Part 19 (2/2)
The fountain of Egeria is not more secludedly beautiful than its current above the fall. Trees overhang and meet, and flowers spring in wonderful variety on its banks, and the ripple against the roots is heard amid the roar of the cataract, like a sweet, clear voice in a chorus. It is a place in which you half expect to startle a fawn, it looks so unvisited and wild. We wound out through the shrubbery, and gained a projecting point, from which we could see the sheet of the cascade. It is ”horribly beautiful” to be sure. Childe Harold's description of it is as true as a drawing.
I should think the quant.i.ty of water at Niagara would make five hundred such falls as those of Terni, without exaggeration. It is a ”h.e.l.l of waters,” however, notwithstanding, and leaps over with a current all turned into foam by the roughness of its bed above--a circ.u.mstance that gives the sheet more richness of surface. Two or three lovely little streams steal off on either side of the fall, as if they shrunk from the leap, and drop down, from rock to rock, till they are lost in the rising mist.
The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet spray reminded us that the most romantic people may take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post-house, with a motley group of Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians--a mixture of company universal in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night. The coming and going vetturini stop at the same houses throughout, and the concourse is always amusing. We sat till the fire burned low, and then wis.h.i.+ng our chance friends a happy night, had the ”priests”[4] taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything but sleep.
Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful scenery was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness.
We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to breakfast. It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in time-worn letters.
At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came to the _c.l.i.tumnus_, a small stream, still, deep, and gla.s.sy--the clearest water I ever saw.
It looks almost like air. On its bank, facing away from the road, stands the temple, ”of small and delicate proportions,” mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold.
The temple of the c.l.i.tumnus might stand in a drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream running still at the base of its _facade_, just as it did when Cicero and his contemporaries pa.s.sed it on their visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson,
”Pa.s.s not unblest the genius of the place”
was scarce necessary.[5]
We slept at _Foligno_. For many miles we had observed that the houses were propped in every direction, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, and the interior of the dome one ma.s.s of stone and rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects of an _earthquake_. For eight or ten miles further, we found every house cracked and deserted, and the people living like the settlers in a new country, half in the open air. The beggars were innumerable.
We stopped the next night on the sh.o.r.es of lake Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time spent at school on the ”dull drilled lesson,” had not been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal--the ”_locus aptus insidiis_” where the consul Flaminius was snared and beaten by the wily Carthaginian on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy of Livy ”much thumbed,” that I might sit on the hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his pithy and sententious description, with the reality.
The battle ground, the scene of the princ.i.p.al slaughter, was beyond the _albergo_, and the increasing darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a departed sunset over the other sh.o.r.e, was reflected glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The heavens seem ”dyed” and steeped in the glory of the sunset.
We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape plucked from the battle ground; and if it was not better for the Roman blood that had manured its ancestor, it was better for some other reason.
Early the next morning we were on our way, and wound down into the narrow pa.s.s between the lake and the hill, as the sun rose. We crossed the _Sanguinetto_, a little stream which took its name from the battle. The princ.i.p.al slaughter was just on its banks, and the hills are so steep above it, that everybody who fell near must have rolled into its bed. It crawls on very quietly across the road, its clear stream scarce interrupted by the wheels of the vetturino, which in crossing it, pa.s.ses from the Roman states into Tuscany. I ran a little up the stream, knelt and drank at a small gurgling fall. The blood of the old Flaminian Cohort spoiled very delicious water, when it mingled with that brook.
We were six days and a half accomplis.h.i.+ng the hundred and eighty miles from Rome to Florence--slow travelling--but not too slow in Italy, where every stone has its story, and every ascent of a hill its twenty matchless pictures, sprinkled with ruins, as a painter's eye could not imagine them. We looked down on the Eden-like valley of the Arno at sunrise, and again my heart leaped to see the tall dome of Florence, and the hills all about the queenly city, sparkling with palaces and bright in a sun that s.h.i.+nes nowhere so kindly. If there is a spot in the world that could wean one from his native home, it is Florence!
