Part 8

They were marched off to Tivoli, to spend the night in the vast, bare guard-room, where every hour the grave _carabinieri_ came and went in squads, as the guards were changed. In the morning they were allowed to send telegrams to their respective consuls in Rome, and by ten o’clock they were set at liberty, with a warning to be more careful in future.

The artists suspected, justly or unjustly, that the weather had much to do with their arrest. It was a miserable evening, when three possible brigands in the hand might be reckoned as worth more than a whole band in the bush!

VII

VIAREGGIO--LUCCA--RETURN TO ROME

VIAREGGIO, October 15, 1898.

The long mole runs far out into the sea, the light-house stands at the extreme end; here we watch the fishing-boats come in every evening, the sailors poling them along the mole to their harborage in the river. They build boats at Viareggio; the real interest of the town, quite apart from the watering-place life, centres in the weatherbeaten sailors, the cumbrous craft with their rich colored sails, the smell of tar, oakum, and fish. This morning we watched a pair of old salts calking the seams of a dory; they had a fire and a pot full of black bubbling stuff, “pitch, pine, and turpentine.” It is late in the season for sea-bathing; this morning we were the only people who braved the pleasant cool water. There is a fine beach with a gradual slope and, as far as I have discovered, no undertow. Last night we walked in the _pineta_, the wonderful old pine forest that embraces Viareggio, spreading out in a half circle, sheltering it from the north winds and leaving it open to the kindly influences of the sea.

Viareggio is full of memories of Shelley; we saw the place where his body was washed ashore, where Trelawney found and burned it in the old classic fashion. We heard the question discussed whether the yacht Don Juan was lost by accident (she was a crank boat) or had been run down by a felucca, whose piratical sailors believed Lord Byron to be on board with a chest of treasure. I suppose we shall never know the truth, so as I am loath to think ill of any sailor, I shall go on believing it was an accident.

It is strange to find ourselves again on the high road of travel, after the loneliness of the Abruzzi. Since the days of the Phoenicians, invading armies of Huns, Goths, Longbeards, palmers, pilgrims, and their descendants, tourists and tramps have patrolled every step of the road we are now travelling.

We drove from Viareggio to Lucca, two and a half hours, through the beautiful Tuscan country in its glowing harvest colors,--every farm a glory, with heaped barrels of grapes waiting to be trodden into wine, strings of yellow, yellow Indian corn and scarlet peppers hanging over the fronts of the houses. The way led through an olive grove: all about us were twisty witch trees, a misty gray wood in which one looked right and left for Merlin and Vivian. Then came a chestnut forest, the great bursting burs filled with big shiny Italian chestnuts. We stopped at the house of a vine grower known to our driver, and asked leave to visit the vineyard. The proprietor, a tall lean man, with a touch of the faun about him (J. wants to paint him as the god Pan) welcomed us cordially. The large Tuscan speech strikes sweetly on our ears after the clipped Italian of the Abruzzi. Even the working people in Tuscany have a certain elegance in turning a phrase which southern Italians of far greater culture lack. Nothing could be more up to date than this Tuscan vineyard, almost as tidy and progressive as the German vineyards. That, after all, is the great thing about travelling; you visit not only different countries, but different ages. A thousand years lie between my friend “Pittsbourgo’s” Etruscan method of ploughing, at Pietro Anzieri, and the system on which this neat thrifty Tuscan vineyard is run.

“Those look like American Isabella grapes!” we exclaimed.

“They are what they appear to be,” said the _vignajuòlo_; “behold an experiment! Many of my best vines were destroyed by the phylloxera, an obnoxious insect which girdles the roots so that the vines die! Do you think I would allow myself to be vanquished by a mere insect? I send to North America for these hardy vines which have so bitter a root that the vile insect touches them not. I graft the native Italian grape upon the American vine and wait. Meanwhile, until I am sure of my grafting, not to lose all profit, I allow the American vines to bear grapes from which I make wine of some sort. I tell you in confidence, it is only fit for _contadini_ to drink, I would not offend you by offering it to you. _Ma, pazienza!_ by and by, I shall cut back the vine to the grafting, and the native vine will flourish upon the American root! Then I shall have a wine worthy to offer _vostra signoria_!”

