faun. We made that our aesthetic handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like manner Story's
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VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN
VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN
We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick. Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they stared or simpered, and said, “Oh!” That was not all we could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her poor, broken aq
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VIII. OVER AT PISA
VIII. OVER AT PISA
If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty minutes which might so much better have been given to either place. But with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the company, great
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IX. BACK AT GENOA
IX. BACK AT GENOA
There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her step-sister republic, “If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa,” which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad connection bet
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X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL
X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL
A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge them upon u
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