THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 
 ISAAC FOOT <
 
 ITALY OLD AND NEW
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF 
 JAMES MONROE TAYLOR 
 
 President of Vassar College 
 1886-1914 
 
 The Biography of an Educator 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
 
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 SIRMIO
 
 ITALY OLD AND NEW 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH HAZELTON HAIGHT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF LATIN, VASSAR COLLEGE 
 
 LONDON 
 STANLEY PAUL & CO. 
 
 31, Essex Street, Strand, W.C. 2
 
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 All Rights Reserved
 
 To 
 
 BRUNO ROSELLI 
 
 che fa del suo lavoro aureo anello fra Italia e America
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAG 8 
 
 I. A Piazza in Rome 1 
 
 II. Due Cuori, Una Capanna 9 
 
 III. The Joys of an Orario 14 
 
 IV. The Madonna of Pompeii 30 
 
 V. A Visit to Ancient Ostia 38 
 
 VI. Italian Crowds and Their Temper ... 55 
 
 VII. Tea-drinking in Rome 71 
 
 VIII. The Aspirations of Italian Women ... 80 
 
 IX. La Bella Zara 90 
 
 X. Epic Days 97 
 
 XL Spring in Sicily and the Carrying Off of 
 
 the Maid 108 
 
 XII. Re-reading Catullus in Sirmio 146 
 
 XIII. The Rome that Horace Knew 161 
 
 XIV. Slabsides and the Sabine Farm 185 
 
 XV. Ovid in Sulmona 194 
 
 XVI. Vergil as a Guide in Italy 207 
 
 Vll
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Sirmio Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 Evander's Capanna 12 
 
 Maria's Children 12 
 
 At Hadrian's Villa 18 
 
 A Street Scene in Tivoli 18 
 
 The Theater at Tusculum 26 
 
 Opening the Child's Grave at Cerveteri 26 
 
 At Ariccia, Near Lake Nemi 48 
 
 A Floor Mosaic in the Baths at Ostia 48 
 
 The Statue of Minerva- Victoria at Ostia .... 52 
 
 The Cathedral at Ancona, Struck by an Austrian Bomb 
 
 the Day After War Was Declared 90 
 
 The Gate at Zara 90 
 
 Market-Day at Zara 94 
 
 The Fiumani on Duty at D'Annunzio's Palace . . . 104 
 
 The Fiume-Susak Bridge 104 
 
 The Transformed Temple of Athena at Syracuse . . 128 
 
 The Prehistoric Ruin at Cefalu 138 
 
 Eleusis— The Carrying Off of the Maid 138 
 
 Catullus' Sirmio 146 
 
 ix
 
 x Illustrations 
 
 FACINO 
 PAGE 
 
 The Old Wall at Vicovaro 182 
 
 "The Villa of Quintus Horatius Flaccus" .... 182 
 
 Sulmona 204 
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 204 
 
 Vergil in Mantua . 210 
 
 Plowing in the Sabine Country 218 
 
 The Temple of Jupiter Anxur Above Terracina . . 218
 
 ITALY OLD AND NEW
 
 ITALY OLD AND NEW, 
 
 A PIAZZA IN ROME 
 
 ONE of my greatest joys in Rome has been my 
 window. Not that my room boasts fair case- 
 ment or bright stained glass through which 
 light filters across floor in patterns or in pictures. My 
 window does not shut me in with beauty but leads me 
 out to life. It is a high casement window, for though 
 this study in the Pensione Girardet by strange Italian 
 calculation is said to be on the third floor of the old 
 Palazzo, it is reached by six long, turning flights of 
 stairs and when in the morning I fling open my shutters, 
 I stand face to face with the saints on the roof of Santa 
 Maria Maggiore's choir. Greeting them, I lean out 
 and look eastward to see if Monte Cavo's crested 
 height shoVs clear against the sky, omen of fair day, 
 and then turning westward I salute the statue of Gari- 
 baldi on the Janiculum. So my day starts with all 
 Italy from the Alban Mount to the War of Inde- 
 pendence spread out before me. 
 
 I would never live anywhere in Rome but on the 
 Piazza dell' Esquilino. Of all those gentle elevations 
 which were once the seven hills of the Eternal City, 
 the Esquiline seems to stand the highest now and the 
 Campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore towers to the 
 stars as once Maecenas' palace on the Esquiline did. 
 
 I
 
 2 Italy Old and New 
 
 Still from here a Nero could watch Rome burn, and I 
 from my window watch Rome live. This beautiful 
 square] sloping down from the great flight of steps be- 
 low the choir of the church to the two rows of green 
 trees that line the street of Agostino de Pretis oppo- 
 site, is an epitome of Rome of the centuries and Rome 
 of today. 
 
 Here, as in all Italy, the background of the modern 
 drama is the magnificent past. The Piazza takes my 
 eyes and thoughts not only to the early settlement of 
 Aeneas's son on the distant Alban hill and to Gari- 
 baldi, mounted guard forever on the Janiculum in the 
 name of liberty. Thoughts of Roman Empire and of 
 Christian church fly about me as rapidly as the swal- 
 lows circle overhead. For on the green grass oval in 
 the center of the Piazza stands an obelisk which with 
 its twin, now on the Quirinal, once adorned the en- 
 trance to the Mausoleum of Augustus, the emperor of 
 reconstruction who in an after-war period of factional 
 struggles such as Italy is experiencing today, established 
 a peace that endured for centuries. A cross tops the 
 obelisk now and all day long gay little Italian children, 
 the wealth of Italy, tumble over its sunny base, but the 
 strength of its shaft is a symbol of the Roman genius 
 for empire-building, and makes me recall the message 
 of Augustus' laureate-poet, Vergil: 
 
 "Remember, O Roman, to rule the people with thy 
 power (this shall be thy art) and to establish the laws of 
 peace." 
 
 The Roman laws last as the basis of our jurispru- 
 dence though the peace of the world is often broken in 
 a universe where equity has to depend not solely on 
 statutes but on the varying virtues of human beings.
 
 A Piazza in Rome 3 
 
 The view from my window makes me think not only of 
 the wise Augustus but of the wanton Nero, for there is 
 the tower which bears the great egoist's name, that 
 distant, massive, square, brick Torre delle Milizie 
 which popular tradition threw back from its thirteenth 
 century origin and made the height where Nero fiddled 
 while Rome flamed. The corruption of such rulers, the 
 effeminate fashions they set for the populace they en- 
 slaved gave to the church her chance and she sought to 
 save the souls of Italy before she attempted to govern 
 her. 
 
 That delicate square Campanile above the trees 
 marks one of the earliest meeting-places of the Chris° 
 tians in Rome, for the church of Santa Pudenziana 
 stands (all evidence goes to show) over the house of 
 Pudens, father of Pudenziana and Prassede, where St. 
 Peter is supposed to have lived, the Pudens whom St. 
 Paul mentioned just before his death in his second let- 
 ter to Timothy. You can prowl down under the church 
 and see where the walls and the bath of a little old Ro- 
 man house have been excavated. Then you can look at 
 St. Peter and St. Paul done in the fourth century 
 mosaics in the church above and find the quaint figures 
 of Santa Pudenziana and her father over the doorway. 
 No church in Rome takes me nearer to pure apostolic 
 times and the beginnings of the faith. Santa Maria 
 Maggiore to be sure in its interior preserves the fourth 
 century basilica plan, but even the cool magnificence of 
 its gray columns of Hymettus marble suggests the 
 splendor of the church, and the whole edifice, built and 
 rebuilt down to the seventeenth century, is a monument 
 to the development of papal power rather than to early 
 faith. Yet Santa Maria Maggiore is my church from 
 dear familiarity and I have heard angelic music there on
 
 4 Italy Old and New 
 
 Christmas and on Easter, and on August fifth I have 
 watched the repetition of the miracle of the snow which, 
 falling here on one hot summer day, revealed to two 
 of the faithful the place where a church must be built 
 to our Lady of the Snowflakes. To me all religion be- 
 ing one aspiration towards the divine, though often I 
 gi\e my ear only to sermons in stones, again "I like a 
 church, I like a cowl" and I can understand how here in 
 Italy the beauty of the services gave and gives the 
 church her hold. 
 
 My window in Rome encourages many musings but 
 not long ones, for its kaleidoscope shifts too rapidly. 
 Really only in the early morning are my eyes allowed 
 to notice the fixed background of the square, its distant 
 views, the great church with its two domes and pointed 
 tower, the Palazzo opposite, the little oval shrine to 
 the Madonna above the Strega sign over the corner 
 shop, the flower-stand bright with roses and carnations, 
 the cabmen waiting contentedly in their carriages un- 
 der the trees. Socn the "Bar Esquilino" at the corner 
 has its tables and chairs out on the sidewalk and the 
 coffee-sippers gather. In the Piazza, the babies arrive 
 with their Sabine nurse-girls, picturesque in their full 
 gay skirts, lace-edged aprons, white kerchiefs crossed 
 on deep bosoms, bright turbans, coral necklaces and 
 ear-rings. Beggars, halt, blind, ragged, amble past 
 with outstretched hands. Peasant women walk by, 
 carrying on their heads long, flat baskets piled high 
 with vegetables. An aeroplane circles overhead. 
 Crowded street-cars squeak painfully up the hill. And 
 always on the steps of S. Maria Maggiore people are 
 passing or loitering. 
 
 The life that goes on upon the steps of the church! 
 Here a woman is selling cherries where in the fall one
 
 A Piazza in Rome 5 
 
 roasted chestnuts over tiny charcoal fire. One group 
 of boys is busy with a game of cards. Two urchins are 
 playing mora, shouting numbers and waving lively 
 hands. Soldiers take their siestas stretched full length 
 on back or face. Men eat their lunches, spreading 
 eggs, cheese, bread out on the steps before them. In a 
 corner, a shrivelled old rag-picker sorts her motley col- 
 lections. Even in the evening under the street-light at 
 the corner men sit reading their paper. One rainy day 
 five cold little boys tried to make a bonfire of news- 
 papers in the sheltered doorway. Every day in and 
 out among the priests and the laymen going up the steps 
 to their devotions, the children weave their games. 
 
 Then the steps make an excellent rostra for political 
 meetings, the orator standing at the top, the crowd in 
 rows on the steps below. One such comizio I attended 
 at the time of the municipal elections in October when 
 a representative of the Partito Popolare appealed for 
 votes. It was a time when all the other parties had 
 united to defeat the clericals and the Socialists and the 
 Partito Populare (the clerical) had a difficult task to 
 make a strong appeal for votes against the united force 
 of the nationalist block. I was interested to see how first 
 this orator claimed for his party the alliance with law 
 and order for which his opponents stood, by disavowing 
 any affiliation with the Russian Socialism which, he 
 said, had become a new tyranny with a new god, Lenin. 
 The speaker stated frankly that his Party asked votes 
 on no platform, but against revolution and civil war in 
 Italy; that they believed in a future syndicalism which 
 would better the living conditions of the laborer, but 
 that now the people must show that those who worked 
 with their hands had a cherished idealism; so in its 
 name he appealed to them and in the name of liberty
 
 6 Italy Old and New. 
 
 and democracy. There were a few ardent youths on 
 the steps behind the orator who occasionally cried 
 "Viva la Russia," "Viva Lenin," but they were prompt- 
 ly hissed down by the crowd. Off at one side of the 
 church in the Via Manin I suddenly saw two long lines 
 of mounted guards, so perhaps their presence helped 
 maintain decorum, but as I listened, I felt that free 
 speech was the order of the hour and that the speaker 
 was voicing the real ideas of his party. 
 
 It was perhaps in answer to that meeting that after 
 dark two or three nights later some sacrilegious person 
 painted on the base of the church wall at the top of the 
 steps in black letters a foot high: "Qui regna il falso," 
 "here reigns the false." When I looked out the next 
 morning, two priests were trying to scrape off the 
 words, but the shadow of them is still there, indelible 
 sign of the political clashes of today in which the church 
 still has its part. 
 
 Not only at election times is the Piazza occupied with 
 politics. I called it, indeed, my political barometer, for 
 the security or insecurity of the government has been in- 
 dicated by the number of guards about the residence of 
 the Minister of the Interior. Giolitti lives at the cor- 
 ner of the Via Cavour and under his windows have oc- 
 curred demonstrations for all sorts of causes from the 
 price of bread to the independence of Fiume. The 
 royal guard about the Piazza was tripled or quad- 
 rupled at times of crises, — the discussion of the Treaty 
 of Rapallo, the obstructionism of the Socialists against 
 the promised increase in the price of bread, the resigna- 
 tion of the President of the Camera, the "white strike" 
 of the postal and telegraph employees. At such a time, 
 when I came back to the Piazza late in the afternoon, I 
 found pairs of resplendent carabinieri on every corner,
 
 A Piazza in Rome 7 
 
 the royal guard patrolling the Via Cavour, and in front 
 of this Palazzo a long line of horsemen wearing their 
 steel helmets. In the midst of such a handsome caval- 
 cade, I felt that we were living in epic days. I knew 
 that his Excellency, the Minister of the Interior, be- 
 hind his curtained windows, was quietly oblivious, for 
 nothing had disturbed his superhuman calm. I pic- 
 tured him as I saw him once. In the Chamber of Depu- 
 ties a heated discussion with many interpellations was 
 raging, accompanied by the violent ringing of the presi- 
 dent's bell, when at the door facing the house appeared 
 Italy's grand old man. Very tall, very large, very erect 
 and proud, the white-haired minister of seventy-eight 
 moved so quietly that in the melee of that excited So- 
 cialistic House he seemed a superman. I thought of an 
 old Greek story: "O Iole, when you saw Hercules, how 
 did you know that he was a god?" "I knew because 
 whether he walked or sat or whatever thing he did, he 
 conquered." That is the personal impression that 
 Giolitti makes and explains in part his renewed grip on 
 Italian politics. The Minister of the Interior not only 
 knew his people and their needs, but in the midst of 
 mercurial and ebullient politicians he kept his calm and 
 won his victories. Little demonstrations might go on 
 in the Piazza dell' Esquilino against one unpopular 
 measure or another, but eventually the crowd dis- 
 persed, the episode was over, and for a little while 
 quiet settled on the political life of Italy as it does on 
 the Piazza at night. 
 
 I sometimes think I love my Piazza best under the 
 stars. The pigeons curl under the cornice of Santa 
 Maria Maggiore. Songs float up from peasants in 
 their wine-carts driving their donkeys home. A gay 
 band of University students gathers on the church steps
 
 8 Italy Old and New 
 
 and in mock Saturnalia invokes pagan gods: "O Bacco, 
 
 Vino, O Venere." A battalion of soldiers marches 
 off from the cascrma near to the invigorating strains of 
 the hvmn of Mameli. Again the unbelievable sound of 
 tinkling sheep-bells calls me from bed to window and 
 there, crossing the Piazza, is a great, huddling brown 
 flock that seems to creep across the square. The sheep 
 are being driven back from winter pastures in warm 
 Calabria to cool mountain heights, just as they were in 
 Horace's time. I picture the shepherds with their 
 flocks at the end of their journey by some cool brook 
 in the Sabine hills and I know half the strength of Italy 
 lies beyond Rome in her sturdy peasant stock. 
 
 I stand at the window as the sound of the sheep-bells 
 grows fainter and once more the Piazza sends up to me 
 thoughts of Alban Kings and Roman emperors, of 
 popes and of liberators, of priests and of soldiers, of 
 parties and of politicians, of children and of contadini. 
 
 1 say to myself: The depth of a tree's roots guarantees 
 its life. Or I reflect in Horace's more Roman figure: 
 This ship of state will weather all storms. Then sud- 
 denly I see a gleam from the light-house on the Janicu- 
 lum, the Faro that was given by the Italians of Argen- 
 tina on September 20, 1921, the fiftieth anniversary of 
 the birth of United Italy, and the flashing of the red, 
 the white and the green brings to me the same message 
 that it carries to the sailors at sea, the glad, abiding cer- 
 tainty "There is Rome."
 
 II 
 
 "due cuori, una capanna" 
 
 "Aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum 
 finge deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis." 
 
 "Dare, my guest, to despise wealth, shape yourself also 
 to be worthy of deity and come graciously to my poor 
 fortune." Aen. VIII, 364-5. 
 
 VANDER was nearly home. He had ridden in 
 to Terracina to buy a bag of flour and his little 
 ^A donkey was lagging wearily in the warm after- 
 noon sunshine. The trip from Monte Circeo's base to 
 the city and back was more than twenty miles and the 
 morning ride had been doubly hard because of a pouring 
 rain and the mud it caused, but Evander's last backward 
 look before Terracina was out of sight had found a 
 bright rainbow arching over Monte Sant' Angelo; the 
 sandy road through the Pomptine marshes had dried 
 quickly; the trailing white blossoms of the thorn hedges 
 and the dashes of yellow broom by the roadside were 
 all the brighter for their wetting; and Monte Circeo 
 towered up clear and grand against a sunset as bright 
 as the oranges in the grove just ahead. Evander 
 shouted to urge his donkey around the turn in the road. 
 Anna heard his voice and was standing in the door of 
 the capanna, their straw-hut, when he first caught sight 
 of it. A slow smile broke over Evander's face. Once 
 more as he rode on, his eyes ran over every detail of 
 
 9
 
 10 Italy Old and New 
 
 their home and he was proud of the work of his hands. 
 He himself alone had laid the ring of foundation-stones 
 for the hut. A neighbor had helped him erect the 
 framework of young tree-trunks which he had felled 
 and drawn from the wood near. Then on the frame 
 he had placed the straw in many layers and fastened 
 it, leaving that little chimney-hole towards the top for 
 the smoke. The wooden door he had hammered to- 
 gether and fitted carefully in a wooden frame with a 
 strong bar across the inside before he had brought 
 Anna to live with him. It was she, however, who had 
 insisted on having that little cross of twigs on the top 
 for another sort of protection. "Lightning falls and 
 straw burns," she had said. "The cross will help us 
 more than the old cow's horns that you have put up." 
 Who knows ? All had certainly gone well with them. 
 
 It had been good fortune first that he had secured the 
 spot for his cap ami a where the brook ran clear in front 
 of the door so that Anna could do the washing without 
 carrying the clothes far. The orange tree that he had 
 planted by the door was bright with golden fruit. The 
 prickly pear at the side was half as tall as the hut, and 
 Anna's vines on the back every morning opened the 
 white flowers that she loved. Together they had built 
 the second capanna, a rough, oblong shelter for the 
 donkey in time of storm, and now that they had a pig, 
 he too had his little thatched pen where they could se- 
 cure him at nightfall. They had just finished another 
 small hut with a furnace of stones in it so that Anna 
 would not need to cook in the Neighbor's any longer. 
 So he had gone to Terracina to buy a new bag of flour 
 to celebrate the completion of their stone oven. To- 
 morrow there would be fresh bread. Perhaps, in time, 
 they could make another large capanna for a dining-
 
 "Due Cuori, Una Capanna" 11 
 
 room. One of the older men in their village had built 
 one. But what was Anna calling to him? 
 
 "There have been strangers here." 
 
 "Why did they come?" he asked, as he got down 
 from his donkey. 
 
 "They were going to climb Monte Circeo and the 
 rain came upon them." 
 
 "Did you ask them into the hut?" questioned Evan- 
 der anxiously. 
 
 "I invited them in by the fire, but," Anna confessed, 
 " I was afraid at first, so I raised my new umbrella and 
 ran out to hunt the pig and drive him into his pen out 
 of the storm." 
 
 "Did you not go back into the hut and keep the fire 
 burning?" Again Evander queried. He was inside 
 now and saw that there was a bright fire in the circular 
 stone-hearth in the center of the room. A pot full of 
 savory soup was steaming over it. 
 
 "Yes, my husband, I returned and kept putting on 
 more sticks from the dry branches under our beds. The 
 strangers stayed dry and warm until the rain stopped 
 and the sun came back." 
 
 "How many were the strangers, Anna? And who 
 were they?" 
 
 Evander had seated himself on the stone threshold 
 and Anna handed him a great bowl of soup and a piece 
 of bread before she went on with her story. 
 
 "There were only two, man and woman, and they 
 were from across the ocean, from the United States, 
 not our people. She was a signorina, for she had no 
 ring. The man did not look at me; he saw only the 
 American woman, but she looked everywhere. I saw 
 her eyes on the fire and the pot and the chimney-hole, 
 on our two beds by the walls, on the washing on the line,
 
 12 Italy Old and New 
 
 on the knives and forks stuck in the straw, on my new 
 pan hanging on a nail inside the door, on my copper 
 tub hanging on the tree outside. 1 ' 
 
 "Did they say nothing?" asked Evander. "Or could 
 they not talk our language ?" 
 
 "The man could not, but the woman could under- 
 stand me and could talk to me but at first she only 
 looked at me. Then she asked : 'Who lives with you 
 here?' I told her: 'My husband, Evander. He has 
 gone to Terracina on the donkey to buy flour be- 
 cause we have finished our new stone-oven and tomor- 
 row I can bake bread in it.' Then she said to me very 
 softly: 'Are you happy?' 'I am very content, Signorina,' 
 I told her. T have my husband and this hut and the 
 orange-tree and the stone-oven and my new umbrella. 
 Did you see the blue stripes in its border?' She smiled, 
 but not for long. She was always sober, the signorina, 
 and the man kept watching her. Then she asked me : 
 Ts there nothing more that you want?' I thought a 
 long time. Then I said: 'Maria, our Neighbor's wife, 
 has a sewing-machine.' She asked if Maria used it 
 often and I told her, 'Yes. Maria makes nice clothes 
 for her little girls. She has two already.' Then her 
 face was very bright suddenly and she whispered to 
 me : 'I love children,' but she said nothing more, for 
 the sun had come out and they started off to the moun- 
 tain. They both shook hands with me and the Signo- 
 rina said that I had warmed both her body and her 
 heart, and she hoped I would always be happy." 
 
 "You have done well," commented Evander laconi- 
 cally. "And now I must feed the donkey and we will 
 go to bed, for it is getting dark and cold." 
 
 About two months later, one night when Evander 
 came back from work in the fields, he saw Anna wav-
 
 EVANDER'S CAPANNA 
 
 MARIA'S (IIIU)REN
 
 "Due Cuori, Una Capanna" 13 
 
 ing her head-kerchief from the door, and her sun- 
 burned face was crimson with excitement as she greeted 
 him. 
 
 "Evander, Evander, the strangers have been here 
 again and have brought us a present." 
 
 "What strangers do you mean? What have they 
 brought?" 
 
 "Only listen! They came in a wagon, the American 
 signor and signorina of the storm. The driver carried 
 a great package across our little bridge over the brook 
 and put it down in front of the door. While he untied 
 it, the lady said to me : 'We have come to thank you 
 again. When I saw how happy you were here in the 
 capanna, I went up on top of Monte Circeo and told 
 this man I would marry him. We are married now 
 and this is a wedding-present that we have brought 
 you.' Look Evander ! It is a Sewing Machine." 
 
 As Evander dropped on his knees in amazement be- 
 fore the shining little hand machine on the earth floor, 
 Anna cried ecstatically: "Maria will teach me to use 
 it and I can make pretty little dresses before the baby
 
 Ill 
 
 THE JOYS OF AN ORARIO 
 
 IN an Italian short-story which I read recently, a 
 wife begins a little domestic comedy by saying pet- 
 tishly to her husband: "There is always an Orario 
 between you and me." For my part, an Orario would 
 be a bond rather than a barrier, for that compact, com- 
 plete and well-indexed monthly Italian time-table called 
 the Orario Generale is one of my most fascinating and 
 time-consuming companions. I pore over the map, the 
 railroad-schedules, the automobile service, the trolley- 
 lines, the Navigazione Maritima, planning jaunts 
 through Italy and on her lakes and seas. Then, like 
 Alexander, wishing for more worlds to conquer, I only 
 regret that there is as yet no page for "Trasporti con 
 aeroplani," for in these novel geography lessons which 
 I am taking from my Orario I would always begin my 
 study from the air. When I did manage to go up over 
 Rome for twenty minutes, a living, colored map of the 
 city lay below me, clear as none I had ever seen on 
 paper, — the shining Tiber curving around the city, the 
 Colosseum still dwarfing all other buildings, even St. 
 Peter's beautiful pile. Between the excitements of turn- 
 ing in a high wind and being momentarily lost in a 
 cloud, I found the Forum and the squares and the 
 churches, and I saw the lines and the color and the size 
 of all Rome, but the city was not so beautiful as the 
 Campagna from whose daisy-starred grass we arose 
 so lightly. I shall never forget the soft opaline colors 
 
 14
 
 The Joys of an Orario 15 
 
 of the plain below and the blue, cloud-hung Sabine and 
 Alban mountains as we flew as a bird to their heights. 
 
 But let me drop to my Orario and, as a proof of its 
 fascination, suggest some of the day-trips about Rome 
 which can be made with its help. I plan my trips for 
 walkers because I am one of those who love to poke 
 about a piedi — one sees more and hears more — but 
 there are virtually always carriages or donkeys for 
 those who wish to ride, available automobiles save time 
 for the wealthy and hurried, and so many kinds of trips 
 near Rome are possible that all tastes can be suited. 
 Let me plan for you, O Walker. 
 
 You will wish to go to the Campagna first, for 
 whether you have never been here or are just return- 
 ing to beloved Italy, there lie the most Roman myste- 
 ries and beauties. I began by the conventional after- 
 noon drive in a little carrozza from the Colosseum and 
 the Passeggiata Archeologica through the Porta San 
 Sebastiano to the Scipios' tomb and the catacombs and 
 on to that "great round tower of other days" whose 
 romance Byron wrote for Caecilia Metella. Then I 
 made my driver take the cross-road, the Strada Mili- 
 tare, so that we got nearer the undulating fields of grain 
 and poppies, the white oxen drawing loads of hay, the 
 little rivulet Almo, the Sacred Grove, dark and awful 
 on its mound, and went on to the Via Latina and up 
 along its huge flat paving stones to the two tombs of the 
 Valerii and the Pancratii (rarely visited) that contain 
 in their underground chambers some of the most ex- 
 quisite of Roman decoration in stucco relief and color. 
 
 Such a drive is only the beginning of the acquaint- 
 ance with the Campagna or the Appian Way. One be- 
 comes far more intimate in a day's walk from Albano 
 into Rome. Take an early train from the Termini
 
 16 Italy Old and New 
 
 (Roma-Velletri line), carry your lunch, and give your- 
 self up to a long day, walking back from Albano along 
 the Via Appia Antica which stretches as straight as the 
 crow flies across the plain to Rome. Take time to be 
 leisurely, for, as Horace wrote, the Appian Way is less 
 difficult for the slow. Old paving-stones are hard on 
 the feet and one wishes time to turn and enjoy the 
 beauty of the hills, to browse with the sheep, to pick 
 pink and white daisies, to read inscriptions on tombs, to 
 let color and light paint indelible pictures on the mind. 
 
 Another day one may spend on the Campagna by 
 taking the Rome-Fiuggi-Frosinone line to Pantano and 
 walking back of the station straight across country 
 towards the great golden cella of the Temple of Juno 
 which marks the site of old Gabii. You remember its 
 legends, — how treacherous Sextus Tarquinius took the 
 city, when it had given him refuge and friendship, by 
 beheading all the leading men as his father had 
 whipped off the poppies' heads in his garden. Now 
 you will find only the golden temple walls, a vague, 
 grass-covered street, a great circular basin of a dried 
 lake, and a mediaeval tower, but there will be sheep 
 grazing, flowers blooming, birds flying, and from the 
 level stretches of the green and gold plain, Soracte and 
 the Sabine hills rise blue and clear. 
 
