Edward Dicey

“ It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of Rome fairly. Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’s reverence for the shrine of his worship. The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery. A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other. ”

“ In the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to ruin. Grass grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier, quieter, and cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter the first church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and bare outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have seen one, you have seen all. ”

“ I have chosen this out of the dozen entrances as recalling fewest of past memories and leading most directly to the heart of the living, working city. You stand then within Rome, and look round in vain for the signs of a city. Hard by a knot of dark cypress-trees waves above the lonely burial-ground where Shelley lies at rest. A long, straight, pollard-lined road stretches before you between high walls far away; low hills or mounds rise on either side, covered by stunted, straggling vineyards. You pass on. A beggar, squatting by the roadside, calls on you for charity ”

“ In the dead Rome of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see only too plainly the permanent condition of the country. As to the present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain ”

“ The old streets of Bologna, with their endless rows of colonnades, are filled with people. The dead Papal city is alive again. The priests have disappeared; friars, monks, Jesuits, and nuns have vanished from their old haunts. St Patrick did not clear the land of Erin more thoroughly and more suddenly of the genus reptile than the presence of Victor Emmanuel has cleared Bologna of the genus priest. It is whispered that out of top windows, and from behind blinds and shutters, priests are peeping out at the strange sight of a glad and a free people, with glances the reverse of friendly ”

“ Flower-sellers, vendors of confetti, hawkers of papers, letters-out of chairs and benches, itinerant minstrels, perambulating cigar-merchants, pedlars, beggars, errand-boys, and a hundred other obscure traders, pick up, heaven knows how! enough in Carnival time to tide them over the dead summer-season. So both necessity and pleasure, want and luxury, will combine to swell the crowd; and the pageant will be gay enough for the Vatican to say that its faithful subjects are loyal and satisfied. ”

“ There is a kind of silliness, I know of no better word to use, about the whole Papal policy at the present day, which is really aggravating. It is silly to rave about the martyr’s crown and the cruel stake, when nobody has the slightest intention of hurting a hair of your head; silly to talk of your paternal love when your provinces are in arms against your “cruel mercies;” silly to boast of your independence when you are guarded in your own capital against your own subjects by foreign troops; silly, in fact, to bark when you cannot bite, to lie when you cannot deceive. ”

“ Subject to these slight restraints, the wild revel and the joyous licence of the Carnival was to rule unbridled. In the words of a Papal writer in the government gazette of Venice: “The festival is to be celebrated in full vigour, except that no masks are allowed, as the fashion for them has lately gone out. There will be, however, disguises and fancy dresses, confetti, bouquets, races, moccoletti, public and private balls, and, in short, every amusement of the Carnival time.” What more could be required by a happy and contented people? ”

“ Around and about me there is a great crowd. Every niche and cornice where foot can stand is occupied. A deep gloom hangs around the darkened church, and from out the lofty vaulted roof thousands of lamps hang glimmering like stars upon a moonless sky. Ever and anon the organ peals forth triumphantly, and the clouds of incense rise fitfully; and as the bell rings, and the host is raised on high, you see above the bowed heads of the swaying crowd the figure of the excommunicated King, kneeling on the altar-steps. ”

“ The nil admirari school are out of favour. In our earnest working age, it is the fashion to treat everything seriously, to find in every thing a deep hidden meaning, in fact, to admire everything. Since the days of Wordsworth and Peter Bell, every petty poet and romantic writer has had his sneer at the shallow sceptic to whom a cowslip was a cowslip only, and who called a spade a spade. I feel, therefore, painfully that I am not of my own day when I express my deliberate conviction, that the ceremonies of Holy Week at Rome are—the word must come out sooner or later—an imposture. ”

“ The day opens drearily, chilly, and damp and raw, with a feeble sun breaking through the lowering clouds; soon after noon the streets begin to fill with soldiers. Till this year the Corso used to be guarded, and the files of carriages kept in order, by the Italian pontifical dragoons, the most warlike-looking of parade regiments I have ever seen. Last spring, however, when the war broke out, these bold dragoons grew ashamed of their police duties, and began to ride across the frontier without leave or license, to fight in behalf of Italy. ”

“ It shall not be on a bright, cloudless day that we enter Rome. To our northern eyes the rich Italian sun-light gives to everything, even to ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due. ”

“ The good seed is obedience and reverence to the Pope our father and the Church our mother. Woe to the tares of the new creed! Woe to the proud and impious men, who under the cloak of piety raise their hands and tongues against their father and mother! The crows and birds of prey shall feed upon their tongues, and the wrath of God shall wither up their hands. ”

“ To judge fully, it is necessary to get behind the scenes, a thing not easy for a stranger anywhere, least of all here. There is too the further difficulty, that when you have got behind the scenes, it is not very easy to narrate your esoteric experiences to the public. Even if there were no other objection, it would be useless to quote individual stories and facts which have come privately to my knowledge, and which would show Rome, in spite of its external propriety, to be one of the most corrupt, debauched, and demoralized of cities. ”