Here is progress for you; here is a man not satisfied to do as his fathers did; here is a country of to-day, a people with a future!

Having made the _giro_ of the vineyard, we came back to the large stuccoed farmhouse which had originally been painted a violent pink; now the color, softened by sun, rain, and time, is a rich variegated yellow. With a gracious gesture, our host threw open the door, and stood smiling in the sun, the matchless human sunshine of Italy in his dark shy face. When he talked about his vines he had been all animation; the ceremony of inviting a lady into his dwelling was rather irksome to him.

“The signori will do me the honor of entering my poor abode?” He showed us into an apartment only a shade less austere than the waiting-room of a convent. It was clean, cold, and of a frightful bareness. Let us hope there was an enchanting kitchen--like our never-to-be-forgotten kitchen at Roccaraso--somewhere in the offing, where our handsome Pan might take his ease.

“The signori will do me the honor to try a glass of my wine?”

J. asked if he had any wine of Chianti. He laughed.

“_Eccellenza_, shall I tell you the truth? I have tuns of wine which I shall sell for Chianti. All you _forestieri_ know that name and demand that wine. The real wine of Chianti would not supply the town of Lucca. Chianti is a small _paese_; its wine is good, who shall deny it? but not so good as that which you will honor me by trying!”

I held out for a glass of the “Americano”; it tastes rather like the unfermented grape juice we have at home.

* * * * *

Lucca at last! a dear, queer, delightful old town with ramparts and fortifications in fine preservation. It has a delicious slumberous quality: its glorious days are in the past; its mediæval walls effectually shut out the rustle and bustle of to-day. My earliest childish impressions concerning Lucca centre about certain long thin glass bottles bearing the words “Sublime Oil of Lucca,” always in evidence at home when there was to be a dinner party. Cross German Mary, the swarthy culinary goddess of our youth, used to hold one of those deceitful bottles gingerly in a clawlike hand, letting the sublime liquid trickle drop by drop into the yellow mixing-bowl wherein she compounded salad dressing such as I have not since tasted. Later in life I was once delayed by a crowd on State Street, Chicago, outside a wholesale warehouse on which was written in large letters “Cotton Seed Oil.” I had to wait for a moment while a crate full of spick and span new _empty_ bottles with fresh gold labels bearing the familiar legend “Sublime Oil of Lucca” was carried into the warehouse! Can you solve me that mystery?

During our first dinner in Lucca, I inevitably demanded “_un poco di quest’olio sublimo_.”

“_Ecco lo quà, Signora_ (behold it here, lady),” said the fat waiter, offering a familiar straw-covered flask of oil, just like those we have in Rome. Sublime Oil of Lucca in long, thin, deceitful bottles is not to be had in Lucca!

My second impression of the town is connected with another cook, the excellent Pompilia: she was born here and first went out to service with a great lady who lived in Florence in the winter, and at Bagni di Lucca in the summer. I have often been made to feel my inferiority to that lady, and enjoyed a certain revenge in refusing to drive out to see Bagni di Lucca, whose fine hotels and bath establishment do not tempt us. We prefer Lucca and the “Universe,” a queer old caravansary, whose limitations we endure in that transcendental spirit with which Margaret Fuller accepted the larger universe. The hotel has been a palace of some importance: our bedroom is of the size and character of the stage of Covent Garden Theatre, when set for the last act of Othello. The gloomy majesty of the furniture is quite appalling; the two stupendous beds could easily accommodate the whole family of children at Orton House.

