Part 8 (1/2)

[6] The zone which supplies the maximum of crimes of violence is Lazio (Latium).

_Law and Justice_

Those who know what it is to feel ”righteous indignation” must suffer in a country where justice is not understood and not appreciated by any one. The Italians still know how to make laws, and legislation here is ahead not only of the sentiment of the country but of the laws of most European peoples--what they have forgotten is how to administer them. It is no exaggeration to say that at present Italian tribunals exist for the sake of the criminal; absurd ”extenuating circ.u.mstances,” which can hardly be taken seriously, are always forthcoming, and as a distinguished Italian declared in the Senate the guilty man here must indeed be an unfortunate wretch (_un povero disgraziato_) if he cannot manage to escape a condemnation. In place of the inexorable penalty which would alone meet the case in a land where lawlessness has prescriptive rights and where capital punishment does not exist, there is a pleasing uncertainty about all penalties.

With a poor sense of humour as conspicuous as the poor sense of justice, a bench of judges will gravely listen to a succession of false witnesses, vulgar perjurers, mere play-actors, who spring up hydra-headed in support of every villain or rascal, be the matter a murder or an affair of two francs.

The terrorisation exercised by the knife and the _vendetta_ has caused the Roman for centuries to enter into a sh.e.l.l of reserve; if an a.s.sa.s.sination takes place--in broad daylight or in the dark, it does not matter--no one sees it; the _guardia_ arrives round the corner in time to make the ”legal verifications” as soon as the misdeed is safely accomplished, and if the victim shrieked first neither he nor any one else happened to hear it. The desire to live in peace, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, making no enemies, has affected a whole people--with the result that the protected person is the malefactor.

The more audacious he is, the more he affects in the city the _allures_ of the brigand, the more successful he will be in evading the law, in gaining the support rendered by the silence or the false witness of all who encounter him. The people, writes Aristide Gabelli, ”seek by silence and dissimulation their own safety rather than the public safety at their own proper peril.” The consequence is, of course, that there is not the least co-operation with the law. The Roman, indeed, feels humiliated by the necessity for seeking its aid; government and law are abhorrent to him, and he alludes to the former as ”_questo porco di governo_”--if you are unable to defend yourself the alternative is not the arm of the law but to stop at home.

The police service of Rome includes three corps--the carabineers, who hunt in couples, in three-cornered hat and cloak and sword; the munic.i.p.al guard who wear a c.o.c.ked hat, with c.o.c.ks' feathers on feast days, and a black uniform turned up with orange; the _Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza_, in black piped with blue, and a _capote_. These last, called _questurini_ because they depend from the _Questura_, are disliked by all Romans who call them ”_avanzi di galera_,” gaolbirds and a.s.sa.s.sins. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find men of civil condition to enter the corps; such work is eminently distasteful to a Roman, and ”set a thief to catch a thief” is the principle on which he supposes the _governo_ acts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAPEL OF SAN LORENZO LORICATO AT S. BENEDICT'S, SUBIACO

See interleaf, page 86.]

Crispi tried to form one police force for the city; at present if you apply to a _guardia di P.S._ your business is sure to concern the absent munic.i.p.al guard, while the carabineers do nothing but support each other in the arduous task of standing at street corners watching the follies of men, criminals and victims.[7] To the munic.i.p.al guard--the popular force, called _pizzardoni_--is entrusted the maintenance of decency and order in the city, and they often brave the wrath of their fellow citizens in its accomplishment. All matters not connected with munic.i.p.al legislation pertain to the State police, who arrest thieves and act in criminal affairs. Soldiers, too, have certain civil duties; they are frequently called upon to act as police, they are called out to help if a house falls down, to form the _cordon_ in case of a fire, and may in certain circ.u.mstances arrest a malefactor.

[7] Very different is their role in the country districts, which they police entirely, and with courage and devotion.

