Rome Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: CONVENT GARDEN OF SAN COSIMATO, VICOVARO

This convent in the Sabine hills stands on a plateau between the river _Digentia_ (now Licenza) and the Anio. Near it is the site of Horace's Sabine farm. See page 169.]

CHAPTER V

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA

Rome is set in the _campagna romana_. The strange beauty of this "Roman country," the birth country of the Latin League, a.s.sails the very doors of the Roman citizen, intruding its poetry, its stillness, from point after point of vantage, causing the beholder to lead every now and then a sort of dual existence, to lose his sense of time and place and personality, and with his feet planted in the city which was once the hub of the world to find himself dreaming in a cloister garden. The atmosphere, the combination of colour and light, is characteristically Roman, it suggests what is mystic but never fails in perfect clearness. With its mystic blues, its blue-greens, its silence, its vastness, the campagna presents none of the features of the _pays riant_ of Florence where little olive-crowned hills, so cared for, so laughing, convey a message like its history definite, h.o.m.ogeneous, cultured, charming. But here a dead city has been besieged day and night by a dead campagna, big with its speech of silence, untilled yet a cradle of civilisation, with the complex language suited to a more difficult message, not entering into your humour but taking you into its secret, beautiful, austere, ma.s.sive and careless of little things, yet yielding you out of its rich secular treasure details of beauty in abundance--here before you lies a history, a power, heedless of your judgment, but century after century looking back at you [Greek: meidiasais' athanato prosopo], as one of the finest lines in Greek verse says of Aphrodite, and recreating your universe for you.

_Latium_ was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium--as though it were wide and s.p.a.cious, suggesting the civilisation which was to spread from here, with its largeness, its s.p.a.ciousness, its contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The _ager antiquus_, the Roman _ager_, however, was of much smaller extent, bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the _Ma.s.sa Festi_ between the seventh and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate--the so-called _gentes_. The extension of the campagna beyond the _ager antiquus_ to form the _ager publicus_ was the result of conquest, the territory thus acquired being let or a.s.signed to private persons as tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and towns, the _castelli romani_, are so-called not as is popularly supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were colonised by Romans from the _ager_ under the protection of the great feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus _castello_, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village which cl.u.s.tered round it.

Something of the dualism which possesses the soul of the Roman, which has I think always conveyed a message to his eyes, his ears, his heart, is derived from the scene before him. Life and death, the _va et vient_ of the world's masters, "the desolation of Tyre and Sidon"--the Roman campagna has looked on both. Chateaubriand describes it as a desolate land, "with roads where no one pa.s.ses," with "tombs and aqueducts for foliage" usurping the place of trees and life and movement; the stillness is broken by no happy country sounds, the eye sees no smoke ascend from the few ruined farmsteads. No nation it would seem has ventured to succeed the world's masters on their native soil, and the fields of Latium lie "as they were left by the iron spade of Cincinnatus or the last Roman plough." Decimated by plague and pest and deserted by man, malarial, fever-bound, the smiling country-seats of the world's conquerors have given place to tiny scattered colonies--as at Veii--haunted by a people emaciated by fever, where lads of eighteen, looking like boys of twelve, are certified by the parish priest as unable to bear arms. Along the world-famous roads lined by the Romans on either hand with the monuments of their dead, that they might retain a constant place in the thoughts of the living who journeyed on these most frequented ways, the ruined tombs are left in possession of the dead alone. The tombs, the _hypogaea_ and _mausolea_ of the great families who dwelt there, often remain standing when all trace of the villas to which they belonged have disappeared, as though one further proof were needed that this is indeed the land of the dead.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A TRACT OF THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT OUTSIDE THE CITY

The Sabine hills are in the distance. See pages 21-22.]

Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life--some seventy cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators, made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these villas met the _rheda_ outside the gates, drawn by its pair of fast-stepping horses. These light carriages were gaily painted with some cla.s.sical subject, as the peasants' carts still are in Naples, and a leather hood with purple hangings protected the owner from the heat. At all the cross-roads are fountains for the use of man and beast, near which a seat shaded by ilex or olive awaits the tired traveller, as we may see it still awaiting him for example at the Porta Furba on the way to Frascati. Excellent roads kept in excellent repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, trees, shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme, but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained English box hedge. The shrubs are tortured into the semblance of beasts and snakes, the name of the owner being sometimes cut in the foliage, a device which may still be seen in the modern grounds of the Villa Pamfili-Doria. The most conspicuous features of the campagna from cla.s.sical times are the aqueducts, stretching right across the _agro_ to the walls of Rome; gigantic remains of the Claudian aqueduct extend for six miles, and the ancient _peperino_ arches of the favourite _acqua Marcia_, which cross the Claudian aqueduct at Porta Furba, still bring water to the city. As cla.s.sic Rome is represented by the aqueducts and mausolea, so feudal Rome is represented by the towers which rose in the campagna between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries--the early semaph.o.r.es on the coast-line to give warning of the approach of Saracen or Corsair, the vedette towers which figured in the baronial wars, and the later fortified towers of the baron's castle. Last but not least Christianity has strewed the campagna with chapels and shrines, the earliest of which supplanted the cult of the local pagan divinity in the ages when Christianity was gradually driving the religion of imperial Rome into the villages and hill retreats. So S. Sylvester replaced the woodland deities, Michael supplanted the G.o.d of war, S. George became the Christian protector against the depredations of ferocious beasts, S. Caesarius replaced the genius of the imperial Caesars. Of the same period are the basilicas erected over the _sepulcretum_ of a martyr at the mouth of a catacomb.

Several causes led to the abandonment of the _agro romano_. The neglect of the roads and the ruin of the aqueducts, which cut off the water supply, the poverty of the despoiled landlords, and the general insecurity following the incursions of the barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought about a rapid depopulation and gradually turned the _agro_ into a pest-bound desert. It would seem that malarial fever is virtually indigenous to the soil of the _agro_, besetting every region as soon as man deserts it. It did not make its appearance, we may suppose, in the inhabited towns of the cla.s.sical period, but that it existed before the middle ages, the popular date for its appearance, is shown by the allusions of cla.s.sical writers since the time of Augustus and by the existence of several temples to the G.o.ddess Fever. In Rome itself it is the persistent belief, which appears to be abundantly confirmed by statistics, that the more building is extended and the horribly noisy paved streets are multiplied, the faster the evil diminishes; for the malarial miasma is held to be an exhalation of the soil, and where earth is freshly turned there is danger. As we all know, it has been quite recently shown that the microbe of malaria is carried by mosquitoes, mosquitoes abound where water abounds, and one of the reasons for the unhealthiness of the _agro_, one of the greatest obstacles to its reclamation, is that there are not less than ten thousand little water-courses which filter down to the valleys, creating marsh and stagnant pools. The evil may really date from the last years of the republic, which saw the displacement of the small freeholders by the large landowners, of the old free labour by slave labour, and the consequent fatal depopulation of the _agro_. But during the middle ages, from the sixth century onwards, all the causes were intensified, and the difficulties which now beset the secular problem of the restoration of agriculture in the Roman campagna and the expulsion of malaria, resolve themselves "into a vicious circle"; for men cannot live there until the malaria is exorcised, and until men live there the malaria will remain in possession. No less than seventy-nine measures for what is known in Italy as the _bonifica dell' agro romano_ have from time to time been projected; and whether Italy will succeed where the popes failed is still doubtful. The initial necessity, the drainage of the campagna, seems in itself to be a task too great for Hercules. For the last four years the military _Croce Rossa_ has perambulated the campagna during the summer and autumn months, combating the malaria with doctors and medicines. It is hoped that this will be followed by the establishment of a larger number of permanent sanitary stations. Since 1870 millions of eucalyptus trees have been planted as air purifiers especially at the little railway stations and other inhabited sites. It is not forgotten that the agricultural colonies of the cla.s.sical age were once the saving of Rome, and within the last few years similar schemes have been devised in the hope that the birth-land of the Roman people may become once more the home of agriculture. Such a _colonia agricola_ for Roman lads, outside the Flaminian gate, was founded by a visitor who has since become the wife of an Italian well known for similar enterprise in Italian Africa.

