CHAPTER IX

THE ROAD TO ROME

Siena, crowning its precipitous hillside, stands, to-day, unchanged from what it was in the days of the Triumvirate. Church tower and castle wall jut out into a vague mystery of silhouetted outline, whether viewed by daylight or moonlight. The great gates of the ramparts still guard the approach on all sides, and the Porta Camollia of to-day is the same through which the sons of Remus entered when fleeing from their scheming Uncle, Romulus.

Siena's Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is a landmark. Dante called it "a great square where men live gloriously free," though then it was simply _the_ Piazza; and the picture is true to-day, in a different sense. In former days it was a bloody "mis-en-scène" for intrigue and jealousy; but, to-day, simply the centre of the life and movement of a prosperous, thriving, though less romantic city of thirty thousand souls.

This great Piazza is rounded off by a halo of magnificent feudal palaces, whose very names are romantic.

All about Siena's squares and street corners are innumerable gurgling, spouting fountains, many of them artistically and monumentally beautiful, and a few even dating from the glorious days of old.

Dante sang of Siena's famous fountains which, in truth, form a galaxy of artistic accessories of life hardly to be equalled in any other city of Siena's class. Leaving that "noble extravagance in marble," Siena's Cathedral, and its churches quite apart, the city ranks as one of the most interesting tourist points of Italy.

Siena has still left a relic of mediævalism in the revival of its ancient horse racing festa, when its great Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is built up and barricaded like a circus of Roman times. Chariot races, gladiatorial combats and bull fights, all had their partisans among municipalities, but Siena's choice was horse racing. And each year, "Il Palio," on July the 2nd and on August the 16th, becomes a great popular amusement of the Sienese. It is most interesting, and still picturesquely mediæval in costuming and setting; and is a civic function and fête a great deal more artistically done--as goes without saying--than the Guy Fawkes celebrations of London, or the fourth of July "horribles" in America. For the thoroughly genuine and artistic pageant Anglo Saxons have to go to Italy. There is nothing to be learned from the Mardi-Gras celebrations of Paris nor the carnivals of the Cote d'Azur.

Some one has said that Siena sits on the border land between idyllic Tuscany and the great central Italian plain. Literally this is so. It marks the distinction between the grave and the gay so far as manners and customs and conditions of life go. On the north are the charming, smiling hills and vales, bright with villas, groves and vines; whilst to the south, towards Rome and the Campagna, all is of an austerity of present day fact and past tradition. Indeed, the landscape would be stern and repellent, were it not picturesquely savage.

Straight runs the highroad to Rome via Viterbo, or makes a détour via Montepulciano and Orvieto. At Asinalunga, Garibaldi was arrested by government spies, by the order of the monarch to whom he had presented the sovereignty of Naples. Such is official ingratitude, ofttimes! The town itself is unworthy of remark, save for that incident of history.

By the direct road the mountains of Orvieto and Montepulciano rise grimly to the left. The towns bearing the same names are charming enough from the artistic point of view, but are not usually reckoned tourist sights.

Montepulciano is commonly thought of slight interest, but it is the very ideal of an unspoiled mediæval town, with a half dozen palazzo façades, which might make the name and fame of some modern scene painter if he would copy them.

Chiusi, on the direct road, lies embedded in a circle of hills and surrounded by orange groves. It is nothing more nor less than a glorified graveyard, but is unique in its class. Lars Porsena of Clusium comes down to us as a memory of school-time days, and for that reason, if no other, we consider it our duty to visit the Etruscan tombs of Clusium, the modern Chiusi.

There are three distinct tiers, or shelves, of these ancient tombs, and interesting enough they are to all, but only the antiquary will have any real passion for them, so most of us are glad enough to spin our way by road another fifty odd kilometres to Orvieto.

Four kilometres of a precipitous hill climb leads from the lower road up into Orvieto, zig-zagging all the way. It is the same bit of roadway up which the Popes fled in the middle ages when hard pressed by their enemies. Clement VII, one of the unhappy Medici, fled here after the sinning Connétable Bourbon attempted the sacking of Rome; and a sheltering stronghold he found it.

This Papal city of refuge is, to-day, a more or less squalid place, with here and there a note of something more splendid. On the whole Orvieto's charm is not so much in the grandeur of its monuments as in their character. The cathedral is reckoned one of the great Gothic shrines of Italy, and that, indeed, is the chief reason for most of the tourist travel. The few mediæval palaces that Orvieto possesses are very splendid, though they, one and all, suffer from their cramped surroundings.

The Hotel Belle Arti, to-day, with a garage for automobiles, was the ancient Palazzo Bisenzi. It had a reputation among travellers, of a decade or a generation ago, of being a broken-down palace and a worse hotel. If one wants to dwell in marble halls and sleep where royal heads have slept, one can do all this, at Orvieto, for eight or nine lire a day.

