Rome Part 7

The pride of the Roman is his chief characteristic; it keeps him from some of the pettinesses of his neighbours and is occasionally the idol to which self-interest is sacrificed. But the same people who are too proud to work are not too proud to beg. This kind of pride, indeed, is to be found a little everywhere in Italy, and I have known a distinguished Italian with a starving family who would consent to give lessons in "Italian literature" but not in "Italian grammar." In France where there is the maximum of self-respect this kind of pride is unknown. The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed, is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as an Italian from another province might do. But the Roman pride is a disease; it clamours for its own license and respects no one else's liberty; it plays into the hands of the Latin lawlessness, and the Roman spirit of revolt has tormented the popes ever since Constantine deserted the capital of the West. The Roman resents what he calls _prepotenza_, but a self-disciplined law-abiding people can hardly understand the stupid _prepotenza_ say of the cabmen in Rome--a majority of whom are Romans. The Roman lad or the Roman man takes it into his head to make a bee-line in your direction, to walk over that particular piece of road or pavement, and the feeble sense of righteous indignation he possesses is only kindled if you attempt to thwart him. The satyr-like--half-childish, half-malignant--cult of the _dispetto_, the miserable pleasure taken in deliberately inconveniencing you, are so many proofs of an undisciplined nature--and where shall we see so many undisciplined faces as in Rome?--albeit that here it masquerades as the just _orgoglio_ of a people descended from G.o.ds and heroes. _"Non me lo dica, perche io sono romano"_ (Do not say it to me, for I am a Roman), is a warning phrase repeated in perfect good faith, as who should say: "Do not provoke this son of a G.o.d."

[Ill.u.s.tration: GIRL SELLING BIRDS IN THE VIA DEL CAMPIDOGLIO

The Forum in the background. The road marks the old _Clivus Capitolinus_. See page 30.]

The Roman's most pleasing characteristic is his genuineness; that, and a certain magnanimity, a certain n.o.bleness of mind. The Roman has no "jesuitry," and he will not say behind your back what he dare not say to your face. In contrast to other Italians is his roughness--a legacy of old Rome--a rudeness of spirit which is a curious compound of pride in the past, of age-long absence of mental cultivation--of a moral quality, brutal sincerity, and of a mental quality, a terrific realism. They are also, perhaps, the best hearted people in Italy; and a dear old Roman friend used to declare that the Romans and the English were the kindest hearted people in the world.

Intellectually, no people in Italy have more talent: it is a key which opens many doors to say that the Roman is talented but not cultured.

There is no real culture in any cla.s.s, but there is a facility unmatched even in this land of natural gifts. The one exception to the general ignorance which exists by the side of an extraordinary quickness is an interesting one: every Roman is an archaeologist; to be unable to take your part in an archaeological discussion would be to write yourself down as an impossible ignoramus. On this subject every Roman is alert, and I was present when the foundations for the first houses which now lead to Porta Salara were being dug, and a marble relief was found which the workmen at once told me was "the rape of Lucretia." Imagine a bricklayer in London proffering a similar observation! With the general ignorance there is also in the upper cla.s.s a widespread intellectual apathy; many of the Roman aristocracy have never visited the Palatine, and when it was suggested to a young Roman that she had never seen the Capitol, she answered: "Oh yes, I saw it the day I was married." Part of the Capitol buildings are the registry offices of Rome where the obligatory civil marriage takes place. The drive on the _Pincio_, which is not larger than the tract of the park from Hyde Park corner to the Marble Arch, satisfies the most exacting ambition; and the fussy foreigner who spends his time in museums and galleries is regarded as a harmless and well-meaning lunatic.

Every human being is the product of contrasts; but the Roman is more so than other men: to explain, not what he is, but what he is not we have, I think, only to look at the contradictions, the inconsequence of a character which in the expressive Italian phrase is _sconclusionato_, it comes to no conclusion. For the Roman though he is turbulent is easily led; he is at once obstinate and teachable; he is not _fin_ but he throws a terrible light on all things; without being "_finto_" (feigned) he puts self-interest first. He is both ingenuous and suspicious; to his overweening pride he joins considerable diffidence; and the tongue which babbles of his personal affairs is the tongue of a man who has a profound distrust of his neighbour.