”Florence the fair,” they call her! I have pa.s.sed four of the seven months I have been in Italy, here--and I think I shall pa.s.s here as great a proportion of the rest of my life. There is nothing that can contribute to comfort and pleasure, that is not within the reach of the smallest means in Florence. I never saw a place where wealth made less distinction. The choicest galleries of art in the world, are open to all comers. The palace of the monarch may be entered and visited, and enjoyed by all. The ducal gardens of the Boboli, rich in everything that can refine nature, and commanding views that no land can equal, cooled by fountains, haunted in every grove by statuary, are the property of the stranger and the citizen alike. Museums, laboratories, libraries, grounds, palaces, are all free as Utopia. You may take any pleasure that others can command, and have any means of instruction, as free as the common air. Where else would one live so pleasantly--so profitably--so wisely.
The society of Florence is of a very fascinating description. The Florentine n.o.bles have a _casino_, or club-house, to which most of the respectable strangers are invited, and b.a.l.l.s are given there once a week, frequently by the duke and his court, and the best society of the place. I attended one on my first arrival from Rome, at which I saw a proportion of beauty which astonished me. The female descendants of the great names in Italian history, seem to me to have almost without exception the mark of n.o.ble beauty by nature. The loveliest woman in Florence is a _Medici_. The two daughters of _Capponi_, the patriot and the descendant of patriots, are of the finest order of beauty. I could instance many others, the mention of whose names, when I have first seen them, has made my blood start. I think if Italy is ever to be redeemed, she must owe it to her daughters. The men, the brothers of these women, with very rare exceptions, look like the slaves they are, from one end of Italy to the other.
One of the most hospitable houses here, is that of Prince Poniatowski, the brother of the hero of Poland. He has a large family, and his _soirees_ are thronged with all that is fair and distinguished. He is a venerable, grayheaded old man, of perhaps seventy, very fond of speaking English, of which rare acquisition abroad he seems a little vain. He gave me the heartiest welcome as an American, and said he loved the nation.
I had the honor of dining, a day or two since, with the Ex-King of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. He lives here with the t.i.tle of Prince Montfort, conferred on him by his father-in-law, the king of Wurtemburg. Americans are well received at this house also; and his queen, as the prince still calls her, can never say enough in praise of the family of Mr. H., our former secretary of legation at Paris. It is a constantly recurring theme, and ends always with ”_J'aime beaucoup les Americains_.” The prince resembles his brother, but has a milder face, and his mouth is less firm and less beautiful than Napoleon's. His second son is most remarkably like the emperor. He is about ten years of age; but except his youth, you can detect no difference between his head and the busts of his uncle. He has a daughter of about twelve, and an elder son at the university of Sienna. His family is large as his queen still keeps up her state, with the ladies of honor and suite. He never goes out, but his house is open every night, and the best society of Florence may be met there almost at the _prima sera_, or early part of the evening.
The Grand Duke is about to be married, and the court is to be unusually gay in the carnival. Our countryman, Mr. Thorn, was presented some time since, and I am to have that honor in two or three days. By the way, we feel exceedingly in Italy the want of a _minister_. There is no accredited agent of our government in Tuscany, and there are rarely less than three hundred Americans within its dominions. Fortunately the Marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain of the duke, offers to act in the capacity of an amba.s.sador, and neglects nothing for our advantage in such matters, but he never fails to express his regret that we should not have some _charge d'affaires_ at his court. We have officers in many parts of the world where they are much less needed.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The name of a wooden frame by which a pot of coals is hung between the sheets of a bed in Italy.
[5] As if everything should be poetical on the sh.o.r.es of the c.l.i.tumnus, the beggars ran after us in quartettes, singing a chaunt, and sustaining the four parts as they ran. Every child sings well in Italy; and I have heard worse music in a church anthem, than was made by these half-clothed and homeless wretches, running at full speed by the carriage-wheels. I have never met the same thing elsewhere.
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