Part 3 (1/2)

It must be clearly understood that the ideal of American comfort is fully and faithfully realized, and if the English have reformed the Italian hotels in respect of cleanliness, it is we who have brought them quite to our domestic level in regard to heat and light. But if we want these things in Rome, we must pay for them as we do at home, though still we do not pay so much as we pay at home. The tips are about half our average, but whether they are given currently or ultimately I do not know. Who, indeed, knows about others' tips anywhere in the world? I asked an experienced fellow-citizen what the custom was, and he said that he believed the English gave in going away, but he thought the spirits of the helpers drooped under the strain of hope deferred, and he preferred to give every week. The donations, I understood, were pooled by the dining-room waiters and then equally divided; but gifts bestowed above stairs were for the sole behoof of him or her who took them.

Germans are said to give less than Anglo-Saxons, and it is said that Italians in some cases do not give at all. But, again, who knows? The Italians are said never to give drink money to the cabmen, but to pay only the letter of the tariff. If I had done that in driving about to look up worse hotels than the one I chose first and last, I should now be a richer man, but I doubt if a happier. Two cents seems to satisfy a Roman cabman; five cents has for him the witchery of money found in the road; but I must not leave the subject of hotels for that of cabs, however alluringly it beckons.

The reader who knows Italy only from the past should clear his mind of his old impressions of the hotels. There is no longer that rivalry between the coming guest and the manager to see how few or many candles can be lighted in his room and charged in the bill; there are no longer candles, but only electricity. There is no longer an extortion for hearth-fires which send all the heat up the chimney; there are steam radiators in every room. There is no longer a tedious bargaining for rooms; the price is fixed and cannot be abated except for a sojourn of weeks or months. But the price is much greater than it used to be--twice as great almost; for the taxes are heavy and provisions are dear, and coal and electricity are costly, and you must share the expense with the landlord. He is not there for his health, and, if for your comfort, you are not his invited guest. As I have intimated, an apartment of four rooms with a bath will cost almost as much, with board, as the same quarters in New York, but you will get far more for your money in Rome.

If you take a single room, even to the south, in many first-cla.s.s Roman hotels it will cost you for room and board only two dollars or two and a half a day, which is what you pay for a far meaner and smaller room alone in New York; and the Roman board is such, as you can get at none but our most expensive houses for twice the money. Generally you cannot get a single room and bath, but at present a very exclusive hotel is going up in a good quarter which promises, with huge English signs, a bath with every room and every room full south. One does not see just how the universal sunny exposure is to be managed, but there can be no question of the baths; and, with the steam radiators everywhere, the northernmost room might well imagine itself full south.

Nearly all the hotels have a pleasant tea-room, which is called a winter garden, because of a pair of palm-trees set under the centre of its gla.s.s roof and the painted bamboo chairs and tables set about. This sort of garden is found even in the hotels which are almost of the grade of pensions and of their prices; but generally the pensions proper are without it. Their rates are much lower, but quite as good people frequent them, and they are often found in good streets and sometimes open into or overlook charming gardens; the English especially seem to like the pensions, which are managed like hotels. They are commonly without steam-heat, which might account for their being less frequented by Americans.

There are two supreme hotels in Rome--one in the Ludovisi quarter, as it is called, and the other near the Baths of Diocletian, which Americans frequent to their cost, for the rates approach a New York or London magnificence. The first is rather the more spectacular of the two and is the resort of all the finer sort of afternoon tea-drinkers, who find themselves the observed of observers of all nationalities; there is music and dress, and there are t.i.tles of every degree, with as much informality as people choose, if they go to look, or as much state if they go to be looked at; these things are much less c.u.mbrously contrived than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat unauthorized fancy, is rather more addicted to very elect dinner-parties and suppers. Below these two are an endless variety of first-rate and second-rate houses, both in the newer quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been turned into streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town which the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the worst these places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are not steam-heated.

It has seemed to me that there are not so many _hotels garnis_ in Rome as there used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with breakfast in his rooms, and likes to browse about for his luncheon and dinner, will easily suit himself. If it comes to taking a furnished apartment for the season, there is much range in price and much choice in place. The agents who have them to let will begin, rather dismayingly, ”Oh, apartments in Rome are very dear.” But you learn on inquiry that a furnished flat in the Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full sun, may be had for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the rents of palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and for this you have linen and silver and all the movables and utensils you want, as well as several vast rooms opening wastefully from one to another till you reach the salon. The rents of the like flats, if vacant, would be a quarter or a third less, though again the agents begin by telling you that there is very little difference between the rents of furnished and unfurnished flats. The flats are in every part of the old town and the new; and some are in n.o.ble sixteenth and seventeenth century palaces, such as we are accustomed to at home only in the theatre. My own experience is that everybody, especially in houses where there are no lifts, lives on the top floor. You pa.s.s many other floors in going up, but you are left to believe that n.o.body lives on them. When you reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming inside for their state and beauty, and outside for their magnificent view, which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome of St. Peter's. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all round the horizon.