One enters Viterbo, forty-seven kilometres from Orvieto, by the highroad to Rome. The little town preserves much of its mediæval characteristics to-day, though, indeed, it is a progressive, busy place, of something like twenty thousand souls, most of whom, appear to be engaged in the wine industry. On the Piazza Fontana is a magnificent Gothic fountain dating from the thirteenth century, and the Municipio, on the Piazza del Plebiscito, is of a contemporary period, with a fine fountained court-yard.

In the environs of Viterbo is a splendid palace, built by Vignola for the Cardinal Farnese, nephew of the Pope Paul III. In form it was a great square mass with its angles reinforced by square towers, with a circular court within, surrounded by an arcade by which one entered the various apartments. It was, perhaps, the most originally conceived work of its particular epoch of Renaissance times; and all the master minds and hands of the builders of the day seem to have had more or less to do with it. These Italians of the Renaissance were inventors of nothing; but their daring and ingenuity in combining ideas taken, bodily, from those of antiquity, made more successful and happy combinations than those of the architects of to-day, who build theatres after the models of Venetian palaces, and add a Moorish minaret; or railway stations on the plan of the Parthenon, and put a campanile in the middle, like the chimney of a blast furnace. The Italian campanile was a bell-tower, to be sure, but it had nothing in common with the minaret of the east, nor the church spire of the Gothic builder in northern climes.

From Siena the coast road to Rome, practically the same distance as the inland route, is one of surprising contrast. It approaches the coast at Grosseto, seventy kilometres from Siena, and thence, all the way to Rome, skirts the lapping waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Off shore is Elba, with its Napoleonic memories, and the Island of Monte Cristo which is considered usually a myth, but which exists in the real to-day, as it did when Dumas romanced (sic) about it. A long pull of a hundred kilometres over a flat country, half land, half water, brings one to Civita-Vecchia, eighty kilometres from the Eternal City itself.

Civita-Vecchia is a watering-place without historical interest, where the Romans come to make a seaside holiday. Hotels of all ranks are here, and garage accommodations as well. The Italian mail boats for Sardinia leave daily, if one is inclined to make a side trip to that land of brigandage and the evil-eye, which are reputed a little worse than the Corsican or Sicilian varieties.

One enters the heart of Rome by the Porta Cavalleggeri and crosses the Ponte S. Angelo to get his bearings.

The hotels of Rome are like those of Florence. One must hunt his abiding place out for himself, according to his likes and dislikes. The Grand-Hotel and the Hotel de la Minerve are vouched for by the Touring Club, and the former has garage accommodation. At either of these modern establishments you get the fare of Paris, Vienna, London and New York, and very little that is Italian. You may even bathe in porcelain tubs installed by a London plumber and drink cocktails mixed by an expert from Broadway.

This makes one long for the days when a former generation ate in a famous eating house which stood at the southeast corner of the Square Saint Eustace. It was the resort of artists and men of letters and the _plats_ that it served were famous the world over.

The Romans' pride in Rome is as conventional as it is ancient. They promptly took sides when the "Italians" entered their beloved city in 1870. The priests, the higher prelates, and the papal nobility were "for the Pope," but the great middle class, the common people, were for the "Italians." Traditions die hard in Rome, and many an old resident will tell tales to-day of the blessings of a Papal Government, which formerly forbade the discussion of religion or politics in public places, and "contaminating" books and newspapers were stopped at the _frontier_. Even a non-smoker was considered a protestor against the Papacy, because to smoke was to be a supporter of the Papal Government's revenue from the tobacco trade.

Rome without the _forestieri_, or strangers, would lose considerable of its present day prosperity. Rome exploits strangers; there is no doubt about that; that is almost its sole industry. As Henri Taine said: "Rome is nothing but a shop which sells bric-à-brac." He might have added: "with a branch establishment which furnishes food and lodging."

The Roman population, as Roman, is now entirely absorbed by "the Italian." No more are the _contadini_, the peasants of the Campagna, or the bearded mountaineers of the Sabine hills, different from their brothers of Tuscany or Lombardy; their physiognomies have become the same. The monks and seminarists and priests and prelates are still there, but only by sufferance, like ourselves. They are no more Romans than are we. Tourists in knickerbockers, awe-struck before the art treasures of the Vatican, and cassocked priests on pilgrimage are everywhere in the city of the Cæsars and the Popes. The venerable Bede was half right only in his prophecy.

"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls--the world!"

Rome is still there, and many of its monuments, fragmentary though they be.