The moral wants of the _agro_ have appealed to the sympathies and occupied the attention of the excellent society of young Catholics, the _Circolo San Pietro_, which has opened and furnished thirty-four of the closed and neglected churches and chapels of the _agro_ for the use of the scattered population; ma.s.s is also said in the hayfields on Sunday for the haymakers, on a wain drawn by oxen, and a very charming little picture of this scene has been prepared under the auspices of the President, Prince Barberini. There are within the city many hundreds of extra-parochial clergy--monks, friars, clerks regular, missionaries, and members of the various ecclesiastical congregations, with scores of churches and chapels where hundreds of ma.s.ses are daily celebrated, and where expositions of the Sacrament, novenas, and benedictions are multiplied. But just outside the walls there are people who never hear ma.s.s, who live and die without the consolation of religion, "without a priest." When the _Circolo San Pietro_ set their hand to the good work of opening the churches and chapels of the _agro_ their difficulty consisted in finding priests to minister in them without payment. "Your Indies are here" said the Pope of his day when S. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, wished to go abroad as a missionary, and Pius X. has recently echoed the saying. There is only one confraternity in the city which imposes on itself the duty of seeking and burying the bodies of those who die from sudden illness or from violence in the campagna. This well-known black "Confraternity of Prayer and Death" accompanies the funerals of the poor gratuitously.

It is affiliated to the Florentine _Misericordia_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAMPAGNA ROMANA, FROM TIVOLI

See page 78.]

The _agro romano_ is divided into nearly 400 farms owned by half as many proprietors. The largest of these farms comprise between 8 and 18,000 acres, the two smallest 5 acres each. About half remains ecclesiastical property, while a third belongs to the great Roman families, one-sixth being still owned by peasant holders. The proprietors allow the big estates to be farmed by the so-called _mercanti di campagna_, who take them on a three or nine years'

tenure. These large merchants of country produce keep a _fattore_ on the farm who is the actual manager; he is both farmer and bailiff. The cattle of the _agro_ are, Signor Toma.s.setti tells us, its most considerable inhabitants. There are 32,000 sheep, 18,000 cows, 10,000 goats, 7000 horses and mules, 6000 oxen, and 1800 buffaloes. The oxen were brought by Trajan from the basin of the Danube, the buffaloes came with the Lombards and were originally natives of India.

Beyond the _agro_ are the _castelli romani_, the hill towns of the Alban and Sabine district. There above Frascati lies the site of Tusculum, the mighty rival of Rome; to the right is Monte Cavo the highest peak in the Alban range where stood the temple of the "Latian Jupiter," sanctuary and rallying point of the Latin League. Below lies Albano of which See the English Pope, Hadrian IV., was Cardinal Bishop. In the Sabine range is the famous city of Tibur (Tivoli), the villa of Hadrian, and S. Benedict's town of Subiaco. To the east is the rock Soracte, "the pyramid of the campagna" and the meeting place of Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins; while a score of little townships in both ranges of hills record the feudal families of Rome, and harbour the descendants of the Latin rural _plebs_. The life led here is not the village life of England, but the life of small, primitive townships, with a mayor, a commune, and the customs of the middle ages. There are no manufactories and no crafts, and there are no cottages, the dwellings being divided into floors as in the big towns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUBIACO FROM THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT]