 After such a walk, go back to Rome and seek the 
 studio of the artist of the Campagna, Signor Onorato 
 Carlandi, a Garibaldian of seventy-eight years, who 
 paints with the fire of youth in his fine boldness of color, 
 his broad effects and varied moods, and who, singing 
 while he paints, has won from his fellow-artists the 
 name of the Cicala. It is a joy to see his water-colors 
 and oils of many places to which I have walked — Ha- 
 drian's Villa with sunlight falling bright on marble ruins
 
 The Joys of an Orario 17 
 
 beside dark cypresses, the swirling Anio, the tawny 
 Tiber, a road bordered with almond trees in full, pink 
 blossom — but most of all I adore the pictures of the 
 Campagna : the Sacred Grove towering dark in the 
 mist, or the plain stretching a blaze of color with the 
 scarlet of the poppies, or the lavender of the thistles, 
 or the yellow of the genestra, and in such brilliancy 
 rows of aqueducts, ancient tombs, mediaeval towers, 
 and, beyond, the lines of violet mountains. When I 
 asked Signor Carlandi if he had ever painted in Dal- 
 matia, he said characteristically: "No, Signorina, I 
 rarely leave the Campagna. For me a love is greater 
 when it is life-long and absorbing. Mine leaves room 
 for no other. To be sure, I have painted some little 
 things in England, but those were only slight infideli- 
 ties." 
 
 Many a day-trip from Rome develops the acquaint- 
 ance begun by these first introductions to the Cam- 
 pagna, for long train rides give new views on the way 
 to the Sabine or the Alban Hills. Rushing tourists 
 "do" Hadrian's Villa and Tivoli in a day, but for real 
 enjoyment one needs a day for each and then another 
 for Horace's Sabine country. A steam tram, starting 
 from the Porta Tiburtina, arrives at the Villa Adriana 
 in an hour. One does not need to be an archaeologist 
 to find pleasure in wandering about Hadrian's great 
 country palace, for ruined walls, broken columns, 
 gnarled olives, aspiring cypresses, distant mountains 
 and Italian sky combine and recombine in pictures of a 
 satisfying beauty even if imagination is not reconstruct- 
 ing and repeopling stadion, theater, library, baths, 
 nymphaeum and all the rest of the imperial labyrinth, 
 or thinking perhaps of the story of handsome, tragic 
 Antinous,
 
 18 Italy Old and New 
 
 On another day, let the same tram line carry you to 
 Tivoli and start early, for there is much to sec. When 
 the trolley stops, take just a look at the Giardino Gari- 
 baldi for the sake of the noble inscription, then go at 
 once to the Villa D'Este which is close by, look at the 
 fresco decorations in the Casino and walk all over the 
 park until you have heard the varying strains of all the 
 waterfalls from the great one that feeds the three bagn'i 
 to the little ones that keep the maiden-hair fresh in the 
 walk of a hundred fountains. Then return to the log- 
 gia of the villa and sit for a while with the views of the 
 magnificent old cypresses below and the white road 
 that winds across the Campagna straight to St. Peter's 
 dome. 
 
 You must not sit too long, for with a glance at two 
 pictures in Tivoli's Santa Maria Maggiore, you should 
 saunter through the town to the street of the Duomo, 
 send some stray child for the custode of the new ex- 
 cavations and get a look at two interesting ancient 
 rooms, one beautifully decorated in marbles, the other 
 with a seated statue of Augustus which is broken, but 
 worth studying. After that, if you are not misled into 
 buying a huge copper water-jar with two handles which 
 you can never carry on your head, as the Sabine women 
 do, to America, follow the main street up to near the 
 Ponte Gregoriano and turning off to the left, go to the 
 Albergo della Sibilla. There you can eat lunch in a 
 garden beside the famous little round temple, listening 
 to the sound of the falls in the deep green gorge below. 
 After dreaming a little to that music, go to the Villa 
 Gregoriano and while it is still hot, visit the charming 
 little Museum for its few treasures of ancient sculpture 
 (ivy-wreathed column, bust of Julius Caesar) and its 
 few choice pictures. The custode's son has made a ter-
 
 AT HADRIAN'S VILLA 
 
 A STREET SCENE IX TIVOL]
 
 The loys of an Orario 19 
 
 raced garden behind the Museum over the Anio which 
 you may see for fifty centesimi and he, while picking 
 violets for you, will tell you his experiences as a soldier. 
 Then you will take the green and winding walk down 
 to the cool depths of the gorge, to the foot of the falls 
 and the great cave, and after ascending you can go on to 
 where the "new cascade" has flung its delicate long 
 white veil across the rocks. The day will not be com- 
 plete without walk or drive across the Anio along the 
 Via delle Cascatelle, for here are beautiful views of 
 Tivoli's two greater falls and here, tradition says, 
 Catullus, Horace and Quintilius Varus all had villas 
 (Thomas Ashby's articles in the "Papers of the British 
 School at Rome" and the "Journal of Roman Studies" 
 will tell you where) . Be sure to stop at the little church 
 of Sant' Antonio to see the quaint votive paintings and 
 don't turn back before reaching the farther side of the 
 great platform on which Varus' villa stood, for the sake 
 of the view across the Campagna. 
 
 There are three trips in the Alban mountains that 
 you should not miss : to Monte Cavo and Lake Nemi, 
 to the Lago d' Albano, to Frascati and Tusculum. The 
 crested top of Monte Cavo had challenged me for days 
 before I finally said: "I will conquer you" and con- 
 sulted my Orario as to method of approach. The start 
 is slow, by train from Porta S. Giovanni with three 
 changes at Bivio Grotta Ferrata, at Valle Violata, at 
 Valle Oscura where the funicular starts for Rocca di 
 Papa, but after that the walk is a gradual climb and the 
 descent to Nemi as easy as to Avernus if you have com- 
 mon sense, map and compass. On the way up, there are 
 some of the largest trees I have seen in Italy and the 
 path goes through real woods with an occasional view 
 back across the Campagna to Rome, a white city glisten-
 
 20 Italy Old and New 
 
 ing rosily from the morning sun in the pale blue dis- 
 tance. We had glimpses too of Lago d'Albano 
 through the trees and finally as we walked up over the 
 great blocks of the old Via Triumphalis, we came to a 
 marvellous view of both Lago d'Albano and Lago 
 Nemi, glistening like gems set in green hills, of distant 
 mountains, of little cities dotting the Campagna, of 
 great Rome and beyond all, the gleaming line of the 
 sea. That view was the treasure of the day, more than 
 the ancient moss-covered wall and the huge tree at the 
 top, but all the walk was its own reward even to the end 
 of the trail. We followed it down through the woods 
 to Nemi, dirty and picturesque over the lake, and then 
 around the lake to the left (by footpath, not high-road) 
 through strawberry gardens and woods festooned with 
 ivy and brightened by rose-pink cyclamen on to Gen- 
 zano. There we had tea on the vine-covered terrace 
 of the Albergo Belvedere over Diana's haunted and 
 mystic lake. 
 
 For a nearer view of Lago d'Albano take the train 
 from the Termini to Castel Gandolfo (an hour's ride) 
 and walk first up the road to the green slope below the 
 Capuchin monastery for the wide view of lake and 
 Monte Cavo across. Here you can eat lunch. Then, 
 retracing your steps, find the gate of the Villa Barbe- 
 rini on the left and try to get permission to see the ruins 
 of Domitian's villa and the enchanting garden where 
 among great ilexes scarlet camelias flame, fountains 
 play, and vistas open to the Campagna. For the ven- 
 turesome it is worth while after leaving the Villa Bar- 
 berini to go down by the foot-path at the south end of 
 the village to the edge of the lake and try to find the 
 elusive custode of the Emissario. We arrived at his 
 gypsy looking cave-house near the water only to learn
 
 The Joys of an Orario 21 
 
 from a small girl that he was off working in the fields, 
 "molto lontano" and had forgotten to leave the key, so 
 there was nothing for us to do but scale, like human 
 flies, the high and crumbling wall that surrounds the 
 entrance of the famous tunnel which tradition says was 
 built by the Romans during the siege of Veii in 397 
 B. C. Such early (or earlier) engineering work was 
 interesting to see and so was the new shore-view of the 
 lake glimmering through reeds and darkened by mauve 
 and magenta shadows. 
 
 By the time we had climbed back to Castel Gandolfo 
 we were ready for rest and tea at Marroni's "Grot- 
 tino" and under his trellised grape-vines we enjoyed 
 the lake and read the Italian poems that decorate his 
 walls. 
 
 "Allora se capisce quanto vale 
 quer lago, quer silenzio e quella scena 
 che in tutto er monno nun ce sta 1' uguale." 
 
 To Frascati and Tusculum it is only an hour by the 
 train from the Termini and in a day good walkers can 
 see several of the villas and climb Tusculum, but there 
 are carriages in plenty and the drive also is delightful. 
 First of all go into the Cathedral and read the tablet 
 to Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, who was 
 buried at Frascati before his body was taken to St. 
 Peter's. Then go to the Villa Aldobrandini, get the 
 aged custode to show you the frescoes, the treasures of 
 the library and afterwards the ornate fountain where 
 Pan plays his pipes to a semi-circle of gods and finally 
 wander out through the superb ilexes and sycamores to 
 the most marvellous of Campagna views. 
 
 From the Villa Aldobrandini the road leads up to 
 Tusculum and presently you can find the overgrown
 
 22 Italy Old and New 
 
 hollow of the amphitheater, and walk up the paved way 
 to that exquisite tree-arched dingle which was once the 
 Forum and which still leads to the beautiful Roman 
 theater on the deserted hillside. You must go on climb- 
 ing above the theater to the summit of the Arx for the 
 whole circle of the view round about the old city 
 founded by Circe's son. Afterwards, map in hand, you 
 can make your way down to the Villa Mandragone and 
 the Villa Falconieri, to wander through their magnifi- 
 cent gardens. 
 
 The lover of hills will not fail to climb another 
 mountain north of Rome. Day after day in your wan- 
 derings you have seen rising like an island from the 
 undulating sea of the Campagna 
 
 ". . . lone Soracte's height, displayed 
 Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid," 
 
 and for the sake of Horace and the mountain's own 
 call, you start. The two hours' train ride from the 
 Piazza Liberta to the station of Sant' Oreste will give 
 you new views of the Tiber Valley. From the station 
 of Sant' Oreste walk up the open road towards the hill 
 town, but turn off up the mountain-trail to the left just 
 before you reach the city itself. Along the road and 
 through the olive-grove we had views of the mountain's 
 long crest, rising like "a wave about to break." The 
 rocky trail up was so gradual that we could talk and 
 enjoy every new picture from the sunlight flickering 
 across the path through the olive grove on the lower 
 slope to the gray monastery of San Silvestro which rises 
 out of the rocks at the summit. The bell at the monas- 
 tery door will summon a ragged, hermit monk who will 
 point out every mountain, hamlet and lake in the view,
 
 The Joys of an Orario 23 
 
 and will unlock to your delighted eyes the fresco treas- 
 ures of the small church. We enjoyed his entertaining 
 loquacity about the former temple of Apollo and Perse- 
 phone, San Silvestro's life and the frescoes, even 
 though we were starving for our lunch. Finally left 
 alone, we ate in the blaze of Apollo's golden light and 
 for joy we might have been on Mt. Olympus with the 
 gods. Our nectar was beauty: a circle of mountains 
 around us except to the south where the line of the sea 
 shone; to the left on the horizon, St. Peter's dome; to 
 the right, the quiet limpid blue of Lago di Bracciano; 
 and behind us, winding through striated meadows all 
 green and red, the silver Tiber. 
 
 I never can tell whether I love more the mountains 
 or the sea, but fortunately one does not have to choose 
 even at Rome. You can go off for one day and be sail- 
 ing on the bluest of deep waters. The train ride to 
 Anzio takes only a bit over an hour, so by nine-thirty 
 you can be walking along the sandy shore north to the 
 ruins of Nero's great villa by the water. Here above 
 on the cliffs in a grassy nook we ate our lunch, then back 
 in Anzio we secured the services of a jolly old sailor 
 named Cristoforo and In a boat with a golden sail 
 tipped with red, we sailed for five hours to Astura to 
 see the remains of Cicero's villa, half under the water 
 and to Nettuno where we landed just as an orange sun- 
 set was lighting the Tyrrhenian sea and a long line of 
 fishing-boats came in homing like gulls with sails 
 spread. 
 
 Another trip that may end with a dip in the surf is a 
 day at Ostia. An auto-bus starts every morning from 
 the Via delle Vite arriving at Ostia Paese at 8:25 and 
 as the return trip is not until evening, you have time 
 to wander all over the excavations, to see the finds in
 
 24 Italy Old and New 
 
 the Museum of the old Castello, and afterwards walk 
 three miles to the coast, have a plunge and take the 
 bus back from Ostia Mare. Ostia is as fascinating as 
 Pompeii though its life was more commercial, and there 
 is much to see: the colossal and beautiful statue of 
 Minerva-Victoria, the street of tombs, houses, baths, 
 theater, barracks, office building, temples, mithreum, 
 then all the delightful decoration of bright frescoes on 
 walls and magnificent mosaics on floors, also the sculp- 
 ture in the Museum where a certain round marble 
 plaque with a dancing Bacchante alone would reward a 
 whole day's journey. 
 
 I have not mentioned the Etruscan sites because 
 there is so much to say about them that I despair. Yet 
 nothing is more fascinating than to go with Dennis's 
 "Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria" in hand (out of 
 date, but still the best interpreter) and visit Veii, 
 Faleri, Corneto, Cerveteri, Orvieto, each possible in a 
 day. If in limited time you have to choose among 
 these for acquaintance with the Etruscans, select Veii, 
 Corneto and Cerveteri. Veii (best reached by automo- 
 bile) will give you an idea of a typical Etruscan site of 
 high ridge protected by two rivers, a remarkable ex- 
 ample of prehistoric engineering in the tunnel cut 
 through the rock, one of the most ancient Etruscan 
 tombs that has been found with beautiful frescoes of 
 horse, rider and dog, then the later Roman city with 
 ruins of road, water channel for sacred spring, and the 
 temple where was found the remarkable archaic statue 
 of Apollo, now in the Villa Papa Giulia, a life-sized 
 painted terra-cotta representing the god running. 
 
 At Corneto (reached by train) you must find the 
 custode of the Etruscan tombs, then visit as many of 
 those underground sepulchres as time and strength
 
 The Joys of an Orario 25 
 
 allow. Sixteen we entered and in them for the first time 
 I felt the Etruscans as living people, for in those 
 painted chambers which copy the architecture of their 
 houses are no gloomy death-scenes, but a most gallant 
 picturing of every-day life: mounted horsemen, chari- 
 ots with their drivers, athletes wrestling, musicians 
 playing pipes and lyres, men and women dancing to 
 music or banqueting. The brightness of the robes, the 
 vivacity of their movements, the joy of life that those 
 frescoes preserve ! 
 
 Cerveteri was to me even more interesting, but per- 
 haps that was because the distinguished excavator, Inge- 
 gnere Rainero Mengarelli himself, spent a day showing 
 me all his work on the Etruscan necropolis : the street 
 of tombs of the period after the fifth century, the dif- 
 ferent types of tombs found, the trench tombs, the 
 tombs above ground, the earlier chamber tombs. The 
 chamber tombs are startlingly picturesque both because 
 the great earth-mounds which originally covered them 
 have been restored and because the chambers them- 
 selves display such variety of grouping and decoration 
 from a bedroom with a simple fresco of lions in red 
 and white to a great hall with places for forty-eight 
 persons and walls covered with reliefs of weapons and 
 animals and cooking utensils, a veritable museum of 
 Etruscan every-day life. Signor Mengarelli gave me 
 the thrill of excavation, for he had saved a recently dis- 
 covered baby's tomb to open while I was there, hoping 
 for a rich harvest of toys and amulets such as he had 
 found in another child's tomb a few days before. I 
 held my breath as the workman lifted off the tufa 
 blocks which covered the tiny oblong box of stone, and 
 carefully removed the accumulated earth with trowel 
 and knife. Signor Mengarelli was most apologetic
 
 26 Italy Old and New 
 
 when only one small bronze fibula or safety-pin came to 
 light, but I was thinking of the baby's mother who had 
 buried that one little object, and the workman's softly 
 murmured comment chimed in with my mood: "Era 
 povero lui ! Una piccola cosa ! Cos! Nostro Signore 
 era un bimbo in una culla, ma egli risucito!" "He was 
 poor, had only one little thing 1 So our Lord was a 
 baby and lay in a cradle, but He arose." 
 
 Neither the pathos nor the gloom of the Etruscan 
 dead had much hold upon us in Signor Mengarelli's 
 cheerful presence and I shall never forget him or his 
 black horse, called Bucchero after the black Etrus- 
 can pottery, a free horse who has never been in a 
 stall, who feeds himself when he is not working for the 
 excavations and who all that day posed proudly on top 
 of one of the highest tumuli as though he were the spirit 
 of one of the painted Etruscan horses escaped from the 
 tomb below. 
 
 Orvieto (three hours by train) has so much more 
 than the Etruscan to offer that a stay of two or three 
 days would be far more valuable than one. The town 
 itself is so picturesquely mediaeval, the Cathedral with 
 facade and frescoes of Fra Angelico and Signorelli so 
 rich in interest. There are other towns to the south of 
 Rome which can be seen easily in a day, Palestrina, 
 Cori, Anagni, Ninfa-Norma-Norba, Velletri, even Ter- 
 racina if time is limited. For Palestrina, the Rome- 
 Fiuggi-Frosinone line arrives in about an hour and a 
 half. One must be an energetic walker to cover the 
 small town from low station to high citadel, for it lies 
 on the hillside so that all the streets are stairs where 
 no automobiles or carriages can ascend, only donkeys 
 and bipeds. Sun-burned, strong-backed women carry 
 up copper water-jars on their heads. Old crones stand
 
 THE THEATER AT TUSCULUM 
 
 OPENING THE CHILD'S GRAVE AT CERVETER]
 
 The Joys of an Orario 27 
 
 twirling distaffs in doorways. Small donkeys encoun* 
 ter you suddenly around corners. All this picturesque- 
 ness we enjoyed as we hunted for ancient Praeneste in 
 the modern town. There was much to find : the city- 
 walls (the great prehistoric one down the hill, a sector 
 of Sulla's time over a carpenter's shop outside the 
 town), the enormous cement-lined, rain-water cisterns 
 of the empire, the old forum and the various visible 
 remains of the Temple of Fortune into which both the 
 Barberini palace and much of the modern town are 
 built, most interesting the room where the oracles were 
 cast and the grotto where they were mysteriously an- 
 nounced through high hole in wall. A little Museum 
 houses sculpture, vases, and even dice from this past 
 splendor. The glory of Palestrina now is the view 
 from the Castel San Pietro, the summit of the Acrop- 
 olis, and that height explains the city's ancient power, 
 for Praeneste was not the typical Etruscan plateau site 
 protected by gorges, but stood on a high limestone 
 ridge commanding the pass to the sea between the Al- 
 ban and Volscian mountains. From the site of the Arx 
 opens one of the most magnificent views I have had in 
 Italy. Back of us were gray limestone ridges of which 
 Praeneste's citadel seemed a part. To the west, be- 
 tween the hills stretched meadows of emerald grain, 
 woods turning autumn russet and rose, two long white 
 roads (the Praenestina and the Labicana) winding to 
 Rome ; farther north, an island in the misty blue rose 
 majestic Soracte; and to the south between Alban and 
 Volscian mountains we looked straight to the golden 
 sunlight on the sea. 
 
 Anagni in the Hernican mountains has less varied 
 reward for a train ride of an hour and fifteen minutes, 
 but it is worth while to have a glimpse of the Herni-
 
 28 Italy Old and New 
 
 cans and the valley of the Sacco, and when you reach 
 the high little town (a stupid, dusty walk from the 
 station; better drive up) you can lunch at the "Gallo" 
 facing the mountain heights and the swirling clouds. 
 The town's treasure is not the piece of ancient wall, but 
 the eleventh century Cathedral with its beautiful Cos- 
 mas pavements, its elegant bishop's throne and, above 
 all, the simple, unspoiled eleventh century crypt with the 
 primitive frescoes of naive feeling and exquisite colors. 
 (Munoz thinks them the work of the unknown artist 
 who painted the scenes from the life of Constantine 
 in Quattro Coronati in Rome.) Madonna and child 
 are there, the four and twenty elders adoring the lamb, 
 beautiful saints, strange seraphim. The one that 
 pleased me most was a figure of John the Baptist carry- 
 ing a scroll in his hand, with this Latin below: 
 
 "Verbo petit astra Johannes St.," 
 
 "By word St. John sought the stars," 
 
 a motto for all aspiring writers to take to heart. If 
 you wish to vary your trip back to Rome, drive across 
 country to the Fiuggi station on the Rome-Frosinone 
 line and enjoy from the steam-tram four hours of 
 mountain views in the Volscian, Hernican, Alban and 
 Sabine ranges. 
 
 Three towns together you can see by taking an hour 
 and a half train ride to Ninfa-Norma and each one will 
 give you something different. First of all, take bus or 
 carriage up to Norma and walk over to Norba. Superb 
 on the ridge's summit, it has preserved prehistoric walls 
 and gate rivalled only by Mycenae and the ruins stand 
 in all their early glory and isolation, for the later city, 
 never rebuilt after Sulla's destruction, lies low in grass- 
 grown temple foundations and scattered pieces of mar-
 
 The Joys of an Orario 29 
 
 ble. The walk to Norba will give you appetite for the 
 gift which unprepossessing Norma can bestow, a beef- 
 steak, tender and juicy, in the little upstairs "Locanda 
 della Fortuna" of Raffaele Tomassini, a genial host. 
 From the heights of the ridge, you will have had the 
 fairest view of Ninfa, the deserted mediaeval village 
 by the railroad, for from Norba you can see all the 
 gray, story-book ruin : the circular town-wall, the moat, 
 the bridge, the castle tower, the church, the houses, but 
 when you descend from Norma in an hour by the don- 
 key-path through the olive-groves, you will wish to walk 
 through the melancholy ivy-draped hamlet and pick as 
 a ricordo an ivy leaf, a rosebud and a violet as you lis- 
 ten to the fountain and the birds. Mediaeval Ninfa 
 was more dead to me than prehistoric Norba. I know 
 not why, unless its flatness on the plain which cuts off 
 all views isolates it more from all beauty but its own, 
 and the charm of its gray ivy-draped walls is so com- 
 pletely of the past. 
 
 Still I turn the pages of my Orario and think of many 
 other day trips I have taken from Rome ; for example, 
 Terracina's fascinating combination of surf and moun- 
 tain, with Horace's old Appian Way over the ridge and 
 Trajan's new cut through the rocks by the sea, her 
 cathedral in Roman forum, and on the height above the 
 town the great ruins of the temple of Jupiter Anxur 
 through whose arches a small shepherd boy fled shyly 
 from us, piping as he went. But part of the enchant- 
 ment of the Railroad Guide is the chance to make dis- 
 coveries and if I have but started you on the quest for 
 walking trips near Rome, I will resign to you my 
 Orario; and afoot and light-hearted once more I will 
 take to the Open Road, confident that it will lead me 
 back to Rome.
 
 IV 
 
 THE MADONNA OF POMPEII 
 
 (A Fantasy) 
 
 THE shade of the long green arbor of the Al- 
 bergo del Sole invited me as I came out on the 
 hot dusty road after my visit to the amphithea- 
 ter of Pompeii. It was five in the afternoon and I had 
 spent all day seeing the marvellous new part of old 
 Pompeii, the street where walls are bright with signs 
 and election notices, wine-shops display their amphorae, 
 bronze pitchers and drinking-bowls, huge doors studded 
 with great bronze nails swing on old hinges, rooms be- 
 hind them open vistas of color on mosaic floor and fres- 
 coed wall, and dominating the street by her magnifi- 
 cence the Venus of Pompeii, come to life again in this 
 uncovered painting, attended by her divine son, tri- 
 umphantly drives four elephants before her chariot. 
 The goddess had held my fancy while I walked over the 
 amphitheater for last views of the great gray bowl sunk 
 in the green hollow presided over by distant blue Vesu- 
 vius. Strange contrasts were in my mind, for I had just 
 seen the last discovery in the Street of Abundance, five 
 skeletons found under the roof of a house, persons 
 evidently overcome while trying to escape there, each 
 with a little money-bag of copper coins in his hand. 
 There they lay in their pitiful ruin and on the wall down 
 the street the Venus Pompeiana still rode in all her 
 bright power. The triumph of art! Or is it that the 
 gods alone are deathless? 
 
 30
 
 The Madonna of Pompeii 31 
 
 So I had meditated, walking through the amphithe- 
 ater, and now I was ready for my tea as I sat down at 
 one of the little white tables in the vine-trellised arbor 
 of the Albergo del Sole. A genial white-haired old 
 man, whom I judged to be the host of the Inn, left his 
 work among the flowers, received and delivered my 
 order, then returned to training jasmine and roses over 
 the Inn wall. Presently a sun-burned, large-eyed young 
 woman brought my tray and was turning to leave 
 quietly when my eyes fell upon an unusual amulet which 
 she wore. Its large oval pictured in bright colors a 
 Madonna and child, their heads crowned and surround- 
 ed with a circlet of stars and before them San Domenico 
 and Santa Catarina, kneeling in astonished rapture. 
 The Madonna wore a golden rosary. 
 
 "Stay a minute with me, please," I said. "What is 
 your name? Carmelita? Tell me about this picture 
 that you wear. What Madonna is it?" 
 
 Her placid face instantly flashed a happy response 
 and as she pressed the amulet to her lips, she answered: 
 "Signorina, do you not know the Madonna of Pom- 
 peii, the Madonna of the Rosary? Have you not been 
 to her shrine?" 
 
 At her amazement over my "No," I begged her, if 
 she had time, to enlighten me while I drank my tea. So, 
 standing where the sunlight flickered down through the 
 grape-vine on her earnest and devout face, Carmelita 
 told me her story. 
 
 "Years ago, Signorina, Valle di Pompeii was not a 
 large town as you see it today, but just a little hamlet 
 on the edge of the great estate of the young Count, and 
 the Count's chapel was very, very small, just large 
 enough for the few families in the village to have their 
 little service in, each Sunday. The Count then was
 
 32 Italy Old and New, 
 
 always in Naples, for he is a very great Avvocato, Sig- 
 norina, and the Countess is a noble lady whose family 
 has lived in Naples for hundreds or years. One year 
 not long ago, the Count was not well and he stayed all 
 winter out on his estate at Valle di Pompeii, and my 
 father says he remembers when it was, for that was the 
 year when they found the picture of the goddess with 
 the elephants in the scavi at old Pompeii (my father 
 was one of the workmen digging there) and the year 
 when the new Madonna came to the little chapel. Did 
 you see the picture of the Venus with the elephants? 
 The new scavi are not open to the public yet so I have 
 never seen her. But the Madonna ! One morning 
 when my father went in to say his prayers, there over 
 the altar was this Madonna with the gold rosary and 
 the stars, and the prayers that he made to her that day 
 were all answered by nightfall, for Giuseppe paid him 
 twenty lire he owed him and my headache stopped for 
 the whole afternoon. I was just a little girl then and 
 always sick, Signorina. 
 