A fine critic with a child's simplicity, he is sceptical and superst.i.tious, credulous and incredulous, seeing the works of the oracle but allowing it to deceive him. Joined to his indifference is a faculty for staking his all on some absurd punctilio: his interest in ideas is greater than in many parts of Italy, his ambitions and pleasures more materialist. The changes which the Roman has witnessed in unchanging Rome are met in himself by changeableness and fickleness of purpose, though the conception of the majestic, the grandiose, the eternal is always there. What are we to say of a people who can unite the pettiest spite with a magnanimous tolerance?

The denizen of the eternal city is proverbially _campanilista_, which may be translated "attached to the village pump"; and while on the other hand he has a sense of public decorum unequalled in Europe, the _blase_ Roman fritters time and talents in petty preoccupations, in distractions which are neither dignified nor stately, and eats and gambles to show his distrust of human effort in general, of all human achievement since the incomparable days when his heroes walked the earth.

The Roman does not merge in you, and he no longer imposes himself on you. He is not free of obsequiousness; and such customs as the _baciamano_ (hand-kissing) are said to derive from the fact that the Romans have been "the hosts of Europe" and have learnt to depend on its bounty. A readier explanation is certainly afforded in that aspect of Catholic Christianity which has always encouraged personal humiliations and servilism in the inferior clergy and the laity: but perhaps the real explanation is to be found in the fact that the present day Roman is the descendant of the Empire, not of the Republic, and Christianity, as we know, easily adopted as its own the servilisms of the later Empire, with those Byzantine proclivities for despotism and adulation which at last led the independent Roman to burn his incense before the "genius" of the most infamous of the Caesars.

_The Romans and the "Italians"_

It is said that the Roman belittles things, that he is an easy despiser. Perhaps the gift of _criterion_ nourished among the grandeurs of cla.s.sical and Christian Rome is a sorry preparation for enthusiasm over the sights to be seen in other men's cities. The fact too that his pride sometimes forbids his stooping to means which ensure the success of his "Italian" brother who comes fortune-seeking to Rome, joined to his sincerity and hatred of humbug are, he thinks, the reasons why as a rule he is cordially detested by other Italians.

The "clericals" have another explanation; the Romans are hated, according to them, because they would take no part in the doings which led to the union of Italy and the invasion of Rome. We may give a little weight to all these reasons and yet understand that the Roman is disliked on other counts. His pride, so think other Italians, is altogether too immoderate for his achievements; and when they entered Rome they found a people devoid of the mental and moral qualities which make fine manners--a certain amount of self-forgetting and graciousness of mind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE TO ARA COELI FROM THE FORUM

The ever-open door of the popular Franciscan Church on the Capitol hill, which became in the middle ages the centre of the civic life of the Roman people. See pages 6, 57.]

After "the Italians" entered the city, these provincial animosities waxed fast and furious. Men from the north were dubbed _buzzuri_, Neapolitans got nicknamed _cafoni_, and to this day a residence of twenty or thirty years does not preserve the hapless "_forestiere_"

and his family from such epithets as _buzzuri_ and _villani_ if they presume to come to words with "a Roman of Rome." On the other hand "the Italians" returned these compliments with interest: the Romans were unlicked cubs, _maleaucati_, lazy, ignorant--the proud tetragram S.P.Q.R. was rendered by the Neapolitans _Sono Porci Questi Romani_ "these Romans are pigs"; while the Roman, finding in the Neapolitan a man still dirtier than himself, retorted that the "Neapolitans' sky is beautiful, and it is clean, because they can't reach it" ("Il cielo di Napoli e bello, ed e pulito, perche non arrivano a sporcarlo").

