“DO NOT go to Rome!” friends at home had implored by letter and word of mouth, prior to our sailing from the other side. English acquaintances and friends caught up the cry. In Paris, it swelled into impassioned adjuration, reiterated in so many forms, and at times so numerous and unseasonable that we nervously avoided the remotest allusion to the Eternal City in word. But sleeping and waking thoughts were tormented by mental repetitions that might, or might not be the whispers of guardian angels.

“Do not go to Rome! Do not thou or you go to Rome! Do not ye or you go to Rome!”

Thus ran the changes in the burden of admonition and thought. Especially, “Do not ye or you go to Rome!”

“Go, if you are bent upon it, me dear!” said a kind English lady. “Your husband is robust, and it may be as you and he believe, that your health requires a mild and sedative climate. But do not take your dear daughters. The air of Rome is deadly to young English and American girls. Quite a blight, I assure you!”

Said one of our Paris bankers to Caput:—“I can have no conceivable interest in trying to turn you aside from your projected route, but it is my duty in the cause of common humanity to warn you that you are running into the jaws of danger in taking your family to Rome. We have advices to-day that the corpses of thirteen Americans, most of them women and children,—all dead within the week—are now lying at Maquay and Hooker’s in Rome awaiting transportation to America.”

This was appalling. But matters waxed serious in Paris, too. Indian Summer over, it began to rain. In Scriptural phrase,—“Neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest”—of mist, sleet and showers—“lay upon us.” Deprived of what was my very life—(what little of it remained,) daily exercise in the open air, the cough, insomnia and other terrors that had driven us into exile, increased upon me rapidly and alarmingly. Weakening day by day, it was each morning more difficult to rise and look despairingly from my windows upon the watery heavens and flooded streets. Sunshine and soft airs were abroad somewhere upon the earth. Find them we must before it should be useless to seek them. The leader of the household brigade ordered a movement along the whole line. Like a brood of swallows, we fled southward. “Certainly to Florence. Probably to Rome. Should the skies there prove as ungenial as those of France,—as a last and forlorn hope—to Algiers.” Such were the terms of command.

We arrived in Florence, the Beautiful, at ten o’clock of a December night. The facchini and cocchieri at the station stared wildly when we addressed them in French, became frantic under the volley of Latin Caput hurled upon them, in the mistaken idea that they would understand their ancestral tongue. Italian was, as yet, an unknown realm to us, and our ignominious refuge was in the universal language of signs. Porters and coachmen were quick in interpretation, much of their intercourse with their fellow-countrymen being carried on in like manner. The luggage was identified, piece by piece, and fastened upon the carriages. The human freight was bestowed within, and as Prima dropped upon the seat beside me, she lifted her hand in a vow:

“I begin the study of Italian to-morrow!”

It was raining steadily, the streets were ill-lighted, the pavements wretched; and when a slow drive through tortuous ways brought us to our desired haven, the house was so full that comfortable accommodations for so large a party could not be procured. The proprietor kindly and courteously directed us to a neighboring hotel, which he could conscientiously recommend, and sent an English-speaking waiter—a handsome, quick-witted fellow—to escort us thither and “see that we were not cheated.”

“Babes in the woods—nothing more!” grumbled the high-spirited young woman at my elbow.

She was the mistress of a dozen telling Italian words before she slept. Our bed-rooms and adjoining salon were spacious, gloomy, and cheerless to a degree unknown out of Italy. The hotel had been a palace in the olden times, after the manner of three-fourths of the Italian houses of entertainment. Walls and floor were of stone, the chill of the latter striking through the carpets into our feet My chamber, the largest in the suite, contained two bier-like beds set against the far wall, bureau, dressing-table, wash-stand, six heavy chairs, and a sofa, and, between these, a desolate moor of bare carpeting before one could gain the hearth. This was a full brick in width, bounded in front by a strip of rug hardly wider—at the back by a triangular hole in the wall, in which a chambermaid proceeded, upon our entrance, to build a wood fire. First, a ball of resined shavings was laid upon the bricks; then, a handful of dried twigs; then, small round sticks; then, diminutive logs, split and seasoned, and we had a crackling, fizzing, conceited blaze that swept all the heat with it up the chimney. The Invaluable’s spirit-lamp upon the side-table had more cheer in it. If set down upon the pyramid of Cheops, and told we were to camp there overnight, this feminine Mark Tapley would, in half-an-hour, have made herself and the rest of us at home; got up “a nice tea;” put Boy to bed and sat down beside him, knitting in hand, as composedly as in our nursery over the sea.

