Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Rome’s Seasons—Childhood Memories of a Roman Spring—My Birthday Festival—A Day in the Country—The Appian Way—Rome’s Great Wall—An Adventure with the Campagna Steers—Campagna Sheep-Dogs—Early Morning Street Scenes—The Giardino Colonna—Secluded Italian Gardens—Inroads of Commercialism—Discovery of a Dream-Garden of the Renaissance—Song of the Nightingale in the Lost Italian Garden.

It is time to take breath. So far, we have been living over in mind the joys and sorrows of certain dwellers near the Appian Way, but every true story, however fair and fine, seems to run like crystal beads strung on a dark thread. The shadow of possible tragedy is behind all things human, and even the happiest tales of old leave one with a little pang at heart for the black hour of death which came to all the actors in them sooner or later. One turns with relief to the things that people wrongly call inanimate—the things of Nature, whose life is so comfortingly different from our own, so rich in vitality that each declining season is lifted up and carried on in the arms of the next, as it were, to return in all its vigour and beauty when the moment arrives.

To dwellers in Rome the “honied core” of all the year comes with the first days of spring. Looking back on Roman winters, indeed, from my later experiences of the season in arctic climates, they were, with few exceptions, one carol of brightness and sunshine; we spoke of winter for the sake of putting on our furs and lighting a few fires, but the violets never ceased to bloom in the open, the shady avenues of the many villas were not too cool for dalliance, and it was only when the “tramontana,” blowing over the mountains in the north, turned the air from balm to crystal, that we had a touch of real winter at all. Nevertheless, the spring, its opening day marked by the arrival of the first swallows, was intoxicatingly welcome. The first day of Lent had put a period to most of the social functions and—such is the levity of youth—had given us girls time to think of a spring frock or so. Then, on some March morning, the cry would go through the house, “The swallows have come!” and thenceforward we lived very much in the open air. From the time when I was very small it had always been the same, and even now, at my “far world’s end,” and with five decades between the “now” and the “then,” the memory of those spring days goes to my head a little. In a snow-bound land of pale suns and wintry wastes I can shut my eyes and feel again the bath of sunshine, smell the bitter-sweet of Campagna thyme and daisy, almost hear the larks at their singing, the soft bleating of the Campagna lambs, the baying of the white sheep dogs, the faint piping of the solitary shepherd boy sitting on the low stone fence while his flock nibbled audibly at the newly sprung grass. That last is one of the prettiest of outdoor sounds, I think. The world has to be very still to let one hear it at all, and then the delicate “crsh-crsh” is like the music of a fairy March accentuated by the regular moving of the light little hoofs over the turf.

One such morning comes back to me very vividly. I think it was that of my tenth birthday, and we had all been taken out to “Egeria’s Grotto” to mark the festa. I wonder if parents know what a real birthday festivity means to an imaginative child? Mine came in the outburst of the Roman April, and, as long as we lived in the old Villa Negroni, was a perfect carnival of flowers. From the time I awoke in the morning, an air of joyous mystery pervaded the house. Every servant came to kiss my hand and bring me a fat posy, sent for to the country, of the strong farmhouse flowers that did not grow in our garden, marigolds and marguerites, jessamine and “gagia”—the yellow powdery blossoms that keep their perfume for fifty years, the whole tied up in a setting of sweet basil and “madre-cara”—I do not know its name in English—a feast of clean fragrance—“Cento di questi giorni!” (a hundred of these days) said every one I met on my way to my mother’s room, for the first thing to do was to rush into her arms and have her tell me how old I was. Then, with a handkerchief tied over my eyes, I was solemnly taken into the big red drawing-room where the rest of the household was already assembled and led to the place where my portrait hung on the wall. There was a breathless second of expectation, then the handkerchief was whisked off, and I saw a bower of white spirea from which my own picture smiled down at me, above a little table covered with a white cloth and smothered in spirea, too. Under the foam of the flowers were all my presents, done up in my dear mother’s favourite parma violet tissue-paper and satin ribbons. The next hour was an intoxication. It always seemed as if all the things I had been longing for for months were collected there. When everybody had been thanked, I was left alone for a while to examine and exult in my new possessions; then I had to be dressed in my best clothes for the real crown of the day, a walk alone with my adored mother, with my pockets stuffed with pennies so that I could give something to every beggar we met! In the afternoon there would be a drive out to some point on the Campagna, with a box of bon-bons to help us enjoy the view, and in the evening the beloved godfather, Mr. Hooker, always came to dine and help me cut my birthday cake, a splendid edifice with my name and the date in pink and white frosting, wreathed in spirea and surrounded by lighted candles to the number of the years I had attained.