At the same time it is an indubitable fact that Italians who live among the Romans come to prefer them to their other compatriots; and I have heard this preference expressed by people so far apart as an educated Piedmontese and an uneducated Calabrese. Perhaps they learn from the Romans tolerance, the smallness of small things, and the greatness of great ones. Perhaps they realise that the Roman has learnt with an admirable patience and teachableness the new lessons that have been put before him. Thrown from easy circ.u.mstances into the vortex of the struggling life of the new capital--overtaxed and underfed--he has suffered as much as the newcomers for a political change which he demanded less loudly than they; and it is to his fair credit that a revolution has taken place in Rome without bloodshed, without violence, without undue bitterness, and that the element of crime and lawlessness has not been supplied by him. The Roman is not a hero, and not a saint, but neither is he a _Camorrista_ and _mafioso_ like the men of the South, nor a _teppista_[5] like the men of the North.

[5] The _Teppa_ and the _Camorra_ are respectively inst.i.tutions of the north and south of the peninsula. The former is recruited exclusively from the lowest cla.s.ses, and is nothing less than a league of the ill-conditioned bent on every sort of evil deed. The _Camorra_--like the _Mafia_--is more akin to a secret society, and to those factionist practices which are eminently characteristic of Italy. In this sense the _Camorra_ is a national inst.i.tution, which infects every Italian enterprise, and functions in every Italian theatre. The _Mafia_, like the _Camorra_, is widespread in Naples and Sicily and counts men of all ranks among its members. None of these were ever Roman inst.i.tutions; and the _teppisti_ who now afflict Rome are an importation from the north.

_Roman Customs and Roman Satire_

The customs of the Romans have been depicted by the inimitable art of Pinelli, their ways of thinking and feeling by Belli in his sonnets and in the modern sonnets of Pascarella. Here the satire, the cynicism, the rude intellect, the ignorance, the self-interest, meet us in every picture.

Nothing and n.o.body have ever escaped the Roman satire, which turns everything into ridicule and burlesque. From the end of the fifteenth century the torso called after the tailor Pasquino, and the statue of Marforio kept up a running fire of wit and mockery. When Pope Sixtus V. who was of the humblest origin made his sisters countesses, Pasquin appeared in a dirty shirt. Asked by Marforio the reason, he replied the next day, "_Perche la mia lavandaia e diventata contessa_,"

"because my washerwoman has become a countess." Pius VI. enc.u.mbered Rome with inscriptions recording his "munificence"; when bread became dear Pasquin seized the occasion to exhibit a tiny loaf with the legend _munificentia Pii s.e.xti_; and when Urban VIII. died the following epitaph alluding to the bees in his coat of arms, recorded his nepotism:

How well he fed his bees How ill he fed his sheep.

All this is very unlike the ideas held by some Catholics who cry "outrage" at the least criticism, and would consider the jests of Pasquin and Marforio sufficient to keep the Pope a prisoner in the Vatican. The popes thought differently; and preserved what face they could under the stinging satire of the Romans.

Pasquin gave place to the _capo-comico_ Ca.s.sandrino, who was delighting every cla.s.s in Rome at Palazzo Fiano in the Corso when the Italians broke upon the scene.

It must be remembered that the Roman would never accept servile occupations; the industries he chose were perforce those which required no plant and no capital, but also those which left him independent--such were the making of Roman pearls and mosaics, watchmaking, the favourite crafts of butcher, tanner, and carter, or the river industries of fisherman, boatman, and wharf porter. The most picturesque of his amus.e.m.e.nts were the dance, the mandoline, the lute, the song and serenade, and that improvisation for which he was always famous. One may still see the _tarantella_ danced on the "Spanish steps" in May by the artists' models, dressed in the old Roman costume which persisted till Napoleonic times--the half Spanish dress of the girls and the short velvet jacket, feathered hat, and knee-breeches of the youths.

When the Roman railway was built, things were conducted in truly homely fashion; the train which was timed to leave at 10.30 was still in the station at 11. When at length it got under way, it might be put back again to land two peasants who had got into the wrong train.