Her “comfortable cup of tea” was ready by the time our supper was brought up—a good supper, hot, and served with praiseworthy alacrity. We ate it, and drank our tea, and looked at the fire, conscious that we ought also to feel it, it was such a brisk, fussy little conflagration. Landlord and servants were solicitous and attentive; hot-water bottles were tucked in at the foot of each frozen bed, and we sought our pillows in tolerable spirits.

Mine were at ebb-tide again next morning, as, lying upon the sofa, mummied in shawls, a duvet, covered with satinet and filled with down, on the top of the heap, yet cold under them all, my eyes wandered from the impertinent little fire that did not thaw the air twelve inches beyond the hearth, to the windows so clouded with rain I could hardly see the grim palace opposite, and I wondered why I was there. Was the game worth the expensive candle? Why had I not stayed at home and died like a Christian woman upon a spring-mattress, swathed in thick blankets, environed by friends and all the appliances conducive to euthanasia? I had begged the others to go out on a tour of business and sight-seeing. I should be quite comfortable with my books, and the thought of loneliness was preposterous. Was I not in Florence? Knowing this, it would be a delight to lie still and dream. In truth, I was thoroughly miserable, yet would have died sooner than confess it. I did not touch one of the books laid upon the table beside me, because, I said to my moody self, it was too cold and I too languid to put my hand out from the load of wraps.

There was a tap at the door. It unclosed and shut again softly. An angel glided over the Siberian desert of carpet—before I could exclaim, bent down and kissed me.

“Oh!” I sighed, in hysterical rapture. “I did not know you were in Italy!”

She was staying in the hotel at which we had applied for rooms the night before, and the handsome interpreter, Carlo, had reported our arrival to the Americans in the house.

Shall I be more glad to meet her in heaven than I was on that day to look upon the sweet, womanly face, and hear the cooing voice, whose American intonations touched my heart to melting? She sat with me all the forenoon, the room growing warmer each hour. Her party—also a family one—had now been abroad more than a year. The invalid brother, her especial charge, was wonderfully better for the travel and change of climate. He was far more ill than I when they left home. Of course I would get well! Why not, with such tender nurses and the dear Lord’s blessing? No! it did not “rain always in Florence;” but the rainy season had now set in, and “Frederic and I are going to Rome next week.” I question if she ever named herself, even in thought or prayer, without the prefix of “Frederic.”

“To Rome!” cried I, eagerly. “Dare you!”

My story of longing, discouragement, dreads—that had darkened into superstitious presentiments—followed. The day went smoothly enough after the confession, and the reassurances that it elicited. We secured smaller and brighter bed-rooms, and almost warmed them by ruinously dear fires, devouring as they did basketful after basketful of the Lilliputian logs. It was the business of one facchino to feed the holes in the walls of the three rooms we inhabited in the day-time. Other friends called—cordial and lavish of kind offices and offers as are compatriots when met upon foreign soil. One family—old, old friends of Caput—had, although now resident in Florence, lived for a year in Rome, and laughed to scorn our fears of the climate. They rendered us yet more essential service in suggestions as to clothing, apartments, and general habits of life in Central Italy. To the adoption of these we were, I believe, greatly indebted for the unbroken health which was our portion as a household during our winter in the dear old city.

We were in Florence ten days. Nine were repetitions, “to be continued,” of such weather as we had left in Paris. One was so deliciously lovely that, had not the next proved stormy, we should have postponed our departure. We made the most of the sunshine, taking a carriage, morning and afternoon, for drives in the outskirts of the town and in the suburbs, which must have given her the name of bella. The city proper is undeniably and irremediably ugly. The streets are crooked lanes, in which the meeting of two carriages drives foot-passengers literally to the wall. There are no sidewalks other than the few rows of cobble-stones slanting down from the houses to the gutter separating them from the middle of the thoroughfare. The far-famed palaces are usually built around courtyards, and present to the street walls sternly blank, or frowning with grated windows. If, at long intervals, one has snatches through a gateway of fountains and conservatories, they make the more tedious block after block of lofty edifices that shut out light from the thread-like street—shed chill with darkness into these dismal wells. This is the old city in its winter aspect. Wider and handsome streets border the Arno—a sluggish, turbid creek—and the modern quarters are laid out generously in boulevards and squares. We modified our opinions materially the following year, when weather and physical state were more propitious to favorable judgment. Now, we were impatient to be gone, intolerant of the praises chanted and written of Firenze in so many ages and tongues. The happiest moment of our stay within her gates was when we shook off so much of her mud as the action could dislodge from our feet and seated ourselves in a railway carriage for Rome.