 "My father told Giuseppe that his prayer was an- 
 swered and Giuseppe laughed and laughed. He is a 
 very wicked man and never goes to church, so it is no 
 wonder that he is poor. He told my father terrible 
 lies, making him promise not to repeat them, and I 
 heard, for I was just inside the door, and could not help 
 hearing. He said that this new picture of the Madonna 
 had been for days in the window of an old Antiqua- 
 rian's shop in Naples which he passed every time he 
 drove the mules in, and then it disappeared from the 
 window, and one day the Count had told him when he 
 brought out the next load of fertilizer to the estate, to 
 stop at the Antiquarian's shop for a package and bring 
 it on top of the load. It was a very, very heavy pack-
 
 The Madonna of Pompeii 33 
 
 age. He took it to the Count's villa and in a few days, 
 there was the Madonna of the Antiquarian's window in 
 Naples in the Count's chapel at Valle di Pompeii. My 
 father told him he was a wicked liar, but Giuseppe just 
 went off laughing. 
 
 "Other people besides my father had their prayers to 
 the Madonna answered, and then about a month later, 
 a wonderful thing happened. A friend of the Coun- 
 tess, another great lady in Naples, was very, very ill. 
 She had been thrown out of a carriage in an accident 
 and no one could see where she was hurt, but all the 
 time she cried and cried, and at night she did not sleep, 
 and she had grown so thin that you could see through 
 her hands. The Countess begged her to come out and 
 try praying to the Madonna of the Rosary, so the beau- 
 tiful, pale young lady came, and she knelt in the little 
 old chapel (I saw her) and promised the Madonna 
 that she would give her a golden crown if she would 
 only make her well. The Madonna heard her prayer 
 and from that moment, Signorina, the queer pains left 
 her, she could sleep, and she did not cry at all. Every- 
 one knew about the miracle because the golden crowns 
 came, two, one for the Madonna and one for the Bam- 
 bino. All the papers wrote about the cure and the 
 splendid gifts. Then every Sunday people began to 
 come out from Naples to the shrine, especially the sick 
 people and every week someone was healed. After- 
 wards everyone who was cured was so happy that he 
 sent back or brought back some present to our Lady, 
 and some very rich people who saw that the little chapel 
 had no room for all who came gave money to build the 
 great new church where I was cured. 
 
 "You must go and see it tomorrow, Signorina. Do 
 you wish to hear what the Madonna did for me ? When
 
 34 Italy Old and New 
 
 I was fourteen, my father died and I was alone, for 
 my mother had gone long before, and I did not know 
 what I would do. I had no money and no relatives, 
 and I was very sick. I had worked hard to get my 
 father's meals and to help him sometimes in his work 
 for the Padrone in the field. I worked even when my 
 head ached and now it always ached and I was always 
 coughing and very cold. I was in despair when my 
 father died. 
 
 "The priest who came to see him before he died said 
 he would get me a place in the Orfanotrofio of the Ma- 
 donna's sanctuary. The church was so rich now that 
 the Count had built this home for orphan girls out of 
 the gifts to our Lady. I was very unhappy and did not 
 wish to leave our two little rooms where we lived and 
 I lay on the bed very sick, crying, the day when my 
 father had been buried, waiting for the Sister to come 
 and get me. The Sisters are very kind to the girls at 
 the Orphanage, but I could not take an interest in any- 
 thing and I kept feeling more and more ill. I went to 
 the church every day and said the prayers, but I said 
 them only with my lips and they left me cold. 
 
 "One day all was different, Signorina. The Cardinal 
 came out from Naples to the festa and all the girls 
 from the Orphanage marched in the great procession 
 through the town behind the cross and him. He blessed 
 us all and in the church afterwards he preached a little 
 sermon and told us that our god was a god of love, that 
 the Blessed Virgin understood all women, that faith 
 could remove mountains and the Madonna of the Ro- 
 sary would answer our prayers. He pointed to the 
 thousands of silver offerings on the panels of the 
 church (you can see them there, Signorina), and said 
 they were a cloud of witnesses to the power of the Ma-
 
 The Madonna of Pompeii 35 
 
 donna of the Rosary and as our faith so would be our 
 strength; we had only to believe and ask what we 
 needed most and our prayers would be answered. 
 
 "Signorina, the Cardinal was so big and wonderful 
 in his red robe that I believed at last and I dropped on 
 my knees, looking up to the Madonna's picture and I 
 prayed with all my heart to be cured and to have a lit- 
 tle home of my own. It was very ungrateful of me, 
 for the Sisters in the Orphanage were most kind, but 
 the Blessed Madonna understood, and, Signorina, as I 
 prayed and watched her, I saw, I really saw her face 
 turn a little towards me, and she smiled, she smiled at 
 me ! I knew then that my prayers were answered and 
 I went out very happy. That night Giovanni who is 
 the cameriere here at the Albergo asked me to marry 
 him and I told him I would. I have never been sick 
 since that moment of my prayer, Signorina. Do I not 
 look well? Giovanni and I have given a silver heart to 
 the Madonna and every day I look at it when I go to 
 say my prayers and thank her again. You can see it, 
 for it is the fourth heart in the top row of the third 
 panel from the front on the right of the altar. 
 
 "If you are ever ill, Signorina, you have only to go 
 and pray at our Shrine. You should go and buy an 
 amulet now and the little book of prayers that the 
 Count has written for us. He is always working for 
 the church and never goes in to his office in Naples 
 now. He has built little houses on his estate for the 
 priests and for the people who work at the shrine and 
 a little inn for the sick people who come, and he writes 
 a great deal about the shrine and all the blessed work 
 of our Lady. People from all over Italy come to the 
 shrine, just as they go to Santa Rosalia's on Monte 
 Pellegrino in Palermo and to Lourdes in France. No
 
 36 Italy Old and New 
 
 one comes to see old Pompeii now without coming to 
 see the wonder-working Madonna of Valle di Pompeii. 
 
 ''Strange people come sometimes, Signorina. There 
 was an English artist who stayed here at the Inn several 
 days to paint and he wished to paint a picture of me. 
 He said I must talk to him while he painted so I would 
 look natural. I told him my story as I have you, and 
 he became very much excited on hearing that the Ma- 
 donna appeared and began her miracles the same day 
 the fresco of the goddess with the elephants was discov- 
 ered in old Pompeii. He told me such strange things, 
 — that the goddess of the elephants was a goddess of 
 love with a little winged son, and she could make people 
 do what she wished; that she loved flowers just as our 
 Blessed Virgin does. You will see her painted among 
 lilies and roses on the walls of the church. He said she 
 was always the goddess of Pompeii and that he is sure 
 when she was re-discovered in the Strada dell' Abbon- 
 danza, as her picture came to light, her power was 
 freed, and she appeared in just another form in our 
 little chapel to be the goddess of Pompeii again, to 
 work for the people, and to make the new city famous, 
 and because she always was the goddess of love, she 
 cured me by making me marry Giovanni. 
 
 "I did not know what to make of the story, so 1 told 
 Giovanni about it and he said the Englishman was un- 
 doubtedly crazy, and we would both go that very night 
 and pray together to the Madonna of the Rosary, and 
 I was never again to think of the English artist or such 
 nonsense. So we went and prayed together for a child, 
 Signorina, and now we have a beautiful baby girl, 
 named Maria for the Blessed Virgin who cured me and 
 gave me Giovanni and my home." 
 
 It was time for me to start for the train to Naples,
 
 The Madonna of Pompeii 37 
 
 but as I promised Carmelita, on my way to the station 
 I stopped at the Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Ro- 
 sary and as I knelt there for a moment with the great 
 throng of devout worshippers and looked up at the 
 beautiful queen of heaven, adorned with jewels, sur- 
 rounded with flowers, I felt a strange sense of awe at 
 the wonders of worship, of faith and of healing, and 
 at the eternally new-old needs of the human soul for 
 its god. Venus redivivaf No ! But there remaineth 
 still the mystery of religion, the unexplainable verity, 
 the perennial belief in the miraculous powers of heaven, 
 and it was passing strange to me that here in Pompeii 
 where the Venus Pompeiana once reigned, I was now 
 kneeling in the great church of the wonder-working 
 Madonna of the Rosary.
 
 V; 
 
 A VISIT TO ANCIENT OSTIA 
 
 FOR one who takes delight in harbors, shipping, 
 cargoes, docks, sailors, seafaring and Joseph 
 Conrad's stories, the ruins of Ostia, the old port 
 of Rome, compose a fascinating chapter in the ancient 
 life of Italy. Yet their significance is so little known 
 that, I suppose, for every fifty travellers who go out 
 from Naples to Pompeii, one goes from Rome to Ostia. 
 Now the reward of a day's trip there, easily made by 
 motor-bus or automobile is a glimpse at an ancient city 
 which was very different in character from Pompeii, 
 commercial, full of business men and foreign-born la- 
 borers, closely connected with Rome but more depend- 
 ent on the sea, expressing in its public buildings and 
 private houses, even ruined as they are today, the char- 
 acter of its life and of its inhabitants. Such a human 
 document, written in bricks, stone, marble, stucco and 
 mosaic, is fascinating reading if one understands the 
 language or has, as it were, a translation of its un- 
 known tongue, or a key for its great historical picture. 
 One difficulty for the average visitor to Ostia is that 
 the descriptions of recent excavations are scattered 
 through the Italian publication, the Notizie degli scavi 
 or secluded in the Literary Supplement of the London 
 Times, or in Thomas Ashby's articles in the "Journal 
 of Roman Studies," and the best guide-book is still the 
 Italian one by Dante Vaglieri published as long ago as 
 1914. There is, however, a small guide in English by 
 
 38
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 39 
 
 Tani, the Guards will point out objects of interest, and 
 the ruins themselves tell much. Perhaps I can be of 
 help by jotting down notes from my study of Ostia and 
 from the brilliant interpretation of the ruins which I 
 heard the Director of the Excavations, Doctor Guido 
 Calza, give. 
 
 The name Ostia, "mouth," is the keynote to the char- 
 acter of the ancient town which was the harbor of Rome 
 at the mouth of the Tiber, fifteen miles from the city, 
 but today because of the deposits brought down by the 
 river, you have to go two miles beyond the excavations 
 to find the sea. Much story and history are associated 
 with this little town. Tradition says it was founded by 
 an early King, Ancus Martius, but neither excavations 
 nor records bear this out. There are no remains earlier 
 than the third century before Christ and the first men- 
 tion of Ostia in history is during the second Punic War. 
 Perhaps there was a little early settlement here for the 
 sake of the saltworks. Ostia was always a colony of 
 Rome and was essential to her as a port for two rea- 
 sons, for her naval supremacy and for her corn supply. 
 Perhaps the foundation of the colony is to be connected 
 with the appointment of the four quaestors of the fleet 
 in 267 B.C., and the assignment of one of them to 
 Ostia. The importance to Rome of the little colony at 
 the mouth of the river was so great that as early as 207 
 B.C., the citizens (along with those of Antium) re- 
 ceived exemption from military service on condition 
 that they be present constantly as a garrison on their 
 own walls. When, however, in 191 B.C., the Ostians 
 tried to secure also exemption from naval service, this 
 was refused. 
 
 Of the many picturesque stories connected with 
 Ostia, the most dramatic is that of the arrival of the
 
 40 Italy Old and New 
 
 Great Mother. When during the second Punic War, 
 Rome was suffering terrible reverses at the hands of 
 I [annibal, the Cumaean Sibyl and Apollo directed that 
 the Magna Mater (a Phrygian goddess, Rhea, or 
 Cybele) should be brought to Rome. When the sacred 
 black stone symbolizing the Great Mother in due time 
 arrived from Pessinus in Phrygia and a great delegation 
 from Rome, led by her noblest citizen, a Scipio, was 
 waiting on the shore at Ostia to receive the sacred ob- 
 ject and carry it to Rome, the boat remained fixed on a 
 sandbar and could not be moved by any amount of 
 human effort. When all were finally in despair over 
 the dreadful omen, Claudia Quinta, a noble matron 
 (some say a Vestal Virgin) whose fair name had been 
 slandered by the gossip of the day, stood forth and 
 prayed to the Great Mother to vindicate her honor and 
 if her life had been pure to follow her to Rome. When 
 Claudia laid her hand on the rope, the ship followed 
 her. A marble altar in the Capitoline Museum in 
 Rome is carved with a picture of this story and to make 
 it clearer, the Magna Mater is represented on the boat 
 not by the black stone, but by a statue. The same story 
 is used by D'Annunzio in one of his most beautiful 
 poems, "A Roma" a deeply serious appeal which chal- 
 lenges Rome, the eternal, to be again the seat of the 
 Great Mother, the spiritual salvation of the world. 
 
 Ostia herself knew the ravages of war, for she was 
 seized by Marius and given over to plunder by his sol- 
 diers, and in 67 B.C. as Cicero tells us, in his speech for 
 the Manilian Law, the fleet was attacked here by Cili- 
 cian pirates and the ships all destroyed or captured. 
 There was need of a real harbor here for the protection 
 both of the navy and of commerce, for as Strabo says, 
 "alluvial deposits continually brought down by the
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 41 
 
 Tiber compelled the larger class of vessels to ride at 
 anchor in the open roadstead at great risk." Julius 
 Caesar planned to make an artificial port, but it was 
 Claudius who carried out his design and made a harbor 
 two miles north of Ostia, communicating with the river 
 by an artificial channel. Here large boats could un- 
 load into smaller craft or into barges which conveyed 
 their cargo to storehouses. Such an operation is repre- 
 sented on a wall-painting from a tomb at Ostia now in 
 the Vatican library. On the boat which is named the 
 Isis Geminiana stand the pilot with an oarlike rudder 
 and the owner with a branch perhaps of laurel. Two 
 porters are walking up a plank carrying bags probably 
 of grain, a third is emptying his bag into a recipient 
 which another man holds, and a fourth sits on the deck 
 beside his bag, which is labelled happily feci, 'I have 
 finished.' The picture is typical of the life of Ostia as 
 the great commercial port of Rome after Claudius' 
 harbor was built. Before that all the largest vessels 
 had to put in at Puteoli, one hundred and fifty miles 
 from Rome, just as St. Paul did. Nero put on his coins 
 a representation of the harbor and would have it called 
 not Portus Claudii but Portus Augusti, so that he might 
 share in the honor of the work, and then Trajan en- 
 larged Claudius' harbor by adding an inner hexagonal 
 basin, and another name, Portus Traiani, and now 
 around the two grew up a new town, Portus Ostiensis, 
 which increased in importance especially in the time of 
 Constantine when it was given the double defence of 
 religion by being made an Episcopal see and of fortifi- 
 cations by the construction of strong walls and towers. 
 Ostia itself, however, flourished through the Empire 
 under Domitian, Hadrian, Severus, and Aurelian; was 
 indeed largely rebuilt in the second century but eventu-
 
 42 Italy Old and New 
 
 ally Portus Ostiensis being well fortified gained the ad- 
 vantage over Ostia which gradually decayed. Portus 
 Ostiensis too suffered the vicissitudes of war, was 
 sacked by Alaric, King of the Goths in 409 A.D., by 
 Belisarius in 537 and by the Arabs in the eighth cen- 
 tury. Little by little as the life of Rome dwindled in 
 importance, the business of Ostia diminished until 
 finally its value was chiefly as a quarry for rich marbles 
 from the ruins. So ancient Ostia in the eleventh cen- 
 tury gave up its treasures for the building of the Cathe- 
 dral of Pisa and in the fourteenth for the Cathedral of 
 Orvieto. 
 
 Something more of the life of the people in the city 
 is learned from the inscriptions found there. Perhaps 
 in the flourishing period of the second and third cen- 
 turies there was a population of 80,000 persons, not 
 counting the transient guests known to every harbor, 
 and this number was largely composed of persons in the 
 middle and lower classes, the men occupied in commerce 
 and industry, and the slaves. There are records of 
 many guilds : of ship-builders and of carpenters, of boat- 
 men and fishermen, of merchants of wine and oil and 
 grain. There must have been, of course, many inn- 
 keepers and tavern-keepers to accommodate the floating 
 population. The city had the usual magistrates of col- 
 onies, duumvirs, quaestors, aediles and a council of de- 
 curions, and besides its officials, Ostia like all small 
 towns had its great, or shall we say, very rich men — 
 Acilius Glabrio whose name is still cut clear in marble 
 block dedicated to the safety of some Caesar, perhaps 
 Domitian, and the two Lucilii Gamale, whose public 
 benefactions are recorded in two long inscriptions. 
 What a strangely modern sound these lists of public 
 services have ! Banquets for the citizens of the towns,
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 43 
 
 rebuilding of public edifices like the baths, the paving 
 of the roads, subscriptions for repairing the temples, 
 generous contributions to war funds. It was something 
 to be a Lucilius Gamale in Ostia ! You can imagine how 
 important such a man was on the occasions when dis- 
 tinguished foreigners landed here en route to Rome, or 
 when an emperor came out to inspect the needs of the 
 harbor, or when the city was visited by the wealthy 
 Romans who owned villas along the Via Ostiense or the 
 shore. 
 
 Of such visits we have the most human and delightful 
 records. About 200 A. D. a Christian lawyer of Rome, 
 Minutius Felix, wrote a dialogue called the "Octavius," 
 the scene of which is laid here. Minutius himself and 
 his friend Octavius, both Christians, and Caecilius, a 
 pagan, had decided on a delightful autumn day to go to 
 that very pleasant city Ostia for the sea-bathing and 
 after walking on the sand "at the very threshold of the 
 water" and watching some small boys skipping shells 
 on the waves, they sat down on the rocks, to rest and 
 to argue. And there was much to talk about, for as 
 they were walking, Caecilius had kissed his hand, in 
 reverence, to a statue of the Egyptian god Serapis, and 
 now they must talk over the worship of the old gods 
 and the new Christ, the temple not made with hands, 
 the hope of a resurrection of the body and all "those 
 things which it is easier to feel than to say." It would 
 be worth while to take the dialogue "Octavius" out to 
 Ostia and read it by the surf where the three friends 
 talked until Caecilius was conquered and "saw a great 
 light." 
 
 Another famous religious conversation took place at 
 Ostia between St. Augustine and his mother Monica 
 before her death there. It is written in the "Confes-
 
 44 Italy Old and New 
 
 sions" beginning in Book IX at the tenth chapter. (I 
 use William Watts' translation.) 
 
 "The day now approaching that she was to depart 
 this life, it fell out . . . that she and I should stand 
 alone leaning in a certain window, which looked into 
 the garden within the house where we now lay, at Ostia 
 by Tiber; where being sequestered from company after 
 the wearisomeness of a long journey, we were recruiting 
 ourselves for a sea voyage. There conferred we hand 
 to hand very sweetly; and forgetting those things which 
 are behind, we reached forth unto those things which 
 are before: we did betwixt ourselves seek at that Pres- 
 ent Truth in what manner the eternal life of the saints 
 was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor 
 hath it entered into the heart of man. But yet we 
 panted with the mouth of our heart after those upper 
 streams of thy fountain, the fountain of life; that being 
 besprinkled with it according to our capacity, we might 
 in some sort meditate upon so high a mystery." 
 
 It was only five days afterwards that Monica fell 
 into a fever and soon realizing that her end was near, 
 bade her sons bury her there, and when they in their 
 distress longed to have her die not in a strange place, 
 but in her own country that there she might be buried, 
 she reassured them saying: "Lay this body anywhere, 
 let not the care for that disquiet you," just as to cer- 
 tain of her friends she had also given words of com- 
 fort, saying "Nothing is far from God." No son 
 could write about his mother more tenderly than does 
 Saint Augustine. 
 
 The picture of son and mother standing in the win- 
 dow of the inn "looking into the garden within the 
 house" is a beautiful introduction to a study of the style 
 of the houses in Ostia. They are very different from
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 45 
 
 the houses at Pompeii in which rooms are grouped about 
 a large central hall, the atrium, and a courtyard sur- 
 rounded by columns, the peristyle ; there are few and 
 very small windows; and there is no complete second 
 story, only in some cases groups of upper rooms with 
 their own staircases. Only one example of this Pom- 
 peian type of house has been found at Ostia. Instead 
 the typical house is a large apartment house of several 
 stories, with rooms on each floor around a central court- 
 yard without a colonnade and lighted from it quite as 
 in a modern apartment house. These houses have many 
 separate staircases for the different apartments and 
 upper balconies. Ask for "the house of Diana" near 
 the Temple of Vulcan and see its amazing character- 
 istics: from the outside the shops with large doors 
 opening on the street, the arched supports for the third- 
 story balconies, and the second-story windows, then, 
 inside, the central courtyard with the fountain and the 
 little shrine to Diana on the wall, the staircases, the 
 upper rooms arranged in groups for separate apart- 
 ments. Then after you have seen it, look up in "Art and 
 Archaeology" for November, 1921, Doctor Calza's 
 article on "The Aesthetics of the Antique City" and 
 see the pictures of reconstructions of houses of this type. 
 As you look at the view of a reconstructed tenement 
 house with its courtyard, you will surely think of St. 
 Augustine and his mother leaning out of a window look- 
 ing down into the garden. Doctor Calza says that one 
 of the most important contributions that the excava- 
 tions at Ostia have made to our knowledge of ancient 
 life is this new light thrown on the history of house 
 architecture during the Empire, for here in a city near 
 Rome and undoubtedly imaging it, we have a style of 
 house which has no counterpart in Greece and the
 
 46 Italy Old and New 
 
 Orient, utterly different from the Pompeian type, and 
 clearly the precursor of the modern house. 
 
 As you walk about, going in one house after another, 
 you will come upon all sorts of fascinating details : little 
 twin shrines on cither side of entrance hall, remarkable 
 frescoes in one large ground-floor room of two orators 
 facing each other and also of two poets, a fresco dec- 
 oration in a room of another house architectural in 
 style but with the columns converging towards the bot- 
 tom and the v r ases on top of the columns not exactly in 
 the center so that the whole effect is asymmetrical, per- 
 haps to suggest perspective. 
 
 There are individual touches in the shops, too, es- 
 pecially in the decorations. In front of one, at the 
 barracks of the fire brigade, in mosaic on the sidewalk 
 is a two-handled goblet and an inscription written in 
 both Greek and Latin saying that Proclus made it. In 
 another tiny shop, the floor mosaic shows again a goblet 
 and around it an inscription with the advice of Fortu- 
 natus (perhaps the shop-keeper) : "As long as ye are 
 thirsty, drink from the bowl." Another large shop is 
 most elaborately adorned in marbles of every color, 
 has a marble counter on the street with three shelves 
 and two basins for washing the goblets, against the wall 
 a sort of sideboard effect with shelves above, cupboards 
 below and paintings of food on the wall and a marble 
 hat-rack with bronze hooks hanging on the wall. 
 
 We can see also some of the public buildings of the 
 people who went to these delicatessen shops and lived 
 in these houses : the barracks of the fire companies, their 
 baths, the building of the corporations trading with 
 Ostia, and the temples of the gods. Of course all these 
 ire in ruin, but the remains are always significant, often 
 beautiful. The barracks of the fire companies show,
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 47 
 
 scratched on two pilasters by the entrance door, names 
 of firemen and an entire alphabet. Inside is a great 
 courtyard and opposite the entrance a sort of alcove 
 chapel of the imperial family, marble columns across 
 the front, a mosaic pavement representing a sacrificial 
 scene with altar, musicians, and bulls, then at the rear, 
 a raised platform bearing five inscribed altars. The 
 barracks show also a latrina or closet with elaborate 
 hygienic arrangements and on the wall an exquisite 
 little marble shrine to revered Fortune. 
 
 The street in front of these barracks is a curiosity, 
 for the road with its great paving-stones stands above 
 the mosaic floor of an earlier building, probably baths 
 of the first century after Christ, so that you look down 
 on mosaics symbolizing the provinces of Rome, the 
 triquetra or three legs for Sicily, a head with a wreath 
 of olive-leaves for Spain, a head with an elephant head- 
 dress for Africa and another with a crocodile for Egypt, 
 and beside the provinces are heads of winds and groups 
 of weapons. Very strange is this magnificent floor 
 decoration of a room submerged beneath a roadway of 
 a later level of civilization. So Ostia disappeared, not 
 by one stroke of fate like that which ended Pompeii, 
 but by the gradual ruin, and rebuilding, and desertion 
 of the centuries. 
 
 The baths, not these under the street, but those of 
 the later empire, show clearly the arrangement of rooms 
 and palestra, the marble bath tubs, the heating arrange- 
 ments, but their great glory consists in the superb mo- 
 saics covering the floors : in one room Neptune driving 
 a chariot of four hippocamps, in another Amphitrite 
 riding through the ocean on a sea-horse and in a third 
 old Triton blowing his sea-wreathed horn. 
 
 The theater is disappointing after a view of the two
 
 48 Italy Old and New 
 
 at Pompeii, and the ones in Syracuse and Segesta, for 
 the seats are nearly all destroyed and there remains 
 only the front of the stage with some of the sculptural 
 decoration, but its outline is clear and its relation to 
 the building of corporations back of it. This to me is 
 one of the most interesting structures in Ostia. Its 
 great open square, 262 by 262 feet, was surrounded 
 by columns and this colonnade was divided into small 
 rooms for the offices of the corporations which had com- 
 mercial dealings with the city. Their floor mosaics give 
 their history, for here are inscribed the names of the 
 corporations, accompanied by pictures of ships, light- 
 houses and dolphins. In a room at the southeastern 
 corner of this building was found the altar, now in the 
 National Museum in Rome, with a relief representing 
 the origins of Rome, — Romulus and Remus, nursed by 
 the wolf, the river-god Tiber, the watching shepherds. 
 In the center of the open area of this building, on a 
 platform seven feet high, was a small temple. The 
 superstructure is gone now, but in place where the hall 
 once was is a seated statue of a goddess, headless, with- 
 out attributes, called Ceres only because so many of the 
 corporations connected with the building had to do with 
 the grain supply. 
 
 In the grassy courtyard other marble statues of 
 toga-clad men stand about as though they were the 
 shades of past Ostians and their presence, the vivid 
 mosaics of seafaring, and the murmur of the stone- 
 pines overhead emphasize a certain mournful quality of 
 disuse which Ostia has for me far more than Pompeii. 
 There people seemed more occupied with the art of liv- 
 ing than with the business of existence, and many of 
 the little houses are so full of color on wall, floor and 
 column and so adorned with flowers that it seems as
 
 AT ARICCIA, NEAR LAKE NEMI 
 
 A FLOOR MOSAIC IX THE BATHS AT OSTIA
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 49 
 
 though the owners must have just gone out for a few 
 moments. 
 
 To study the temples of Ostia is to study the develop- 
 ment of Roman religion, for here the evidence of in- 
 scriptions shows that there were dedications to the 
 abstract Roman deities of early times like Fortune and 
 Hope, to the great Greek and Roman gods, Jupiter, 
 Venus, Vulcan, to the Roman emperors, to Oriental gods 
 especially Mithras and Cybele, and finally a Christian 
 basilica. But the best way to study the cults of Ostia 
 is to read the interesting book written by Professor Lily 
 Taylor, for the ruins of the temples that you visit have 
 no labels, indeed many are mere stone foundations, 
 vague outlines of former halls and vestibules and bases 
 of columns. A few have more character. The so- 
 called Temple of Vulcan stands high and magnificent 
 on its lofty platform, three sides of the great walls 
 towering up above its long entrance flight of steps. This 
 ruin of the second century after Christ dominates all 
 Ostia and for this reason probably was attributed to 
 Vulcan, the most important god in a city where, from 
 the docks and the storehouses of grain, there was al- 
 ways danger of fire. More probably this was the 
 Campidoglio with the forum in front of it and so per- 
 haps should be assigned to Jupiter, or to the goddess 
 Roma and Augustus. 
 
