Part 2

The Borgo, our quarter,--Leonine City is its best name,--is not fashionable, and the street-cries are still in full force here. The earliest is the Acetosa water, “_Fiasche fresche aqua ’Cetosa!_” I hear it in my dreams, plaintive, melodious. “Flasks of fresh Acetosa water!” Then comes the rumbling of the cart, the hee-hawing of the donkey, and the remarks of the man to the donkey. This is what he said to-day: “I call all the apostles to observe this infamous beast of a donkey: may he die squashed, this son of a hangman!” I do assure you he is the dearest donkey, pretty and willing, but rather restive about stopping. The Acetosa Spring is a mile and a half from the city, out Viale Parioli way. It has been in use since the days of the Cæsars, perhaps since the days of the Tarquins. The Romans take a course of _Aqua ’Cetosa_ every summer; six weeks is the orthodox time; it is “cooling to the blood.” It costs two cents a flask.

Signor Augusto Rotoli has written out for me the notes of several of the cries. In the Acetosa score he has indicated the blows of the driver, the kicks of the donkey, and finally the patter-patter of the poor little beastie’s hoofs over the rough paving-stones of the Borgo Nuovo:

VENDITORE DELL’ AQUA ACETOSA.

Nel silenzio del mattino, all’ alba, in distanza, e poi piu presso alla residenza--questo è un effetto molto caratteristico.[1]

At seven o’clock a herd of twenty goats is driven into the piazza by two dark satyrs with shaggy thighs and flashing eyes, peasants in goat-skin trousers they are from the Campagna. The children crowding round them in the piazza, and I looking down from my terrace, watch them as they milk their yellow-eyed beasts. Goats’ milk, Pompilia says, is good for consumptives and delicate babies; I have not yet learned whether she considers it heating or cooling to the blood. We are not allowed to have _broccoli_, carrots, or mutton at this season because they are heating, and are obliged to have more rennet than we like because it is cooling!

After the goats are gone the blackberry man comes. I like his cry best of all, it is in a melancholy minor, “_More, more, chi vuol maniar le more?--more fate!_” “Moors, moors, who wishes to eat moors?--ripe moors!” Moors, if you please, because they are black!

IL VENDITORE DI MORE.

“Buy a broom” is far prettier in Italian--Romanesque, I should say--than in English. At first we could not make out the words, the man seemed to be singing “O! so far away!” The notes, long drawn out, pensive, fascinating, like a sailor’s chantey, haunted us. “_O! scopare, cacc’ aragni!_” “O brooms, chase the spiders!” The latter are Turks’ heads on the ends of long sticks, necessary for ceilings twenty feet high like ours.

LO SCOPARO.

Nella folla del giorno nel frastuono di carrozze e veicoli questo tono minore è molto rimarchevole.[2]

VENDITORE DI PESCE.

“_Pesce vivo, calamaretti!_” “Live fish, little inkstands!” The _calamaretti_, small cuttle-fish, are]

called little inkstands because of the black liquid--sepia, isn’t it?--which they eject when attacked. Fried a golden brown and served with fresh soles as a garnishing they are too good for common people.

The umbrella mender is a bit of a poet, he makes his cry rhyme. “_Ombrellare. Chi ha ombrelle per raccomodare?_” “The umbrella man. Who has umbrellas to mend?”

“_O ricotta, ricotta!_” When I hear this I run to the window, wave my handkerchief, and the _ricotta_ man brings up a fresh goat’s-milk cheese in a green wicker basket; it is a sort of spiritualized cottage cheese. When quite new, eaten with _maritozzi_ warm from the bakery downstairs, it makes a better luncheon than I can get at the Café di Roma.

“_Alice!_” (pronounced a-lee-chee) “anchovies,” is a strident cry which we hear at intervals all day. Anchovies are a staple food with the lower classes. At home I only remember them as an appetizer at some brutally long dinner parties. The people eat anchovies with bread or with macaroni; they are cheap, strong of flavor, and a little of them goes a long way. We have them with _crostine_ and _provatura_ for luncheon sometimes. _Provatura_ is cheese made of buffalo’s milk. Little crusts of bread with alternate layers of _provatura_ and anchovies skewered together like chickens’ livers and toasted make a pleasant dish.