It was a long day’s travel, but the most entrancing we had as yet known. Vallambrosa, Arezzo (the ancient Arretium), Cortona; Lake Thrasymene! The names leaped up at us from the pages of our guide-books. The places for which they stood lay to the right and left of the prosaic railway, like scenes in a phantasmagoria. We had, as was our custom when it could be compassed by fee or argument, secured a compartment to ourselves. There were no critics to sneer, or marvel at our raptures and quotations. Boy, Ætat four, whose preparation for the foreign tour had been readings, recitations, and songs from “Lays of Ancient Rome,” in lieu of Mother Goose and Baby’s Opera, and whose personal hand-luggage consisted of a very dog-eared copy of the work, illustrated by stiff engravings from bas-reliefs upon coins and stones—bore a distinguished part in our talk. He would see “purple Apennine,” and was disgusted at the commonplace roofs of Cortona that no longer

At mention of the famous lake, he scrambled down from his seat; made a rush for the window.

“Papa! is that ‘reedy Thrasymene?’ Where is ‘dark Verbenna?’”

As a reward for remembering his lesson so well, he was lifted to the paternal knee, and while the train slowly wound along the upper end of the lake, heard the story of the battle between Hannibal and Flaminius, upon the weedy banks, B. C. 217; saw the defile in which the brave consul was entrapped; where, for hours, the slaughter of the snared and helpless troops went on, until the little river we presently crossed was foul with running blood. It is Sanguinetto to this day.

The vapors of morning were lazily curling up from the lake; dark woods crowd down to the edge on one side; hills dressed in gray olive orchards border another; a bold promontory on the west is capped by an ancient tower. A monastery occupies one of the three islands that dot the surface. A light film, like the breath upon a mirror, veiled the intense blue of the sky—darkened the waters into slaty purple.

A dense fog filled the basin between the hills on the May-day when Rome’s best consul and general marched into it and to his death.

On we swept, past Perugia, capital of old Umbria, one of the twelve chiefest Etruscan cities; overcome and subjugated by the Roman power B. C. 310. It was a battle-field while Antony and Octavius contended for the mastership of Rome; was devastated by Goth, Ghibelline and Guelph; captured successively by Savoyard, Austrian, and Piedmontese. It is better known to this age than by all these events as the home of Perugino, the master of Raphael, and father of the new departure from the ancient school of painting. The view became, each moment, more novel because more Italian. The roads were scantily shaded by pollarded trees—mostly mulberry—from whose branches depended long festoons of vines, linking them together, without a break, for miles. Farms were separated by the same graceful lines of demarcation. Other fences were rare. We did not see “a piece of bad road,” or a mud-hole, in Italy. The road and bridge-builders of the world bequeathed to their posterity one legacy that has never worn out, which bids fair to last while the globe swings through space. As far as the eye could reach along the many country highways we crossed that day, the broad, smooth sweep commanded our wondering admiration. The grade from crown to sides is so nicely calculated that rain-water neither gathers in pools in the road, nor gullies the bed in running off. Vehicles are not compelled, by barbarous “turnpiking,” to keep the middle of the track, thus cutting deep ruts other wheels must follow. It is unusual, in driving, to strike a pebble as large as an egg.

The travellers upon these millennial thoroughfares were not numerous. Peasants on foot drove herds of queer black swine, small and gaunt, in comparison with our obese porkers—vicious-looking creatures, with pointed snouts and long legs. Women, returning from or going to market, had baskets of green stuff strapped upon their backs, and often children in their arms; bare-legged men in conical hats and sheepskin coats, trudged through clouds of white dust, raised by clumsy carts, to which were attached the cream-colored oxen of the Campagna. Great, patient beasts they are, the handsomest of their race, with incredibly long horns symmetrically fashioned and curved. These horns are sold everywhere in Italy as a charm against “the evil eye”—the dread of all classes.

About the middle of the afternoon we descended into the valley of the Tiber—the cleft peak of Soracte (Horace’s Soracte!) visible from afar like a rent cloud. We crossed a bridge built by Augustus; halted for a minute at the Sabine town that gave Numa Pompilius to Rome; watched, with increasing delight, the Sabine and Alban Mountains grow into shape and distinctness; gazed oftenest and longest—as who does not?—at the Dome, faint, for a while, as a bubble blown into the haze of the horizon—more strongly and nobly defined as we neared our goal; crossed the Anio, upon which Romulus and Remus had been set adrift; made a wide dÉtour that, apparently, took us away from, not toward the city, and showed us the long reaches of the aqueducts, black and high, “striding across the Campagna,” in the settling mists of evening. Then ensued an odd jumble of ruins and modern, unfinished buildings, an alternation, as incongruous, of strait and spacious streets, and we steamed slowly into the station. It is near the Baths of Diocletian, and looks like a very audacious interloper by daylight.