 Equally impressive are the underground chapels 
 sacred to the Phrygian god, Mithras. Enter the large 
 one next "the house of Apuleius" near the Corporation 
 building and try to get its atmosphere. It is a long 
 narrow room with a central passage six feet wide and 
 two benches on either side where the votaries knelt. 
 Opposite the entrance is a cast of the original altar- 
 piece, always found in these Mithrea, a relief represent-
 
 50 Italy Old and New 
 
 ing the victorious young sun-god slaying the bull which 
 S) mbolizes the powers of darkness in the world. There 
 is an altar in position. In the pavement near the door 
 is a hole for the blood of victims and near it in mosaic 
 is wrought a knife of sacrifice. There are mystic sym- 
 bols on floor and benches, semicircles, planets, signs of 
 the zodiac and of all these you may read in Professor 
 Franz Cumont's book on this remarkable worship. On 
 either side of the entrance is a figure of a torch-bearer, 
 one with torch raised, the other with torch lowered, 
 and this too had its meaning for the faithful who came 
 to worship the invincible young warrior-god whose cult 
 the Roman soldiers had brought back from eastern 
 lands. 
 
 One of the recent discoveries is a Christian basilica 
 between the granary and the main street, at least this 
 group of rooms, often rebuilt, shows clear traces of the 
 rectangular nave ending in elevated choir and two large 
 apses on the sides forming with the nave a cross so that 
 probably it was finally a Christian building. The most 
 surprising find in the church is a colossal group of Mars 
 and Venus, a group made of Parian marble and a rep- 
 lica of a type of the fifth century before Christ, the 
 Venus resembling the Venus of Milo. These great 
 gods have strangely enough the faces of a Roman em- 
 peror and his wife, Commodus and Crispina. The 
 group as it stands under one of the tremendous arches 
 of the National Museum in Rome is so magnificent that 
 it seems to belong to those Baths of Diocletian rather 
 than to Ostia, the port. 
 
 Yet as I write those words I realize that I am think- 
 ing of the ruined Ostia of today, and not of the live 
 city of the second and third century after Christ. Imag- 
 ination needs to reconstruct this main street with its
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 51 
 
 magnificent public buildings, its large block houses, its 
 fountains, its statues ; and then try to picture some great 
 fete day, the annual January games in honor of Castor 
 and Pollux, here worshipped as gods of the sea, or the 
 spring festival of the launching of the ship dedicated to 
 Isis, if indeed that beautiful ceremony which Apuleius 
 describes did take place at Ostia as we believe. That 
 account in the eleventh book of Apuleius' Metamor- 
 phoses is another passage to read after you have seen 
 the scavi and are resting at Ostia mare by the surf. 
 Walter Pater retells in English Apuleius' narrative : 
 
 "At the head of the procession, the master of cere- 
 monies, quietly waving back the assistants, made way 
 for a number of women, scattering perfumes. They 
 were succeeded by a company of musicians, piping and 
 twanging, on instruments the strangest M arius had ever 
 beheld, the notes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of 
 this votive rite to a choir of youths, who marched be- 
 hind them singing it. The tire-women and other per- 
 sonal attendants of the great goddess came next, bear- 
 ing the instruments of their ministry, and various 
 articles from the sacred wardrobe, wrought of the most 
 precious material; some of them with long ivory combs, 
 plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert of move- 
 ment as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. 
 Placed in their rear were the mirror-bearers of the 
 goddess, carrying large mirrors of beaten brass or sil- 
 ver, turned in such a way as to reflect to the great body 
 of worshippers who followed, the face of the mysterious 
 image, as it moved on its way, and their faces to it, 
 as though they were in fact advancing to meet the 
 heavenly visitor. They comprehended a multitude of 
 both sexes and of all ages, already initiated into the 
 divine secret, clad in fair linen, the females veiled, the
 
 52 Italy Old and New 
 
 males with shining tonsures, and every one carrying a 
 sistrum — the richer sort of silver, a few very dainty 
 persons of fine gold — rattling the reeds, with a noise 
 like the jargon of innumerable birds and insects awak- 
 ened from torpor and abroad in the spring sun. Then, 
 borne upon a kind of platform, came the goddess her- 
 self, undulating above the heads of the multitude as the 
 bearers walked, in mystic robe embroidered with the 
 moon and stars, bordered gracefully with a fringe of 
 real fruit and flowers, and with a glittering crown upon 
 the head. The train of the procession consisted of 
 the priests in long white vestments, close from head 
 to foot, distributed into various groups, each bearing, 
 exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols of Isis — the 
 corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of equity, and 
 among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and 
 adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked 
 the high priest, the people kneeling as he passed to kiss 
 his hand." 
 
 The picture of such a religious pageant helps us to 
 recall the past life of Ostia by the sea and perhaps to 
 reconstruct the great central street, the Decumanus, and 
 repeople it. I have not begun to describe all there is 
 to start imagination: the gates to the city, the monu- 
 ments along the roads, the bazaars, the mills of grain 
 and oil, the so-called imperial palace, the docks, the 
 many temples, and the most beautiful thing in all Ostia 
 I have not yet mentioned, the colossal statue of Min- 
 erva-Victoria, which stands near the principal gate of 
 the city on the main street, a statue made in the first 
 or second century after Christ but a type derived from 
 the fourth century before Christ, the goddess of wis- 
 dom in full panoply of armor, but given wings. She 
 Stands in the open, her old Piazza grass-covered now,
 
 TI1K STATU-: OF M INKR VA \KT< >RI A AT OSTIA
 
 A Visit to Ancient Ostia 53 
 
 her background the sky and passing clouds, a magnifi- 
 cent and dominant goddess. 
 
 Usually people enter Ostia by the Street of Tombs. 
 I would see the street of life, the Decumanus, first and 
 then go back to the Via dei Sepolcri, enter the Porta 
 Romana, and walk up the street of death. On either 
 side tower tall, solemn cypresses. Very touching are 
 the small columbaria with the little niches in which stood 
 the urns containing the ashes of the humble. There 
 are also beautiful fragments of individual monuments, 
 here a Cupid supporting a great heavy garland of fruit, 
 there a marble doorway flanked by fasces, and pictur- 
 ing the four seasons in the guise of small winged folk, 
 Psyche and Cupids. How much is represented here, — 
 the symbols of power, the passing year, the door of 
 death ! There is another great tomb on the Via Osti- 
 ense whose inscription tells the story of young Lucius 
 Domitius Fabius Hermogenes, — how when the young 
 knight was well started in his career, having been a sec- 
 retary for the aediles at Rome, decurion at Ostia and 
 flamen of the deified Hadrian, he died when he was 
 holding the office of aedile in Ostia and was given a 
 funeral at the expense of the city and an equestrian 
 statue in the forum, and his father in appreciation of 
 these honors made a large contribution to the city trea*- 
 sury. How little the world changes! Office-holding, 
 municipal service, public recognition, father's pride, 
 then the golden bow broken, the mourners by the tomb, 
 then the mourners dead and buried, and no one to care 
 for the monument until even it is buried by nature her- 
 self, and at last the excavator's spade for the sake of 
 the knowledge of antiquity brings to light the half- 
 effaced inscription. 
 
 But such mortuary musings do not last long in the
 
 54 Italy Old and New 
 
 sunlight and the open air and the wind, and I shook 
 them off as I stood on the top of the tower of the Cas- 
 tello, La Rocca, gazing at the view of the ruins by the 
 curving Tiber, the great plain, the sacred island, and 
 the gleaming sea. Then I went down to see the little 
 Museum in the Castle and among the fragments of 
 marble statues, portrait busts and heads of gods, I 
 came upon an exquisite round marble plaque suspended 
 so that I could see both sides, on one a satyr playing 
 the double pipes, on the other a Maenad dancing in 
 joyous ecstasy. That beautiful little oscillum took me 
 back to the zest for life which makes every passing day 
 worth while, at Ostia, at Rome, at Poughkeepsie, or at 
 Ulubrae if, as Horace wrote, you have a contented 
 spirit. It was, with his pregnant "I have lived" in my 
 thoughts that I then walked the two miles down the 
 sandy road between the green meadow stretches to the 
 invigorating salt air, the rhythm of the waves, and a 
 plunge in the surf.
 
 VI 
 
 ITALIAN CROWDS AND THEIR TEMPER 
 
 IN the annual art exhibition in Rome this spring 
 one large canvas represented an Italian crowd. 
 A great group of workers was following two men 
 whose upturned faces had a certain fanatic light. Be- 
 side the leaders ran a woman carrying her baby. The 
 title of the picture, "The Strike," suggested that the 
 artist had wished to portray a part of the great indus- 
 trial movements which are signs of Italy's growth today, 
 but as I studied his portrayal, I felt that he had failed 
 signally. His crowd had no character. They were 
 blindly following leaders who were blind also. They 
 all like sheep had gone astray. Not so pitiful have 
 been the Italian crowds that I have seen. I thought I 
 could do better with such a subject. I resolved to try 
 a picture of Italian crowds and their temper. 
 
 Of course, the writer has this great advantage over 
 the artist that he can give like a cinema not one scene 
 but scores in succession to produce his effect, and I 
 should be at a loss in painting Italian crowds if I had to 
 select only one : I have been in so many and diverse. 
 I think I will beg-in with children and churches, for in 
 Italy even the babies are gregarious. 
 
 Christmas is so peculiarly the children's season that 
 I was not surprised to find part of Rome surrendered to 
 them. They had almost seized the Campidoglio, for 
 on Sunday, December twenty-sixth, the stairs leading 
 
 55
 
 56 Italy Old and New 
 
 from the Piazza of the Capitol to Santa Maria in 
 Aracocli was a veritable rag-fair for the Small. Hun- 
 dreds of persons, every group with a child or with 
 several, were moving up and down the steps around the 
 stands where all sorts of little toys were being sold : 
 tiny cradles with candy bambini in them, little jointed 
 marionette figures dressed in every conceivable costume, 
 miniature sets of dishes, Japanese parasols, noisy 
 squawkers, balloons of all colors. The prices were in- 
 finitesimal. "Otto soldi per un bambolone" I heard 
 one hawker shout. But the children happily clutched 
 their little purchases and carried them into the church. 
 For the scene on the steps of Santa Maria in Aracoeli 
 was only a prelude to the real business of the day, the 
 recitations of the children in the church in immemorial 
 Christmas custom. Inside I found the most marvellous 
 Presepio I saw in Rome, for the life-size figures and 
 beautiful effects of lighting gave an almost unearthly 
 beauty to the scene, where all the hosts of heaven, above 
 shining crescent moon and stars, looked down on the 
 manger, in front of which, surrounded by Mary and 
 Joseph, Saint John and the kings, lambs and doves, 
 stood the wonder-working Bambino. His stiffly-bound 
 little figure was ablaze with the jewels and gold of vo- 
 tive gifts, his head wore an ornate golden crown with 
 which a Pope once rewarded his miracles, but I am 
 sure no present ever pleased him more than the Christ- 
 mas recitations of the little Italians. Opposite the Pre- 
 sepio on a small, high, wooden platform constructed 
 against a tall gray column the children stood and recited 
 their pieces to the sacred Bambino facing them. They 
 were little tots, from five to ten, I should judge, and 
 naturally greatly excited, their cheeks flushed, their eyes 
 sparkling, but their sweet, high voices were clear and
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 57 
 
 certain, their many little gestures expressive, their mien 
 most earnest. Only one, very small, made a mistake 
 and had to begin over again amid derisive giggles of 
 naughty little boys below her, but the second time she 
 was word perfect. It was an ordeal, for a large crowd 
 stood listening, not only proud parents, but priests, 
 soldiers, foreigners and also little friends. I saw many 
 a Small One lifted up on father's shoulder to see; and 
 up over the crowd floated luminous pink and blue bal- 
 loons whose strings were clutched below by tiny hands. 
 It was all a Babies' Day, a remarkable public oppor- 
 tunity for the self-expression of infancy, and the crowd 
 that watched and listened was as happy as you would 
 expect it to be in a nation that adores children. 
 
 A church festival that was almost another children's 
 day was the blessing of the lambs at Sant' Agnese fuori 
 le Mura on January twenty-first. The little church was 
 crowded long before the ceremony and as we stood 
 listening to preliminary masses, I noticed how many 
 children were there as well as the long row of young 
 girls in white veils kneeling on the steps of the choir for 
 their first communion. It was fitting, for little Saint 
 Agnes suffered martyrdom at thirteen and because the 
 lamb is a symbol of her infant purity, the two lambs 
 whose wool is to be used to make the archbishop's robe 
 are brought to Saint Agnes' church for benediction. 
 The crowd, children included, was quietly devout in the 
 beauty of the church where many candles, burning in 
 high crystal chandeliers, cast their light on the delicate 
 alabaster statue of the Saint, on the mulberry porphyry 
 of the baldachino columns, on the dull gold of the apse 
 mosaics. But when at last the organ began to play and 
 the choir to sing, the excitement was so intense that, 
 most incongruously, two carabinieri had to make a pas-
 
 58 Italy Old and New 
 
 sage through the crowd for the two beadles of San 
 Giovanni Laterano who bore in the lambs. The beas- 
 ties lay in their baskets, very white and good, decked 
 with pink and blue ribbons and flowers, and never 
 lifted their voices at the high altar through the arch- 
 bishop's long prayer, nor indeed in their difficult reces- 
 sional when the ardent crowd all tried to pat them and 
 the children, touching them with affectionate hands 
 cried shrilly: "Addio, addio." To me the lambs were 
 no more self-controlled than the children in their quiet 
 devotion, and their loving calls. I was glad that friend 
 of children, Kenneth Grahame, was there, for when I 
 saw, above all the Italians, his magnificent head with 
 white hair and moustache, ruddy out-door coloring, 
 intent blue eyes, and the sudden smile of a young god, 
 I felt that he would understand in what a golden age 
 the Italian children live, amid beauty and spontaneity. 
 The period of adolescence demands more vivacious 
 self-expression than childhood and it is not strange, in 
 this era of world-strikes and group action, to find the 
 students in Italy banding together in public demonstra- 
 tions which are as innocent as they are lively. In Rome, 
 at some small crisis they gather in the streets, are 
 peaceably dispersed by the Guardie Regie, dash around 
 winding ways to some more obscure Piazza, sing their 
 songs, begin their speeches, again are scattered. I saw 
 the young Fascisti here one afternoon when they be- 
 lieved that national spirit needed exhilaration marching 
 up the Corso Umberto, singing the Hymn of Mameli, 
 and calling to all patriots to display the Tricolor, and 
 from Palazzi, office windows and shops, men looked out 
 tolerantly and with good-humored response unfurled 
 their flags until the Corso was brilliant with the waving 
 red, white and green. A more typical student agitation
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 59 
 
 occurred in mid-winter when the students protested 
 against the high price of books, declaring in public 
 meetings, with a surprisingly serious ardor, that many 
 of them could not afford to study. There was some 
 glass-breaking in the large and expensive bookstores 
 and a few arrests, but their own orators with extreme 
 good sense exhorted them to show the self-control 
 which their just cause demanded and not to give occa- 
 sion to anarchists to laugh in their sleeves and point 
 derisive fingers at the outbreaks of those who pretend 
 to be upholders of education, discipline and law. I was 
 especially interested in finding that again and again the 
 students united for joint expression, achieved free 
 speech, and maintained self-control in action. 
 
 Besides these crowds of the Very Young there are 
 crowds of Intellectuals, "High-brows" they would be 
 dubbed in America, who gather in overwhelming num- 
 bers for music, for classical plays and — more surprising 
 — for lectures. The crowds of men who assemble for 
 band-concerts in every small city as well as on the Pincio 
 in Rome are not amazing, for such music in the open air 
 always has a popular appeal, but it was surprising to 
 find in mid-summer at Verona the old amphitheater 
 packed to the top with thousands who had come from 
 all over Italy to see grand opera. It was thrilling to be 
 a part of that great Italian audience which under the 
 full moon watched the magnificent spectacle of Boito's 
 "Mefistofele" so breathlessly and at the end, rising, 
 cheered and applauded so madly, a proud people, sen- 
 sing all the great past which the building represented, 
 responding to all the beauty of their eternally creative 
 genius. 
 
 I was not surprised to find the theater largely at- 
 tended, for the Italians in every-day life are such facile
 
 60 Italy Old and New 
 
 and expressive actors that this form of art cannot but 
 be highly developed and hugely enjoyed. A novelty 
 for me was the children's theater, that Teatro dei Pic- 
 coli where day after day all winter at five the marion- 
 ettes entertain an audience of little people with such 
 delightful performances as "Guerin Meschino," "Gian- 
 ni da Parigi," "Venti Mila Leghe sotto il Mare," yes 
 and even with "La Tempesta" 1 For the Teatro dei 
 Piccoli was not to be outdone by the Argentina or the 
 Valle in producing Shakespeare. My greatest theatrical 
 surprise was to find that more Shakespeare is being 
 given in Rome than in New York, — "Othello," "King 
 Lear," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Romeo and 
 Juliet" among the plays of the winter, and the large 
 audiences which evidently justified the productions were 
 as keenly responsive to both the tragedy and the comedy 
 as they were naturally to such Italian plays as "II 
 Beffardo," "La Cena delle Beffe" and D'Annunzio's 
 "La Gioconda" and "La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio." 
 It was natural that "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" 
 should each be "molto simpatico" to Italian hearts, but 
 the very British and very roisterous Falstaff was as 
 quickly understood by the Italian sensitiveness to per- 
 sonality, however new and strange. 
 
 Intellectual curiosity is as much a national trait as 
 it was of the Greeks when St. Paul proclaimed that 
 they always wished to see and hear some new thing. 
 Italian curiosity, however, focuses as much on the old 
 as on the new. A nation that must always have a live 
 wolf on the Campidoglio in memory of Romulus' kindly 
 nurse is one that cherishes traditions and monuments 
 even to the point of desiring knowledge about them. 
 Sunday after Sunday you may see in the Forum a great 
 throng of men, women and children, many poorly
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 61 
 
 dressed, about some lecturer who is explaining the 
 history of some building. The list of announcements 
 in the papers for such Sunday lectures is long. Then 
 there are also the classical trips in or near Rome made 
 under the auspices of some society. One such gita 
 which I attended was conducted by Commendatore 
 Tambroni to Frascati and Tusculum and there fifty 
 people from Rome followed him up the long green road 
 to the Roman theater on the hill to sit in the old seats 
 for an hour's lecture on the history of Tusculum. And 
 this was a group not only of scholars, but of artists and 
 professional men with their wives and daughters. In 
 Commendatore Tambroni's talks in the city, in the 
 Michael Angelo cloisters of the National Museum and 
 on the Passeggiata Archeologica beyond the Arch of 
 Constantine, not only such a nucleus of the Really In- 
 terested was present, but the Passing Crowd stopped 
 and stayed, small boys wriggling through the audience 
 to the front for a better view, stray soldiers standing 
 attention, priests foregoing prayers, beggars fringing 
 the outskirts of the crowd, all quietly attentive to ac- 
 counts of some ancient tombstone, mutilated statue, 
 ruined temple. Both the numbers and the interest in 
 such archaeological talks are indicative of the Italian 
 reverence for the past. 
 
 This innate sense of reverence in the race is mani- 
 fested always in the presence of death, no Italian fail- 
 ing to stop with lifted hat when a funeral passes. Such 
 reverence at times projects itself into action, conspicu- 
 ously in the after-war organization of the Fascisti, 
 groups of young men who in the name of their five 
 hundred thousand brothers dead in the war have banded 
 to try to make realities out of some of those ideals-in- 
 words for which they fought. Such reverence at other
 
 62 Italy Old and New 
 
 times acts as all inhibitive force to restrain violence. 
 Last summer in Ilorence when the industrial agitations 
 were at their height and the workmen had assumed 
 control of the operation of the factories, one of the 
 greatest experiments ever countenanced by a govern- 
 ment, in the midst of some street excitement, one of the 
 Carabinieri was accidentally killed in the performance 
 of his duty. I saw his funeral cortco pass the beautiful 
 facade of the Cathedral while all Florence, hushed and 
 reverent, stood in silent honor to his martyrdom. Amer- 
 ican newspapers may proclaim such an episode as his 
 death a vign of revolution. One who lives here con- 
 siders it remarkable that when Italy is making industrial 
 and social experiments with a rapidity hardly paralleled 
 in thf world, although feeling runs high and clashes 
 bet? '.en factions come, so few lives in proportion to 
 fche great numbers involved have been lost, such gen- 
 eral balance has been preserved, such crucial experi- 
 ments have been made. 
 
 Watching the great game of politics here this winter, 
 f have been impressed with the fact that in the political 
 life as well as the industrial, the temper of the people 
 is shaping its own future through experiment. The 
 Socialist House of Deputies was in itself a great na- 
 tional experiment, the Socialist majority being elected 
 in an after-war reaction when peace and bread were 
 compelling slogans for votes, and the experiment went 
 on until the astute Minister of the Interior, seeing that 
 the nation (no millennium arriving) was tired of con- 
 stant obstructionism in Parliament and social agitation 
 in public that incited unbalanced anarchists to violence 
 like that in the Milan theater, dismissed the Camera 
 and called for the elections which diminished the Social- 
 ist numbers and united most of the other parties in a
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 63 
 
 Nationalist block. I saw the temper of the Socialist 
 Camera at an ordinary session, extraordinary enough 
 in my eyes, though most of the speeches were as dull as 
 those of the average college faculty meeting. Academic 
 circles, however, manifest no such freedom of expression 
 as found vent there, for Deputies showed their personal 
 reactions to speeches at the moment, hurled invectives, 
 anathematized and howled together while De Nicola 
 in the chair shook continuously a huge bronze bell that 
 was noisy but ineffective. All this was over a censure 
 just reported by a committee of inquiry on the pecula- 
 tions of a certain Socialist member. From this bedlam 
 the House presently dropped into one of those dull and 
 interminable speeches by which the Socialists were 
 obstructing the proposed increase in the price of bread 
 and though certain Deputies of the Center assured the 
 Honorable Zanardi that all his arguments were already 
 before them in a printed statement which they waved, 
 he went droning on until the house was half emptied. 
 Such a session is no fair representation of all that the 
 Socialists are doing for Italy in getting the principles 
 of syndicalism into the national consciousness and in giv- 
 ing publicity to the cause of the workers, but having 
 promised much and accomplished less, they have seen 
 the pendulum swing back and their power truncated by 
 the practical sense of the populace which is determined 
 somehow to have the work of reconstruction go on. 
 Certainly, however, the Socialists had their day in the 
 Camera and enjoyed the greatest freedom of speech. 
 
 I had the good fortune to be present also at the 
 Senate on an occasion that was peculiarly significant. 
 The Senate is a very different looking body from the 
 Camera, for the members are veritably "fathers" of 
 the country appointed for life and nominated by the
 
 64 Italy Old and New 
 
 king on the basis of long service in the Camera, dis- 
 tinguished work in science or scholarship and dis- 
 tinguished service to the state. One sees hoary heads 
 and well-known faces, — General Badoglio and Admiral 
 Millo, Vita Volterra, mathematician, Rodolfo Lanci- 
 ani, archaeologist, Marconi, inventor, Sonnino, states- 
 man; — and watching one feels that the Senate of today 
 might be the subject of as dignified an historical paint- 
 ing as Maccari's great representation of it at the time 
 of Cicero and Catiline. The first session I attended was 
 for the discussion of the Treaty of Rapallo, that corol- 
 lary of the Treaty of Versailles, by which Italy's fron- 
 tiers have been guaranteed by land to the north, but 
 left inadequate by sea to the east, a compromise meas- 
 ure, as treaties are, to secure a modus vivendi during 
 a reconstruction period. All knew that the Treaty had 
 to be signed, for the economic recuperation of Italy, 
 but the bitterness of the day was voiced by the new 
 senator from Zara, Ziliotto, who protested in the name 
 of the Italianita of Dalmatia against the sacrifice of 
 Zara's sister-cities on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. 
 The Senate listened gravely until the orator suddenly 
 launching a tremendous enconium of the hero of Fiume 
 declared that Italy could not make peace against or 
 without Gabriele D'Annunzio. That name of poet- 
 aviator-commander, which still so inflames the hearts 
 of young Italy, fired the bald-headed fathers to a vocif- 
 erous protest almost equal to those of the Camera, but 
 amidst hisses and cries of "Basta, basta," "Enough," 
 Ziliotto calmly continued his praise of the influence, the 
 independence and the patriotism of "the greatest leader 
 of Italy." The Treaty had to be signed and the terrible 
 "five days of Fiume" at Christmas-time had to be en- 
 dured by the nation which now is sacrificing even its
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 65 
 
 most passionate hero-worship to its national life. The 
 temper of the Senate as I saw it then and at other times 
 was a grim, sustained resolution to hold the country to 
 recuperation. 
 
 National traits appear also in the great public feste 
 of anniversary days. Such a one was September 20, the 
 fiftieth birthday of United Italy. I wished to share all 
 the popular celebrations, so the evening before I went 
 up on the Pincio for the illumination. Two great war 
 search-lights or "reflectors" were being operated by 
 soldiers, and first one made a Milky Way of light above 
 the avenue of trees through which we ascended the hill. 
 Soon they sent golden beams filtering down through 
 trees on fountains as if Zeus were descending to Danae. 
 Then suddenly they would flash on the city below and 
 evoke St. Peter's dome from the dark. Again in a 
 moment they were off to the sky chasing each other in 
 great while balls, a mystic dance of Luna and Endym- 
 ion. And all the time the band was playing to their 
 madness and the enraptured crowd was watching 
 quietly, proud of the glory that is Rome. On the morn- 
 ing of September twentieth, I stood in the enormous 
 crowd at the foot of the Campidoglio to see the senators 
 and the deputies go up to hear the speeches in the hall 
 of the Horatii and the Curiatii. The most moving part 
 of the morning was not the gorgeous picture made by 
 tricolor and flag of Rome, floating above the Dioscuri 
 at the top of the steps, or the enthusiasms of the crowd 
 as they cried "Viva il Re" when in a great touring-car 
 the king dashed past, but the sight of the Garibaldini 
 some forty of them, old, old men in scarlet shirts and 
 caps, proudly stumping up the slope of the Capitoline, 
 the heroes of the day for the sake of their youth when
 
 66 Italy Old and New 
 
 they flung lives and fortunes into the cause of the 
 Thousand. 
 
 Such days call out the pride of Italy in her history 
 and show her unity. The spirit of the war, that reunion 
 of all forces in a great, common cause, was again evoked 
 on November fourth, the anniversary of the overwhelm- 
 ing defeat of the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto. For 
 five and a half hours in the Piazza Venezia I watched 
 the celebration, unconscious of bodily fatigue in the 
 contagious exaltation of the crowd's spirit. The cere- 
 mony which took place before the Altar of the Country 
 on the Monument of Vittorio Emmanuele was the 
 decoration by the king of the flags that had seen service 
 in the war. The Piazza Venezia was gradually sur- 
 rounded by a cordon of soldiers, conspicuous among 
 them the black Africans in baggy white trousers, red 
 fezzes and red velvet jackets, and the mounted lancers 
 along the bottom of the Piazza, magnificently sitting 
 their great horses and carrying on the tops of their 
 spears small dark-blue banners. With the striking 
 black, red, white, blue of the Carabinieri and the green- 
 gray of the soldiers, the Piazza was already brilliant 
 before the Grand Corteo arrived. Promptly at nine- 
 thirty the resplendent king's guard rode in, men who 
 seemed giants in black and steel with long horse-hair 
 crests flowing from glistening helmets. There followed 
 the royal carriages, coachmen and footmen in scarlet 
 livery, a guard of honor of army and navy in each 
 carriage, in the first the king who was warmly acclaimed 
 by the people, then Queen Margherita and Queen 
 Elena, the crown prince and the young princesses, but 
 far more than by any royalty was I stirred by General 
 Diaz who walked with Admiral de Revel at the head of 
 "the army with banners."
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 67 
 
 After that great commander of Vittorio Veneto 
 flowed a stream of men in gree.i gray and dark blue, 
 carrying the tricolors, and we realized anew what those 
 youths had endured as we saw not only flags rent to 
 mere streamers, but men carrying them who were mu- 
 tilated in face and body. Through the crowd at last 
 I caught a glimpse of the great white monument 
 thronged with men in uniform and across the top of the 
 steps, before the statue of Roma, the long rows of the 
 flags awaiting the king's recognition. Above, five aero- 
 planes were circling. Below, the Piazza was now filled 
 with ranks of soldiers. The thoughts of those who 
 were making the speeches and those who watched were 
 with the dead as much as with the living and, as the 
 mothers of the fallen laid a golden wreath upon the 
 altar of the fatherland, Italy in silent reverence seemed 
 to reconsecrate herself to united effort towards those 
 ideals of liberty, democracy and justice for which she 
 had believed she was fighting. 
 