The great business of the year is the vintage, which takes place in the Roman campagna in October; in land held under manorial rights, however, the tenants must await the lord's pleasure. The vines are trained round short canes set close together, and the grapes are collected in wooden receptacles narrowing towards the base: these are emptied into the _tino_, whence they are pressed, by the old biblical method of treading with the feet, into an enormous cask below called the _botte_. Here the grapes are left for several days to ferment, the skins rising to the top. In the little yards of filthy houses one may see the grapes being boiled in a cauldron, an illegitimate subst.i.tute for fermentation. The wine of the _castelli romani_ is famous; every district makes both red and white, the latter being generally preferred in Rome itself; the white "Frascati" and white "Genzano" are famous; Albano wine is praised by Horace, and excellent "Marino" is still made in the vineyards of the Scotch college which has its summer quarters there. The Sabines yield the "Velletri," a good red wine but difficult to find pure; Genazzano and Olevano also produce an excellent grape, but the difficulty in some of these small towns is to find a vine grower to take sufficient pains with his wine making. Colouring matter is usually employed for the red wines, the least noxious resource being a plentiful admixture of elderberry. The wine made one year is not as a rule drunk till the next; it is not prepared for exportation, but is kept, or sent to Rome, in barrels, from which it is decanted for retail commerce into flasks where the wine is protected with a few drops of oil in lieu of a cork. The wine is also sold by the _barile_ (sixty litres), _mezzo barile_, and _quartarolo_ (fifteen litres), the usual price given in Roman households being about seven francs the _quartarolo_. Every _trattoria_ and restaurant, however, sells wine by the Roman half-litre measure--the _fojetta_--and the prices 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 may be seen chalked up outside the wine-shops. Outside vineyards and rural _trattorie_, where wine is sold, a bough is hung out as a sign, reminding one of the origin of the proverb "Good wine needs no bush."

The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "_L'olio si sente_"

(One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "_Ojo e sempre ojo, ma strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sara?_" (Oil is always oil, but who knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most beautiful things in the Italian country--and its grey-green colour, with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be over after the middle of February.

The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same Latin _plebs_, except that they no longer serve the world's masters and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great cla.s.sical civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the general outlines the same people--but more not less barbarous than of yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised, by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("_e il destino_" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and coa.r.s.e as the cruel are coa.r.s.e. The inhabitants of the _castelli romani_ were described by a compatriot as "_pieni di superbia, debiti, e pidocchi_" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to hear ma.s.s in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house, there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised his gun and calmly shot his brother _in the presence of their mother_.

The mother and son were punctual in their obligations to church and convent, and the _arciprete_ of the parish journeyed to Rome to bear witness at the trial that the murderer was "il fior del paese," (the flower of the flock). When the man was acquitted, the priest had no better lesson to inculcate for the community of which this was the "pearl," than to accompany the local band which went forth to welcome the fratricide back to the village which held the still fresh grave of the brother he had treacherously murdered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GARDEN OF THE MONASTERY OF SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO

This fifth-century monastery (restored five hundred years later) was dedicated to the sister of S. Benedict, the founder of Western Monasticism. The first printing press in Italy was established here.]

It is commonly believed, even by the educated, that "things" happen in the campagna which happen nowhere else, possession, obsession, "overlooking," witchery. Hysterical manifestations are indeed common at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical.

Some sixteen years ago the government determined to check this source of hysteria, and directed the rural clergy to perform no more exorcisms. I visited a friary in the Sabines at this time and saw the work of the evil spirits in the shape of a packet of hairpins (complete with its sample pin), tresses of hair, or a good fat nail which had been swallowed by the energumen and which under the emotional stress attending the exorcism--the dim light, the monotonous droning of the _frati_ who are saying their office behind the high altar--are brought up again. I enquired of the Father Guardian what happened now that exorcism was forbidden? Well, a woman had been there only the day before, and he had explained to her that he could only p.r.o.nounce "a simple benediction," which had resulted after a quarter of an hour before the altar in the ejectment of the objects shown me. Such an end to an ancient Christian ministry destined to free poor human beings from the toils of Satan gives food for reflection. The secular conflict between religion and science has set foot even in the Roman campagna. If in England we have our Christian scientists, in Italy the authorities have to cope with a people whose remedy for the bite of a rabid animal is a ma.s.s said at the shrine of some special madonna--both put faith before a trust in "dry powder," and there has never yet been an age of the world in which there have not been those who thought them right. The popular sanctuaries in Italy, indeed, help to keep up much that is undesirable. At the April festa at Genazzano a peasant will kneel down before the miraculous image of the Madonna which hangs, like Mohammad's coffin, without visible support, and having made his prayer will rise and shake his fist at the picture, exclaiming "_Bada, Maria!_" (Beware, Mary!) Many things, thin silver hearts, candles, and other dainties have been promised if the desired favour be granted, but if the Madonna be not tempted by these to accede to the wishes of her worshipper, she must look out for herself.