The first day we drove out into the neighboring country, where we found the same joyous harvest atmosphere we left in the Abruzzi. The town of Lucca is mellow with another harvest, the great art harvest of the renaissance; pictures and marbles that strike us fresh and strong from the dead hands that made them, not too familiar like the more famous works of Florence and Venice. We never before knew much of Matteo Civitalis, the statuary; he is now our loving friend for life. Fra Bartolomeo, the Lucca painter, we already knew, though not so intimately as now. We have put in some days of hard sightseeing. Did I say hard? no, splendid, soul inspiring. I feel as if I had put my lips to the fountain of life, and drawn deep draughts of inspiration. There are great churches, grim St. Romano and San Michele, the cathedral with its precious jewel, the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, one of the most lovely monuments of the renaissance. As we lingered near the tomb the old sacristan approached; he eyed us anxiously before speaking.

“The signori are interested in sculpture?” We said that we were. “If their excellences have time, I will gladly show them what the church contains of interest to the amateur.”

How often he must have been snubbed and hurried by breathless tourists!

“A thousand thanks. We have come to Lucca partly to see the cathedral of St. Martino; figure to yourself if we have time!”

The withered old face broke up into the tenderest smile; it went to one’s heart that he should offer so timidly a service so precious. We spent the morning mousing about the church seeing all its treasures in the mellow glow of the old man’s enthusiasm.

“The illustrious ones have heard, perhaps, of a certain English writer who calls himself Ruskino?”

We said that we knew Ruskin’s books. He flushed with pleasure. “He was my friend; more than thirty times he visited Lucca, and he never came without making a sketch of the tomb of Ilaria.”

We go into the cathedral every day to look at Ilaria, where she sleeps in marble effigy, flower crowned, immortally young and lovely, just as Jacopo della Quercia, the sculptor, saw her, nearly five centuries ago. The tombs of Lucca remind one of the memorial tablets of the Street of Tombs in Athens. It is hard to say just where the resemblance lies; in form and manner there is little in common, the resemblance is of the subtler, deeper sort; a spiritual not a material likeness!

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, October 16, 1898.

We found our dear old palace very much as we had left it, save that Ignazio, the gardener, had suddenly, and without orders, added one hundred pots of flowers to the terrace. The difficulty and fatigue of watering this hanging garden of Babylon sometimes seems more than J. and I and Pompilia, our horticultural cook, can manage. Yet I cannot regret the addition which promises many new delights,--chrysanthemums among them. Pompilia asked many questions about what we had seen in our wanderings; she cannot forgive us for not having driven out to Bagni di Lucca! She tells me that she too is a great traveller.

“_Sa, Signora mia, ho viaggiato per tutto il mondo. Da Lucca a Firenze, da Firenze a Lucca, da Lucca a Firenze, e poi a Roma!_ Know, mistress, that I have travelled all over the world, from Lucca to Florence” (the distance is about fifty miles), “from Florence to Lucca,” etc.

Our first visitor after our return to Rome was Sora Giulia, the dark-eyed Jewess who keeps an antiquarian’s shop in the Borgo Nuovo, a few doors away.

“Welcome home, Signora. I have brought you a few _occasioni_ (bargains); a piece of lace, well, wait till you see it, _un oggetto unico_!”

Nena took Sora Giulia’s baby while the antiquarian untied her green damask bundle of old lace and linen.

“Behold, _Signora mia_, this priceless flounce. How well it would become you on a vesture of ceremony!”

She spread out with a caressing touch a deep lace flounce of Milan point. It was indeed “an unique object.” The sacred letters IHS and all the emblems of the Passion were wrought into it with wonderful freedom of design,--the ladder, the cross, the mallet, and so on. It had evidently been made for an ecclesiastic.

“It is truly a splendid piece of lace, Sora Giulia, but is it not known to you that such a flounce may only be worn by a _sacerdote_?”

“_I preti sono poveri!_”

“Not all priests are poor. Show it to Don Marcello.”

“_Ma chè_--, he buys no longer, he has to sell. But you, Signora, you are not like these others. _Eh dica, lei è veramente Christiana?_ (Say, are you really a Christian?)”

Was not her eagerness _not_ to have me a Christian pathetically significant? My mother remembers her Hebrew master, a scholarly Jew, taking hurried farewells of her in order to get back to the ghetto before the gates were shut at eight!

“I cannot buy this flounce. I could not wear it if I did.”

