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                              ROMA BEATA

[Illustration: _Terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci_

From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Miss Mabel Norman]




                              ROMA BEATA

                     Letters from the Eternal City

                                  BY

                               MAUD HOWE

       AUTHOR OF “A NEWPORT AQUARELLE,” “THE SAN ROSARIO RANCH,”
             “MAMMON,” “PHILLIDA,” “LAURA BRIDGMAN,” ETC.

           _With Illustrations from Drawings by John Elliott
                         and from Photographs_

                                BOSTON
                      LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
                                 1909




                       _Copyright, 1903, 1904_,
                    BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT & COMPANY.


                          _Copyright, 1904_,
                          BY THE CENTURY CO.


                          _Copyright, 1904_,
                          BY AMERICA COMPANY.


                          _Copyright, 1904_,
                        BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY.


                          _Copyright, 1904_,
                    BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.


                         _All rights reserved_


                               Printers
                S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.




                             TO MY SISTER

                           LAURA E. RICHARDS




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

I. LOOKING FOR A HOME                                                  1

II.   CADENABBIA--WOERISHOVEN--PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP               31

III. A VISIT TO QUEEN MARGARET                                        50

IV. A PRESENTATION TO LEO THE THIRTEENTH                              76

V. IN THE ABRUZZI MOUNTAINS                                           97

VI. SCANNO                                                           119

VII. VIAREGGIO--LUCCA--RETURN TO ROME                                142

VIII. ROMAN CODGERS AND SOLITARIES                                   163

IX. BLACK MAGIC AND WHITE--WITCH’S NIGHT                             187

X. ISCHIA                                                            215

XI. OLD AND NEW ROME--PALESTRINA                                     239

XII. THE ANNO SANTO                                                  264

XIII. THE QUEEN’S VISIT                                              292

XIV. STRAWBERRIES OF NEMI                                            314

XV. THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING                             338




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                                    PAGE

Terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci                          _Frontispiece_
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Miss Mabel Norman

The Appian Way                                                        30
From a photograph

The Madonna of St. Agostino                                           72
From a photograph

The Pincian Gate and Wall of Rome                                     76
From a photograph

Roccaraso                                                             98
From a pencil drawing

Marta, a Vestal of the Abruzzi                                       107
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Mrs. Whitman

The Tiber, at the Ponte Nomantana                                    158
From a photograph

A Lost Love                                                          202
From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson

Ischia                                                               216
From a photograph

The Lady K.                                                          250
From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson

Dante                                                                311
From a pastel drawing in the Collection of Mrs. David Kimball

The Palace of the Orsini at Nemi                                     318
From a photograph




ROMA BEATA




I

LOOKING FOR A HOME


ROME, January 20, 1894.

Rome, which we reached Thursday, is very much changed since I last saw
it; imagine the Fountain of Trevi, all the principal streets, even many
of the smaller ones, gleaming with electric lights!

We at once engaged an apartment bathed with sun in the Piazza di Spagna,
sun from early morning till late afternoon. But when we moved into it,
the day was overcast. The apartment which had been tropical with the sun
when we hired it was arctic without it!

We interviewed our _padrona_ (landlady), an immense woman, and demanded
a fire.

“But, Excellency, it is not good for the health.”

We told her we understood our health better than she, and reminded her
that fires had been promised.

“Excellency, yes, if it makes cold; but to-day it makes an immense heat.
_Diamine!_ this saloon is a furnace.”

The thermometer could not have stood above forty-two degrees, but she
was not to be bullied or cajoled. Then J. went out and bought wood
“unbeknownst” to her and lighted a fire in the parlor grate. All the
smoke poured into the room. The _padrona_ charged with fixed bayonets.

“Gentry, we are ruined! Not is possible to make fire here.”

“Why did you not say so before?”

“Who could figure to himself that gentry so instructed would do a thing
so strange?”

These people are so polite that this was an insult, meant as such, taken
as such. In the end J. prevailed. A small fireplace was unearthed from
behind the wardrobe in our bedroom. He worked like a stoker, but the
badly constructed chimney swallowed all the heat. For three days I was
never warm, save when in bed. Monday we forfeited three months’ rent,
paid in advance, and went, tame and crestfallen, to a _pension_, a
sadder and a wiser pair.


PALAZZO SANTO CROCE, March 10, 1894.

The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again,
in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant
rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his
lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little
suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of
splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found.
We have bought our linen, blankets, _batterie de cuisine_, and other
beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday--am I not my mother’s own
child?--I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see
some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big
Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a
certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round
in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of
the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected
to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had
much tea, more talk, and most _panettone_--half bread, half cake, with
_pignoli_ and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in
the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it
is better.

My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two
francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch
of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our
old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch
twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the
tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse.
Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came
the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with
snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is
there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there
must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another
season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in
midsummer chiefly,--has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau--cheerful
person that, by the way--says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite
color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my
window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is
never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is
hysterical!

Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear
the music. At the _festa_ of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of
the Blind Institution furnished the music--a good band, though not equal
to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed
with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping
yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her
skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time
the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took the heavy youngster,
the mother took the new-born, and, squatting down, calmly suckled it.
The music was marred by the wailing of this and other infants, but no
one seemed to mind. After all, it was the only way the women could have
heard mass; the little ones were too young to be left alone at home.