One cry I do not like, “_aqua vita!_” short and sharp in the early morning, as soon as the newsboys begin to shout “_Don Quichotte_” “_Popolo Romano_,” “_Corriere_,” this cry comes like an antiphony. “_Aqua vita!_” “Water of life?” Water of death! brandy.

We sent all the way to the English bakery in Via Babuino for our bread till the day I met Count Luigi Primoli in the baker’s shop on the ground floor of our palace; he was tucking a brown paper parcel into his pocket. There had been a function at the Vatican. He had been to pay his respects to Leo XIII., and on his way home had stopped to buy what he told me were the best _maritozzi_ in Rome. The baker is an important person; he owns his shop and four caged nightingales, which sing divinely. We now buy our bread, flour, macaroni, and oil from him, and he changes all the neat fifty-franc notes we get from the banker’s; he can always be trusted to give honest money.

I soon found out that in all domestic affairs I must learn Italian methods; it was useless to try and teach Pompilia and Filomena our ways. After the tussle over the washing I gave it up. Set tubs, wash-boards, wringing-machines? Nothing of that sort. On Sunday evening the clothes are put in a large copper vessel, a basket-work cover is laid on top, over which a layer of wood-ashes is spread. Boiling water is then poured on slowly, percolating a little at a time through the clothes, which are bleached by the lye of the ashes; this is the _bucato_. When they have stood long enough in this witch’s cauldron the clothes are carried down to the basement and washed with cold water in the vast stone fountains of the palace, which we have the right to use one day in the week. The women employ a stiff brush and the queerest green soap to scrub the linen; if we have any table-cloths left at the end of six months, we shall be lucky. The American clothes-pins and line I sent for are neatly displayed in the kitchen as curiosities. We “hang out” on an iron clothes-line to which the linen is tied by small pieces of twine, as it was in the days of the Empress Faustina. We are no better than our mothers! The clothes are sent out to a _stiratrice_ to be ironed.

Our cooking fuel costs us one dollar a week. Saturday morning the _carbonaro_ arrives, carrying on his back a huge sack of charcoal, for which I pay five francs. I am told it is ten cents too much, but one must pay something for being “_forestieri_.” The cooking is done over four little square holes filled with charcoal, set in a table of blue and white tiles; a big hood overhead carries off the fumes; quite the prettiest kitchen range I ever saw! The charcoal is kindled by means of paper, little fagots, and a turkey-feather fan plied by old Nena. I like my kitchen, it is full of such queer, nice pots and pans; a row of deceitful copper saucepans hang along the wall, always bright, never used, but brushed over with white of egg, which acts like a varnish to protect the polish; a big white marble mortar, a long copper kettle for the fish, and the green and yellow bowls and mixing dishes are my favorite utensils. I foresee that the old brass _scaldino_ J. picked up at the junk shop will some day serve as an ornament to the front hall at home. We have a brace of warming-pans and the queerest metal box for live charcoal. When you want a warm bath you fill your tub with cold water, put hot coals in this box, screw it up tight, and put it into the water, which it finally heats. Prehistoric? Fortunately, we prefer our baths cold! Pompilia begged some slips from our geraniums, planted them in empty kerosene cans, and now the kitchen window is bright with flowers. Everything grows so quickly here that it is easier to have plants than not.

August 16, 1894.

The _parroco_ (parish priest) has called. Filomena came all of a flutter to summon me. The visit has raised us in our servants’ eyes; they have never before lived with pagans or Protestants. I like the _parroco_. He is a fine man of forty-five, evidently a peasant, but possessing that assured, courteous manner the priests all have; it is wonderful, the bearing and polish the Church gives them. The _parroco_ was rather disturbed at being offered a cup of tea at five in the afternoon,--it was stupid of me to have it brought in; the Anglo-Saxon association of eating and drinking with sociability is hard to get rid of,--but he made a long visit and gave me good advice about the local charities. The gnawing poverty all about us is the drop of gall in our honeypot. Our door is literally besieged by our poor neighbors and by begging monks and nuns. At the _parroco’s_ suggestion we now divide what we can afford to give between the benevolent society which looks after the sick and old, the Trinitarian order of monks, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. Besides these a man calls on Saturday morning from the “Holy Family” and carries away a big bag filled with _robaccio_,--trash,--things that at home would go into the ash-barrel.