It was dusk when our effects were collected, and they and ourselves jolting over miserable pavements toward our hotel in the guardianship of a friend who had kindly met us at the station. By the time we had reached the quarters he had engaged for us; had waited some minutes in a reception-room in the rez-de-chaussÉe that felt and smelt like a newly-dug grave; had ascended two flights of obdurate stone stairs, cruelly mortifying to feet cramped and tender with long sitting and the hot-water footstools of the railway carriage; had sat for half an hour, shawled and hatted, in chambers more raw and earthy of odor than had been the waiting-room, watching the contest betwixt flame and smoke in the disused chimneys, we discovered and admitted that we were tired to death. Furthermore, that the sensation of wishing oneself really and comfortably deceased, upon attaining this degree of physical depression, is the same in a city almost thirty centuries old, and in a hunter’s camp in the Adirondacks. Even Caput looked vexed, and wondered audibly and repeatedly why fires were not ready in rooms that were positively engaged and ordered to be made comfortable twenty-four hours ago; and the Invaluable, depositing Boy, swathed in railway rugs, upon one of the high, single beds, lest his feet should freeze upon “the murdersome cold floors,” “guessed these Eyetalians aren’t much, if any of fire-makers.” Thereupon, she went down upon her knees to coax into being the smothering blaze, dying upon a cold hearth under unskilfully-laid fuel. The carpet in the salon we had likewise bespoken was not put down until the afternoon of the following day. The fires in all the bed-rooms smoked. By eight o’clock we extinguished the last spark and went to bed. In time, we took these dampers and reactions as a part of a hard day’s work; gained faith in our ability to live until next morning. Being unseasoned at this period, the first night in Rome was torture while we endured it, humiliating in the retrospect.

It rained from dawn to sundown of the next day. Not with melancholy persistency, as in Florence, as if the weather were put out by contract and time no object, but in passionate, fitful showers, making rivers of the streets, separated by intervals of sobbing and moaning winds and angry spits of rain-drops. We stayed in-doors, and, under compulsion, rested. The fires burned better as the chimneys warmed to their work; we unpacked a trunk or two; wrote letters and watched, amused and curious, the proceedings of two men and two women who took eight hours to stretch and tack down the carpet in our salon. Each time one of us peeped, or sauntered in to note and report progress, all four of the work-people intermitted their ceaseless jargon to nod and smile, and say “Domane!” Young travelled in Italy before he wrote “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!”

Our morrow was brilliantly clear, and freshness like the dewy breath of early Spring was in the air. Our first visit was, of course, to our bankers, and while Caput went in to inquire for letters (and to learn, I may add, that the story of the thirteen American corpses was unsupported by the presence, then or during the entire season, of a single one), we lay back among the carriage-cushions, feeling that we drank in the sunshine at every pore—enjoying as children or Italians might the various and delightful features of the scene.

The sunlight—clarified of all vaporous grossness by the departed tempest—in color, the purest amber; in touch and play beneficent as fairy balm, was everywhere. Upon the worn stones paving the Piazza di Spagna, and upon the Bernini fountain (one of them), the Barcaccia, at the foot of the Spanish Steps,—a boat, commemorating the mimic naval battles held here by Domitian, when the Piazza was a theatre enclosing an artificial lake. Upon beggars lolling along the tawny-gray Steps, and contadini—boys, women, and girls—in fantastic costume, attitudinizing to catch the eye of a chance artist. Upon the column, with the Virgin’s statue on top, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and David at the base, rusty tears, from unsuspected iron veins, oozing out of the sides,—decreed by Pius IX. in honor of his pet dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Upon the big, dingy College of the Propaganda, founded in 1622, Barberini bees in bas-relief conspicuous among the architectural ornaments. More of Bernini’s work. Urban VIII., his patron, being a Barberini. Upon the Trinita di Monti at the top of the Spanish Staircase, where the nuns sing like imprisoned canaries—as sweetly and as monotonously—on Sabbath afternoons, and all the world goes to hear them. Upon the glittering windows of shops and hotels fronting the Piazza—the centre of English and American colonies in Rome. Upon the white teeth and brown faces of boys—some beautiful as cherubs—who held up great trays of violets for us to buy, and wedded forever our memories of the Piazza and this morning with violet scent. Upon the wrinkles and rags of old women—some hideous as hags—who piped entreaties that we would “per l’amore di Dio” make a selection from their stock of Venetian beads, Naples lava trinkets, and Sorrento wood-work. Upon the portly figure and bland countenance of Mr. Hooker, coming out to welcome us to the city which has given him a home for thirty years, and which he has made home-like to so many of his country-people. Lastly, and to our fancy most brightly, upon the faces of my Florence angel of mercy and her family party, alighting from their carriage at the door of the bank, and hurrying up to exchange greetings with us.

This was our real coming to Rome! Not the damp and despondency of the thirty-six hours lying just behind us; dreariness and doubts never renewed in the five fleet-footed months during which we lingered and lived within her storied gates.