If you fumed and fretted, you were told to remember how long the journey would have taken before the day of railways. The Roman indeed had then and has now no sense of time--least of all has he learnt the proverb which he supposes is ever on the lips of our countrymen "_times_ is money." If you enquire of a Roman the hour of ma.s.s he replies "About ten, or half-past, or eleven--thereabouts." The shopkeeper, the waiter in a cafe, used to take no notice whatever of you when you entered his premises; he continued tranquilly to read his paper or finish his cigar, and only marvelled that there could in your opinion be any reason sufficiently urgent to warrant your disturbing these occupations. The Roman's time is as eternal as his city, and one of the lessons he has yet to learn is its value for other things than money-making. No one answers a letter; your lawyer or your banker think themselves as un.o.bliged to satisfy your curiosity as to the fate of your cheque or your business as the butcher and the baker. The Roman learns on his moral side, but remains so obtuse on the material side as to be a perpetual ill.u.s.tration of the reputation he has for strong-headedness, for "putting Trajan's column in his head," and refusing to budge like a mule. The Romans indeed are haunted by the past, and they are perhaps the people of Europe who have least grip on the present.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE CHURCH OF ARA COELI

See pages 57, 230-31, and interleaf, page 138.]

It is in their folklore, the popular rhymes and tales, the customs and amus.e.m.e.nts of the people, that we realise that no loyalty or reverence can exist by the side of that pa.s.sion for laying bare; and understand the coa.r.s.eness which waits on the wide-eyed gaze of the Roman, unsparing and gross, because it is the result of what Ricasoli has called "the real poverty of the poor"--a moral poverty. The Roman goes to see some tight-rope dancers and describes the treat it was for him:

Above all there's the great pleasure of the height, For if any one of them were to fall, Nothing in the world could save him.

He goes to the play. This is his impression of the tragedy:

The last act when he kills himself and her I can tell you was just satisfying (_M' ha proprio soddisfatto_).

Or take his summary of the problems life presents:

... _a sto paese tutto er busilli_ _Sta ner magna allo scrocco e dd orazione._

"The whole difficulty in this life is how to eat without paying for it, and to get your prayers said."

But the scene may change, and the same Roman is called upon to go forth into the campagna with the beneficent _confraternita dell'

Orazione e Morte_ in search of the body of some victim of violence. He is found _pancia all' aria_ and brought back to his family; but amidst the keen observation of all that happens, of the situation, there is not a pitiful or generous sentiment; the scenes suggest nothing of interest but the faithful gross record of purely external impressions. Yet these men have trudged along the heavy roads, up and down, stumbling and struggling through the dark night to perform the act of pity which teaches them, apparently, so little.

Tragedy, comedy, a funeral, a marriage, the visit to your dead, the game of hazard, the incidents of an a.s.sa.s.sination, all these things come under the same clear, coa.r.s.e, unintimate, unloving observation of a people who hold, wisely enough, that "L'occhi so' fatti pe'

guarda"--the eyes are made for looking--but who care as little how they look as they trouble to select what shall be looked upon.

"_Che bella giornata; che peccato che non s' impicchi nessuno_" is the traditional greeting to a fine day, repeated even now with a modern humorous sense of its ghastliness. "What a fine day! what a pity no one is going to be hanged!" And the Roman's liking for distraction and noise is not sated even when he goes to bed. Before 1870 serenaders waked, and charmed, the sleeping city; but the Roman who is supposed to have been "killed between a policeman and official red tape," still reminds us that he is not so very dead after all, or that the _guardia "non s' e fatto viva,"_ for he now roars down the thoroughfares in the small hours of the night, thus procuring for himself the pleasure of disturbing you--a form of recreation with which even the police have too much sympathy to interfere. For the Roman tolerates other men's lawlessness but has no respect for their liberty.

_The "Coltello" and Crime_

As with children who cannot "play the game," his games of chance degenerate into quarrelling and killing. The terrible habit of carrying, stowed away in a pocket at the back of the trousers, or up the sleeve, what the Romans call "the instrument" gives them a ready means of converting hot blood into hot deed. The _coltello_ used to be, and still is at times, the favourite gift of a girl to her lover--to have used it with deadly effect is in her eyes a necessary sign of prowess, and to feel it always ready is in his sight the welcome earnest of power to a.s.sert his virility. Italian crime is committed in hot blood; sudden rage or "love" supply the motive, and there is very little of the premeditated cold-blooded crime of which d.i.c.kens gives us an example in the details of Nancy's murder in _Oliver Twist_. The worst crimes of violence, however, are brought about from motives so futile as to seem incredible when they are mirrored in some ghastly a.s.sa.s.sination. It is enough to disagree with your comrade, to win a litre of wine from him, to refuse to withstand the police--to find yourself on the way to _Sant' Antonio_ or the _Consolazione_ with three inches of steel in your stomach, nay not unfrequently in your back. Primitive, terrible, childish, barbaric, this love of blood, this power of "seeing red" in a quarrel, has made the Italian the bravo of Europe, and makes the total of Italian homicides at the present day exceed those in England, Germany, Belgium, France, and Austria put together. Ninety-five homicides for every million of the population contrast in Italy with six for every million in England. In the time of the Venetian pope Clement XIII., in the middle of the eighteenth century, the proportion of homicides in Rome was twenty-five times higher than this.