General Booth must have got his idea of the Household Brigade from some such institution, and I am learning new lessons in economy every day! Nothing is wasted here, not the tiniest scrap of food nor the most disreputable cast-off garment. My servants watch for my old shoes; three pairs of eyes are fastened on them daily. You know how much more precious old shoes are than new,--especially Appleton’s, which come all the way from Boston? Well, yesterday I was shamed into giving away my most cherished old boots and am wearing to-day a horrid stiff new pair. Every night a bundle is smuggled out of the house full of odds and ends of food which support a certain poor family whose grandmother has attached herself to us. Her perquisites are the old newspapers, empty bottles, stale cake and bread, sour milk, the very orange and lemon peels, and the leavings from the servants’ table. I am so thankful there is enough to fill the poor old blue market handkerchief, but it would never do for me to show knowledge of its existence; that would spoil the sport.

You ask about the comparative expense of life here. People who would be called well off at home are rich in Rome; people we should consider poor can live here with much comfort and some luxury. For instance, cabs cost sixteen cents a course for two people, or forty cents an hour. I pay my seamstress fifty cents a day, and my cook seven dollars a month; a clever young Italian doctor, modern, up-to-date, well educated, is quite satisfied with a dollar a visit. Good hotels (not the two or three most extravagant) charge twelve francs (about two dollars and forty cents) a day. Meat, chicken, eggs, fish, fruit, and vegetables are cheap; but all imported groceries are horribly dear by reason of the fifty per cent. duty they must pay. Coffee costs fifty cents a pound, sugar twenty, American kerosene oil is sold in five-gallon cans for three dollars--fancy! we pay more for petroleum than for olive oil or for wine. Postage stamps, salt, and tobacco--all government monopolies--are sold only at tobacconists’. Milk is not cheap; the best in Rome comes from Prince Doria’s herd of Jerseys. Unfortunately, we are not on his milkman’s route; our milk comes from the Villa Ada, which belongs to an American lady, a daughter of Rogers, the sculptor. It is very good milk, quite different from that we get at a pinch from the _vaccaria_ round the corner, where in a dark, dreadful dungeon stable pale cows, with long untrimmed hoofs, pass their melancholy lives. Pompilia is in despair because we will drink our milk unboiled; when I saw the prisoner cows I understood why. Italy is a poor country, and poor people can live comfortably here. Rents, service, and food are all cheap; it may be a paltry reason for abandoning one’s country that one can get more pork for one’s shilling elsewhere, but it is a potent reason. Here in Rome prices are all scaled to the different pockets. I pay less at the same shops for the same things than my rich friends pay, but some things even the rich cannot secure; certain conveniences--rapid transit, steam heat, “rapid delivery,” express service--cannot be purchased, and, what is really serious, good schooling is not to be had at any price, so few Americans with children to educate settle in Rome. But for men and women there is no school like Rome. Willy nilly, I learn something every time I go out of doors, whether it be to the Appian Way, the Via Sacra, the Forum, or to the Corso. The yellow Tiber, the fountains, the nightingales of the Villa Medici, the ilex trees of the Borghese, seem to whisper the secrets of the city with the mighty past, the mother and law-giver of nations.

II

CADENABBIA--WOERISHOVEN--PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP

CADENABBIA, LAKE OF COMO, August 29, 1894.

I fear the vagabond instinct is the strongest one I have, for I was glad to leave Rome a week ago--to leave _my_ Rome, think of it! with its galleries all to myself, and its churches, and no tourists; still, the fleas had become too vicious, and all the “lame ducks” were upon me--shabby gentlemen attached to the Vatican, seedy artists with portfolios of unsold sketches, decayed gentlewomen professing Dante and lacking pupils--for the foreign colony, by which they live, has dissolved, and we were the last Anglo-Saxons left in town except some young secretaries of the British Embassy.