When you have taken your furnished flat, the same agency will provide you a cook at ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a lady's maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to sleep out of the house. Then will come the question of provisions, and these seem really to be dear in Rome. Meats and vegetables both are dear, and game and poultry. Beef will be forty cents a pound, and veal and mutton in proportion; a chicken which has been banting for the table from its birth will be forty cents; eggs which have not yet taken active shape are twenty-five and thirty cents throughout winters so bland that a hen of any heart can hardly keep from laying every day. I am afraid I am no authority on b.u.t.ter and milk, and groceries I do not know the prices of; but coffee ought to be cheap, for n.o.body drinks anything but subst.i.tutes more or less unabashed.

For the pa.s.sing stranger, or even the protracted so-journer, whose time and money are not too much at odds, a hotel is best, and a hotel in the new quarter is pleasanter than one in the old quarters. Ours, at any rate, was in a wide, sunny, and (if I must own it) dusty street, laid out in a line of beauty on the borders of the former Villa Ludovisi, where the aging or middle-aging reader used to come to see Guercino's ”Aurora” in the roof of the casino. Now all trace of the garden is hidden under vast and vaster hotels and great blond apartment-houses, and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been spared, though it is no longer so accessible to the public. Still, there is a garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks across the sun and dust of its street into the useful vegetation of the famous old Capuchin convent, with the church, to which I came so eagerly so long ago to revere Guido's ”St. Michael and the Dragon” and the decorative bones of the good brothers braided on the walls and roofs of the crypt in the indissoluble community of floral and geometric designs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 14 THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH, ROME]

All through the months of February and March I woke to the bell that woke the brothers to their prayers before daybreak and burst the beauty-sleep of the hotel-dwellers, who have so far outnumbered the monks since the obliteration of the once neighboring villa. This was, of course, a hards.h.i.+p, and one thought things of that bell which the monks were too good to say; but being awake, and while one was reading one's self to sleep again, one could hear the beginning of the bird singing in the modern garden in the rear which followed upon the bell-ringing. I do not know what make or manner of bird it was that mostly sang among the palms and laurels and statues, but it had a note of liquid gold, which it poured till a certain flageo-lettist, whom I never saw, came to the corner under the villa wall and blew his soul into one end of his instrument and out of the other in the despondent breathings of most melancholy music. Then, having attuned the spirits of his involuntary listeners to a pensive sympathy, he closed with that international hymn which does not rightly know whether it is ”My Country, 'tis of Thee,” or ”G.o.d Save the King,” but serves equally for the patriotism of any English or Americans in hearing. I do not know why this harmless hymn, which the flageolettist gave extremely well, should always have seemed to provoke the derision of the donkey which apparently dwelt in harmony with the birds in that garden, but the flageolettist had no sooner ended than the donkey burst into a bray, loud, long, and full of mockery, with a close of ironical whistling and most insolent hissing; you would think that some arch-enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race was laughing the new-felt unity of the English and Americans to scorn. Later, but still before daylight, came the wild cry of a boy, somewhere out of perdition, following the deep ba.s.s invitation of his father's lost spirit to buy his wares, whatever they were. We never knew, but we liked that boy's despairing wail, and would not have missed it for ever so much extra slumber. When all hope of more sleep was past there was no question of the desirability of the boy who visibly arranged his store of oranges on the curbstone under the villa wall, and seemed to think that they had a peculiar attraction from being offered for sale in pairs. His cry filled the rest of the forenoon.

The Italian spring comes on slowly everywhere, with successive snubs in its early ardor from the snows on the mountains, which regulate the climate from north to south. We could not see that it made more speed behind the sheltering walls of the Capuchin convent garden than in other places. The old gardener whom we saw pottering about in it seemed to potter no more actively at the end of March than at the beginning of February; on the first days of April a heap of old leaves and stalks was sending up the ruddy flame and pleasant smell that the like burning heaps do with us at the like hour of spring--in fact, vegetation had much more reason to be cheerful throughout February than at any time in March. Those February days were really incomparable. They had not the melting heat of the warm spells that sometimes come in our Februaries; but their suns were golden, and their skies unutterably blue, and their airs mild, yet fresh. You always wanted a heavy coat for driving or for the shade in walking; otherwise the temperature was that of a New England April which was resolved to begin as it could carry out. But March came with cold rains of whole days, and with suns that might overheat but could not be trusted to warm you. The last Sunday of January I found ice in the Colosseum; but that was the only time I saw ice anywhere in Rome. In March, however, in a moment of great exasperation from the mountains, it almost snowed. Yet that month would in our climate have been remembered for its beauty and for a prevailing kindness of temperature. The worst you could say of it was that it left the spring in the Capuchin garden where it found it. But possibly, since the temporal power was overthrown, the seasons are neglected and indifferent. Certainly man seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent.

Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice look vacant, and the high wall which encloses it is plastered and painted with huge advertis.e.m.e.nts of clothiers and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and other events out of keeping with its character and tradition.

The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the Northern lands will tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which has sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I, who am a sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share them. No doubt the Newer Rome has made mistakes, but, without defending her indiscriminately, I am a Newer-Roman to the core, perhaps because I knew the Older Rome and what it was like; and not all my brother and sister sentimentalists can say as much.

II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME

Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had pa.s.sed.

Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864 as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting, in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so many good things. At the same time I must own that I heard no other foreigner praising her for her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian, who had seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the Ghetto should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a shame, and an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also thought the Tiber Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks of other days invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters of the town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an effect of disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown to the lover of the picturesque. There used to be a particular type of typhoid known as Roman fever, but now quite unknown, thanks to the Tiber Embankments and to the light and air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect munic.i.p.al housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley unswept; every morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces formerly almost impa.s.sable to the foot and quite impossible to the nose.

I am speaking literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand why some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and avenues, should look askance at the decency of the newer Rome and feign it an offence against beauty and poetry, I do not see why a Londoner, who himself lives in a well-kept town, should join with any of my fellow-barbarians in hypocritically deploring the modern spirit which has so happily invaded the Eternal City. The Londoner should rather entreat us not to be humbugs and should invite us to join him in rejoicing that the death-rate of Rome, once the highest in the civilized world, is now almost the lowest. But the language of Shakespeare and Milton is too often internationally employed in deploring the modernity which has housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One must confine one's self to instances, and one may take that of the Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much peace and pleasure except when I was reminded that it was formed by plotting the lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots and building it up in attractive hotels and apartment-houses. Even then I did not suffer so keenly as some younger people, who had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though there are still villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not really miss the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise, and the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The villa was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been painted.

There is no doubt but at one time, directly after the coming of the capital, Rome was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome has grown up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now ”stuffs out her vacant garments with her form” pretty fully. One must not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is said.

Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome, was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so called, where Zola in his novel of _Rome_ has placed most of the squalor which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts. In these he shows himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I found that I had already pa.s.sed through the quarter without noting anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and misery, in a s.p.a.ce where on the East Side or the North Side in New York I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly as our streets look when they have just been ”cleaned,” I knew that the next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best never have been since the days of Waring.

Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type, fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_ standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them. Like suburban effects are characteristic of the new wide residential streets on the hither side of the Tiber, and on both sh.o.r.es the streets expand from time to time into squares, with more or less tolerable new monuments--say, of the Boston average--in them. The business streets where they bear the lines of the frequently recurrent trams are s.p.a.cious and straight, and though they are not the Corso, the Corso itself, it must be remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive, and is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have no s.p.a.ce to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals betray a glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether these palaces are outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from what sight one can get of them; no, not even the most besotted sentimentalist of those who bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome when they mean Rome of the Renaissance. How much of that Rome has been erased by modern Rome I do not know, but I think not so much as people pretend. Some of the ugly baroque churches have been pulled down to allow the excavation of imperial Rome, but there are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is said the princely proprietors of the old palaces which are let in apartments along the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are going to pull them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of modern rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately domiciles, and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they spoke of these rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices of the sort, and I should not be surprised if I went back to Rome after another forty-three years to find most of them standing in 1951 where they now stand in 1908. Rome was not built in a day, and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt within the brief period that will make me one hundred and fourteen years old. By that time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I can say to the few survivors: ”There, you see that new Rome never went half so far as you expected.”

But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American pride was flattered by the sign on a handsome apartment-house going up in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the impa.s.sioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors.

New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of s.h.i.+ning foliage peering over them, that now enchant the pa.s.ser in the street; from the windows of my electric-elevatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of oleanders and of laurels

”Shaking its loosened silver in the sun.”

Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down, while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its spreading shade. All these things beautifully abound in Rome now, as they always have abounded, and there is no reason to fear that they will cease to abound.