Europe Revised — 12 - Ch. VII: Thence On and On to Verbotenland, pt. 1

Thence On and On to Verbotenland Ah, Rome--the Roma of the Ancients--the Mistress of the Olden World--the Sacred City!

Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak!

It is customary for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks, to carry on like this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if they did speak, they would doubtless speak Italian, which would leave him practically where he was before.

And so, having said it myself according to formula, I shall proceed to state the actual facts: If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and a beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of, and a hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of a tragic mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using the water, and a great, overpowering smell--yes, you can see a Roman smell; a cart mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten cents' worth on him; a palace like a dream of stone, entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels; a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted silver and which carries more than its weight in dirt--if in addition everybody in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy, and is trying to sell you something or wheedle you out of something, or pick your pocket of something--you need not, for confirmatory evidence, seek the vast dome of St. Peter's rising yonder in the distance, or the green tops of the cedars and the dusky clumps of olive groves on the hillsides beyond--you know you are in Rome.

To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests by one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds; we richen the color masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smells to the Nth degree, and set half the populace to singing.

We establish in every second doorway a mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held there while the mother searches the child's head for a flea; anyhow, it is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we add a special touch of gorgeousness to the street pictures.

For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts, and green hubs and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that would have suited Sheba's Queen; and the mule that draws the cart is caparisoned in brass and plumage like a circus pony; and the driver wears a broad red sash, part of a shirt, and half of a pair of pants--usually the front half.

With an outfit such as that, you feel he should be peddling aurora borealises, or, at the very least, rainbows.

It is a distinct shock to find he has only chianti or cheeses or garbage in stock.

In Naples, also, there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight to gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on it.

On the stalls of the truckvenders the cauliflowers and the cabbages are racked up with an artistic effect we could scarcely equal if we had roses and orchids to work with; the fishmonger's cart is a study in still life, and the tripe is what artists call a harmonious interior.

Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces.

They may have been successes as palaces, but, with their marble floors and their high ceilings, and their dank, dark corridors, they distinctly fail to qualify as hotels.

I should have preferred them remaining unsaved and sinful.

I likewise observed a peculiarity common to hotelkeepers in Italy--they all look like cats.

The proprietor of the converted palace where we stopped in Naples was the very image of a tomcat we used to own, named Plutarch's Lives, which was half Maltese and half Mormon.

He was a cat that had a fine carrying voice--though better adapted for concert work than parlor singing--and a sweetheart in every port.

This hotelkeeper might have been the cat's own brother with clothes on--he had Plute's roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white teeth, and Plute's silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into you.

The only difference was, he stuck you with a bill instead of a claw.

Another interesting idiosyncrasy of the Italian hotelkeeper is that he invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town in Italy, but begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures you with his hand on the place where his heart would be if he had a heart, is full of thieves and liars and counterfeit money and pickpockets.

Half of what he tells you is true--the latter half.

The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling how you may send money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote warning you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy.

Likewise you are constantly being advised against carrying articles of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully locked, bolted and strapped.

It is good advice too.

An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that when he reached the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draft whistling through it gave him a bad cold.

However, he may have exaggerated slightly.

If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate accommodations--forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the compartments--a railroad journey through the Italian Peninsula is a wonderful experience.

I know it was a wonderful experience for me.

I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains--towns that were old when the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket.

I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they should carry carbines and knapsacks.

I only know that these things are done.

In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a whole hillside becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons.

The thrifty owner gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below, too, for there he raises vegetables and grains, and the like.

Like everything else in this land, the system is an old one.

I judge it was old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it: Now each man, basking on his slopes, Weds to his widowed tree the vine;

Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine, Salutes thee god of all his hopes.