Is the Italian more cruel, more brutal, more wanton than his fellows?

To the first two questions I should answer No, to the last, Yes. The cruelties of the French Revolution, the coa.r.s.e brutalities of England even down to the century just pa.s.sed, the horrors recently revealed in the German army, would at no time have found their counterpart in Italy. But the Italian--the Roman--is wanton, he is an egoist who sates his impulses without any reference at all to the other people and the other interests involved. He is wanton, for he lacks the sense of personal responsibility; wanton, for he carries on life and government with no regard to justice. The Italian is a child of nature, a combination of his own two conceptions of "faun"-like irresponsible grace and "satyr"-like animality; an undisciplined creature living in the conditions of modern civilisation. But although the Italians are a vital people, a people alert on the side of the self-protecting instincts, and with the egoism of the vital temperament, they are not an inhumane people: they have in abundance the imaginative sympathy which instructs and softens, and if they lack the sense of justice they are in some ways more merciful than we.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOORWAY OF THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT (SAGRO SPECO) AT SUBIACO

See interleaf, pages 82 and 86.]

No one can understand the disposition of the Italian in any part of the peninsula who does not appreciate in it a certain mildness--something expressed by the Italian _mitezza_ but not by our English _meekness_--which preserves him from excesses from which other peoples are not free. The Romans of antiquity boasted no such sentiments; from that cruel period there has come down to us one story of humanity--the humanity of a dog; the compa.s.sion shown by a dog for one of a group of victims executed in the neighbouring Mamertine prison, and callously thrown out upon the steps of the highway of civilisation--the Roman Forum. But as a population the Romans of the modern city are not cruel.

If you look in upon the Roman as he watches the public torture of prisoners in the first part of last century you will have the story in brief of his irresponsibility, his unstrenuous att.i.tude towards all such matters. He shrieks with delight at the writhings of the victims, but will shout with pleasure if one of them succeeds in making good his escape. Little has been done to instruct the spirit of the ignorant Roman, yet few such scenes of repulsive cruelty to animals as Naples and Florence present are to be laid at his door; and the best of the population need fear no compet.i.tors in human and merciful sentiment. What the country cries out for is for these better sentiments to have the force of a public opinion--a civilising agent as yet completely absent in Italy. No force in the country helps the Italian to that "self-reverence" the lack of which Mrs. Barrett Browning discerned in him. Nowhere in Europe is callousness to human life so great;[6] nowhere in Europe, writes an enlightened Italian priest, is there so much cruelty to animals as here; yet so unaccustomed are the people to that best form of moral education--moral suasion--a gradual civilising of spirit, that they are incapable of putting two and two together, and still urge the ignorant argument that if you inculcate humanity to animals while there is so much to be done for men, you are somehow wronging the latter; they suggest, apparently, that by kicking a dog you are somehow helping a baby. It is to be hoped that the thesis of the priest above quoted, that the protection of animals is a real means of education, may be accepted boldly by the better clergy now that Leo.

XIII. has called such protection _altamente umano e cristiano_.

Visitors are outraged by the disgusting cruelties which even the children in Italy are the first to practise, and no amount of sophistry will make them believe that such conduct is decent in the superior animal. That secular Italy will be obliged to take up the subject is certain, and one hopes that then the clergy will return to the simpler spontaneous religious feeling of the country--marred by scholastic dogmas--which gave a patron saint to the lesser creation, and which still places in every stable and cattle-shed of Umbria the image of "S. Antony, protector of animals."