“ The prince of Piombino, who is married to one of the half-English Borghese princesses, was the only Roman nobleman I heard of, as being amongst the crowd. But if the nobility were not present on the Via Nomentana, they were equally absent from the Corso. The footpaths were thronged with a dense file of orderly respectable people. There were, perhaps, half-a-dozen carriages, the owners of which had some sort of carnival-dress on, but that was all. There were no cries, no throwing of confetti, no demonstration of feeling, except in the very fact of the assemblage. ”

“ The whole house keeps rising, shouting, cheering. The musicians lay down their instruments, and the ballet-girls drop their postures and Cæsar forgets his dignity, and one and all crowd forward on the stage and join in the general cheering; and when the king leaves, the curtain drops upon the unfinished ballet, and the whole house rush into the piazza to see Victor Emmanuel again as he drives away. ”

“ There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas Company. What trade there is is huckstering, not commerce. In fact, so Romans have told me, you may safely conclude that every native you meet walking in the streets here, in a broadcloth coat, lives from hand to mouth, and you may pretty surely guess that his next month’s salary is already overdrawn. The crowds of respectably-dressed persons, clerks and shopkeepers and artizans, whom you see in the lottery offices the night before the drawing, prove the general existence not only of improvidence but of distress. ”

“ At last, in some cities of this unhappy Italy, men have come to make in truth an apotheosis of the cut-throat and the assassin. Praise and honour are lavished on the most villainous of men and actions, while at the same time endurance in the faith and even episcopal resolution in maintaining the holy rights of that faith, and its provident blessings, are stigmatized with a strange audacity, by the names of hypocrisy, fanaticism, and perversion of religion. ”

“ These balconies and the windows are scantily filled with shabbily-dressed persons, who look on the scene below as spectators, not as actors. At rare intervals a carriage passes. The chances are that its occupants are English or Americans. On the most crowded day there are, perhaps, at one time, fifty carriages in all, of which more than half belong to the forestieri. Indeed, if it were not for our Anglo-Saxon countrymen, there would be no carnival at all. We don’t contribute much, it is true, to the brilliancy of the coup d’œil. ”

“ Beggars too are universal. Everybody begs; if you ask a common person your way along the street, the chances are that he asks you for a “buono mano.” Now, even if you doubt the truth of Sheridan’s dictum, that no man could be honest without being rich, it is hard to believe in a virtuous beggar. The abundance, also, of lotteries shakes one’s faith in Roman morality. A population amongst whom gambling and beggary are encouraged by their spiritual and temporal rulers is not likely in other respects to be a virtuous or a moral one. The frequency of violent crimes is in itself a startling fact. ”

“ In a city like Rome a crowd which filled the whole Corso’s length cannot be described as a faction, while the occupants of the aristocratic carriages which lined both sides of the street are not likely to have had two hide-tanners for their leaders. The size of the crowd disposes at once of the idea that the persons who composed it were bribed to be present; and the attempt to identify the action of the French troops with that of the Papal gendarmes, is upset by the plain and simple fact, that the French patrols were on the Porta Pia road, and not in the Corso at all. ”

“ It is a Sunday afternoon, and at three o’clock I have turned out of the broiling streets into the vast, crowded theatre of Reggio. Every place is occupied, every box is crammed; rows of lights sparkle around the darkened house, and the heat is a thing to be remembered afterwards. There is a gorgeous ballet being acted on the stage, and Cæsar is being tempted by every variety of female art and posture, in a way which never happens except to ballet heroes, and to Saint Anthony of Padua. ”

“ In this attire you have to stand for a couple of hours amongst a perspiring and ill-tempered crowd, composed of tourists and priests, for the Italians are too wise to trouble themselves for such an object. During these two mortal hours you are pushed forward constantly by energetic ladies bent on being placed, and pushed back by the Swedish guards, who defend the entrance. The conversation you hear around you, and perforce engage in, is equally unedifying, both religiously and intellectually, a sort of réchauffé of Murray’s handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday’s sermon. ”

“ There are one or two very young men—English, I suspect,—dressed as Turks, or Greeks, or pirates, after Highbury Barn traditions, looking cold and uncomfortable. Half a dozen tumble-down carriages represent the Roman element. They are filled with men disguised as peasant-women, and vice versâ; but, whether justly or unjustly, they are supposed to be chartered for the show by the Government, and attract small comment or notice. Amongst the foot-crowd, with the exception of a stray foreigner, there is not a well-dressed person to be seen. The fun is of the most dismal character. ”

“ Under no free government would or could a city of 170,000 inhabitants support 10,000 unproductive persons out of the common funds; for this is substantially the case at Rome in the present day. Every sixteen lay citizens, men, women, and children, support out of their labour a priest between them. The Papal question with the Roman priesthood is thus a question of daily bread, and it is surely no want of charity to suppose that the material aspect influences their minds quite as much as the spiritual. Still even with regard to the priests there are two sides to the question. ”

“ The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned backwards. For three long hours you have a succession of dreary monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible, broken at intervals by a passage of intonation. There is no organ or instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for female vocalists. ”

“ In the middle of the day, at street-corners and in sunny spots, you see groups of working-men playing at pitch halfpenny, or gesticulating wildly over the mysterious game of “Moro.” Skittles and stone-throwing are the only popular amusements which require any bodily exertion; and both of these, as played here, are as much chance as skill. The lottery, too, is the great national pastime.
This picture of the Roman people may not seem a very favourable or a very promising one. ”