I.

QUOMODO SEDET….

Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco: "Questo È Gesu Nazzareno"—as the housekeeper might say, "This is the present Earl"—also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the print of i suoi santissimi piedi, square little feet, of such a squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as the pattern on a pat of butter.

Turning my face, in that tornado of dust, towards Rome, its walls stretch suddenly before me across the vineyards and fields, broken walls, of any mediÆval city you please, and hiding, it would seem, emptiness behind them. The desolation of this distant city, with its foreground of squalid hovels, and ill-favoured wine shop and smithies where the very inscriptions, "Vino di Marino," or "Ferracocchio," or "Ova di Giornata," look as if a megalomaniac, escaped from an asylum, had dipped a brush into a paint-pot and splashed all over; this foreground of vague tombs, masonry heaven knows what, all flowered with huge wild mignonette; this other moving background of ragged peasants and unutterable galled horses; the desolation of this dead city which I feel behind those mediÆval walls comes home to them, like the sting of the dust whirlpools and roar of the wind. Quomodo sedet sola civitas!

Meanwhile, close to one of those city gates, is a poster announcing lectures "Sur le costume des Premiers Chr Étiens!"

But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us, bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Past! At moments like these I feel that one needs be entirely engrossed either in making two ends meet (a clerk or shopkeeper, or one of these haranguing archÆologists holding forth under the Arch of Drusus) for his dinner or in tea parties and "jours," and "sport," to endure the company of Rome.

I went into the vigna of S. Cesario for the key of the church. It is the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico, seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and Borgia suppers. And in this church and the neighbouring one the impression of the inscriptions recording succession of popes and cardinals, all the magnificent locusts who came swarm after swarm, to devour this land, leaving the broken remains of their hurried magnificence, volutes, plaster churches, and, inscriptions! inscriptions!

April 13.

II.

VILLA FALCONIERI.

Villa Falconieri, Frascati—abandoned, overgrown—the wonderful outline of huge Mondragone, with its pines against the mountains. All these villas near each other, and while they open up into the hill and woods (the lovely delicate rose of the budding chestnuts) are still almost within hail of the little town across the valley. So different from the Tuscan villa, even the grandest, say Mte. Gufoni, which is only the extended fattoria, its place chosen by the accident of agricultural business. This mouldering rococo villa is inhabited in summer by the Trappists of Tre Fontane, of that Abbey of St. Anastasia which was the suzerain of all Maremma, great part of Umbria and the Tuscan islands! At the end of their miserably cultivated little orto, presiding over the few leeks and garlics, on the balustrade towards Rome of all divinities, who but Hortorum Deus!

Near Grottaferrata in a flat green field, a nun, all in white, was seated under one of the big olives: a curious biblical figure.

April 26.

III.

PORTA LATINA.

Yesterday with P. D. P. at Porta Latina. He told me an extraordinary thing. In the blocked-up arch of that suppressed gate, at the end of a blind alley, an old old couple—a man of ninety and a woman of eighty, had taken up their abode for months; helped occasionally by the monks of the neighbouring convent (with pretty rose-garden) of S. Giovanni a Porta Latina, to whom however permission was refused (the Superior referring to the Card. Vicar and the Card. Vicar to his Confessor) to give a roof to the couple because of the woman; also there was a suspicion that the couple had not been married in church. All this P. D. had learned when these people were still there, in the arch. But we found them gone; and the strangest sight instead. In the immense thickness of the gate a heap of reeds in a corner; and strewn all about in this artificial grotto, old rusty utensils, a grater, a strainer, broken pots, papers, rags, half-burnt logs, a straw hat, and a walking stick! And over a kind of recess, on a plank, a little shrine, two broken Madonnas picked out of some dust-heap, withered flowers in a crock, and a sprig of olive, evidently of last Palm Sunday! Poor little properties, so poor, so wretched that they had remained unmolested, despised even by the poorest, safe at the end of that blind road in that closed-up gate of Rome! That two human beings in our day should have lived there for months, even years (for they returned after an absence, the monk told us); lived, like some anchorites of old, in the ruins, in a grotto made by human hands; with the vineyards all round, and the shrubs and flowers waving from the broken masonry! Their rags and shreds of paper littered the rank grass and acanthus by the walled-up gate, where the little Bramantesque temple stands, built by a French prelate under Julius II., and inscribed "Au plaisir de Dieu." Au plaisir de Dieu!

Over the walls, the great bones of the Baths of Caracalla half hidden by trees: and, closing the distance, St. Peters. We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi. The grey Franciscan who showed us round told us that a lady had given five hundred francs for admission of the old man and woman of the gate at the Petites Soeurs; but these required the religious marriage. About a month ago the couple was married and taken off to the Petites Soeurs; the day after the poor old man died! The old people had desired the monks to distribute their bedding and rags to the poor, now they themselves were provided for. And that is how the place came to be abandoned. The old man told the monks he much preferred the arch to the damp cellar where a greengrocer of Rome used to make him sleep. "They had good sides those people," I remarked. "Sfido! bonissimi," said the Franciscan; he was from Albi, but had got to speak with a Roman accent.

While we were there, under the impression of that story, of the deserted church, the ragged grey monk, and of that whole squalid, imaginative Roman corner, a little cart drove up with a young man and two little girls, who went round with us and gathered sprays of hawthorn off the walls, leaving the pony to graze meanwhile. "No Romans," said P. D.; and indeed they turned out to be Vicentines, the young man a student of law taking out his young cousins for a scampagnata. P. D. very characteristically made them write their names for him in his pocket-book, and bowed to the little girls as if they were duchesses. More characteristically still, my friend carried off the old beggar's stick to keep in his study.

April 26.