 Such attempts to share the experiences of many an 
 Italian crowd have made me, I believe, participate in 
 their feeling so that I can appraise their temper. I do 
 not forget the old Roman proverb "many men, many 
 minds," 
 
 "quot homines, tot sententia;," 
 
 and I know that different groups have different spirits 
 and that another person may receive from them differ- 
 ent impressions from mine. For myself, I have found 
 certain group traits recurring so often that they seem 
 to me national. One is a warmth of feeling that makes 
 devoted friends and bitter enemies, that easily strength- 
 ens into worship for the church, for a hero, or for a 
 cause so that passionate ardor paints the national life
 
 68 Italy Old and New 
 
 in Titian's colors. Such feeling, easily ebullient, carries 
 its own perils, but because it seeks and attains the outlet 
 of full self-expression, it is not often surcharged or 
 dangerous. The freedom of speech maintained (not 
 always without struggles) in press, open air meetings, 
 public discussions, Camera and Senate is the greatest 
 guarantee of the nation's sanity, for it proves that re- 
 stricting fear is absent. The Italians, personally and 
 as a nation, so respect the right to be one's self, that 
 self-expression is tolerated alike for individual and 
 group. 
 
 Sensitiveness to beauty is another part of the national 
 heritage in a country where from childhood men have 
 the aesthetic senses stimulated by nature and by art. 
 There is a true psychology back of Wordsworth's lines, 
 
 "Beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face," 
 
 and the eye as well as the ear drinks unconsciously that 
 magic draught. This aesthetic sense of the Italians is 
 evinced not only in the support of various forms of art, 
 but in the cultivated aspect of their public life from the 
 beautifying of the Roman forum and the Palatine with 
 wealth of roses, oleanders, wistaria, to the smart ele- 
 gance of the military uniforms and all the brilliant 
 pageantry of national celebrations. 
 
 Of course, intermingled with such fine sense of form 
 is the reverence for the past that makes part of the 
 national pride, that historical sense which sees not only 
 the present, but looks before and after. "Italy can 
 afford to wait for justice," a statesman remarked, "for 
 she counts time, not by hours, but by centuries." It is 
 an anomaly that hand in hand with such reverence for
 
 Italian Crowds and Their Temper 69 
 
 the past goes an intellectual curiosity about the untried 
 that is making the Italians today such experimenters in 
 national problems that now the workmen may try to op- 
 erate factories, now forty Fascisti, elected deputies on a 
 vague program and with no party affiliations, may dash 
 into the Arena of public life chanting "Ci siamo noi," 
 "We are here," and attempt, like the knights of the 
 round table, "to right all wrong." Perhaps one reason 
 the Italians are not afraid of experiment or of the new 
 is because they know how deep-rooted and vital are 
 their traditions. Also the lightheartedness that starts 
 many a little song floating up from the streets and that 
 makes even beggars often so gay and the good humor 
 which is part of the reward of living much in the open 
 keep the country sanguine in its worst moments. 
 
 Moreover, at times of national crisis that which binds 
 is far stronger than that which sunders. In the war, 
 united Italy was reborn, and the memory of that renas- 
 cence today forms the subconscious welding of all fac- 
 tions. When D'Annunzio in his last days in Fiume 
 indignant at the "rinunciatori" in the home govern- 
 ment, flung off his war decorations and declared him- 
 self an outlaw, one of the humorous papers had a skit 
 representing the conversation of two Deputies in Rome. 
 
 "What a pity D'Annunzio has given up his country!" 
 "Don't worry. If any foreign nation attacks Italy, D'An- 
 nunzio will be Italian again." 
 
 That patriotism which holds the most volatile is deep- 
 rooted in the common soul. Skirmishes between Com- 
 munists and Fascisti may keep daily life agitated and 
 hot feeling and free speech may create abroad the 
 mirage of an Italian revolution, but here one sees the 
 fundamental patriotism of the individual Italian and
 
 70 Italy Old and New 
 
 knows that the reverence for past history and the devo- 
 tion to a growing state are stronger than the fisticuffs of 
 the hour. When again shall come the call "Brothers of 
 Italy, Italy awakes," 
 
 "Fratelli d'ltalia 
 L'ltalia s'e desta," 
 
 together all her sons, shoulder to shoulder in one great 
 crowd, will respond with a single devotion, 
 
 "Stringiamci a coorte 
 Siam pronti alia morte: 
 Italia chiamo."
 
 VII 
 
 TEA-DRINKING IN ROME 
 
 THE first lesson that many Americans who come 
 to Rome have to learn of the Eternal City is the 
 art of relaxation. Days in Italy are much 
 longer and much more leisurely than in the United 
 States. You may make the morning what you will, for 
 the light breakfast served in your room with your news- 
 paper takes no time and readjusts you to a new day 
 without the strain of liking your fellow beings before 
 you have had your coffee. After lunch you are forced 
 to take a siesta, for all business is suspended from 
 twelve to three, and if you wish to venture out in the 
 warm sunshine, you will find even the cab-drivers wak- 
 ing reluctantly and nothing except the Museums open 
 to you. Dinner will not be served until eight, so by 
 half-past five it is well to rest again and somewhere 
 find a place for table-talk, that delightful exchange of 
 ideas and confidences which whets personality and 
 makes life more scintillating. 
 
 The Italians agree so fully with Emerson's dictum, 
 "the law of one to one is necessary for conversation," 
 that the tea-tables are generally small, but if you must 
 be more social, obliging camericri will accommodate 
 you with extra chairs or combine multiples of tables. 
 The Romans will sip hot black coffee while English or 
 Americans linger over tea-cups, but in hot weather all 
 indulge in the famous and fancy ices of the country, 
 
 71
 
 12 Italy Old and New 
 
 cassata Siciliana, ijclali, caffc yranita con panna, spu- 
 monc. How delicious the very names are! 
 
 The mood of any day may be satisfied by a special 
 atmosphere for one's tea hour and a little jaunting 
 about soon tells you where to go for the best food, 
 what types of people you see in different tea-rooms, 
 where you may drink to music, where you may loaf and 
 invite your soul out-doors. 
 
 English tea, English muffins, Scotch marmalade and 
 the British you will find at "Miss Babington's" in the 
 Piazza di Spagna. A typical habitue was a dear old 
 Scotchman who always sat in a well-sheltered corner 
 opposite the door and responded to my inquiry for his 
 health with a brisk: "Thank you kindly, I'm in my 
 frail usual." All during the war he had knitted mufflers 
 and socks for Italian soldiers and in his devotion to his 
 second country he had even sold his treasured first edi- 
 tion of Keats for funds to give the blinded, and now 
 often of an afternoon after reading an hour or two in 
 the sacred Keats' rooms over the Spanish steps, he 
 would come to "Miss Babington's" for his tea as do 
 so many of the foreigners who live in sight of Bernini's 
 ship fountain. You can go in Miss Wilson's and Piale's 
 circulating libraries in the square and exchange your 
 books or run into Cook's or the American Express for 
 information about your next trip, or buy Christmas 
 presents of Roman scarves and Roman pearls across 
 the street, or get an armful of fresh flowers for five 
 lire on the steps above the fountain, and then having 
 enjoyed the conveniences of the Piazza di Spagna, sit 
 down in Miss Babington's to read your paper or to talk 
 polite nothings, for here tables are too close for con- 
 fidences or a free getting acquainted. 
 
 "Old England" is another tea center for the English
 
 Tea- Drinking in Rome 73 
 
 and Americans, especially in winter when for us chilly 
 folk there are two open wood fires. There is music 
 too after five, the tea-pots do not drip, there are com- 
 fortable wicker-chairs for those who loathe sitting up 
 straight and after your shopping in the great depart- 
 ment store of which this tea-room makes the top floor, 
 you can relax here, watching stout British matrons read 
 Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography by the fire, or, in the 
 outer circle of tables back of the columns, handsome 
 Italian gentlemen talk to their quietly dressed wives or 
 their loudly bejewelled innamorate. 
 
 A more purely Italian place is La Tour's in the S. S. 
 Apostoli, the upstairs room, that magnificent baroque 
 salon of the old Palazzo Colonna where crystal chande- 
 liers sparkle and marble statues watch the crowd below. 
 Here about six every day in the week, Sunday included, 
 you will find the room crowded with fashionable Ital- 
 ians. More interesting to me is the historic little Caffe 
 Greco just off the Piazza di Spagna on the Via Con- 
 dotti. Its long narrow space is divided by partitions 
 and pillars into five small rooms each of which has 
 its own character. In the front one, an hexagonal 
 glass case in the center displays autograph letters from 
 famous habitues and pictures of the Caffe in times past, 
 and on this case presiding jauntily and incongruously 
 over the room stands a bronze statuette of Mark 
 Twain. At one end of the room is a small side-board 
 gay with wine-bottles. Along the sides elderly gentle- 
 men solemnly indulge in chess and checkers. In the 
 next two rooms, the light is artificial and dim, and here 
 journeys are apparently ending in lovers' meetings, for 
 smart officers always seem to be greeting their ladies 
 after long absence. How the art of coquetry can be 
 practised under the quizzical and amused eyes of the
 
 74 Italy Old and New 
 
 Pan-Statue facing them I cannot imagine. The two 
 rear rooms are long and narrow. On the right-hand 
 one under the sky-lights you will find writers dictating 
 to secretaries, men with ruffled hair composing, artists 
 making small pencil sketches, ordinary persons reading 
 the last newspaper. In the other long room there is a 
 billiard table, and, beyond, the bar where a very hand- 
 some, dark-haired, dark-eyed youth will show you 
 above his head an oil sketch of a beautiful fair baby boy 
 and laughingly tell you "That is myself" while he 
 points out the artist's inscription: 
 
 "A Mario Gubinelli 
 Ottimo fra i bambini 
 pessimo fra i modelli." 
 
 The rooms are all decorated with oil paintings of Italy 
 and Rome, dark old-fashioned paintings of the Cam- 
 pagna, of Soracte, of Tivoli's water-falls, of the Colos- 
 seum, the Arch of Titus and the Palatine, and in among 
 these panels are set medallion relief portraits of famous 
 past habitues, Liszt, Wagner, Thorwaldsen, Gogol. 
 You can see them all if you go early in the afternoon. 
 Be sure not to miss the miniatures painted by the pro- 
 prietor, Signor Gubinelli, that hang in a case at the 
 farthest end of the Caffe, exquisite, artistic work. 
 
 For classical atmosphere instead of artistic, seek the 
 Basilica Ulpia and do not be misled by the name to 
 suppose you are going to worship. A humorous paper 
 in reporting a Sunday conversation laughed at just this 
 chance of error. 
 
 "Have you been to church today?" 
 
 "Yes, I went to the Basilica Ulpia." 
 
 "Oh ! Then you certainly were in heaven." 
 You must understand that the Basilica Ulpia is not a
 
 Tea-Drinking in Rome 75 
 
 church at all but a very elegant restaurant built in an 
 apse of the old law-court or basilica in Trajan's Forum. 
 You enter from the Piazza of Trajan's Column and 
 drink your tea under the unadorned imperial walls, and 
 you may descend (especially after dinner for coffee) 
 to a lower room of the same old structure where your 
 feet will freeze on the great flat stones of the original 
 pavement and imperial awe or shivers from walls so 
 ancient create a need for more and more caffe nero. 
 
 The Basilica Ulpia from its classical heritage might 
 well be a modern center of political life, but you will 
 not find it so. To see the Deputies of Rome, you must 
 go to Aragno's, the great caffe on the Corso Umberto, 
 and watch the throngs of politicians that pour over there 
 from Montecitorio, to sip coffee and liqueurs and make 
 the politics of Rome over the cups. Men sit out at the 
 tables on the sidewalk, women pass by on the other side 
 and this is a pity because the Aragno ices are delicious. 
 
 Both men and women, however, may enter the 
 "Golden Gate," or on warm days sit out in front of that 
 charming tea-room at the top of the Via Veneto, look- 
 ing at the great Aurelian wall and under its round 
 arches at the green vistas of the Villa Borghese. Half 
 the Roman world drives by, half sits here drinking to 
 dreamy music and watching the passing show. 
 
 One can be even cooler in summer on the Terrace of 
 the Rinascente. You step into the store from the con- 
 fusion and noise of the Corso Umberto, take a rapid 
 elevator to the top of the building and walk out on a 
 wide terrace overhung with trailing green of rose- 
 bushes and wistaria, surrounded with gardenias, and set 
 with wicker chairs and tables covered with gay cloths 
 in blue and white, red and white, yellow and white pat- 
 terns. The chief attraction is not the "specialty" of the
 
 76 Italy Old and New 
 
 Rinascente, a marvellous concoction of strawberry ice, 
 fresh wild strawberries and whipped cream, but the 
 views all over Rome, of roof-tops, spires, campanili, of 
 the green Pincian, and the Janiculum. My favorite 
 table is one where I can look down on the column of 
 Marcus Aurelius and the bubbling fountain below it and 
 the busy crowd passing so rapidly and so quietly. Up 
 here one is far from 
 
 "the noise and fret and fume of town," 
 fumum et opes strepitumque Romae. 
 
 But the most beautiful and thoroughly Roman spot 
 for tea or for dinner outdoors is the Castello dei Cesari 
 on the Aventine. On your way up, driving or walking, 
 you will go to the Francescan church of Santa Sabina 
 for its peaceful beauty of gray columns and marble 
 chancel and to the Villa of the Knights of Malta for the 
 glimpse of Saint Peter's through the key-hole at the end 
 of the long green way. Then at sunset time you will 
 arrive at the Castello dei Cesari and taking a hurried 
 look at the busts of the emperors in the great red hall 
 inside, you will seek the terrace for tea with the sunset 
 shedding orange and violet lights on the Palatine's mas- 
 sive imperial ruins and stately cypresses. 
 
 At any and all of these places, you may hear, if your 
 ears are attuned to the beautiful Italian language and 
 if you are not talking too rapidly yourself, the chit- 
 chat of the hour. Bits of conversation wafted to your 
 ears show what is in Rome's mind from the eternal 
 newspaper to last night's opera. What is the exchange 
 today? Will the ministry fall? Are England's domes- 
 tic difficulties greater than Italy's? Who drew the suc- 
 cessful number in the Tombola? Is Dina Galli or 
 Emma Grammatica the more artistic actress? Where
 
 Tea-Drinking in Rome 77 
 
 is D'Annunzio now? How is it that the ex-Kaiser still 
 owns the Villa Falconieri at Frascati? Who is operat- 
 ing the Fiat works at present? Can the steamship lines 
 continue service to the United States under the new 
 immigration laws? 
 
 Suddenly you cease to hear the stray questions of the 
 talk of others and your mind instead of following two 
 lines of thought is absorbed in one as your companion 
 grows more interesting. I shall never forget one talk 
 up at the Castello dei Cesari this spring or what a 
 young Sicilian Lieutenant told me. 
 
 It does not matter how we utter strangers came to be 
 there together at tea-time. The stupid details of pre- 
 liminary introductions I will forego and only state that 
 we had never seen each other before and probably 
 never would again, and that sense of detachment per- 
 haps made him talk more freely to me. The men who 
 have fought say so little about their war experiences 
 that certain stray sentences stick in my mind. Not long 
 before a Captain had remarked to me : "I would never 
 tell you what war at the front was like, but just imagine 
 a river running red with blood, with blood!" An Al- 
 pino had emphasized another aspect. "It was different 
 for us up in the mountains," he said. "We didn't have 
 the vermin of the trenches, and when our officers died 
 we covered them with the bright Alpine flowers and 
 buried them in the mountains where the beauty made it 
 a little easier." A few words may say so much, but the 
 young Sicilian officer told me more, in fact a little story, 
 which might be called 
 
 "A Bottle of Strega." 
 
 "Yes, it is my right arm that is limp, Signorina. It 
 was paralyzed and doesn't work yet, so the doctors sent
 
 78 Italy Old and New 
 
 me back to Sicily for a rest and now they are going to 
 try electricity on it. I get on very well with my left 
 hand as you see, and I'm here." 
 
 He was the picture of life with his high Sicilian col- 
 oring, all bronzed and crimson-cheeked, his dark eyes 
 glowing. 
 
 "I was up at Monte Grappa. I was there for months 
 and months. It was very dangerous, and little by little 
 life became different. Our minds were all right and we 
 thought about everything, but we did not feel any more. 
 I don't know why it was unless we gradually returned 
 to a kind of wood life like the animals because we were 
 always in danger and our minds were bent just on keep- 
 ing alive. An officer would be killed, some man with 
 whom I had served two years, who was more to me 
 than a brother and I'd just say 'E morto, poverino,' 
 'He's dead, poor man!' and there it was! I knew it, 
 but I didn't feel it at all. One night the Colonel told 
 me that the next day we were to take the peak ahead 
 from the Austrians. It was a very dangerous assault 
 and there wasn't much chance of coming back. At 
 such a time I thought of my father and mother and 
 home, but I didn't feel anything. That night I had one 
 hundred lire. I said to myself: 'If the Austrians take 
 me prisoner tomorrow, they will get the one hundred 
 lire, and if I am killed, there it is !' So I decided to buy 
 a bottle of Strega and I treated the men and we were 
 sipping it and laughing over it when the old, long-faced 
 Colonel came by and called me. 
 
 " 'How can you go on so to-night?' he said. 'Don't 
 you know the danger you are going into tomorrow? I 
 will carry the important papers because I shall be in 
 less peril than you will.' 
 
 "Well, we finished my bottle of Strega, and the next
 
 Tea-Drinking in Rome 79 
 
 day we took the peak. The old Colonel was killed and 
 I only had my right arm hurt and here I am. But it 
 still all seems so strange, Signorina. I often wonder 
 about it and try to think why I was so different, why I 
 felt nothing, and I cannot explain it. I think that my 
 heart was paralyzed then and now it is only my arm, 
 so it is all very well. But I always think about that 
 night when I have a little glass of Strega like this." 
 
 For me too now the word Strega has an association 
 and I never see the golden 'witch' liqueur without re- 
 membering that vivid young Sicilian officer, so intensely 
 alive though partly broken, so merry and so sober, so 
 simple and so brave.
 
 VIII 
 
 THE ASPIRATIONS OF ITALIAN WOMEN 
 
 Y 
 
 4 4 "^ ^TOU are going to write something about the 
 aspirations of Italian women, Signorina? 
 But every Italian woman has one and the 
 same aspiration — husband and home." This was the 
 declaration made to me only a few days ago by a very 
 intelligent young Italian lady who had taken the degree 
 of letters from the University of Bologna and has now 
 entered on a professional career in America. There 
 was merriment in her eyes, but sincerity in her tone as 
 we went on to discuss the position of women in Italy 
 before and after the war. And her frankness like that 
 of many other Italian women in Italy with whom I 
 have talked helped me to shape these impressions. I 
 call them "impressions" designedly, for on such a sub- 
 ject statistical evidence is naturally not available and 
 daily contact and patient observation must combine for 
 personal conclusions. I had a chance to talk with types 
 of women as different as a peasant living in a straw-hut 
 and the philanthropic daughter of the head of the Min- 
 istry. But even after all such exchange of ideas, I feel 
 that my "impressions" are so personal that in the be- 
 ginning I must emphasize that they are just my own. 
 
 When I keep hearing people repeat the truism, "the 
 war has made such a difference in the position of women 
 in Italy," I wonder if they realize that these new steps 
 towards freedom are only a return to the prestige and 
 
 80
 
 The Aspirations of Italian Women 81 
 
 power which the matronae Romanae enjoyed in the Re- 
 public and the Empire. There are two illuminating and 
 delightful essays by Frank Frost Abbott in his book 
 "Society and Politics in Ancient Rome," which assem- 
 ble some of the striking facts about women in public 
 affairs in the time of the Republic and in trades and 
 professions during the early Empire. It is amusing to 
 read how in 195 B. C, the women of Rome were tired 
 of war-time regulations about expensive clothing and 
 joy-rides in their chariots and to secure a repeal of the 
 law passed after the battle of Cannae did some peace- 
 able picketing around the forum, and assailed the doors 
 of certain high officials opposed to them until their op- 
 position was withdrawn. A nobler cause for the femin- 
 ist movement came in 43 B. C, when before the menace 
 of war with Brutus and Cassius after Caesar's death, 
 the Triumvirs demanded that the richest women evalu- 
 ate their property and make large contributions to the 
 state. It was then that the women, led by Hortensia, 
 appeared in the forum before the Triumvirs' Tribunal 
 and declared that they would contribute to a war 
 against a foreign enemy, but never to a civil war; and 
 moreover that they should not be asked to pay taxes 
 when they had no share in the government. We do not 
 wonder when we hear of such concerted action of 
 women, that individuals played a great part in politics 
 through political marriages and brilliant salons, or that 
 the hands of a Cornelia, a Clodia, a Julia, an Octavia, 
 a Scribonia, a Servilia, a Fulvia could for a time shape 
 the affairs of the world. 
 
 Moreover political prestige was supplemented or 
 perhaps founded on the economic independence which 
 many women achieved by the middle of the first century 
 B. C. For the old strict control which the head of a
 
 S2 Italy Old and New 
 
 house exercised over life and possessions of the family, 
 the patria potestas, became virtually a dead letter so 
 that a woman of wealth under the nominal control of 
 husband or guardian held her own property and with it 
 the prestige which possession of wealth gives. 
 
 With such new economic freedom of the Roman 
 matronae, went along a beginning of aspiration for 
 work, so that we find women attempting to practise 
 medicine and law even when they had to disguise them- 
 selves as men or be called "Men-women," securing emo- 
 tional satisfaction in orgiastic religious rites, expressing 
 themselves occasionally in literature and on the stage, 
 in the mimes, and even entering into the trades and 
 controlling such a large business as that of the making 
 of bricks. 
 
 Now through the vicissitudes of the ages it seems 
 that women in Italy have not advanced tremendously 
 beyond the freedom which they held in the late repub- 
 lic and early empire. As for property-owning, now 
 after marriage the husband holds all his wife's property 
 under his own name so that before the law the Italian 
 matrona is not economically independent. Moreover, 
 to an observer during a winter in Rome, it did not seem 
 that individual women were playing a part in politics by 
 indirect influence. Of course recently a law has been 
 passed extending the suffrage to women but it is neces- 
 sary to have another decree before it can become opera- 
 tive, so that as yet the women have not exercised their 
 right or been tested as citizens. 
 
 In the professions, there are some women doctors 
 and more nurses, some lawyers and many in office work. 
 Women are finding self-expression by acting in both 
 comedy and tragedy and by singing in grand opera, and 
 there are writers of such distinction as Grazia Deledda,
 
 The Aspirations of Italian Women 83 
 
 Matilde Serao and Ada Negri. But the greatest op- 
 portunity for Italian women at present is in the field of 
 education; and in this many are engaged, one even hold- 
 ing a professorship in Law in the University of Rome. 
 
 Aspiration is not, however, measured by attainment 
 and in the after-war Italian world perhaps the greatest 
 advance for women is in the forward look. Of course 
 we must remember that in general the progressive 
 women are in the city centers and that in the country 
 districts, especially in the south, there is much general 
 illiteracy, and the position of women is unaltered in 
 attainment or vision. Yet as I visited a village of 
 capanne or straw-huts near Monte Circeo and as I 
 watched in different country regions the peasants work- 
 ing in the fields or gathering the olives or working on 
 the vintage, I was impressed by their vigorous healthy 
 bodies and by the way in which men and women shared 
 their work, shoulder to shoulder, and still I hear across 
 the meadows the soft responsive strains of the 
 stornello, the song of peasant to peasant made out of 
 their joint labors. 
 
 So in the little story I have told under the proverb, 
 "Due cuori, una capanna," I have tried to show the 
 normal happiness of "the sun-burned wife of the indus- 
 trious Apulian." And for all classes of society in Italy 
 I believe that the family is still the center of the 
 woman's life. At the other end of the social scale from 
 life in the capanne, the young women of rank are pass- 
 ing through a transitional period now, for after the 
 new freedom that they gained in war work, many as 
 nurses, they find it difficult to tolerate arranged mar- 
 riages, or marriages in which husbands may have the 
 old conventional ideas of the woman's sphere being 
 limited by the home. They wish to go on with some of
 
 84 Italy Old and New 
 
 the lines of work in which they became interested and 
 they wish to see a door of escape open by divorce from 
 marriage which proves disastrous. But the difficulties 
 of a love marriage for the highborn Italian girl are 
 many: she must think of rank and parentage, of re- 
 ligion and convention. And she must realize that 
 whatever the aspiration of thinking Italian women 
 towards greater freedom in matrimony, the Church 
 has planted its foot so firmly against divorce that there 
 cannot now be experiments in the bonds of wedlock. 
 
 Some young women of the upper and middle classes 
 are happily and tactfully solving their desires for both 
 homes and for a more active life by continuing after 
 marriage their social service work for the ex-soldiers, 
 for the blind, for the children of dead soldiers or of 
 the poor and for women who need to be taught indus- 
 trial arts. All the handiwork under the patronage of 
 great ladies from stencilled gowns to the lace-making 
 of Burano has its fine place in economic reconstruction 
 of women's work. The work for the mutilati and the 
 tubercular and the blind soldiers is a sacred national 
 duty. But most important of all work for the future 
 to which women can turn their hands is the work for 
 the children. 
 
 I talked with a woman doctor, herself glowing with 
 life and the mother of a family, who was the director 
 of an open-air school for children just outside of Milan 
 and saw her photographs of instruction in care of the 
 silk-worm, of the raising of grain, of horticulture, of 
 the care of animals. In Florence, I visited the Dis- 
 pensary of San Domenico where under an Italian doc- 
 tor, Italian and American women are working together 
 for better health conditions in a rural district and are 
 sending a visiting nurse out to the homes where there
 
 The Aspirations of Italian Women 85 
 
 is need. In Rome, I talked with Mr. John Gray, trea- 
 surer of the Italian-American Committee for Assistance 
 to Children and learned the details of their work in 
 maintaining in country districts those Asili Infantili or 
 Kindergarten Schools where little children are looked 
 after and fed during the day while their parents are 
 working in the fields. Only one who has visited the 
 little towns in the Abruzzi Mountains or the Pomptine 
 Marshes can appreciate the conditions in which the Ital- 
 ian babies have to live without such care. In Rome also 
 Donna Enrichetta Chiaraviglio-Giolitti told me of the 
 ideals and work of the Italian "Scuola pratica di 
 assistenza all' Infanzia" on the Via S. Gregorio al 
 Celio. Founded in 1911 the school has maintained 
 from the first the aims of diminishing infant mortality 
 and raising health standards for children by actual care 
 of destitute babies, by clinics for poor mothers and by 
 instruction in the care of infants. At present the work 
 of the Scuola includes a laboratory, a school for in- 
 struction in the care of children and in domestic econ- 
 omy, an asylum for children, clinics for mothers and 
 children, visiting of homes. Two special features of 
 interest are the courses for "little Mothers," in which 
 simple instruction in infant hygiene is given to the little 
 girls from the upper classes of the elementary schools 
 so that they can help their mothers at home more in- 
 telligently and the courses for visiting nurses and rural 
 school-teachers. When I talked with Donna Chiara- 
 viglio-Giolitti of the work of our Children's Bureau in 
 America, she said to me with tears in her eyes: "We 
 know all that you have done in America for the chil- 
 dren, and as yet we are only making a beginning here, 
 but we hope to do much more as time goes on. We 
 know the need."
 