Wax images can be laid out to melt in the sun, there to learn how agreeable is a continued drought, statuettes can be stood in the corner with their faces to the wall, a rival patron saint can be pitched into the river, by the same hand which brings gifts. "See how you like it!" Does not the primitive man create his G.o.d by looking into himself? and Caliban with his "So he!" inaugurates theology.

Another Roman picture is afforded us by the lottery. It is to be found, indeed, all over Italy, but we are only concerned with its influence in Roman life, where it has always flourished, first under the popes when a prelate presided to bless the opening of the lottery and now under the State, for the Romans are born gamblers. Seventeen millions a year are raised in this way out of the pockets of the poorest of the poor. The excuse made is that as the people will gamble the only safeguard against gigantic frauds on the gamblers is to make the lottery a department of the State. Certainly it would be absolutely impossible to trust to fair play if the choice of the numbers depended on any private persons; even if they were honest, no Italian would believe it. The "Book of the Art," with its rough hideous drawings of the things represented by the lottery numbers--one to ninety--is the only book which the unlettered Italian can read.

Every event national or domestic becomes the subject of play. You "play" the a.s.sa.s.sination of the King or the death of the Pope, the accident which has happened to your neighbour your master or your mistress, and you play the death of your kinsfolk. In order to get the money the people have recourse to the _monte di pieta_--the p.a.w.nshop--and the women will p.a.w.n the mattress off the bed. Sometimes the choice lies between the two chief pleasures of the Roman, eating and the lottery, and it is the best proof of the fascination of the latter that it is so often preferred to the joys of the table. In every tiny village as in every great city throughout Italy there is a _banco dell lotto_, and the winning numbers are exhibited over its doors every Sat.u.r.day. Five numbers--for example, 5, 9, 27, 36, 50--appear each week. This is called the _cinquina_. But you can win the _ambo_ (two correct numbers), the _terno_ (the most usual of all), or the _quaterna_. Not more than five numbers can be played, but if you "plump" for the _cinquina_ you gain a big sum; or you can declare your intention to play for all four possible combinations. In this case you gain little if the _cinquina_ comes out. It is the same with the _terno_, if you plump for it you gain much more. But the gain also depends on the amount you put into the lottery, and any sum from six _centimes_ can be played. When Pius IX. died a Roman jeweller won 40,000 scudi (8000). How can one expect the gambling of the poor to cease when even twelve _centimes_ (less than five farthings) may bring fifty francs?

The Roman goes to the lottery with all the paraphernalia and a good deal of the sentiment of devotion. "Se ci aiuti Iddio e la Madonna,"

they exclaim--If G.o.d and the Madonna will help us--we shall win the _terno_. There are several "tips" for winning. One which is as awesome as it is efficacious consists in starting the _kyrie eleison_--hardly recognisable in its popular dress as _crielleisonne_--and then say on your knees thirteen _ave marias_ to as many madonnas. Having invoked Balda.s.sare, Gasper, and _Marchionne_ (Melchoir)--though what the three wise kings have to do in that _galere_ is not very obvious--you go out of the house, taking care to answer nothing if any one calls you. You go straight to the church of S. John Beheaded, where those who suffered capital punishment used to be interred, and then whatever you see or hear inside or out, look it up in the "Book of the Art" and you are safe to win. Another _bella divozione_ for the same end is to go up the steps of Ara Coeli on your knees reciting a _requiem aeternum_ or a _de profundis_ on each step. A large number of the people praying so devoutly to the Madonna di Sant' Agostino (whose other princ.i.p.al care is the safety of childbirth) are praying for luck in the lottery--praying or threatening, for the one is very kin to the other in the primitive mind as it is in the magic of all primitive peoples.