The Romans are devoted to their children, although their ways are not
our ways; no woman of the upper class nurses her child, baby carriages
are unknown, and swaddling is still in vogue, at least with the lower
classes. I know a young American lady, married to a Roman, who imported
a perambulator for her first baby. The _balia_ (wet-nurse), a superb cow
of a woman, refused to trundle it, saying she was not strong enough,
although I saw her carry a heavy trunk upstairs on her head while I was
calling at the house! The baby is now a big eighteen-months-old boy;
every day the _balia_ goes out to give him an airing, carrying him in
her arms! Here, leading-strings are facts, not symbols. In Trastavere,
where I went sightseeing yesterday with Helen--peering, as she calls
it,--the best sight we saw was a darling red-haired baby in
leading-strings stumbling along in front of its grandmother. In the
division of labor, the care of the children falls upon the grandmother;
the mother’s time is too valuable; if she is not actually employed in
earning money, there is the heavier work of the household to do. To use
the pet phrase of the boarders, “things are different here from what
they are at home.”


PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, July 10, 1894.

Here we are in a home of our own! One moonlight night J. came in with
the news that he had found the very apartment he had been looking for;
if I didn’t mind, we would go and see it at once. Naturally, I didn’t
“mind.” We took a _botte_ and threaded the network of narrow streets
that lead down to the Tiber. We crossed the river, a huge brown flood,
silver where it swirled about the piers; drove past the Castle of St.
Angelo to the dingy old palace at the junction of the Borgo Nuovo and
the Piazza San Pietro. He would not let me stop to look at anything, but
hurried me through the entrance, along the corridor, past a courtyard
with orange trees and a fountain where the nightingales were singing, up
a high, wide stairway guarded by recumbent statues of terra-cotta
Etruscan ladies, to a rusty old green door. We pulled a bell-rope and
set a bell jangling inside. The door was opened by the _esattore_
(agent), a brisk young man, who carried a three-beaked brass lamp by
whose light we explored the apartment. They hurried me so that I could
only see that the high ceilings were of carved wood, that the windows
were large, and that I liked the shape of the rooms. J. kept saying,
“Wait till you see the terrace.” The terrace, or house-top, is a flat
roof; it covers the whole length and breadth of the apartment, and
belongs exclusively to it. A parapet three feet high runs around it; at
one end is a small room with a second smaller terrace on its roof,
reached by a flight of stone steps; at the other end is a high wall with
a little, open belfry on top. The view is sublime; you look down into
the Square of St. Peter’s with the Egyptian obelisk in the middle,
Bernini’s great colonnades on either side, the Church of St. Peter’s at
the end, with the Vatican, a big, awkward mass of a building, behind it,
and in the foreground the twin fountains sending up their columns of
powdered spray. On the left loomed the Castle of St. Angelo; it was
light enough to see the time by the clock. You can imagine all the
rest,--the city spread out like a map, the dark masses of trees marking
the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, the Campagna, the Sabine and the
Alban hills beyond, Mt. Soracte, our familiar friend, on the left, over
and under all the soft deep notes of the big bell of St. Peter’s
throbbing out the Angelus.

The bargain was struck that very night! But when we went over the next
day J. let the cat out of the bag by saying, “I was afraid if you went
by daylight, and saw what an old ruin it was, you would never consent to
our taking it!”

It did look discouraging. The last tenant, a monsignore, who lived here
thirty years, never allowed the owners to make any repairs; he said he
could not be bothered with workmen. He died a short time ago, leaving a
red rose growing in a wooden half-barrel on the terrace. The owner of
the palace, Signor Mazzocchi, armorer to the Pope, waited till the new
tenant should turn up before making any changes. The palace was built in
1661. It has gone to wrack and ruin, but it is a magnificent old wreck.
It stands on the site of the house the great architect Bramante built
for Raphael, one pier of which is still standing, built into our walls.
It once belonged to a Cardinal Rusticucci, whose arms are cut in stone
over one of the doors; he was of the same family as the gentleman Dante
met in one of the lower circles of the Inferno.

“_Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce, Jacopo Rusticucci fui; e
certo la fiera moglie più ch’altro mi nuoce._”

“And I who am placed on the cross with these was Jacob Rusticucci. It is
certain my proud wife harmed me more than another!”

The palace seems to be called indifferently Rusticucci, Accoramboni, and
Mazzocchi. We hesitated for some time between the three names; finally
the Dantesque name carried the day, and I have had Palazzo Rusticucci
engraved upon our cards. It is considered very plebeian here to have
your address on your cards, but I cling to my American ideas.

The monsignore’s red rose on the terrace looked so lonely that I went
last Wednesday to Rag Fair in the Campo dei Fiori and bought a pink ivy
geranium, some <DW29>s, and a white carnation to keep it company; they
were absurdly cheap; flowers are a necessity here, not a luxury. I also
bought a sack of earth, some flower-pots, and a watering-can. I got up
at dawn the next morning and potted my plants; hard work! When J. came
up at seven o’clock for coffee, there they stood in a row at the end of
the terrace.