 86 Italy Old and New 
 
 Working along the same lines is the unique School 
 for Visiting Nurses on the Via Manin in Rome. These 
 organizations I have mentioned are simply illustrations 
 of the sort of work for children that has been started in 
 Italy and a proof of the growing field here opening to 
 women. So conscious indeed are the Italian women 
 themselves of the importance of the children in a na- 
 tion's life that in the pages of "II Giornale della 
 Donna" I read a proposition that just as the govern- 
 ment demands eighteen months' military service of 
 men, there should be a conscription of all women for 
 education in care of children. 
 
 Not only such educational work has developed apace 
 since the war, but there has been a great increase in 
 the numbers of women demanding the best possible 
 education and flocking to the Universities. Italy may 
 well be proud of the fact that her Universities have 
 never been closed to women and that through all her 
 history, she has thus recognized the intellectual equality 
 of women, while in a democracy like America, we have 
 the peculiar anomaly that the political status of woman 
 as a citizen has been established before her right to the 
 same educational opportunities as men has been demon- 
 strated by the opening to her of all higher institutions 
 of learning. In Italy in elementary education there are 
 separate schools for girls and boys but after this there 
 are mixed schools for secondary and advanced educa- 
 tion. A notable exception to this has been the special 
 college to prepare women for teaching, the "Istituto 
 Superiore di Magistero Femminile." For this a prepa- 
 ration of ten years is necessary (four in the elementary 
 school, three in the complementare, three in the nor- 
 male) and the course in the Magistero demands four 
 years more. The diploma of these institutions gives
 
 The Aspirations of Italian Women 87 
 
 the right to teach in the scuole elementari, complement 
 tarl and normali, but preference even here is given to 
 those women who hold the laurea (or doctor's degree) 
 from the Universities and the graduates of these 
 Istituti may not teach in the ginnasi or the licet and it 
 is recognized that the work of the Magistero is not so 
 advanced as that of the Universities. For these rea- 
 sons a number of the women with whom I talked think 
 that these special institutions for the separate educa- 
 tion of women will not be continued much longer since 
 women more and more prefer to attend the universities. 
 Other women and some men told me that the conserva- 
 tism of many Italian parents will still prefer to have 
 separate education for their adolescent daughters. 
 
 For preparation for the Universities two kinds of 
 training are possible according to the courses to be pur- 
 sued. To enter the faculties of Law, Philbsophy, 
 Belles-Lettres and Medicine in the Universities a can- 
 didate must attend a ginnasio for five years, a liceo for 
 three, and have an education which includes the study 
 of Greek and Latin; to enter the Faculty of Sciences in 
 the Universities and the schools of engineering, a can- 
 didate may go to ginnasio and liceo (with the classical 
 training) or to a scuola tecnica for three years and an 
 istituto tecnico for four years and omitting the Classics 
 devote more time to modern languages. There is also 
 a well organized commercial course with two secon- 
 dary schools with terms of three and four years and an 
 advanced course corresponding to university work, and 
 there are industrial schools and schools of agriculture. 
 
 It is natural to find more women in the Universities 
 taking the literary course than any other, but some are 
 studying engineering, medicine, and law, and many are 
 working in chemistry, especially in applied chemistry.
 
 88 Italy Old and New 
 
 It is interesting to learn that in the University of Rome 
 there are several women acting as assistants in physics 
 and chemistry and one woman professor who teaches 
 philosophy of law. Italian women taught in the Uni- 
 versities in the Rinascimento and continue to do so to- 
 day. 
 
 The greatest lack in the education of Italian women 
 today seems to be in physical education. Italian men 
 receive physical training in their period of required 
 military service, but in the system of education there is 
 virtually no account taken of the health side. The 
 majority of Italian schools have no garden even, and 
 there are no study-halls, only recitation rooms, so that 
 space for exercise is lacking. In Rome there were last 
 year three trained nurses working in the schools and the 
 School for Visiting Nurses on the Via Manin, started 
 during the war by the American Red Cross, is planned 
 to promote just such work. Certain industries in Milan 
 and Turin have gymnasiums for women employees and 
 creches for children, but Rome has done nothing yet 
 along this line, in which a tremendous field of pioneer 
 work lies open to Italian women. 
 
 Personally, I am inclined to think that along these 
 lines of work for children and in education lie the great- 
 est satisfactions at present for the aspirations of Ital- 
 ian women. The suffrage is too new and untried an 
 asset to make the political world as yet a great oppor- 
 tunity. In the field of literature, writing is so poorly 
 recompensed and the reading public for Italian books 
 so limited, that rarely can any Italian man or woman 
 make a living by the pen. In the so-called learned pro- 
 fessions as in every country the numbers of women are 
 still bound to be comparatively small. But in the field 
 of the care of children and the education of the young,
 
 The Aspirations of Italian Women 89 
 
 Italian women have a great tradition and a great future. 
 America has out-distanced Italy in child hygiene and 
 physical education for women. Italy anticipated Amer- 
 ica in her national recognition of the fact that "woman 
 having received from her Creator the same intellectual 
 constitution as man, has the same right as man to in- 
 tellectual culture and development." It is beautifully 
 fitting that in the pioneer American college for women, 
 founded by Matthew Vassar, who wrote these words, a 
 great stained-glass window in the library opposite the 
 entrance door should depict the conferring of the Doc- 
 torate by the University of Padua in the seventeenth 
 century upon a distinguished young Venetian woman. 
 As the rays of the setting sun slant through this noble 
 memorial to the Lady Elena Lucrezia Cornaro- 
 Piscopia, may the gay, young American girls passing 
 below from book-shelves to reading-tables lift their 
 eyes to a thought of the beauty of learning and the 
 honor due it, and may they across seas share with the 
 women of Italy one of their immemorial aspirations.
 
 IX 
 
 f LA BELLA ZARA" 
 
 ACROSS the Adriatic is a tiny city so historic and 
 fair that it is peculiarly precious to the Italian 
 . people to have it now a part of Italy. "Zara 
 nostra," "our Zara," the King called it affectionately in 
 the address of the Crown on the opening of Parliament 
 June the twelfth, 1921, "a new lighthouse of civiliza- 
 tion and of culture on the other shore of the Adriatic." 
 Now, once more Italian, Zara becomes the goal of a 
 pilgrimage for crusaders who wish to see where lies 
 the heart of new Italy. 
 
 I went over in steamer from Ancona, finding that port 
 of sailing a joy in itself through all its fine architecture 
 and picturesque ways : the Cathedral crowning hill high 
 over curved bay, adorned within by ten Corinthian col- 
 umns from the old Temple of Venus, the Palazzo del 
 Comune with the fifteenth century Adam and Eve sculp- 
 tured naked and unabashed on the fagade, the magnifi- 
 cent Gothic portal of the hospital church of San Fran- 
 cesco and the perfect little cortile of the Prefettura, the 
 Loggia dei Mercanti with a Gothic fagade by the same 
 Giorgio da Sebenico who made San Francesco, old nar- 
 row stairways, palace doors framing views of bay, pic- 
 turesque iron lamps hanging at the top of steep, winding 
 streets, the great arch of Trajan on the north pier. 
 Then there was the sea, a glorious day of it, and the 
 
 90
 
 THE CATHEDRAL AT ANCONA, STRUCK BY AN AUSTRIAN 
 BOMB THE DAY AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 
 
 THE GATE AT /..\\<.\
 
 "La Bella Zara" 91 
 
 unforgettable beauty of the approach to Zara. For 
 the land which we first sighted dissolved, as we ap- 
 proached, into dozens of islands, gray rocks with a low, 
 sparse, green growth over them, and in among these 
 we coursed towards the green strip of shore backed by 
 distant mountains, mountains so bare, so blue and 
 white, that they seemed at first a cloud-mirage rather 
 than Velebit Alps. Finally there was the tiny, penin- 
 sula city, stretching out like Sermione, gem of all al- 
 most-island places, into the violet-blue water. Zara is 
 a veritable jewel set in aquamarine and carved in tow- 
 ers and belfries, and one needs the skill of a maker of 
 cameos or a painter of miniatures to picture so exqui- 
 site a possession. From my window at the top of the 
 Hotel Bristol, as I looked across the blue canal to the 
 long ridge of the island Ugliano and its high Venetian 
 fortress, then outlined against an orange sunset, I fell 
 in love with Zara. 
 
 The history in which the tiny city had a share I Here 
 in northern Dalmatia early Liburnian vikings ruled and 
 ranged the sea as pirates, fought with rival Celts, were 
 involved in struggles between Greeks and Romans, 
 were conquered with the other Illyrians by the Romans 
 and made a province, shared the turmoil of the civil 
 war between Caesar and Pompey, and finally had to be 
 visited in two campaigns by both Agrippa and Octavi- 
 anus before the Pax Augusta settled on the Adriatic's 
 eastern coast and the first public libraries in Rome were 
 founded from Dalmation spoils. Brunelli's scholarly 
 history of Zara records what part Jader or Zara 
 played in all Dalmatia's history and gives among the 
 illustrations a picture of the beautifully carved stone 
 which honors Augustus as parent of the Roman colony. 
 Zara was involved too in the reorganization of the Illy-
 
 92 Italy Old and New 
 
 rian province made by Diocletian under the menace of 
 barbarian enemies, but we do not know how much she 
 endured of later devastations from Visigoths, Huns, 
 Ostrogoths and Slavs. The dark curtain lifts from her 
 past with the beginning of her sacred story when mar- 
 tyr's blood flowed and the Archbishop Donatus and 
 the Gonfalone Grisogonus gave her new and individual 
 history. Then for her loveliness the city itself became 
 a martyr like her saints and after a pacific occupation 
 by the Venetians was seized by the Hungarians, was 
 sacked by the French, was tossed back and forth be- 
 tween Venice and Hungary and finally bestowed on 
 Austria. 
 
 Out of so turbulent a life such beauty flowered. The 
 ages have left their marks and you will find in the 
 Museum of San Donato even Liburnian tombstones, 
 weapons and jewelry. But the Roman ruins and the 
 Venetian architecture give the town its character. 
 There are fragments of a Roman arch built into the 
 Porta Marina and two superb Roman columns domi- 
 nate tiny Piazzas. There are pieces of old Roman wall 
 and outside the town on the way to the little Albanian 
 village of Borgo Erizzo a mile distant are traces of 
 Trajan's aqueduct. But the most impressive Roman 
 ruins are those under the Museum of San Donato, the 
 ninth century church which was built above the old 
 Roman forum. The form of the building is unique, 
 round, of two stories, each with six pillars and two an- 
 cient columns, but the first floor is the interesting part, 
 for here, when excavations were made down to the 
 Forum pavement, the buried bases of the columns and 
 the lower part of the wall were uncovered and found 
 to be composed of all sorts of fragments of Roman 
 buildings, drums of fluted columns set up on edge, in-
 
 "La Bella Zara" 93 
 
 scriptions with fine floral borders. The Museum is 
 rich in Roman ivories and glass and in Venetian mate- 
 rial of every sort, all arranged with beautiful care by 
 the thirty years' work of the distinguished Curator, 
 Signor Bersa. 
 
 In the city library, Professor Brunelli, the historian 
 of Zara, displayed to me some of its treasures, an early 
 diploma for a Laureate from the University of Padua, 
 richly illuminated, an old French history of Dalmatia 
 illustrated with steel engravings, and a most curious 
 old dictionary written by hand in the eighteenth century 
 with illustrations drawn for each word. It was an in- 
 teresting psychological study to see what words the 
 writer had listed and what were his pictorial reactions 
 to his words. Some of his pictures which were uncon- 
 ventional he had neatly screened with little blank 
 squares of paper, veils that could be lifted. 
 
 The churches of Zara have their treasures which 
 have been sacredly guarded. At San Francesco a genial 
 frate in brown cowl, while he displayed their ten price- 
 less missals, told me the story of a senator who coming 
 to Zara on a visit and seeing the poverty of the Fran- 
 cescans jokingly asked them why they did not sell their 
 books for American dollars, rebuild their church and 
 live in comfort. The frate told him that after they 
 had saved their treasures from the Austrians during 
 all the years of occupation, they would starve now be- 
 fore they would sell them and the senator replied : "You 
 are right and if need comes, we will protect them for 
 you with our arms." The Francescans showed me also 
 their touching wooden crucifix of the ninth century and 
 the magnificent carved choir stalls. The Cathedral has 
 nothing more beautiful than those in its rich carving, 
 and marble altar. At San Simeone the four angels were
 
 94 Italy Old and New 
 
 a delight, those that hear the Reliquary of the Saint at 
 the high altar, so strangely created, two of marble, two 
 wrought at Venice from Turkish cannon. 
 
 We kept coming on Venetian joys as we walked 
 about, the Clock Tower, the rare little cortile which 
 had been plastered up in a modern house by the Aus- 
 trians, but has been restored by the Italians to all the 
 beauty of delicate columns and rounded arches. Then 
 there was the market to see in the Piazza dell' Erbe. 
 Here were crowds of peasants, Morlaks and Slavs, 
 in the picturesque native costumes, the men with tiny 
 round scarlet caps perched on one side of the head, 
 loose jackets with the fronts embroidered in bright 
 wool and adorned with silver filigree buttons, 'the 
 women with white head kerchiefs bordered with col- 
 ored tassels, embroidered jackets and aprons, belts cov- 
 ered with silver disks, full skirts, heavy woolen stock- 
 ings. Many of the people were too poor for such good 
 clothes and wore cheap, dark, cotton garments. One 
 touching little old man in a red cap who had a live hen 
 under each arm, with a few grains of corn in his hands 
 under their beaks to keep them content until they were 
 sold, asked me not to take his picture because his shoes 
 were so tattered. And I had thought only to photo- 
 graph his affection for his pets. 
 
 On one side, women were selling wine and oil, pour- 
 ing them out of great cans into little flasks. Potatoes, 
 corn, tomatoes and greens were weighed. Some tables 
 were piled high with fruit, grapes, figs, pears, plums; 
 others were as beautiful with flowers, especially single 
 asters, pink, white, lavender. On another side of the 
 Piazza were tables of shoes. Over there was a butch- 
 er's shop, the slaughtered sheep dripping in front. 
 Women walked about, carrying country produce in
 
 MARKET-DAY AT ZARA
 
 "La Bella Zara" 95 
 
 great baskets on their heads. Others were stuffing pur- 
 chases into gay woolen bags. Patient little donkeys 
 stood waiting for burdens. Good-natured Italian 
 policemen were arbitrating disputes between sellers 
 and buyers. Back of the surging crowd around the 
 stalls, at one corner of the Piazza towered the antique 
 Corinthian column, a sort of symbol of Rome's protec- 
 tion of these simple contadini whose lives in the barren 
 limestone region of Dalmatia are so undeveloped and 
 so hard. 
 
 Little Zara was fortunate in having come to her to 
 reestablish her Italianita such a man of parts as Vice- 
 Admiral Enrico Millo, the Governor of Dalmatia dur- 
 ing the Italian occupation. As I talked with his Excel- 
 lency, in the Governor's Palace, I felt that in this dis- 
 tinguished and cultured Admiral the best traditions of 
 the old Roman ideals for provincial government were 
 perpetuated. Every aspect of public health, education, 
 religious freedom, freedom of the press, and develop- 
 ment of the country made part of his constructive plan 
 for Italian rule. I should like to drink his health again 
 in the sparkling colorless Maraschino liqueur, made at 
 Zara, which he named for me so humorously "aqua 
 americana." 
 
 A country excursion from Zara takes you north, 
 walking or in automobile, to the tiny hamlet of Nona, 
 once Roman Aenona, to see the place where most of 
 the Museum's treasures were found and to get an idea 
 of the barrenness of the land as it lies, stony, unshaded 
 under the mighty mountains, pasture ground for stunted 
 herds of sheep and goats, shepherded by stunted chil- 
 dren. The beauty of Zara herself is more poignant 
 after such a trip among the poor peasants of the hinter- 
 land. With her mountains, her canal, and her islands,
 
 96 Italy Old and New 
 
 she lies sea-girt, adorned with the beautiful gifts of 
 ancient Rome and of Venice, an Italian jewel, no, bet- 
 ter in the King's metaphor, an Italian lighthouse, flash- 
 ing from Dalmatia to Italy alike at sunset, through the 
 dark, into the dawn.
 
 X 
 
 EPIC DAYS 
 
 NEVER had I expected in the twentieth century 
 to be plunged into an heroic situation and 
 live in epic days. For many years when I 
 became over-tired with the high pressure of American 
 life and worn with trying to understand the subtleties 
 of surrounding persons trained by conventional society 
 to think one thing in their heart and say another with 
 their lips, I had taken down my Homer and reading 
 aloud the beautiful hexameters had seemed again to 
 hear 
 
 "The surge and thunder of the Odyssey," 
 
 had seemed to 
 
 "See the stars, and feel the free 
 
 Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers," 
 and 
 
 "Athwart the sunrise of our western day 
 
 The form of great Achilles, high and clear." 
 
 And the sights and sounds of Homeric times had in- 
 variably made that heroic life in its close contact with 
 nature, its simple expression of feeling and its ready 
 action seem larger and grander. So it was with such 
 preparation of recurrent mood that I visited Mycenae 
 and Fiume. 
 
 Memorable is the twenty-first of April when at dusk 
 a party of Americans came riding down the valley to 
 
 97
 
 98 Italy Old and New 
 
 Mycenae. In a golden sunset lurid under dark clouds, 
 Mount Arachnaeon's gray ridge had looked high 
 enough for the flashing of the signal to the watchman 
 on the top of Agamemnon's palace which announced 
 that the Trojan war was over. Now in the twilight 
 down all the roads into the valley the flocks of sheep 
 were tinkling home and high over Mycenae's rock be- 
 tween the two gray peaks of Mount Elias and Mount 
 Szara arose a full white moon. Here at the foot of the 
 mountains we were welcomed at the "Hotel la belle 
 Elene de Menelas," a little two-story, rose-pink house 
 with green shutters set in the shade of feathery pepper- 
 trees, and here our host Demetrius assisted by his two 
 sons, Agamemnon and Oreste, and a charming young 
 daughter with two long brown braids, Helen herself, 
 served us as delicious a dinner as though Mycenae were 
 still rich in gold. The unbelievable event of sleeping 
 there was made more Homeric by our having to divide 
 the tiny hotel into men's quarters and women's quar- 
 ters, and by Helen spreading the fair purple blankets 
 and coverlets above for some of us in the portico and 
 trying to assist at our ablutions, standing solemnly by 
 basin, holding towel in hand. 
 
 Then in the early morning there was the walk up 
 to the Treasury of Atreus and to the old citadel on the 
 hill. Only one who has been there can imagine the 
 sense of splendor that falls as one enters that huge bee- 
 hive tomb with its perfect dome, or passes through the 
 great gate where the two rampant lions guard the 
 stronghold of the king of men, or stands in the sacred 
 circle of the royal shaft-graves, or views the strength 
 of the Cyclopean city-walls, or peers down into the se- 
 cret subterranean well which gave water in time of 
 siege, or passes over the stone threshold into the palace
 
 Epic Days 99 
 
 to the central hearth, surrounded by columns, where 
 some Clytemnestra may have sat plotting the death of 
 her returning Victor-Lord. The glamour of the heroic 
 civilization hangs over those stone ruins on the moun- 
 tain's side and it is very fitting that the only occupants 
 of ancient Mycenae today are the eagles who have built 
 their nests on top of the ramparts above the sheer 
 gorge between the mountain-peaks. 
 
 Very remote though real, seemed Mycenae, the city 
 of fourteen hundred years before Christ. Very near, 
 but unreal seemed the city of Fiume which I visited be- 
 fore the occupation of D'Annunzio was over. Or shall 
 I say that Fiume seemed not unreal, but incredible? 
 As I look back at my five October days there and at the 
 five days which two months later ended the epic of the 
 Fiumani, I have still the sense of amazement that in 
 the twentieth century there could have been events so 
 Homeric in character, so unrelated to realities, — an 
 expedition led by a poet, an army of boys worshipping 
 their Commandante, a tiny city defying the world. 
 Though the facts of the history of Fiume are an old 
 story now, feeling still runs so high at the mention of 
 D'Annunzio's name and the issues though believed dead 
 by those far away are still so lively a subject of contro- 
 versy, that I will not concern myself with them here. 
 Suffice it to say that the tiny town at the head of the 
 Adriatic when it was abandoned by the Hungarians 
 after the great Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto, be- 
 lieved itself in danger of being swallowed up by neigh- 
 bors, enemies or allies, and unable to maintain its cher- 
 ished and historic corpus separatum and its Italianita. 
 This I say was the belief of the city and the tragic calls 
 which it sent to the outer world caught the ear not of 
 statesmen, or of assembled nations, or of philanthro-
 
 100 Italy Old and New 
 
 pists, but of a poet fed on that strange mixture of 
 classicism and romanticism which sometimes produces 
 action. Just what was in the complex, subtle mind of 
 the Aviator-Commandante when he adopted the cause 
 of Fiume, no other can declare, but the call of the holo- 
 caust city somehow appealed to him as it did later to 
 the writer of these youthful verses: 
 
 TO FIUME 
 
 "Blockaded, starved and bartered, this fair Maid 
 Had still maintained her 'body separate' 
 And stood against her hill inviolate 
 
 Her poignard in her hand, but undismayed. 
 
 "Now chained to the lone rock, the unfailing streams 
 Denied her thirst, her plight is desperate. 
 Yet lift your eyes, Andromeda, and wait! 
 Lo ! In the sky unconquered Perseus gleams." 
 
 So Perseus flew down to fair maiden-in-distress, the 
 incredible march of D'Annunzio upon Fiume took 
 place, and from that "night of Ronchi," September the 
 twelfth, 1919, to the terrible "five days" at Christmas 
 time in 1920 which ended the D'Annunzian occupation, 
 the epic days of Fiume lasted. 
 
 It was in the midst of the Epic that, in spite of the 
 blockade, the unpopularity of American passports, and 
 the presence of the Bubonic plague, I was given safe 
 conduct into the city and had a chance to see its small, 
 but beautiful personality: the caerulean bay, girt by 
 high hills, the city climbing the rocks, the Frangipani 
 castle guarding the river which gave name to town and 
 legend "Indeficienter," "never failing" to the city's 
 crest, the little bridge across which the Italian regulars
 
 Epic Days 101 
 
 in Susak and D'Annunzio's legionaries in Fiume 
 touched hands, the little harbor divided by a mole into 
 Porto Baross and the inner bay, in short, the diminutive 
 loveliness of all that fed so high a flame. And it was 
 while I was in Fiume, talking day after day to boys of 
 seventeen and eighteen in D'Annunzio's army, that I 
 sensed that their amazing deeds could be fittingly rec- 
 orded only in Homeric strains. With apologies to cer- 
 tain distinguished translators, let me try to begin in 
 English an Homeric version of an Italian epyllion. 1 
 
 Sing, I pray, ye muses who inhabit Olympian dwell- 
 ings, sing of the march of the Hero, the little man of 
 the winged words, and the winged service, who mar- 
 shalled a band of youths to seize a beleaguered city. 
 Youngsters they, but valiant, many were sons of the 
 mighty, yea, and perhaps better the sons than the weary 
 and home-staying fathers. Dark was the night and 
 quiet when the silver-tongued orator of the rocky 
 Abruzzi bethought himself of impetuous valor. Sud- 
 den he leapt in his armor from the earth where he stood 
 to his chariot; terribly flashed the words from the 
 poet's lips as he darted. "Italy and Life," he cried, 
 and at the sound joy came upon all the Young-hearted. 
 And as many as the birds that flee from the coming of 
 winter and sudden rain, or as many as the tribes of 
 thronging bees that issue from some hollow rock, ever 
 in fresh procession and fly clustering among the flowers 
 of spring, or as many as the tearless phantoms that flit 
 about the shore of the river of forgetfulness, even so 
 many were the stalwart young heroes who mounted on 
 their chariots or marched in serried ranks after the 
 
 *1 have used freely the translations of the "Iliad" by Lang, Leaf 
 and Myers, and of the "Odyssey" by Butcher and Lang.
 
 102 Italy Old and New 
 
 flying captain, and as they rushed onward, there was 
 heard a strange sound of singing, — "Eia, eia, alala ! To 
 the holocaust city!" 
 
 So might the march to Fiume be recorded. And 
 there were other later events as "irregular" that, set 
 down in cold newspaper reports, would be dubbed acts 
 of brigandage or highway robbery, or sentimental 
 twaddle, but which slip strangely into Homeric phrase- 
 ology. Let us try the seizure of the ship, the taking of 
 the horses, the conversation at the Susak bridge. 
 
 Now so long as the legions of the Fiumani still had 
 corn and red wine, they refrained them from seeking 
 for vessels laden with food upon the high seas, for they 
 were fain of life. But when the corn was now all spent, 
 and hunger gnawed at the belly, then secretly in the 
 dark they loosed the hawsers of a decked ship and 
 climbed on board themselves. Then laid they hands on 
 the tackling, and they raised the mast of pine tree and 
 set it in the hole of the cross plank, and made it fast 
 with forestays and hauled up the white sails with 
 twisted ropes of oxhide and gray-eyed Athene sent 
 them a favorable gale, a fresh North wind singing over 
 the wine-dark sea. The wind filled the belly of the 
 sail, and the dark wave seethed loudly round the stem 
 of the running ship and she fleeted over the wave ac- 
 complishing her path. And right soon before the sun 
 arose and left the lovely mere, they came in sight of 
 another vessel and quickly they spied her cargo, many 
 kine that she bear, fair kine of shambling gait and 
 broad of brow. And the Fiumani quietly hove their 
 curved ship to beside the vessel which carried the cattle 
 and leaping on board more quickly than nimble thought
 
 Epic Days 103 
 
 darts from mind to mind, they began slaying on this 
 side and on that, until the sailors begged them to take 
 the precious cattle, sparing so their lives for to each 
 man his own is precious. And all the company con- 
 sented thereto, and quietly in the cover of the darkness 
 both the seafaring ships sped back into the harbor for 
 well did their pilots guide them. Then they stayed 
 their well-builded ships in the hollow harbor, and the 
 company went forth from out the ship and deftly got 
 ready supper. Forthwith they drove off the best of 
 the kine, and the Fiumani gathered in throngs on the 
 seashore, rejoicing greatly, for they knew that soon 
 they would satisfy their gnawing hunger. 
 
 Now there was need also of horses for the soldiers 
 in the little city, for all their horses had sickened and 
 died and since the city lay on a hillside, there was need 
 of beasts of burden to carry the guns up the hill, and 
 to bear their scanty provisions. So to the Comman- 
 dante spake a youth of the loud war-cry: "Comman- 
 dante, my heart and manful spirit urge me to enter a 
 town of the foemen hard by, even of the enemy; but 
 and if some other man will follow with me, more com- 
 fort and more courage will there be." Then him again 
 answered the volatile, brilliant commander: "Ah, ye 
 sons of Fiume, how shall I speak my thanks to you ! 
 Volentes, O willing ones, ye bear in your hearts our 
 motto 'the next thing always.' One for all, all for one, 
 shoulder to shoulder, go forth for the night is waning. 
 Near is the dawn, and the stars have gone onward. If 
 the spirit is for us, who can be against us?" 
 