“_Per carità_, then look at this _reticella_.” (Literally “small net,” a coarse white netting with designs worked in by hand.) “The _forestieri_ are mad about _reticelle_, they are buying them all up to make table-cloths and pillow covers. Soon it will be impossible to find them. I never saw a better piece, you shall have it at your own price. In confidence, the _padrone di casa_ says if he is not paid his rent to-day he will turn us out. What a bad season we have had! No travellers since June. Those Florentine antiquarians put lies in the papers about there being plague or cholera, or some such _porcheria_ in Rome, just to keep the voyagers away from us. We make nothing; but we must eat and pay our rent all the same! The _padrone_....”

“With respect, he is an infamous beast, they all are, _Madonna mia_!” Nena broke in. When she took Sora Giulia’s part I knew that the antiquarian was really in straits. We bought the _reticella_ for the sum due the landlord, and Nena went downstairs to the baker’s shop to change the bill.

“Sora Nena will tell you that I speak the truth. That brute of a _padrone_ extorted her rent yesterday, took her last _centesimo_. What is the result? I tell you, this morning Nena’s daughter had nothing to eat for her breakfast but one raw lemon. In consequence, the child at the breast has colic, which is not strange.”

“What about the child’s father?”

“He is a _muratore_ (mason), but he gets no work. Sora Nena gives him to eat as well as his wife.”

Nena is a Venetian, and she takes snuff. She has other faults but I hear oftenest of these from the other servants. Before we went to Roccaraso I asked her if she had ever owned a silk dress. She laughed at the question; “silks were not for the likes of her,” etc. In parting I gave her a cast-off black satin, with rather peculiar wide stripes. The first Sunday after our return Pompilia went to mass in the satin dress, and poor pathetic little Nena in her old snuff-stained cotton gown. When I asked an explanation, she said that she had sold the satin to the cook: “Pompilia can afford to wear silk; I ask you, whom has she in the world belonging to her? Some cousins, who send her a basket of flowers on her _festa_! She puts every _soldo_ she can scrape together on her back. Well, let that console her for being a _zitella_! “If you could have heard the spiteful hiss of her _zitella_ (old maid). Nena has a daughter, an idle son-in-law, and seven grandchildren to support, but she pities Pompilia, who has only herself to think of!

“When the _forestieri_ come, you will recommend me to them?” said Sora Giulia in parting. I can do so with a good conscience. If she guarantees a candlestick to be silver, you may be sure it is not merely plated. If a bargain is struck she will keep her side of it; as much cannot be said of all her Christian confrères among antiquarians.

It is strange how the _antichità_ mania attacks people in Italy. Every one we know collects some manner of junk. A friend of J.’s who goes in for old coins was driving near Girgente, in Sicily, through the wildest, most primitive country. A peasant digging in a field offered him a handful of coins, moist with mud, just turned up with the spade.

They were all ancient Roman coins, copper or silver, familiar and not particularly valuable, with the exception of one rare Greek goldpiece which he bought for a large price. Afraid of being robbed, he took the next boat for Naples, pushed on to Rome, where he had been passing the winter, showed his treasure trove to an expert, and learned that there were but three others known to be in existence: one in Berlin, another in the British Museum, a third in a private collection. When he reached London, he showed his coin to the gentleman in charge of the collection at the British Museum. They compared it with the specimen in the case. The Girgente coin seemed as good a specimen; as a last test it was put under a powerful lens, which showed it to be a brand new imitation!

The Muse of Via Gregoriana, J. C., has a catholic taste and buys all manner of things from empire furniture to silver lamps. Her last craze is for peasant jewelry. She “acquires”--one does not buy _antiquità_--every piece she can lay her hands on. Some of the designs are excellent; the jewels are mostly flat rose diamonds, garnets, and misshapen pearls set in silver. Out of half a dozen odd earrings she will construct you a charming ornament, necklace, pendant, what not, and sell it to you at a small profit, which she devotes to helping young Roman musicians, several of whom owe their education to her. I call that a pleasant combination, to make your hobby carry your charity.