The soldiers form the most respectable and the only disciplined part of the male population in a city like Rome. One often sees, of course, battalions of men from all the Italian provinces, youths of twenty just enrolled, and among them there is seldom a vicious face. For these are the mothers' sons, and they compare very favourably with our ”Tommies.” The same cannot be said of the other youths who throng the city. Perhaps seven-tenths of the crime is committed by lads in their teens and early twenties; I have heard a Senator declare that there are boys of twelve in the prisons who are already _perfetti criminali_; and surely nowhere in Europe are boys and youths worse trained. The most appalling phenomenon, however, is the existence of a degraded type, of all and every age, usually belonging to the decently-clothed cla.s.ses, whose outrages on decency were described by an Italian in a Roman newspaper as ”enough to sicken the coa.r.s.est navvy.” These practices, according to some old Romans, are one of the results of the French occupation, but such an explanation of occurrences which are to be met with nowhere else in Europe or out of it, must be taken with all reserve. Gaolbirds like these molest women with impunity; and the _amor proprio_ of the vile nature awakes just in time to heap further outrage when this molestation is resented.

Women have always been hustled in the Roman streets, and as Italian ladies are only now beginning to walk unaccompanied, the foreign visitors bear the brunt of the amiable practice still in vogue of not moving on the narrow pavements, but leaving the lady to take the gutter. Such conduct from men to women contrasts strangely with the courtesy so often extended even to beggars; and a woman of the people, a servant or a porteress, will invite the beggar who is interrupting your conversation to desist, with such phrases as: ”Move aside a little; Do me this pleasure.”

_Courts.h.i.+p and Marriage_

It will be astonis.h.i.+ng to many, no doubt, to hear that courts.h.i.+p in Italy is a prosaic affair. Of pa.s.sion there is plenty and to spare, but the tragic element does not enter every day, and then no sentiment comes in to disturb matters. After the first _etiquette_ of the situation is over, and the letters vowing that you have _il paradiso nel cuor_--which are duly discounted by the peasant _fiancee_--have been written, things run uneventfully enough. A young Abruzzese servant--from the most saving population of Italy--became enthusiastic when recounting the virtues of his proposed bride to his mistress, which culminated with: ”Signorina mia, _e piena di biancheria_”--”she is full of house linen.”

There is among all Italian women more dignity in their relations with men than there is among English women. The Italian woman has a n.o.ble reticence, a power of self-protection, which imposes itself on lover and husband. She is not accustomed, as we are in modern times, to walking abroad unaccompanied, and there is no doubt that here the Englishwoman shows a self-respecting demeanour which is everywhere recognised as ent.i.tling her to all the respect she feels for herself.

What I speak of is the Italian woman's att.i.tude towards the man to whom she is engaged or married, in comparison with the Englishwoman's.

The former will not serve her husband as an English or German _frau_ will; nor, before marriage, will she lay herself out to keep the man at any cost as the English girl of the servant cla.s.s will do. Here Italian self-respect is greater than English. The Roman woman of the lowest cla.s.s habitually displays this personal dignity and reticence in the streets; and nowhere in Rome will you see such scenes as are to be witnessed on any bank holiday at a seaside place in England, on Sat.u.r.day evenings in London, or in country towns after dark, among men and women of the lower middle cla.s.s.

The Italian woman will avoid scandal to herself and hers at whatever cost; she will suffer any deprivation or loss to compa.s.s this, to keep her trouble from the eyes of the curious world. There is none of that vulgarity of soul--consummated in modern times among Anglo-Saxon peoples--which hastens to wash dirty linen in public. This is one reason why divorce is so distasteful in Italy, and especially to the women, who would one and all suffer individually in order to bind the man, to preserve the family and its honour, in preference to the enjoyment of the personal freedom which the looser bond implies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STEPS OF THE DOMINICAN NUNS' CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO

This and the church of Santa Caterina da Siena form a Dominican corner of Rome on a spur of the Quirinal. The garden of Palazzo Aldobrandini is seen in the background. See pages 6, 171.]