 So spake he, and up started two stalwart young 
 heroes and when they had prayed to San Vito, they 
 went forth on their way, like two lions through the 
 dark night, to find the steeds that were needed. And
 
 104 Italy Old and New 
 
 quickly they came to the city of the enemy. Now they 
 were slumbering, foredone with toil, but near each man 
 were his steeds. And the Fiumani spied them from 
 afar and spake one to the other: "Here are our men 
 and here are the horses. Come now, put forth thy 
 great strength. Do thou slay the men, and of the 
 horses will I take heed." 
 
 And like as a lion cometh on flock without a he ds- 
 man, on goats or sheep, and leaps upon them with evil 
 will, so set one Fiuman on the enemy and slew the 
 guardians of the horses. Meanwhile his hardy com- 
 panion loosed the whole-hooved horses and bound them 
 together with thongs and drove them out of the press, 
 smiting them with a green branch since he had no shin- 
 ing whip to smite them. And when they stole secretly 
 out of the crowded press of the enemy, swiftly they 
 sprang upon the steeds and sped to the city of life. 
 And in the palace of the Commandante the sentinel at 
 the door listened and said to himself softly: "Shall I 
 be wrong or speak sooth? for my heart bids me speak. 
 The sound of swift-footed horses strikes upon mine 
 ears. Would to god our two brave soldiers may even 
 instantly be driving the whole-hooved horses from 
 among the enemy." Not yet was his whole word 
 spoken when they came themselves and leaped down to 
 earth, and gladly the others welcomed them with hand- 
 clasping, and with honeyed words. But they lifting 
 their eyes hoped only to hear the praise of the Com- 
 mandante. 
 
 Now Italian regular soldier and legionary Fiuman 
 met in the mid-space of the bridge that crossed the 
 river between Fiume and Susak, and there where the 
 strange barrier of a barbed wire kept them asunder, 
 the twain were come nigh in guard duty to each other.
 
 THE FIUMANI ON DUTY AT D'ANNUNZIO'S PALACE 
 
 THE FIUME-SUSAK BRIDGE
 
 Epic Days 105 
 
 To the Italian Regular first spake the Fiuman of the 
 loud war-cry: "Who art thou noble sir, of mortal men? 
 For never have I beheld thee on guard duty ere this, yet 
 now hast thou far outstripped all men in thy hardihood, 
 seeing that thou approachest the poignard of an 
 Ardito." 
 
 Then the glorious son of the regular army made an- 
 swer to him: "Great-hearted Fiuman, why enquirest 
 thou of my generation? Even as are the generations 
 of leaves such are those likewise of heroes. You and 
 I and all our dear comrades tomorrow may be scat- 
 tered on the earth in the battle. For a bitter order has 
 come and brother is fighting with brother. Know, O 
 Fiuman, that I like you am Italian. I too have sworn 
 an oath, to my King and my country. And you I hear 
 have sworn to make Fiume Italian, — have pledged 
 your word in blood to your great-hearted Commander." 
 
 So said he and straightway answered the youthful 
 Fiuman : "Surely thou art to me a guest-friend of old 
 time, for our fathers both have served the same king, 
 the same country. Yet, O my brother-in-arms, how can 
 we shun each other's spears in the conflict? For you 
 stand on the wrong side of the bridge and I on the other 
 side with Fiume. And here we shall remain." Just 
 then there sounded a terrible breaking of timber, a 
 crashing explosion, thudding things hitting the water, 
 booming from ships in the harbor. Presently all was 
 quiet, but there was no bridge over the river. 
 
 So I might go on with the amazing story, but I hope 
 I have written enough to show how easily the episodes 
 of the life in Fiume drop into epic narrative. What- 
 ever your opinion of the abstract "Fiume question," 
 whatever your Anglo-Saxon condemnation of the social
 
 106 Italy Old and New 
 
 standards of D'Annunzio, I would have challenged any 
 man or woman with red blood to talk with the young 
 legionaries of Fiume and not believe that they, the rank 
 and file, were of the stuff of the heroic age. Their 
 flaming worship of their leader, their passionate be- 
 lief that they were fighting for the liberty of a little 
 Italian city, their disregard of their impuissance and 
 their sublime faith in the truth of D'Annunzio's motto: 
 
 "If the spirit is for us, who can be against us?" led 
 many to fight to the death. Why, anyone who had been 
 to Fiume and seen the legionaries' small numbers, their 
 slight equipment, their isolation, their poverty, knew at 
 once that they could not resist any regular army for a 
 day, but to the last those boys believed in their cause 
 and in their power. 
 
 Think of the foolhardy things they did! Now, 
 hearing a rumor that little Zara on the Dalmatian coast 
 might lose her Italian identity in the final treaties ma- 
 noeuvred by the Allies, they manned a boat, dashed out 
 of the harbor and arrived before Zara to assist the 
 Governor of Dalmatia, were gravely and courteously 
 received by his Excellency, given barracks in Zara, and 
 the freedom of the city as honored guests, and kept 
 there until the end of D'Annunzio's command. Then 
 when in the night the little company first tried to tunnel 
 its way out, then seized a boat in the harbor and were 
 about to start northward, they were of course easily 
 made prisoners. 
 
 Or think of the little bands that escaped the block- 
 ade of Fiume and seized the tiny, jewel-like islands of 
 Veglia and Arbe, summoned by appeals from the Ital- 
 ians there. And when the end of the life of the legions 
 in Fiume came, and the regular army ordered them tc 
 withdraw from Veglia and Arbe, few though they were"
 
 Epic Days 107 
 
 and mighty the warships before them, they refused to 
 stir until a command in D'Annunzio's own hand was 
 brought to them and their lives were mercifully spared 
 by the indulgence of the desired letter from their Hero. 
 Then at the beginning of their last fatal "five days," 
 think, how on the outskirts of the town the Fiumani put 
 up placards of appeal to the Italian regulars, believing 
 those would disarm the cannon : 
 
 "Brothers! If you wish to avoid the great misfor- 
 tune, do not pass this limit. 
 
 "If your leaders blind you, may the God of Italy 
 give you light." 
 
 Such simple faith in the possibility of superhuman 
 deeds, such spirit, such dash, such courage, and such 
 dying are the qualities of epic heroes, and seem to be- 
 long in an age when the world was younger. Even as 
 I write of them in this after-war time of disillusion and 
 self-seeking normality, I catch my breath and think that 
 those young intellectuals who so ardently dared all for 
 the magic word "Liberty" had their great day. In the 
 height of their adventures, a young Florentine lawyer, 
 just married, said to me nonchalantly after speculating 
 on the industrial and financial crisis of his country: 
 "Oh well! If there is a revolution in Italy, my wife 
 and I will go to live under D'Annunzio's constitution in 
 Fiume !" Such a stronghold of the spirit did the little 
 city seem to many devotees. There will be, however, 
 no revolution in Italy, as all who live there are aware. 
 D'Annunzio is no longer in Fiume. And the epic days 
 of the world are perhaps over.
 
 XI 
 
 SPRING IN SICILY AND THE CARRYING OFF OF THE 
 
 MAID 
 
 ISLANDS have always had for me a magic charm. 
 As I have cruised among them along the coast of 
 Maine and the shore of Dalmatia and in the Ion- 
 ian Sea, often I have wished to stop at some beckoning 
 sea-girt place, sure of latent adventures there. Islands 
 seem more individual than great continents, more full 
 of personality in their isolation, more certain to have 
 had the past that makes romance. Think of the islands 
 that have been the settings for great stories : Cythera 
 whither came Venus born of the foam and blown by 
 the winds; Delos, the wandering, tethered by Zeus's 
 chains to become a stable birthplace for another great 
 deity; Scyros where Achilles, in the garb of a girl was 
 hidden by his war-dreading mother among the daugh- 
 ters of the king until Odysseus discovered him and car- 
 ried him off to Troy; Lemnos with tragic Philoctetes 
 left alone and sick, to eat his heart and talk to rocks 
 and woods; all the enchanted Homeric isles, — Circe's 
 JExa. with the singing of the goddess and the grunting 
 of her victims, Calypso's fair close, the Phaeacian 
 Scheria where exquisite Nausicaa gave the uncouth, 
 shipwrecked Odysseus royal hospitality, rocky Ithaca 
 where faithful Penelope spun and unravelled and 
 waited for her lord, and then other isles of Greece — 
 Lesbos, where burning Sappho lived and sung, or 
 Salamis over against which the king sat on the rocky 
 brow counting by thousands his ships soon to be de- 
 
 108
 
 Spring in Sicily 109 
 
 stroyed. Scores of these famous islands press their 
 claim on memory, and above all rise the Islands of the 
 Blessed with their beautiful mystic Elysium. The sto- 
 ries throw a glamour over geography and make the 
 word 'island' a magician's wand to summon delight. 
 
 Some such spell I felt cast over me when I took boat 
 for Sicily in the spring and my mood of eager antici- 
 pation was crystallized by lines from a great poem I 
 had been reading, an ode in which Pindar writing for a 
 Syracusan who had won a chariot-race paid high tribute 
 to Sicily and the goddess of the spring: 
 
 "Sow then some seed of splendid words in honour 
 of this isle, which Zeus, the lord of Olympus, gave unto 
 Persephone, and bowed his head toward her in sign 
 that this teeming Sicily he would exalt to be the best 
 land in the fruitful earth, with gorgeous crown of cita- 
 dels. And the son of Kronos gave unto her a people 
 that wooeth mailed war, a people of the horse and of 
 the spear, and knowing well the touch of Olympia's 
 golden olive-leaves" (Nem. 1, Myers' translation). 
 
 As the boat from Naples neared Palermo in the early 
 morning and I saw in the light of dawn the shell of 
 gold, that rounded valley girt by mountains, yellow with 
 fruit, in which Palermo lies, I could see why Pindar 
 called Sicily "best land in the fruitful earth." Over the 
 Concha d'Oro towered too one of her great citadels, 
 for the huge rock at the right was the height that Ham- 
 ilcar Barca held and Pyrrhus stormed, and that hour as 
 I saw Monte Pellegrino all rose, gray and green in the 
 golden haze of early sunshine, I determined that before 
 I left Sicily, I too would scale the height of Ercte. 
 
 I felt like Pippa with her one day as I faced only 
 three weeks in Sicily. I wished at the moment that my 
 luggage was a library instead of a portmanteau and
 
 110 Italy Old and New 
 
 that I was going to live there instead of to travel. 
 Books on Sicily all seemed so bulky and heavy that I 
 could not carry those I had looked over; E. A. Free- 
 man's scholarly histories, Pitre's "Feste Patronali in 
 Sicilia," Paton's "Picturesque Sicily," Louise Caico's 
 "Sicilian Ways and Days," Crawford's "Rulers of the 
 South," Cecilia Waern's "Mediaeval Sicily," H. Fest- 
 ing Jones's "Diversions in Sicily," and the beautifully 
 illustrated "Sicily" of Alberto Pisa and Spencer C. 
 Musson. I was carrying with me a few indispensables, 
 the remarkable 1919 Gitida of the Touring Club Itali- 
 ano, Hare's "Sicily," Trevelyan's "Garibaldi and the 
 Thousand," Thucydides, Pindar, Theocritus and Ver- 
 gil. I thought that those would serve to lead my feet, 
 refresh my memory, and give me joy. 
 
 Memory needs special aid in Sicily. So many civil- 
 izations have claimed the island and left their stamp. 
 What an historical pageant the procession of occupants 
 would make ! Legendary Cyclopes and Laestrigonians 
 first, then those mysterious early peoples, the Sicanians, 
 the Elymi, and the Sicelians, bearing the long bronze 
 lances now exhibited in the Syracuse Museum, magnifi- 
 cent Greek tyrants, crowned with the laurels of victo- 
 ries in the great athletic contests of Greece, swarthy 
 Phoenician traders, Roman empire-builders, hordes of 
 barbarian Goths, then Byzantine captains, Christian 
 missionaries, Saracen conquerors, Norman kings and 
 Germans, rulers from Provence and from Aragon, Eng- 
 lish generals and last Garibaldi and the Thousand, 
 marching by in their red shirts. No wonder that after 
 such a history, Sicily is bewildering in the multitudinous 
 and overwhelming impressions she makes. You will 
 see the purest of Greek Doric columns from the fifth 
 century before Christ and the most gorgeous of brilliant
 
 Spring in Sicily 111 
 
 mosaic chapels from the twelfth century after Christ. 
 You will pass from Museum rooms filled with classic 
 sculpture to street-scenes of gay carts decorated with 
 Saracen stories. You may look at the beautiful little 
 coins adorned with four-horse chariots which were 
 struck by Greek tyrants and at the mammoth porphyry 
 sarcophagi where Norman kings were entombed. At 
 noon you may stand alone on the top seats of the Greek 
 theater at Segesta looking off to the sea, and in the 
 evening you may listen to Grand Opera in the Teatro 
 Vittorio Emmanuele of modern Palermo. From the 
 heights of Epipolae you can see how the Greek fort 
 Euryalus protected the great ancient city of Syracuse 
 and from the Gibilrossa Pass you can look down the 
 road by which the Thousand descended to capture 
 Palermo. And in the quiet of the siesta hour you will 
 be reading the Homeric Hymn to Demeter or the chant 
 of the Garibaldini. 
 
 Palermo, the first city I visited, had all this bewil- 
 derment and fascination. I stayed a week and hardly 
 began to know the city and the treasures near. I will 
 confess at once that I selected the Hotel des Palmes 
 because it was near the Museum, wishing to get daily a 
 little time with the sculpture from Selinunte, but I found 
 myself very comfortable with a window opening to 
 green palm-trees, delicious food and a most courteous 
 Italian proprietor. I made the mistake of following my 
 usual habit of walking about the city first to get orien- 
 tated, but Palermo is too large and too much a business 
 city. The Via Maqueda and the Corso Vittorio Em- 
 manuele did not please me, nor did the octagonal 
 piazza where they cross, the Quattro Canti, with its 
 heavy baroque facades of Seasons and Holy Maidens 
 interspersed among homely Spanish kings. I found
 
 112 Italy Old and New 
 
 myself looking in shop windows for bargains in Sicilian 
 drawn work, counting the number of banks I passed and 
 studying Palermitan millinery. So I gave up walking, 
 hailed a small carrozza whose horse had a peculiarly 
 high feather waving from the top of his head and whose 
 driver had the richest of Sicilian coloring and directed 
 that I should be taken to the Cathedral, the Palazzo 
 Reale and San Giovanni degli Eremiti. 
 
 The Cathedral is as strangely composite as Palermo 
 itself for little is left on the outside of the twelfth cen- 
 tury foundation and century after century of additions 
 have made a curious medley with an excrescence of a 
 dome topping it all, but I liked its brown color, its 
 length, its delicate towers and its entrance portal. I 
 understood better the simplicity of the crypt, with its 
 cool granite columns, unadorned walls and early sarco- 
 phagi, one that of Walter of the Mill, the English Arch- 
 bishop who founded the church for William the Good. 
 But the tombs of the Kings are by far the most impres- 
 sive part of the Cathedral, those great porphyry sarco- 
 phagi where lie five great monarchs and two queens. 
 Such magnificent sepulchres ought to insure repose yet 
 in 1781 the sarcophagi were opened and you may see 
 now in the treasure room of the Cathedral the precious 
 objects taken from them, — the jewelled crown of Con- 
 stance of Aragon, a bit of the rich robe of Henry VI, 
 and a magnificent Spanish pallium. Verily after death 
 divinity does not hedge a king. 
 
 From the tomb of Roger II I went to two of the 
 beautiful creations of his reign, the Cappella Palatina 
 in the Palazzo Reale and San Giovanni degli Eremiti. 
 No room ever seemed to me more gorgeous than the 
 Cappella Palatina, but in its Arab-Norman style, it is 
 Oriental and remote from me, not so much in the lines
 
 Spring in Sicily 113 
 
 of nave and aisles and pointed arches and cupola, but 
 in the blaze of color of the golden mosaics and their 
 rich splendor. It is not a room in which I could pray. 
 It made me excited and eager to study the mosaic pic- 
 tures that caught my fancy, — Jacob's ladder, Adam and 
 Eve, Noah's Ark, Abraham wrestling with the angel, 
 all the stories of my childhood wrought on gold. A 
 room as perfect and more sympathetic to me is the 
 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, where golden 
 light filters through alabaster windows on mosaics of 
 a dark blue ground instead of gold. 
 
 These older mosaic pictures on blue like those of 
 S. Prassede in Rome appeal to me more, yet, when I 
 think of St. Mark's in Venice and its subdued golden 
 harmony, I am not sure. The larger interior seems 
 better suited to such magnificence or perhaps one's 
 mood determines one's taste. In Palermo, I know I 
 found more satisfaction in Roger's other beautiful 
 structure, San Giovanni degli Eremiti. It may have 
 been because I wanted air and sunlight and was so 
 content to look at two rose-red domes under pointed 
 arches of a little cloister where a trailing rose flung its 
 saffron blossoms over a stone well. A black cat rolled 
 happily in the sunshine though she was tied by a cruel 
 rope. The Custode's grave, thirteen-year-old son ex- 
 plained that the gatta if allowed to roam at will, ate 
 lizards, and this food made her very ill so she could 
 not have her freedom. Alas! When I returned to 
 Palermo three months later, la gatta had broken loose, 
 eaten her prey and died, and two black and white off- 
 spring, who had inherited their mother's tastes, were 
 languishing resignedly at the ends of their chains in 
 the exquisite fourteenth century cloisters while the liz- 
 ards darted safely by. Even in a garden as beautiful
 
 114 Italy Old and New 
 
 as Eden life may have its cares and the Custode had 
 his rheumatism and the Son his English exercise to 
 write for school and the cats their cords, but my sym- 
 pathy for them all could not darken my joy there in 
 golden fruit of lemon and orange trees, peach-trees in 
 pink blossom, trailing white roses and ground covered 
 with freesia, mignonette and violets. 
 
 After such a morning I chose to loaf and invite my 
 soul through a long siesta time, then later went to the 
 Piazza Marina and walked out under the Porta Felice, 
 the great sixteenth century gate, to the sea, a pleasant 
 place in which to dream if Palermo gave one time. I 
 started to dream about how the high car of S. Rosalia 
 must have looked as on her festa it passed through the 
 Porta Felice left open at the top for it, but my feet were 
 aquiver to be off and soon I was investigating famous 
 inns in this old quarter and finding with delight the 
 beautiful Renaissance portal of Santa Maria della 
 Catena, the tiny church named from the chain which 
 once, it is said, was fastened here to close the mouth of 
 the harbor. Tea in the English tea-room in the Piazza 
 Marina gave refreshment with a look over the Giardino 
 Garibaldi and then later a chance of seeing the treas- 
 ures of the gift-shop, — ancient Byzantine ikons, Assist 
 embroidery, book-racks made of parts of painted carts, 
 conversation-beads of flame-colored amber. 
 
 I have no intention of chronicling stupidly all my 
 itineraries or all my teas, but perhaps a few of my 
 first experiences will speed the introduction of others 
 to Palermo. Another morning I went over to the 
 Piazza Bellini to see La Martorana and San Cataldo. 
 Incidentally on the way I was lured into the church of 
 Santa Catarina on the Piazza Pretoria to see Jonah. 
 Santa Catarina is so magnificently baroque that one
 
 Spring in Sicily 115 
 
 gasps for breath in the oppression of such heavy gor- 
 geousness, takes a hurried look at Antonello Gagini's 
 statue of the saint, and then finds on the first pilaster at 
 the right the joyful Jonah story, the capsized ship, the 
 floundering prophet, the gaping whale, all wrought in 
 high relief and brilliant color. Such use of baroque 
 bordering on the humorous treatment of the sacred 
 seems to me the most pleasing, for beauty I have not 
 yet seen in that style of decoration in spite of the fact 
 that a delightful young architect tried to educate me to 
 it during one whole half day in southern Greece. I 
 remember as we walked up the flowery hills towards 
 Messene's old stronghold how eloquently he maintained 
 that the baroque style which had made most of the great 
 palaces in Rome and the villas near must be judged by 
 its best and not its worst and in the light of the truth 
 that it had saved for us the Renaissance. 
 
 I admit my narrowness of architectural sympathy and 
 confess that La Martorana's beauty was sadly marred 
 for me by the baroque additions and the gaudy little 
 chapel opening out of the apse, with its priceless lapis 
 lazuli altar. One has to hunt in La Martorana for the 
 original lines of the building and the few old mosaics 
 remaining, but one mosaic picture in the vestibule is 
 worth a morning's stay, — the severe spiritual Christ in 
 his simple robes, crowning Roger the gorgeously ap- 
 parelled little earthly monarch. There is a delightful 
 mosaic of the nativity also, two happy animals peering 
 into the manger, the Child ready for his bath, but with 
 golden aura about his head, the saint pouring a tenta- 
 tive hand into tub to test heat of water. How naive 
 and blithe are some of these early Christian pictures 1 
 The most beautiful architectural part of the church 
 now is the delicate campanile and I stood looking at
 
 116 Italy Old and New 
 
 it long before entering S. Cataldo. This little Norman 
 church has been restored to all its original beauty of 
 line. Three rose domes, pointed windows, an Arabic 
 inscription for a frieze, rectangular plan, it shows with- 
 out; within three apses, six ancient columns, the old 
 mosaic floor giving the only color and under the cool 
 severity of unadorned walls, the lovely old marble 
 altar carved with the symbols of the evangels about 
 the Lamb. 
 
 It is wiser to see La Martorana, S. Cataldo and the 
 Palatine Chapel before going out to the perfection of 
 Monreale. Tram 9 from the Piazza Bologni takes 
 you up and up for an hour or more, past hedges of 
 gray-green cactus and scarlet geraniums over the Conca 
 d'Oro to the lovely height where Monreale's cathedral 
 flowers. One needs a day to begin to enjoy this most 
 perfect Norman monument in all Sicily, and after that 
 day, one will return. What is the charm? Partly the 
 natural beauty of the setting on the hill over the golden 
 plain and the sea; partly the proportions of the struc- 
 ture outside and in, — the basilica with three apses, the 
 Byzantine sanctuary, the great rectangular cloister; 
 partly the joy of the mosaics which paint on the walls all 
 the story of the life of Christ, and the sculptured capi- 
 tals of the columns from some of which pagan Ceres 
 and Proserpina look out; partly the varied fascination 
 of the cloister's carvings and the delight of hunting for 
 such personal touches as the capital whereon William II 
 the Founder offers the Duomo to the Madonna, or that 
 other where a Roman marble-cutter inscribed his own 
 name. Then you may climb about the roof for one view 
 after another of the adorable island, and you may sit 
 in the cloister listening to the water falling from the
 
 Spring in Sicily 117 
 
 exquisite column of the fountain, and all day you drink 
 deep of beauty until you are fairly weary of your senses. 
 
 Then it is time to go down the hill and relax in cafe 
 or tea-room and here I have a merry warning: remem- 
 ber if you are making engagements that there are three 
 cafes called Caflisch. I shall never forget how a dis- 
 tinguished English lady and I in an attempt to have 
 tea together "at Caflisch's" chased each other from one 
 place to another like kittens in a circle until I finally sat 
 down at one on the Via Maqueda, ordered cakes and 
 cups and let her catch up with me. 
 
 You will wish to go out to Cefalu soon after seeing 
 Monreale for the sake of comparisons and new impres- 
 sions of mosaic decoration from the great cathedral 
 there. We had a great disappointment on entering the 
 Duomo, for the apse was entirely hidden from view by 
 a network of wooden scaffolding that had been erected 
 for the restoration of the famous mosaics. My spirits 
 sagged until I conceived the idea of this being a great 
 opportunity for studying the technique of the mosaics 
 at close range and was able to convince a reluctant priest 
 that I was steady of head and foot. Then guided by 
 a little lame Custode with large gold rings in his ears, 
 I ascended shaky ladders and walked around six un- 
 steady stories of scaffolding. It was absorbingly inter- 
 esting to see the details of these Greek-Byzantine mo- 
 saics and in spite of my nearness to them, I was greatly 
 impressed by their simplicity and dignity, the remote 
 face of the ascetic Christ, the gentle Madonna in 
 mauve, the angels of the six folded wings, the glorious 
 company of the Apostles. Here I seemed to sense real 
 religious feeling, and the effect on me was like that of 
 the Russian church music. 
 
 Later with a small-boy guide I climbed to the top of
 
 118 Italy Old and New 
 
 the gray promontory on which ancient Cephaloedium 
 stood and saw on the crest of the hill the most remark- 
 able prehistoric ruin, — temple or tomb or private 
 house, Phoenician, Sikel, or Pelasgic, who knows? But 
 there it stands, high, broken wall gray on the green hill, 
 its lower part of magnificent polygonal blocks and in 
 them a huge entrance door with sculptured portal, lead- 
 ing into vestibule from which two other similar doors 
 open. Here is that familiar motif of drama which 
 might be called "the mystery of the door," for the mag- 
 nificent door in polygonal wall stands unexplained, com- 
 pelling study and conjecture. 
 
 I have left what meant most to me in Palermo until 
 the last, yet there was nothing to which I went so often 
 as the Museum, for in the peculiarly beautiful setting 
 of the old monastery with its two courtyards green with 
 palms, ivy, and papyrus under the fountain are as- 
 sembled great treasures. I did not have time to get any 
 idea of the Saracenic art from the Arabian Room, nor 
 much feeling for Sicilian painting from the pinacoteca 
 although I went upstairs twice to see the famous Flem- 
 ish triptych with its exquisite miniature fineness. I often 
 walked about the well-arranged rooms of the Greek 
 vases and the room of the bronzes where are the little 
 Pompeian group of Hercules and the stag and the 
 amazingly lifelike ram which once lay over the great 
 entrance door of Castello Maniace in Syracuse. The 
 mosaic room too demanded a classical glance at the 
 great floor picture of Orpheus charming the animals, 
 but the room where I sat for many a half hour was 
 the room of the sculpture from Selinunte. It was a 
 disappointment that I could not get to the site of Seli- 
 nunte itself to see the chaotic ruins from which these 
 great reliefs came, yet I knew the best of Selinunte to-
 
 Spring in Sicily 119 
 
 day was here. The fascination of the hall is the chance 
 to study the development of decorative relief sculpture 
 from such primitive work as the grotesque Hercules 
 killing the Gorgon and stiff, timid Europa riding her 
 bull to the four fifth century metopes where rectangular 
 spaces are filled with such varied and beautiful compo- 
 sitions. As I sat before them, I became absorbed in 
 studying details of technique, the red paint still visible 
 on Athena's robe in the Medusa metope, the attempts 
 at foreshortening in the primitive quadriga group, and 
 the varied arrangement of two figures in the later me- 
 topes and the way in which the heads, hands and feet of 
 the female figures are made of a finely worked, white 
 marble, very different from the porous stone of the rest 
 of the reliefs. The art of Greek sculpture seems to be 
 developing before one's eyes in that room; and leads 
 one's thoughts to the next stage, the final triumph of 
 Attic art on the Parthenon. 
 