Some of these may have been conducting a solitary nocturnal vigil, having risen from their beds, kindled two candles, and proceeded to carry through one or other of the _belle divozioni_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOLY STAIRS AT THE SAGRO SPECO

The ravine (above the monastery of S. Scholastica) where S. Benedict took refuge from the corruption of Rome, became the site of the _Sagro Speco_, the sacred cavern, with the ninth-century monastery of _San Benedetto_. The peasants of Subiaco ascend the stairs here represented on their knees, as the _Scala Santa_ in Rome is ascended, and, occasionally, even the numerous stairs of _Ara Coeli_. See page 86.]

In the country-places the great stand-by is the Capuchin, who has a reputation for suggesting lucky numbers. When he comes collecting alms in village or city the poor man asks him for a likely _terno_. He is not supposed to suggest these numbers, but he and the people understand each other, and every word, every allusion, which falls from his lips is thereupon eagerly noted. If he mentions a recent a.s.sa.s.sination, you "play" number _72 morto a.s.sa.s.sinato_, then the numbers indicating the day or some special circ.u.mstance, "a quarrel,"

"the knife" with which it was done, "jealousy," "a man," or "a woman."

The element of chance, the ineradicable belief in luck, makes a man sure to play if three numbers come unbidden into his head. No pious person dreams of the "numbers of the Madonna"--6, 8, and 15--without at once "playing" them. The Madonna evidently intends "to do something" for you; indeed "if the Madonna suggests numbers" it is a safe thing, you can put five francs on it. It is popularly said that 2, 3, 5, 6 are numbers which always come out, these and their combinations. Fifty-eight is the number indicating the Pope, and 52, _morta che parla_, is played by good simple women who have dreamt of their dead mother. The industrious working middle cla.s.ses and even the better cla.s.ses "play," though the latter play _sub rosa_. On Sat.u.r.day the people collect round the little lottery offices--some of them have waited to pay their bills until they ascertained their luck. On the appearance of the fateful numbers there is a general talk, a general lamentation: "If I had only done so-and-so." "If I had only played _morto_ instead of _ferito_" ("dead" instead of only "wounded.") For the Roman the whole known world sacred or profane is absorbed in the business of the lottery. Thus one of the popular sonnets in the Roman dialect describes how the flight into Egypt came about. On the 27th of December the Patriarch Joseph is snoring in bed, dreaming of lottery numbers, when an angel appears to him and says: "See here, old man, what a fine _festa_ there is going to be over number 28" (the 28th of December commemorates the ma.s.sacre of the Innocents). Thereupon S.

Joseph wakes like one crazy, hires a young donkey, and takes the Madonna and her child off to Egypt.

Many English travellers to this favoured country of the G.o.ds since the days when Vulcan and Minerva vied with each other as to which should bestow the best gift on Italy, must have wished that nothing more sensitive than the olive had been placed in the hands of its countrymen. Signor Gabelli has described the burly Roman carter beating his horses or mules, the red cap which hangs over one ear matching his flaming face, afire with triumphant pride in this exercise of brute force and dominion. No one rebukes him. On the contrary the clergy delight to dwell on the distinction between the duties owed to men and the absence of all obligation towards the brutes. The distinction, of course, works no better in modern than in ancient times, and means nothing less than the systematic brutalisation of the Italian people. The doctrine that animals (like "the sun and moon") were "made for man" is held to justify all mishandling of them, all domineering and callousness. This is frankly immoral; and until priests overcome their reluctance to set forth ethics in a way that does not involve a break with the order and march of all human civilisation, theology will continue to accommodate itself to racial characteristics, and specious theological propositions will still serve as a cloak for bluntness of moral perception. Only this year a _marchese_ told me that he "could not admit that animals feel." The effect of such sentiments in a squire among an illiterate tenantry may be readily imagined; the ignorant Italian gentleman justifies theology by the astounding proposition that all sentient creatures below man have been provided with a set of non-sensitive nerves; the rustic finds in the pleasure which it affords him to know that this proposition is untrue an ampler justification of the ways of Providence.