As I grew a little older I preferred to spend the whole day in the country, and then the place to make for was the so-called Grotto of Egeria. There was surely solitude, where it seemed as if no one ever came but ourselves; the outer world was left a thousand miles behind; the velvet undulations of the lonely valley were all a carpet of short thyme over which we rolled like the little kids of the goats that scampered away at our approach. And, best of all, there was the deep grotto with the broken statue and the shadowy crystal of its mysterious spring, its sides and vault one mantle of diamond—sprent maidenhair fern, its moist air and soft green light—a reflection from sun and grass outside—making it a place where the most light-hearted child could not but feel the solemnity of something very ancient and very spiritual. I used to linger there to dream of Egeria, the more than mortal, less than spirit maid who revealed the lore of Heaven to the Sabine Sage. I could picture her pale beauty, as she would sit by the spring and let Numa tell her of all the perplexities and difficulties of his rule, and very earnestly did I beg her to appear to me too, but she never came; how could she, when that had never really been her home? Then I would leap back to earth with a bound and join my brother and sisters and the little playmates who always came with us, in a breathless game which began with a mystic incantation I have never heard except in those days and in my own family. I should be glad if any one could enlighten me as to its origin, though I fancy it may have been an inheritance from some witch ancestress. Thus it ran:

For every word a head was counted round and round the hand-in-hand ring, and the unlucky one to whom fell the last one “Out” had to break away and fly, with all the rest in mad pursuit. Some distant point, generally the last ilex tree on the far side of the grove, had been fixed upon as sanctuary; if the fugitive could touch this before being caught, all was well; if not, he or she was at the orders of the others for any wild prank they might choose to command—three somersaults down a steep incline was a favourite one, while the victors looked on and cheered or derided, as the case might be.

Had our dear governess been of the Faith in those days as she was later, she could have told us more marvellous and romantic tales than we had ever heard about our storied playground—the “Triopius Pagus,”[1] not only of Atticus and Annia Regilla, but of Cecilia and Valerianus, and Tiburtius, and all the valiant comrades of Urban, and the immediate successors of his stormy pontificate. As it was, the classical landmarks were all that the Appian Way held for us, barring one spot, the “Domine, quo vadis?” of St. Peter, which had an unexplained fascination for us all. The Appian Way we loved for the sake of its endless beauties and for the monuments and ruins which were like a compendium of the history of Rome. A writer that I used to admire, though time has robbed me of his name, said that the things he loved best in the world were its high roads; that to look along one of these and know that it cut its way, in a clean swath, over mountain and plain, from one end of a continent to the other, was to be free to travel whithersoever fancy flew, no matter how chained and confined the body might be. The Appian Way, leading to the favourite seaport of Brundusium, a distance of rather less than a hundred and fifty miles, was the true road to Africa, to Palestine, and to all the eastern and southerly provinces of the huge straggling Empire. It was easier to sail the sea than to climb and descend the Alps; there are various records in history of a race, from some spot in the eastern portion of the Empire, run by accuser and accused, the one by sea and the other by land, each striving to reach the seat of power in Rome the first; and, in spite of the capricious storms and calms of the Adriatic, it was almost invariably the seafarer who won the day.

Starting from the milestone of solid gold, which Rome set up on the Palatine as the centre of the world and the point from which all distances were to be measured, the Appian Way ran due south, issuing, in the early days, from the Capena Gate, which was pulled down and lost sight of when Aurelian enlarged the city’s precincts and rebuilt her walls as they stand to-day. Fine walls they were, with their huge outstanding buttresses at short, regular distances from one another all the way. The recesses between them were deep enough to shelter a dozen houses, and were utilised, down to my own time, for the erection of strong wooden stockades within which riders and pedestrians could take refuge at the approach of a herd of the fierce Campagna cattle being driven to market either in Rome or in some town further south. The Roman oxen look mild and peaceful enough when, nose-ringed and weighted with the ponderous wooden yoke, they draw the plough or wagon; but the three-year-old steer, though he is one of the most beautiful creatures in the world, with his snow-white hide, his startled eyes and his widely curved, black-tipped, arrow-pointed horns, is a terrifying customer to meet in his untamed state and with a score or two of his companions!