A traditional characteristic of the Roman is that he has always given a fairer share of life to women than other Italians. Since the day when Romulus called the Roman _curiae_ after the thirty Sabine women who had thrown themselves into the breach for the Romans, and conferred on them special privileges, the Roman woman has played a dignified part in the life of the city. As priestesses the vestals possessed privileges shared by none but the emperor; and the idea of the Roman matron, the wife not ”in the hand” of her husband, was a Roman contribution to social ethics two thousand years before the idea occurred to Englishmen. There is nothing that antiquity has handed down to us more dignified than the seated female figures in Roman museums. These views of women ceased, naturally enough, when Rome which had been the greatest political became the greatest clerical city in the world; but the Roman tradition was handed on in the Italian universities outside Rome, which admitted women five hundred years before they were allowed to share in the benefits of those colleges of Cambridge and Oxford which their money and influence had done so much to endow.

The women of the people still, however, enjoy in Rome ”an almost unlimited liberty.” The Roman man shares his recreations with his wife, and the wife-kicking which is such a plague spot in the life of the common people in England, is not one of them. English fair-play to women is indeed merely a matter of cla.s.s; it has never penetrated to the lower strata, and in the English middle as in the English lower cla.s.s the men are still ”the lords of creation.” This conjugal relation in fact remains a bulwark of a certain coa.r.s.eness which no one can deny to the Englishman, and which is registered in the Italian's firm opinion that English wives are bought and sold in open market. In other parts of Italy, however, in Calabria and the Abruzzi (even Piedmont is conspicuous for want of gallantry), the wife is regarded simply as a chattel, and the brutal husband aims his blow at his wife's face in order that the neighbours may recognise _il segno del marito_. The sufficient explanation _e suo_ (it is his own) is the same which will be given you if a youth maltreats a dog; and in both cases the moral quality of the argument is as ign.o.ble as it can be.

Socially, the talents of the Romans are not higher than our own. The Italian people have not the social gifts which are the _privilegium_ of their Latin neighbour. On the society of ancient Rome was superimposed clerical Rome--a city where the s.e.x which makes society was nowhere, where the _pezzo grosso_ in every drawing-room was a Roman cardinal, not a great lady; and there can be little doubt that this has not proved a civilising influence on the Roman. But in natural gifts of disposition the Italian greatly excels us; and in no English gathering can the charm be approached which Italians will impart to an _alfresco_ party, an impromptu _festa_--often including a great mixture of cla.s.ses--when the simplicity, the unfailing good humour, and the successful efforts to please are a lesson to the Englishman. The Italians by gathering together make a natural _festa_, as by walking they make a natural procession--something that is graceful and unselfconscious, absolutely simple without missing stateliness.

_The Romans and Art_

The art history of Rome is as distinct from that of the rest of Italy as is its social, its religious, or its political history. We look in vain to Rome for a first-rate picture, a first-rate poem, even--with the exception of Palestrina--for a first-rate composer.[8] The fatal facility which hampers all Italians, who can achieve with little labour what less gifted peoples travail to attain, meets in the Roman that curious inconclusiveness, that strange universal sterility, which begins with the character itself. Nevertheless the Roman has not failed to give us what it is his function to give--he has always been a fine-art critic; every great thing has come before him, and of all he has been an incorruptible judge, seldom deceived, using all the powers of _finezza_, of ridicule, of satire, and of fine judgment at his command, to raise or to create a standard of fine work. If there is one art which may be said to be not only the gift of Italy but to have remained Italian, it is singing; and here the Roman has kept in the forefront both as critic and executant. The Italian really _loves a voice_--the Englishman loves the sentimental rendering of a theme; and the criterion of vocal sound which the Italian possesses, he finds, perhaps, in his own throat. ”Roman throats and chests must, in some particular way, be differently constructed from those of other people” wrote Walter Pater; and the resonant voices of Italians may be due to the absence of the protruding German and English chin which captures and m.u.f.fles so many of our vocal tones.

[8] _Clementi_, indeed, was a Roman, and a Roman buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.