The difference in the grade (ground level) of modern Rome, as compared with that of antiquity, a difference of from sixty to seventy feet, may still be expected to give up finds to the industrious pick and shovel properly and intelligently handled. The archæological stratum is estimated as nine miles square.

Rome is a much worked-over field, but the desecrations of the middle ages were hardly less disastrous to its "antiquities" than the new municipality's transformations. Some day the seven hills will be levelled, and boulevards and public gardens laid out and trees planted in the Forum; then where will be the Rome of the Cæsars? "Rome, Unhappy City!" some one has said, and truly; not for its past, but for its present. Whatever the fascination of Rome may be it is not born of first impressions; the new quarters are painfully new and the streets are unpicturesque and the Tiber is dirty, muddy and ill-smelling. Byron in his day thought differently, for he sang: "the most living crystal that was e'er." Should he come back again he would sing another song. These elements find their proper places in the city's ensemble after a time, but at first they are a disappointment.

Next to Saint Peter's, the Vatican and the Colosseum, the Castle of Sant'Angelo is Rome's most popular monument. It has been a fortress for a thousand years. For a thousand years a guard has been posted at its gateway.

The ruin of men which has passed within its walls is too lengthy a chronicle to recount here. Lorenzo Colonna, of all others, shed his blood most nobly. Because he would not say "Long live the Orsini," he was led to the block, a new block ready made for this special purpose, and having delivered himself in Latin of the words: "Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit," gave up his life in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, "on the last day of June when the people of Rome were celebrating the festivity of the decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle." This was four centuries and more ago, but the circling walls and the dull, damp corridors of the Castel Sant'Angelo still echo the terror and suffering which formerly went on within them. It is the very epitome of the character of the structure. Its architecture and its history are in grim accord.

Within the great round tower of Sant'Angelo was imprisoned the unnatural Catherine Sforza while the Borgias were besieging her city.

The Castel of Sant'Angelo and the bridge of the same name are so called in honour of an Angel who descended before Saint Gregory the Great and saved Rome from a pest which threatened to decimate it.

Close to the bridge of Sant'Angelo, just opposite Nona's Tower, once stood the "Lion Inn," kept by the lovely Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Cæsar, Gandia and Lucrezia Borgia. She was an inn-keeper of repute, according to history, and her career was most momentus. The automobilist wonders if this inn were not a purveyor of good cheer as satisfactory as the great establishments with French, English and German names which cater for tourists to-day.

The Villa Medici just within the walls, and the Villa Borghese just without, form a group which tourists usually _do_ as a morning's sight seeing. They do too much! Anyway one doesn't need to take his automobile from its garage for the excursion, so these classic villas are only mentioned here.

To describe and illustrate the Villa Medici one must have the magic pen of a Virgil and the palette of a Poussin and a Claude Lorrain. In antiquity the site was known as the Collis Hortorum, the Hillside of Gardens. Lucullus, Prince of Voluptuousness, and Messaline, the Empress of debauch, there celebrated their fêtes of luxury and passion, and it became in time even a picnic ground for holiday making Romans.

The Villa Medici was originally built for Cardinal Ricci in 1540, but by the end of the century had come into the hands of Cardinal Alessandro di Medici. The Tuscan Grand Dukes owned it a century or so later on, and it was finally sold to the French to house the academy of arts founded at Rome by Louis XV.

It is useless for a modern writer to attempt to describe the quiet charm of the surroundings of the Villa Borghese, the nearest of the great country houses to the centre of Rome. Many have tried to do so, but few have succeeded. Better far that one should point the way thither, make a personal observation or two and then onward to Tivoli, Albano or Frascati.

One word on the Forum ere leaving. Not even the most restless automobilist neglects a stroll about the Forum, no matter how often he may have been here before, though its palaces of antiquity have little more than their outline foundations to tell their story to-day.

Commendatore Boni, who has charge of the excavations, brought to light recently a curiously inscribed stone tablet, which, owing to the archaic Latin it contained, he found it impossible to read. A number of learned Latinists and archæologists soon gathered about him. This is what they read:

QUE STAELA VI A DEGLIA SINI

While some declared that "_que_" was an enclitic conjunction, and that therefore the inscription must be incomplete, others asserted that the word was an abbreviation of "_queo_," and that the inscription might be read: "I am able to gaze upon the star without pain."

While the dispute was on, a peasant of the Campagna passed by. He approached and asked the reason of the crowd. He was told, and gazing at the inscription for several minutes he read slowly:

"Questa e la via degli asini" ("This is the way of asses.").

And the Latinists, the archæologists, and the other savants crept quietly away, while the Commendatore in good, modern Tuscan made some remarks unprintable and untranslatable.