I believe Rome is the best place in Europe to buy jewels, because princes as well as peasants are continually throwing them on the market. One day our jeweller, Signor Poce (he lives in a little shop in the Corso, near the Piazza del Popolo), showed us a set of the finest emeralds I have seen in years. He said they belonged to some great lady who was obliged to part with them. That night we met those emeralds at a ball! they were in the shop again the next morning! Don’t be too sorry for the lady: she is a sensible English woman; and we happened to hear that she has lately redeemed a long-neglected estate belonging to her Roman husband, and is putting in modern improvements in the way of oil and wine presses. It is the same with the poorer people. What you read about the peasants parting with their precious possessions, furniture, laces, jewels, is true, but it is only part of the truth; they are selling them to buy better things--health and education! When you read about the heavy taxes, remember what they pay for! What Italy has done since 1870 is as wonderful as what France did in paying off the war debt to Germany out of the farmers’ stockings. Reading and writing are better than pearl earrings. The Tiber embankment, alone, cost the Romans a pretty penny. It spoiled the picturesqueness of the river--the sloping banks covered with trees and flowers must have been wonderful--and it did away with the Roman fever! The river used to overflow its banks every spring and to flood whole districts of the city. J. remembers boats rowed by sailors going

about the Piazza Rotonda and along the Via di Ripetta, carrying bread to the people in the submerged houses. When the river receded, “came the famine, came the fever.” When I was in Rome for the first time, as a girl, I had a bad case of old-fashioned Roman fever. Since my return, I have seen Suora Gabriella, the dear nun who nursed me so faithfully (she really saved my life) through that long dreadful illness. In speaking of the character of the work done by the nursing sisterhood to which she belongs, she said, “Since there is no more fever, the character of our work has changed somewhat; we now take surgical cases!” The doctors and hotel-keepers claim that Rome is the second healthiest city in Europe, having the lowest death rate after London. If this is true, we owe it to Garibaldi, for he it was who urged the Romans to build the Tiber embankment,--their best monument to his memory.

October 25, 1898.

This morning, Maria, the porter’s wife, was announced. She had come on “_ambasciata_” from the wife of the wine merchant opposite. “You remember the poor little _gobbetto_ (hunch-back), Signora? the one who has brought you so much luck, since that day when you rubbed his hump?”

“I remember him, yes; what of him?”

“He is very ill; he suffers much, cannot sleep, cannot eat. One sees all his bones! His mother, poor woman, prays that you will ask the American Marchesa who lives at the Palazzo Giraud Torlonia to lend her carriage for the transportation of the _santo bambino_ (the holy child) from the church of Santa Maria in Aracieli, to her house.”

“But why does she want the _santo bambino_ at her house?”

“After that blessed image visits his bedside, the poor _gobbetto_ will either recover or find repose in death. It is too terrible to see him suffer!”

“Is this thing which you tell me true?”

“It is most true, as you will see.”

I knew the poor crippled child, had one day taken him up in my arms. Maria, seeing me, had supposed I knew the superstition that it is lucky to touch the back of a _gobbo_.

“Will it be permitted to bring the _bambino_ to the house?”

“If a carriage can be sent of the proper style--there must be one servant on the box and one to walk beside, there must be two horses; an ordinary hired carriage from the piazza will not do.”

“If the Marchesa consents?”

“The _bambino_, attended by two priests, will be brought to the _gobbetto’s_ bedside. Then the thing will soon be over for the poor child--one way or the other!”

I went on the errand to my neighbor, Mrs. Haywood. (The Haywoods having a title from the Vatican, she is called Marchesa by the poor people of our quarter, but among her American friends she remains Mrs. Haywood.) She is a kind woman and an excellent neighbor. I found her at home in that splendid old Palazzo Giraud, built in 1503 (some say by the great architect Bramante), occupied by Cardinal Wolsey when he was papal legate. J.’s studio, by the way, is in one wing of this palace. Mrs. Haywood gave me tea in the library, one of the finest rooms in Rome. It has a balcony running around it, filled with rare books and manuscripts, for Mr. Haywood is a great bibliophile.