The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming a.s.sistance against them from the government. One of the best known Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi.

In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the brigands are the chief herdsmen called _b.u.t.teri_, in blue jacket and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A primitive and cla.s.sical feature of campagna labour is the singing with which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the accompaniment--the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights which pa.s.s these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour, protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful species known as the _lupetto romano_--the Roman wolfling--balances himself on the cargo and const.i.tutes himself the protector and companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across the sunburnt plain of the _agro_ the men drop asleep, and it is then easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer salutes as he pa.s.ses, still exist in some of the untouched parts of Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the _b.u.t.teri_ and the wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country"

but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly reminded, when figures like these with their pastoral divinities took possession of the Palatine hill.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE GLEANER IN THE CAMPAGNA]

Italy has always been the land of Saturn, the nature G.o.d. Her festivals were the festivals of the doings and events of nature, the Lupercalia of Lupercus, the Palilia of Pales; she was and she remains pagan, if pagan is to mean the natural as opposed to the supernatural att.i.tude towards life--natural and humanistic as opposed to mystic and ideal. Under the new names lie concealed the old G.o.ds. The true Latin G.o.ddess is Pales, the earth mother, the source of grace, the real giver of gifts to her devotees--enshrined, dedicated to the gospel under a hundred aspects of what Bonghi has happily called that "gentilissimo fiore del cattolicismo," the cult of the Madonna. Some unseemly tracts and pictures have represented Christ as turning away from the leprosy of the sinner's sin, and it is Mary whose compa.s.sion for the prodigal never wavers, who persuades the Christ to have pity.

That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the Italian mind. The nature G.o.ddess, the mother, the earth and its fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never parted with it.

It is the hour of the G.o.d Pan, that midday hour which Pan alone can withstand. The sun is high in the heavens, the earth exhales heat, round about are the great silences. Nothing else stirs, nothing moves, nothing breathes. The great repose is indeed tense with a great activity, but a hush of nature greets this supreme hour of the sun in its glory--the world lies dead at the feet of the giver of life. The hour of the G.o.d Pan is the mystery which is daily renewed for the Italian; what has remained constant amid all changes is the nature-myth, and the secrets it is always whispering to the children of its soil.

CHAPTER VI

THE ROMAN MeNAGE

As in other European towns, the custom in Rome is to live in flats.

The houses are high, of no particular style of architecture, and in the older portions of the city they overshadow a labyrinth of narrow streets paved with large uneven slabs of stone. Here are no side walks for pedestrians who with an indifference born of long practice walk habitually in the middle of the roadway, moving leisurely to one side in obedience to the warning cries of the drivers, or patiently waiting and flattening themselves against the shop doors if two vehicles desire to pa.s.s one another. Long ragged grooves sc.r.a.ped along the house walls and at street corners by the hubs of heavy cart-wheels, testify to centuries of clumsy driving.

There have always existed in Rome, however, a certain number of villas within the walls, and their timbered parks and terraced gardens ornamented with fountains and statues, have been one of the characteristic features of the city. Their wealthy owners probably possessed a sombre palace as well along the Corso, but the villas were pleasant in the warm weather, and two centuries ago wonderful Arcadian entertainments were given beneath the shade of their ilex groves. Some of these villas still exist in their original state or as public property, many have been crowded out and demolished and their gardens have been cut up into building plots. The taste for villa-building is, however, not yet dead, and of late years small dwellings in a Baroque style have been springing up like mushrooms in the new quarters, and immense rents are asked for them.

Roman flats or apartments as they are called, vary from magnificent suites of thirty or forty rooms to a small domain of three or four.