It was forbidden of course to drive a herd through the city, but we often met them in our drives and rides. Once, I remember, riding alone save for a groom. I was exploring a winding lane, scarcely three feet wide and cut so deep that even from the saddle I could not see what lay on either side of it. Mooning along on a gentle little mare, perfectly happy with my own thoughts, I heard a cry from Tom, the good old English groom who was temporarily responsible for my safety: “Look out, Miss! It’s them blooming cattle. Put her at the bank!”

I raised my eyes and saw a forest of horns, like files of spears, the first pair menacingly lowered, coming round a curve in the lane not twenty yards ahead of me. How we made the top of the bank I do not know—the mare quite understood the situation and was as nimble as a cat—but when we had dropped into the field on the other side we were both very shaky, and I felt too meek to resent Tom’s curt dictum: “The high road or the open after this, Miss! Them lanes isn’t safe for the likes of you!”

He was not my own servant, only an employÉ of the one English livery-stable Rome possessed in those days, but if he had seen me grow up he could not have been more faithful and vigilant for my comfort and safety. He taught me to ride, and many a delightful scamper we had together over those ideal stretches of springy turf, but he never relaxed from his stern contempt of all things not British, and particularly of Latin equestrianism. I think that and the Englishman’s incurable homesickness were too much for him, for a year or two later I heard to my great regret that poor Tom had lost his mind and had had to be removed to an asylum.

There are other animals, besides oxen, to whom it is well to give a wide berth on the Campagna—the sheep-dogs. They take their calling seriously and will let no stranger come within speaking distance of their flocks. There are two or more to each flock, and when they scent danger they send up a peculiar howl which summons the guardians of any others in the vicinity, so that before one knows it one may find oneself the centre of quite a mob of these formidable creatures, baying and leaping round one and thirsting for one’s blood. They are exceedingly handsome, of a pure ivory white, with long silky coats and well-feathered tails, the head broad at the brow and pointed at the muzzle in approved sheep-dog style. Brought up at home, they show great affection for their masters and acquire charming manners, but as professionals, in the exercise of their duty, they are rather terrifying. They particularly distrust mounted visitors, and it is more dangerous to approach them on horseback than on foot. Once, I was out with Dr. Nevin, the American clergyman, an old cavalry officer and an enthusiastic rider, who ought to have known every trick of the Campagna and its beasts, when we stumbled right into a flock of sheep, and the next moment we were attacked by five or six infuriated sheep-dogs, barking madly, leaping at our horses’ throats, catching at the skirt of my riding habit and Dr. Nevin’s long coat in the effort to drag us down from our saddles. The horses were badly frightened, but managed to kick quite judiciously, and broke away before either they or we had been hurt. We had a good run then with the dogs in full pursuit at first; then they left us alone and returned stolidly to their respective posts.

Talking of the sheep-dog, whom somebody has rightly called “that bundle of intelligence,” I would note the fact that he has another delightful quality rather unusual in big dogs—humour. One of the quaintest incidents I ever saw occurred in a South Devon watering-place where we used to spend a good deal of our time. As the clock struck twelve, one fine summer’s day, a large flock of sheep was driven in at the upper end of the town, through the whole length of which they had to pass to come out on the Exeter road beyond. One very old sheep-dog accompanied them, but just as they had passed the schoolhouse, the doors were opened and a crowd of little children tumbled out into the street. The dog saw that the sheep could make but few mistakes in the straight street, so he deliberately turned back and started to drive the children after them. Running round and round, barking peremptorily, pushing the stragglers into place, he got some fifty or sixty little ones into a compact mass, and drove them along in the wake of the sheep. The children saw the joke and were immensely amused, but not one dared to drop out till the old dog, visibly laughing too, said good-bye with a bark and a wag, and bounded away after his own flock.

I have always wondered why the dogs that accompanied the goats, when they were driven into Rome to be milked in the morning, were not proper sheep-dogs, but rather mild-tempered mongrels of every imaginable variety. I suppose the real sheep-dog would consider it beneath his dignity to look after mere goats, despised creatures belonging to poor peasants! Nevertheless, their daily visit was one of the pleasures of my youth—when I was not too sleepy to get up and look out of the window towards six or seven A.M. Their coming was heralded by the soft tinkling of two or three bronze bells hung round the necks of the leaders of the flocks, and then came the quick pattering of the little hoofs over the pavement of the Piazza SS. Apostoli. They had their regular points of call, and that was one of them, in the angle formed by the side of the convent attached to the Church, and the small steep street which was one of the outlets of the Piazza. There they would stay for perhaps half an hour, in the warm brown shade, while the people from all the houses round ran down with mugs and pitchers which the goatherd, a handsome young contadino, in peaked hat, goatskin leggings, and scarlet vest, filled with creamy, foaming milk for about twopence a quart. I was often ordered to drink it, and the tall glass overflowing with warm ivory froth was such a pretty object that it made me forget the rather rank flavour of the draught.