Unless one has seen the Sistine Chapel at noon on a blazing August day one has not really seen it. The figure of Adam receiving the touch of Life from the Creator is, for me, the highest expression of the art of painting. The hours I spent across the way at the Vatican and St. Peter’s made up for any small inconveniences of the heat I may have suffered. If one is to pass a summer in a city instead of in your green Maine woods, many-fountained Rome is the city of all others! There are no mosquitoes,--literally, we have neither a bar nor a netting in the house--the nights are cool, the citizens are too poor to go away in any appreciable number, so there is none of that desolate feeling which makes London a Desert of Sahara in August, and Paris worse. But the heat of the last week of August drove us to the Italian lake country, and here we are at Cadenabbia--from _Ca’ di Nabbia_, house of Nabby, an old woman who once lived in a little hut, or _ca’_, on the shore. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I am writing before breakfast. Outside my window is the Lake of Como with its mountains. On one side there is deep purple shadow, the other palpitates with light. Soon we shall have coffee and green figs in the _pergola_ below, under the canopy of grape-leaves. Cadenabbia is all villas and hotels; behind, half way up the hill, is the village of Griente, to reach which we climb steep streets of steps paved with round cobbles. Griente is all gray stone, with delicious arches spanning the narrow ways. The syndic’s house stands apart; his fat wife and pretty daughter seem always to be sitting sewing before the door. The _padre_, a dear old man, showed us his garden and called our attention to the trellis he had contrived for his grapes. We must taste his wine, made from these Muscats--made, I warrant, by his own hands. We did taste it and found it excellent.

“_Sapete, Signori_,” he said, “_un goccettino di vino e’ buona per lo stomaco_ (Know, Signors, that a little drop of wine is good for the stomach).” St. Paul was of his way of thinking.

J. has been seized with a fury of sketching; he goes every day to Griente and draws and draws! The old women and the children make much of him. Yesterday he heard one boy say to another, “It must be very hard to paint and smoke a pipe at the same time.”

“_Ma ché!_” said the other, “he only does it for bravado!”

The other day he frescoed a lad’s nose with vermilion like a Cherokee brave’s; since then all the boys in the district torment him for the ends of his pastels.

This is one of the prosperous provinces of Italy. The town of Como has silk manufactories, where the best Italian silk stockings are made and the nicest of the piece silks. There is a feeling of comparative _bien être_ in all classes which adds much to one’s own comfort. The flood of travellers that pours through here brings a certain prosperity, though I incline to think it a specious one. Everybody asks, “What would Italy do without the tourists?” Perhaps if the people were not so busy making silly knicknacks to sell to tourists, they would pay more attention to cultivating their land. Improved agricultural methods are what Italy needs above all else; she has the finest soil and climate in Europe; she could supply half the continent with fruit, oil, and wine if she had a little more common sense! I have seen oranges and lemons rotting under the trees at Sorrento, and in Calabria I have seen grapes used to enrich the soil! This is not because the Italians are “lazy”--“lazy Italians!” there never was a more unjust reproach borne by any people--the Italian peasants are the hardest-worked people I know. They tug and toil just to put bread in their mouths; they almost never taste meat. Last Sunday afternoon at the railroad station in Rome the floor and platform were covered with sleeping peasants waiting for the train to take them to their work. Each man carried round his neck seven loaves of coarse bread strung on a piece of rope, his week’s rations,--dry bread, with a “finger” of wine to moisten it if he is lucky! It is evident that they are willing to work, and yet Italy is miserably poor! Somebody is blundering somewhere, I am too rank an outsider to know who. Some foreign writers lay every ill Italy endures to the heavy taxes the government has imposed. I am not so sure that what Italy has got in the last quarter century is not worth the price she has paid for it. There are abuses, steals, a bureaucracy, and a prodigious megalomania (swelled head), but the people are learning to read and write!