Long before the goats came in, however, the silence of the dawn had been broken by the strange sad cry of the “Acqua Vi” man, who, announcing his wares in an almost funereal tone, lured the earliest labourers and artisans, on their way to their work, to begin the day with a nip of spirits. He was followed by two “calderari,” or tinkers, who must have had some secret feud, for they came along within a few minutes of each other every day on the same beat, and even Roman pots and kettles do not break down every day. One man announced himself in deep and hollow tones, his long-drawn “Cal-de-raro!” sounding like a passing-bell; the other was all that was gay and sprightly, and his cry was like a ripple of laughter, ending on an impossibly high note. Then there was the tramp cobbler, the seller of roasted melon seeds (bruscolinaro), the umbrella-mender, and I do not know how many more; musical, friendly, familiar, the old street cries gave a great charm to the morning hours.

At one time, in a certain warm spring and summer, I was taken with a passion for early rising, and with my mountain-born maid, Adelina, used to be out and away long before the sun was up, walking for miles outside one of the gates and enjoying every minute of the divine morning freshness. The infancy of the day is a very wonderful thing anywhere, but most of all in my own Romagna, where the glow of the later hours and the riotous colours of sunset have a ripeness which blends but too well with the ancientness of the buildings and the gilded tumble of the ruins that are, and always will be, Campagna’s landmarks. But at dawn it is all young, bland, mysteriously dewy and immaculate, tint blending into tint, and shadow shaded through a hundred indefinable modulations of unborn blue and hinted violet and cloud grey, that will be plain gold later in the day. One of my favourite haunts at that hour was the “Giardino Colonna” which stretches up in a series of terraces from behind the palace just across the square from the Odescalchi, to end on the Quirinal in Piazza di Monto Cavallo. On the lower level the gardens can only be approached from the house, with which they are connected by a series of little ornamental bridges thrown across a deep and narrow intervening street utilised as a mews for the palace, but on the hill an imposing iron gateway, topped by the gilt crown and column which are the arms of the “Lustrissima Casa Colonna,” gives access to a paradise of trees and flowers and fountains which is the more delightful because so unexpected in the very heart of the city.

Italian gardens, though generally planned to give one imposing spectacle of some kind, with great wealth of statues and marble balustrades and elaborate formations or quiet stretches of water, are rich in small sequestered courts of flowers and greenery; the people who seem to have cared least for privacy in their houses took pains to make many solitudes in their gardens. Doubtless the desire for shade from summer heats had much to do with the intricate—apartments, one might almost call them—which diversify the villas and cut off spot after spot in an absolute seclusion of high box walls and over-arching trees, entered only by one small opening somewhere in the otherwise impenetrable hedge. And, incidentally, the screened shelter thus afforded has fostered the growth and all-winter blooming of more delicate flowers and shrubs than could have survived the sudden attacks of the “tramontana,” in the open. The “Giardino Colonna” was full of charming surprises of the kind one remembers gratefully in the more arid stretches of life. One particular morning there remains very clearly imprinted on my memory, a morning of June, when I was running about with my small half-brother and sister, feeling very much their age. I had lost sight of them for a moment, and in seeking for them broke into an enclosure I had not seen before. Two or three tiny terraces, bordered with old bas-reliefs, lay just touched by the first rays of the sun; a delicate mimosa tree, very feathery and fragile, stood within reach of the spray of a fountain that sent a shaft of diamonds high into the air; all around was a tangle of Banksia roses and white lilies, and an ancient sarcophagus of honey-coloured marble on the top terrace, overflowing with ferns, looked like a golden casket in the low sunbeams. Every branch and leaf and petal was pearled with dew and spray, and the fragrance of the flowers in that miraculous freshness of the morning was almost too sweet for mortal senses to hear.

It is so funny to see some of our brilliant decadents in art and literature trying to embody their ideas of the “joie de vivre” in pictures of wild debauch, in mad dances of painted girls and drunken youths, in reproductions of the entertainments invented to stimulate the senses of the old Romans and Egyptians—people already half dead with satiety and incapable of experiencing a single thrill of healthy pleasure. Five minutes of existence, given a young heart in a young body, on a summer dawn amid the flowers, outtops their crude imaginings of the joy of life as completely as the rising sunbeams outshine our poor artificial lights.

I have been afraid to ask after the “Giardino Colonna” of late years. So many other Roman gardens have been destroyed by the beauty-haters who rule the city that I am always expecting to be told that it exists no longer. The great process of destruction has not been confined to Rome alone. Only the other day I learnt from a correspondent that the lovely Villa Doria at Pegli has been swept away to “make room” (in our half-depopulated Italy!) for a German soap factory! To the vultures of commerce nothing is sacred. All that is ancient and beautiful is an insult to the industrial nobodies, with their sordid past and their ignoble future. The more perfect a spot is the more it arouses their desire to destroy it and annihilate even its memory by using its site for the basest ends. After all, everybody feels more at home in a background suited to his complexion!

I spoke in another book[2] of some forgotten villas that my sister and I discovered in the vicinity of Rome. One of these has, I have reason to believe, escaped the notice of the modern vandal, and I have no intention of revealing to him its name or location. Lying far out of the city, in a depression of the Campagna, it is invisible till one is close upon it, and we had passed near it hundreds of times before an accident revealed its existence to us. The very road to it is unmarked on the guide-book maps, and even from the road little is to be seen through the iron gate in the high brick wall save a formal court overgrown with grass, and a long low house, of graceful architecture, but much defaced by time and weather. Something of a mournful dignity in its aspect attracted us, and my sister suggested that we should alight from the carriage and see if we could get in. After ringing many times at the iron gate, we saw an alarmed contadino regarding us suspiciously from a corner of the house, evidently uncertain as to our character and motives. We lost no time in explanations, but promised him a lira if he would open the gate, whereupon he took courage, came and examined us more closely, and, seeing only two young girls with a private carriage and a respectable family coachman smiling in amusement at our enthusiasm, the guardian of the place relented and let us in.

Then we realised what we had found. That which we had taken for the front of the house was only its back, turned, Moorish fashion, to the public road. Its front, all balconies and arches and tall old windows, looked towards the southeast, and from the first terrace, with its supporting colonnade, the ground sloped away in ever-widening spaces of wild greenery intersected with thick avenues of ilex trees that twisted away and lost themselves in dells beyond our view. The house really stood high, and was placed just where an opening in the undulations beyond gave a wide view of the Campagna stretching away to Tivoli and the Sabine Hills; but a moment after stepping down from that first terrace the outside world vanished and we found ourselves in one of the dream-gardens of the Renaissance, where it seemed as if no foot had trod for the last hundred years. The ilexes, all untrimmed, had united in dense roofs over the grass-grown avenues; the syringa had everywhere so interwoven itself with the high box hedges that these were now three and four feet thick and all abloom in their impenetrable interstices with white stars of sweetest perfume, mingling with the white cups of morning glories, unearthly pure and scentless, like the love prayers of a little nun.

In ecstatic silence we went on and on, catching glimpses, through the rare openings in the green walls on either hand, of broad enclosures all a riot of flowers and grasses in the afternoon sun. It must have been at least a hundred years since the sun had struck through the many-tiered roof over our heads to touch the brown soil, bedded down with the leaves and acorns of a hundred autumns, under our feet. The shade that never could be shadow seemed painted in—a viewless veil of clear grey-brown, broken to an oval of gold where an archway in the hedge let in the westering sun. I had gathered a handful of ilex acorns, those delicate gems of polished grey-green set each in its fretted cup of colder grey—when a turn in the avenue brought us to a standstill before a statue on a pedestal—a young god in very old, dappled marble, his arms stretched out, his head thrown back, as if calling despairingly after some vanished worshipper. The deep greenery rose in an arch above him, the green walls shrank back to make a niche; the clear, colourless light touched his face and limbs almost to life as we looked at him—and then his appeal was answered. From some unseen point close to us there burst forth such a torrent of heart-broken song as can only come from the throat of an Italian nightingale in the solitude of a lost Italian garden. The silver notes went soaring to heaven and fell back in a rain of music like audible tears. Then, from far away, a sister Philomel took up the strain, another and another broke in and linked it on, till all the air was a delirium of music, wild and sweet and thrilling—going up from the little brown throats, without money and without price.

The nightingales’ hour had come, and we, poor human intruders, crept away silently and left the lost garden to them.