That reminds me of what I heard Sir William Vernon Harcourt say at a luncheon in Rome. Some one asked where he was staying. “I am stopping at the Hotel Royal opposite to the Ministry of Finance,” he said. “Strange that Italy should have the largest finance building in the world and the smallest finances!” The folly of putting up these mammoth public buildings, these dreadful monuments to Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour, and the other great men who brought about the _Risorgimento_, is appalling; but Italy is realizing her mistakes; she is learning at an astonishing rate.

WOERISHOVEN, BAVARIA, September 20, 1894.

I have been banished by bronchitis from the Eden, Cadenabbia, and have come to Father Kneipp’s Water-Cure, near Munich, although it is a little late in the season to take the “cure.” It is _de rigueur_ before seeing Father Kneipp to consult a regular practitioner, who pronounces whether or no you are a fit subject; people with weak hearts are not allowed to take the cure. I paid a small sum, became a member of the Kneipp Verein, received a blank-book--in which the _medico_ wrote out a diagnosis--and a ticket stating the hour of my appointment with “the _Pfarrer_,” as Father Kneipp is called. I arrived a little before time at an immense barrack of a place like the waiting-room at a railroad station. The door to the consulting-room was guarded by two functionaries who read aloud our numbers as our turn came, looking carefully at the tickets before letting any one enter.

“_Einundzwanzig!_” (twenty-one), and I passed into the long room and stood before Father Kneipp, like a prisoner at the bar. He is one of the most powerful-looking men I have ever seen; his eyes pierced me through and through. I handed him the book with the diagnosis. He read it, grunted, ruminated, bored me with a second auger glance, then dictated my course of treatment to one of his secretaries, a callow _cherico_ who sat beside him at a long table with three or four other men.

I found out afterwards that they were young doctors studying his methods. Father Kneipp spoke to me rather sharply, going directly to the point. Never mind what he said, I deserved it, I shall not forget it, and, like Dr. Johnson, “I think to mend!” “Come again in a fortnight,” he said suddenly. The consultation was over and I was ushered out. I had not reached the door when “_Zweiundzwanzig_,” a crippled boy, a far more interesting case than mine, came in.

Father Kneipp dislikes women, ladies especially, me in particular, because no one had warned me not to wear gloves, a veil, and a good bonnet. If I had put an old shawl over my head and looked generally forlorn, he would have been kinder. Isn’t that dear? His benevolence is of the aggressive type; he grudges time spent on rich people,--is only reconciled to them, in fact, because they offer up gifts in return for health, and in this way a great sanitarium has grown up where the prince is nearly as well treated as the peasant--but it is the peasant folk, his own people, that the _Pfarrer_ loves! This is the only truly democratic community I have ever lived in,--a pure democracy governed by a benevolent despot! The despot is past seventy years old; he has an aldermanic figure, a rough peasant head, and extraordinary bristling white eyebrows, standing out a good two inches from his pent-house brows. His coloring is like an old English country squire’s,--brick-red skin, bright blue eyes, and silver hair. He is a prelate; so his rusty black cassock is piped with purple silk, and he wears a tiny purple skull-cap. His two inseparables were with him, a long black cigar and a white Spitz dog....

* * * * *

The fortnight is almost up, the cough gone, the vitality come. Yesterday I went to hear one of the Father’s health talks in the big, open hall, free to all. Good, practical common sense was what he gave us, nothing new or startling,--just the wholesome advice of a very wise old man. Enthusiasm and common sense are his weapons. After it was over we waited to see him come out. A group of bores hung on to him; one sentimentalist caught his hand and tried to kiss it, which so enraged the _Pfarrer_ that he gave the fellow a slap!

Such people! If you could only hear them testify to their cures, like lepers and the halt in the Bible! Tell Anagnos that two blind men say they have been cured here this summer. The applications were general, not local, save bathing the eyes in warm straw water. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One had been blind four years, the other longer. Atrophy of the nerves of the eye was the trouble in both cases. The younger man was going away in despair after a few weeks’ treatment. He drove to the station, got into the train; _suddenly he saw something moving_, cars going in the other direction! He got out again, returned to Woerishoven, persevered with the treatment, and now sees!