 I did not leave Palermo without fulfilling the vow 
 I made on my approach, — to ascend Monte Pellegrino. 
 Hamilcar Barca was in my mind, the great Carthaginian 
 commander of the first Punic war with Rome, fought so 
 largely on Sicilian soil, and I kept thinking of Sir Roger 
 Casement's sonnet to the "Eagle of Eryx," 
 
 "Thou that didst mark from Hercte's spacious hill 
 The Roman spears, like mist, uprise each morn, 
 Yet held, with Hesper's shining point of scorn, 
 Thy sword unsheathed above Panormus still." 
 
 But when I climbed old Hercte I found that the moun- 
 tain brow is given over to the memory of a Christian 
 saint instead of a Punic conqueror. From the sea, 
 ships entering the harbor see the colossal statue of
 
 120 Italy Old and New 
 
 Santa Rosalia on the northeast side of the mountain, 
 but the sacred cave where this niece of the Norman 
 King, William Second, was metamorphosed from noble 
 maid to hermit lies on the back side of Monte Pelle- 
 grino and the ascent is long for the pilgrims, especially 
 on rainy days like the one on which I walked up. Yet 
 I saw a very heavy, lame woman painfully walking back 
 down the slippery road and a young father and mother 
 laboriously pulling a carriage containing a tiny crying 
 child. So efficacious is believed to be a visit to the 
 shrine. The cave where Santa Rosalia lived and died 
 has been transformed into a little chapel and here ser- 
 vice is held three times a day, the priest told me, near 
 the beautiful recumbent marble statue of the young 
 saint, clad in stiff golden robe and crowned with gold. 
 A little Museum full of magnificent gold and silver 
 votive offerings testifies to the devotion of pilgrims who 
 believe they have been healed here. 
 
 I kept thinking of the miracles of religion and of war 
 as I walked down the mountain, and almost equally 
 strange seemed the freshness of the path worn by pil- 
 grim feet, and the boldness of the venture by which 
 Pyrrhus once stormed this bare gray limestone ridge. 
 Then I forgot all history, as stopping in a rocky pas- 
 ture, overgrown with sparse low cedar and golden ge- 
 nestra, I saw the silver-gray, misty-green view of the 
 harbor encircled by Cape Zaffarano, and at the edge of 
 the Conca d'Oro the low red city of Palermo on the 
 shining bay. 
 
 Even a pilgrim may have tea and I found the Villa 
 Igiea very conveniently near the base of the mountain 
 and in its flowery garden above the ships riding at 
 anchor I planned how on my next visit I should go to 
 Selinunte, Segesta and Solunto. Segesta only have I
 
 Spring in Sicily 121 
 
 yet achieved and that shall be the end of my Sicilian 
 story. 
 
 I had hardly found spring in Sicily in my city life in 
 Palermo so the long day on the train from Palermo to 
 Taormina was joyful in giving me a sight of the coun- 
 try. It was a rainy day, of mists and clouds and leaden 
 sea, but through its grayness the gold fruit of the lemon 
 groves shone all along the northern and the eastern 
 shores. The north of the island seemed very fertile, an 
 irrigated country of vegetable gardens, olive orchards, 
 peach trees all abloom in deep rose, high hedges of 
 prickly pear or pink geraniums. At my left was the 
 sea, on my right green wooded heights, row after row, 
 cloud-wrapped, and in the valleys between them the dry, 
 pebbly beds of torrents. I read history as the train 
 stopped at one station after another. Here at Termini- 
 Imerese are the hot springs which a nymph showed 
 Hercules for his refreshment on his trip with Geryon's 
 cattle, but I saw from the train no bagni, their modern 
 successors. Neither could I see any trace of Himera, 
 home of the poet Stesichorus, and site of the terrible 
 revenge that Hannibal, son of Gisco, took here for the 
 death of his grandfather, — the destruction of the town 
 and the sacrifice of three thousand citizens to his grand- 
 father's shade. Soon I saw again picturesque Cefalu, 
 a warm, brown city stretching out on a point into the 
 sea, the golden brown cathedral with its two towers 
 rising high above the houses, and on the great towering 
 mountain above, the proud prehistoric ruin. Later the 
 Lipari islands rose, dim-blue silhouettes from a silver 
 ocean, only a remote line for the home of Aeolus, god 
 of the winds, but looming nearer "close to the Sicanian 
 coast and Aeolian Lipare, a lofty island, with smoking 
 rocks," where is heard a mighty anvil chorus on the
 
 122 Italy Old and New 
 
 forges of the Cyclopes, "the home of Vulcan and the 
 land by name Yulcania" (Aen. 8, 415-22). Then all 
 the afternoon there were tunnels, tunnels, tunnels as we 
 ran under the mountains that descend close to the sea. 
 Perhaps the intermittent view of hills and water seemed 
 more picturesque in their sudden beauty after the dark. 
 
 Milazzo's long slender promontory brought to mind 
 together Agrippa who won the battle of Naulochus off 
 the coast and Garibaldi's advance. Finally there was 
 one long tunnel and we came out upon Messina, lying 
 low in her curved sickle line by the sea between two 
 ridges of hills, all her houses looking very new, from 
 the rebuilding after the earthquake. As the train 
 rounded one ridge and ran out into the town, I saw 
 the shore of Calabria across and realized that I was 
 facing Scylla and Charybdis tamely and safely from the 
 land. 
 
 Here at Messina one changes to the train for the 
 south and presently we were passing through more fra- 
 grant lemon-groves, and by pebbly torrent beds, and 
 along green hills, and always on the left was beating 
 the sea. It was dark when we reached Taormina and 
 I saw nothing as we drove up, up, up to the city on the 
 rock, but I was out early the next morning and had an 
 hour alone in the most beautiful ruin I had ever seen. 
 I say this in retrospect, for I was bitterly disappointed 
 in the theater when I entered it in the orchestra : it 
 seemed so small, insignificant, colorless. I felt the 
 mistake of my position and went at once up the stairs 
 at the left to the very top and there had a view that 
 held me for an hour. I realized as I lingered that the 
 ruin is probably more beautiful than the original 
 theater, for the back of the stage, broken as it now is, 
 frames a view with stiff cypresses in the foreground,
 
 Spring in Sicily 123 
 
 then far below the turquoise sea, and the white surf, and 
 beyond in the distance Mount Etna's snow-capped peak. 
 All this magic setting intensifies the color of the ruin, 
 the dull red of old bricks, the gray of the Corinthian 
 columns of the scena. My eyes wandered off to the 
 craggy hills over the town, Mola with its Castello, 
 Monte Venere, Monte Ziretto, and then I turned to 
 the north and had another sea view, the coast to Cape 
 Alessio and its fort and across the water Calabria's 
 long point. All my precious hour I heard the surf 
 below and against its music now and then the song of a 
 blackbird. 
 
 When other forestieri began to arrive, I descended to 
 explore every part of the theater, trying to trace Hellen- 
 istic structure and Roman additions. Back of the scena 
 part of the Greek wall remains, massive marble blocks, 
 and some marble columns are embedded in the later 
 Roman brick-work. Details to notice are the niches 
 for statues back of the gray columns of the scena, the 
 reservoirs for water under the stage, the entrance doors 
 to stage and to orchestra, the excavated seats cut in the 
 native rock, the large room at the left of the stage as 
 one enters the orchestra. There is a tiny one-room 
 Museum above the theater but there is not much of in- 
 terest, architectural fragments found in the theater, a 
 headless torso of an ephebus, Hellenistic work, a Ro- 
 man sarcophagus with a Bacchic scene. I enjoyed more 
 the genial Custode who while he sold me a coin of 
 Tauromenium told me that the reason why the stemma 
 of the city is the minotaur is because the first colonists 
 thought that the three hills back of the city had the 
 shape of a bull-man. 
 
 All the rest of the day I roamed about the little town, 
 looking for its Roman and its mediaeval treasures.
 
 121 Italy Old and New 
 
 The one central street, the Corso Umberto, is not long 
 from the Porta Messina to the Torre Mediaevale so 
 one can be leisurely. I hunted up the Palazzo Corvaia 
 with the picturesque entrance gateway, court-yard and 
 staircase with the delicious fourteenth century reliefs 
 of the Creation, the fig-tree, Eve spinning and Adam 
 delving, the Odeon, a little Roman theater, half exca- 
 vated, the Duomo with one beauty, its entrance portal, 
 the diverting fountain where various beasties spout 
 water, and atop sits the Minotaur crudely restored as 
 a maiden queen or saint, crowned, San Domenico's 
 lovely cloister where the convent bell now summons 
 not monks but hotel guests to dinner, the Badia 
 Yecchia, a ruined Gothic tower with exquisitely deli- 
 cate pointed windows traced against the sky, the chiesa 
 del Carmine with its nice Latin couplet over the door: 
 
 Ingredimur veluti portam nos virgo sacelli 
 Te porta caelos ingrediamur ita. 
 "As we enter the door of your shrine, maiden, 
 so by you as a door may we enter heaven." 
 
 I do not wonder that Taormina is a haunt of artists 
 for besides the beauties of site and theater, there are 
 many picturesque street scenes: a group of old men 
 sitting in the Piazza weaving chair bottoms; a woman 
 in a green skirt, lavender apron, pink waist and yellow 
 kerchief, leading her goat; a gray stone archway with 
 a mass of orange-honeysuckle above and under it an 
 old wrinkled crone with a red kerchief over her head. 
 But much as my eye was caught by all this, I had the 
 feeling that there were too many picture postcards in 
 little shop windows to make these effects unsophisti- 
 cated. Taormina is too full of English-speaking artists 
 and tourists to let it keep a real simplicity that would
 
 Spring in Sicily 125 
 
 befit its rock. Yet its charm and its accessibility make 
 exploitation almost unavoidable and I with the other 
 Anglo-Saxons long to return for the blooming of the 
 almond blossoms and for the flush of dawn on Etna's 
 white face. 
 
 Theocritus and Ovid, the Odyssey and the Aeneid 
 are the proper companions for the train between Taor- 
 mina and Syracuse for they best tell the stories of the 
 Cyclops which haunt this shore. The tale of the un- 
 couth Polyphemus in love with the delicate nymph, 
 Galatea, you will find in two charming idyls (Theoc. 6 
 and 11) and then as you near Acireale you may read in 
 Ovid (Met. 13, 750-897) how here Acis, the young 
 lover of Galatea was transformed into a stream that 
 he might escape the jealous vengeance of his giant rival. 
 Near Aci Castello you will see off shore the Rocks of 
 the Cyclops, those great missiles which the blinded 
 Polyphemus hurled after Ulysses when he escaped him 
 so craftily, and in the ninth book of the Odyssey and 
 the third of the Aeneid you may read the story of 
 Polyphemus in anger. Then as you near the end of the 
 four hours' train-ride, you will forget the Cyclops' 
 Idyls and Epics for Pindar's greeting to Siracusa. 
 
 "O resting-place of Alpheos, Ortygia, scion of famous Syra- 
 cuse, thou that art a couch of Artemis and a sister of Delos, 
 from thee goeth forth a song of sweet words " (Nem. 1, 1 sq.). 
 
 Taormina is superlatively charming, Siracusa is su- 
 perlatively splendid. Yet something of the exquisite 
 haunts too this historic harbor where so much of an- 
 cient history was made, and it is well to begin a stay 
 in Ortygia, that fourth of the ancient city which is now 
 modern Syracuse, with a visit to the spring of Arethusa
 
 126 Italy Old and New 
 
 and a thought o\ the story culled from Vergil, Ovid and 
 Shelley, — how amorous river-god Alpheus pursued shy 
 nymph Arethusa through Greece even under the sea to 
 this island and when she at last was transformed into 
 a spring, here their waters mingled in happiness. The 
 acusans with the Italian sense of beauty have made 
 the fountain of Arethusa, in the very heart of the city, 
 a lovely thing. The great, clear, bubbling pool lies 
 deep below the city streets surrounded with high ivy- 
 covered walls. Feathery papyrus grows thick in half 
 oi it through which white ducks swim in and out, and 
 through the clear water pearly-gray fish dart. It is 
 the head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins that 
 graces many of the beautiful coins of Syracuse, those 
 artistic monuments, miniature but magnificent, of her 
 splendor. 
 
 To study the coins of Syracuse is to study her his- 
 tory, for one great Greek tyrant after another struck 
 pieces of money to commemorate his power and his 
 victories. Here is the silver Damareteion struck by 
 Gelo after his defeat of the Carthaginians in 480. For 
 the victory of Hiero I over the Etruscans at Cumae 
 we should see the famous inscribed votive helmet in the 
 British Museum. This Hiero is one of the monarchs 
 who proved that peace has her victories no less re- 
 nowned than war by gathering to his court the great 
 literary geniuses of his time, Aeschylus, Pindar, Simon- 
 ides, Bacchylides. The defeat of the Athenians in 413 
 B. C. is signalized by another great silver medallion 
 with a suit of Athenian armor under the victorious 
 quadriga. Timoleon's altruistic restoration of the free 
 life of the city 343 is symbolized in a coin bearing the 
 head of Zeus the Liberator. Pyrrhus' victories over 
 Sicily 278-5 B. C. produced a gold coin with the head
 
 Spring in Sicily 127 
 
 of Athena on the obverse and a victory on the reverse. 
 We know the face of Theocritus' patron, Hiero II, 
 from his coin-portrait; we know too the likeness of his 
 wife Philistis, whose name is carved on the theater. 
 Another coin gives us the profile of Hieronymus who 
 by allying himself with the Carthaginians, brought on 
 the Romans' siege of Syracuse and Marcellus' victory. 
 Then the glorious days of the city were over and it was 
 the prey of the vandalism of a Verres and of the con- 
 quests of Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. 
 
 All this tremendous history is recorded in great mon- 
 uments and one needs days to visit Ortygia, Neapolis, 
 Epipolae and Achradina. I began with Ortygia and 
 after visiting Arethusa hunted next the ruins of the 
 so-called "Temple of Diana," more probably of a 
 Temple of Apollo as a dedicatory inscription carved on 
 the stylobate shows. When I wished to enter the iron 
 gate which barred my study here, a small girl of about 
 ten informed me that she was the Custode and as proof 
 for my incredulity produced a huge key and maintained 
 a pompous air of oversight during my investigations. 
 Yet she allowed two playmates to set out tiny doll's 
 furniture and play house-keeping on the marble steps 
 while I looked at the two mighty Doric columns re- 
 maining from this most archaic of Doric temples on the 
 island. 
 
 Next I sought the temple of Athena. Never was 
 Doric more strangely metamorphosed than here into 
 this baroque Duomo. Zosimus, the bishop of the sev- 
 enth century after Christ was the one who embedded the 
 magnificent old columns in the church walls where his 
 own resplendent portrait now hangs. Athena has given 
 way to a silver Santa Lucia who does not scorn wearing 
 a beautiful Greek cameo upon her bosom, and to the
 
 128 Italy Old and New 
 
 lowliest of girlish madonnas by Gagini who stands 
 timidly under the tremendous Doric columns near the 
 font, which is an ancient vase of marble. The Duomo 
 in spite oi all changes retains something of the magnif- 
 icence of the temple which Cicero celebrated, and is a 
 hall where one feels the worship of centuries. 
 
 The Museum of Syracuse is a delight both in its 
 wealth of treasures and in the excellent arrangement of 
 them made by the care of Professor Orsi, the Director. 
 It is due to his scholarship that here may be studied the 
 prehellenic antiquities which reveal four periods of the 
 hitherto little known Sicilian civilization. Here too 
 are well-arranged collections of pottery, terra-cottas, 
 and coins, architectural fragments from the old temple 
 of Athena and part of a great red altar that stood 
 before it. Then there are magnificent terra-cotta sarco- 
 phagi from Gela, of the sixth and fifth centuries, with 
 the inside beautifully decorated in relief and color, one 
 with exquisite little Ionic columns in the four corners. 
 The halls of sculpture aroused that wild desire for 
 possession which comes over me when I see the perfec- 
 tion of small works of ancient art. Intellectually I dis- 
 approve severely of private ownership of any great 
 works of art; aesthetically I covet beautiful little 
 statues, and here the small ones were marvels: a little 
 niche relief of a seated Cybele, two small reliefs of 
 horsemen, and above all, a marble statuette of Her- 
 cules with even the exquisite head perfect. This ap- 
 pealed to me more than did the magnificent bust of 
 Zeus or Poseidon. Of course, the most famous statue 
 here is the Venus Landolina and she is very beautiful, 
 but no goddess at all though posed in the conventional 
 Anadyomene way, just a very individual woman, tall, 
 long-waisted, broad-hipped, two dimples at the base of
 
 THE TRANSFORMED TEMPLE OF ATHENA AT SYRACUSE
 
 Spring in Sicily 129 
 
 her back, tiny hollow at the base of her throat, and long 
 slender fingers on one exquisite remaining hand. 
 
 Another afternoon I drove to see the sights of Ne- 
 apolis: theater, street of tombs, Ear of Dionysius, 
 amphitheater and altar. Leave the theater till last 
 for the sunset there and disregarding chronology go 
 first to the great Roman amphitheater of Augustus' 
 time. The building seemed as large as the Colosseum 
 as I looked down into it but it is far from that though 
 larger than those of Pola and Pompeii and only a little 
 smaller than Verona's. It is very beautiful, for the 
 arena is carpeted with emerald grass and overgrown 
 with flowers so that I carried away a great bunch of 
 nameless darlings in pink, purple, white, yellow, as well 
 as some dear familiars like white clover, mignonette 
 and a sprig of spearmint. The plan is much like that 
 of the Colosseum, but it is a sunken bowl and one looks 
 down into it all, seeing it first from above. There is 
 a great entrance passage and portal, and opposite that 
 another gate to the city, a little side door too for the 
 carrying away of the dead. In the center is a cistern, 
 in which end two canals, perhaps to be used in flooding 
 the arena for naumachiae, around the arena a parapet 
 and underneath a crypto-corridor with doors on the 
 arena for the entrance of men and animals. The whole 
 ruin is most impressive and so is the "altar of Hieron 
 II," near. The great platform up to which three steps 
 lead is clearly large enough for the sacrifice of four 
 hundred and fifty bulls offered to Zeus the Liberator 
 who had freed Syracuse from the tyranny of Thra- 
 sybulus. Opposite the altar is the Latomia del Para- 
 diso, an immense quarry over a hundred feet high, 
 curiously named when one thinks of the slavery of labor 
 which must have gone on there. The collapse of the
 
 130 Italy Old and New 
 
 rock-roof makes it a great cavity with only one tall, 
 rock-pillar standing and over these fallen rocks and 
 walls and floors run riot masses of trailing green vines 
 and bright flowers. The most interesting part is the 
 grotto called "the ear of Dionysius" because of the tra- 
 dition that at the little aperture at the top Dionysius 
 could hear even the whispers of his captives imprisoned 
 there. Its curving shape makes it a megaphone so that 
 the low words of the Custode reverberated in the 
 depths, and his blow on the iron lock of the door was 
 increased to the noise of artillery. As quarry and 
 prison, the Latomia del Paradiso has its horror and 
 I was glad to go on to see the Nymphaeum and its 
 water-course back of the theater and the street of 
 tombs with the huge wagon-ruts in the road and the 
 rock-hewn chambers on either side. Then I went to 
 the theater and sat down on the upper seats for the 
 great view over the city, the plain and the harbor. The 
 theater itself is one of the largest of the Greek world 
 and once had sixty-one tiers of seats though now only 
 the forty-six low r er remain. They are cut in the rock 
 of the hill, divided by two praecinctiones around the 
 wider of which runs a rock-wall with inscriptions of the 
 names of Hiero II, his queen Philistis, Nereide, daugh- 
 ter of Pyrrhus and wife of Gelo II, and Olympian 
 Jupiter, names apparently used to mark the different 
 sections of seats. I could not see the ancient stage, for 
 workmen were busy preparing the setting for a per- 
 formance of Aeschylus' "Choephoroi," putting up a 
 small temple and Agamemnon's tomb, but I sat long 
 with thoughts of the great ancients whom those seats 
 had held, Aeschylus, Pindar, Aristippus and Plato; and 
 of how Timoleon, old and blind, spoke here to his
 
 Spring in Sicily 131 
 
 fellow-citizens; and how here perhaps was given the 
 Persians of Aeschylus after the .victory of Himera. 
 
 Another great day at Syracuse took me to Epipolae 
 and Achradina with Thucydides. The Sicilian ex- 
 pedition is almost too terrible a narrative to read upon 
 the scene of its enactment, the horror becomes so mani- 
 fest. Yet on "that long high ridge back, of the city," 
 I had new thoughts of the significance of the facts. 
 Perhaps it was because it was spring and Persephone 
 returning to the upper air had brought with her a wealth 
 of yellow daisies and white thistles that starred the hill- 
 side and the sense of her recurrent power made me muse 
 on the part that Alcibiades' travesty of the Ceres- 
 Proserpina mysteries played in his recall. A certain 
 terrible divine nemesis seemed to have pursued his 
 countrymen for his imputed sacrilege. More than that, 
 not only did the tragic drama of the expedition seem to 
 have worked to its logical religious conclusion, but 
 here on the ridge overlooking all the magnificent plain 
 which ancient Syracuse occupied, I asked myself what 
 right greater nations like Athens and Sparta had to 
 make this coast the battleground of their ambitions. 
 On Epipolae, the sympathy which had always gone be- 
 fore to the Athenians shifted in the balance. 
 
 That was the effect of the scene, — not of the Greek 
 historian. Even without the great fort Euryalus, this 
 height commanded the plain and from it one can see 
 why the Athenians rushed to take it and one can trace 
 the lines of the walls and counter walls which they and 
 the Syracusans built. Below too lies the harbor with 
 the projecting-points within which the ships of the 
 second Athenian expedition were imprisoned by the 
 chain of their enemy's vessels. And there back inland 
 must have begun the sad retreat of the defeated army
 
 132 Italy Old and New 
 
 which was to end in capture. Thucydides' narrative is 
 too poignant for rehashing. 
 
 Well, Syracuse with the help of Sparta, saved her 
 independence and learned wisdom about her own de- 
 fence for the next wars, and when the struggle with 
 Carthage came, Dionysius was ready with this magnif- 
 icent fortress of Euryalus which today crowns the old 
 hill of Epipolae. The walls converging here he built 
 also in an amazingly short space of time, 30 stadia of 
 them in 20 days by the use of 60,000 men and 6,000 
 pairs of oxen. The Fort of Euryalus is an amazing 
 example of the strength of a Greek fortress. The 
 Custode took me all over it with careful explanations 
 so that I saw the three fossae, the piles of masonry on 
 which the drawbridge over the third rested, the towers 
 which supported the catapults, the staircase cut in the 
 rock for exit towards the city and how it was protected 
 by windows for archers opposite its entrance, the com- 
 plicated system of corridors and galleries, some with 
 trap-doors for speedy exit, the courtyard for the cav- 
 alry, the rings to which to tie the horses, the four under- 
 ground storerooms. The position and the strength of 
 the walls even now make the Castello seem impregnable. 
 
 I was glad to get absorbed in the Italian Custode's 
 technical descriptions of methods of defense to relieve 
 for a while the tragedy of the Athenians, but worse 
 moments came on my drive back when I went to the 
 Latomia dei Cappuccini, the quarry-prison of the seven 
 thousand captive Athenians. The ravishing beauty of 
 the garden at the bottom of those sheer stone walls 
 did not lessen the horror of Thucydides' story (Thuc. 
 VII, 37, Crawley's translation). "The prisoners in the 
 quarries were at first hardly treated by the Syracusans. 
 Crowded in a narrow hole, without any roof to cover
 
 Spring in Sicily 133 
 
 them, the heat of the sun and the stifling closeness of 
 the air tormented them during the day, and then the 
 nights, which came on autumnal and chilly, made them 
 ill by the violence of the change; besides, as they had to 
 do everything in the same place for want of room, and 
 the bodies of those who died of their wounds or from 
 the variation in the temperature, or from similar 
 causes, were left heaped together one upon another, 
 intolerable stenches arose; while hunger and thirst 
 never ceased to afflict them, each man during eight 
 months having only half a pint of water and a pint of 
 corn given him daily. In short, no single suffering to 
 be apprehended by men thrust into such a place was 
 spared them. For some seventy days they thus lived 
 all together, after which all, except the Athenians and 
 any Siceliots or Italiots who had joined in the expedi- 
 tion, were sold." The Athenians were left there for 
 six months longer. Then those who survived were 
 sold as slaves or put to work in the public prisons. 
 Tradition says that a few gained their freedom by re- 
 citing to the aesthetic Syracusans the plays of Euripi- 
 des, and of this story Browning has made a great 
 poem in "Balaustion's Adventure." 
 
 In the quarries, my sympathy went back to the Athe- 
 nians and I would have been most terribly depressed in 
 the midst of the fragrance of the flowers and the sing- 
 ing of the birds had it not been for a very sprightly 
 Custode. Italian-like he could not bear the menace of 
 tears and, a Sicilian, perhaps he did not wish me moved 
 by the fate of an enemy. In any case, he first attempted 
 to divert me by a most idyllic description of the love- 
 making of nightingales with imitations of the bird-notes 
 and then he tried a story, his own innocuous version 
 of the rape of the Sabine women. "You are going to
 
 134 Italy Old and New 
 
 Greece, Signorina? I should like to go there because 
 1 hear the Greek women are the most beautiful in the 
 world. Oh! Yes! Of course, some Italian women are 
 handsome, at least in Rome. That is because the Ro- 
 man women are descended from the early Sabines. 
 Rome had no women at first and at a festa the Romans 
 said to the Sabine men: 'Go away, go away. Your 
 mother and your sister shall remain here.' And the 
 Romans were much larger and stronger than the Sa- 
 bines so the Sabines had to run away leaving their 
 handsome female-relatives for the Romans. So when- 
 ever you see a very beautiful woman in Rome, Sig- 
 norina, you know she is descended from the early 
 Sabines!" The Custode appeared much pleased with 
 his success when he saw me smiling. Perhaps he did 
 help restore my judgment, for I said severely to my 
 emotion: "Such brutalities as this quarry-prison are 
 the remnants of barbarism that war evokes. Think of 
 the conduct of the Athenians at Melos." Yet I was 
 glad to leave the beauty of the Latomia and I would 
 never stay in the Villa Politi near its haunting gloom. 
 As I had begun my days at Syracuse under the aus- 
 pices of the water-nymph Arethusa, I had hoped to fin- 
 ish them with a visit to another, and to see Cyane's 
 famous pool, but I had to postpone the trip up the Ana- 
 pus through the feathery papyrus. I should like to see 
 the place where the nymph boldly rose from the water 
 and with waving arms tried to stop Pluto in his carry- 
 ing off of Persephone. I was thinking much of that 
 Sicilian story on the long day's journey from Syracuse 
 to Girgenti, perhaps because the train passed near the 
 vale of Enna and Castrogiovanni's long ridge. I had 
 decided not to stop, for there are no traces of the 
 temples of Demeter and Persephone, and sulphur mines
 
 Spring in Sicily 135 
 
 have laid waste the flowery meads, yet, perversely when 
 we passed the station, I was disappointed not to alight 
 and ascend the hill for the magnificent view from this 
 umbilicus of Sicily and for a eight of Lake Pergusa 
 where Proserpina one day was gathering flowers when 
 in a moment Pluto saw her, fell in love and carried her 
 away. But it was not only Castrogiovanni-Enna that 
 reminded me of Demeter and Persephone. I was leav- 
 ing Syracuse, a city where many men like Hiero had 
 done "honour to Demeter whose footsteps make red 
 the corn, and to the feast of her daughter with white 
 steeds" (Pindar, Olym. 6) and I was going to Gir- 
 genti, "lover of splendour, most beautiful among the 
 cities of men, haunt of Persephone, who by the banks 
 of Akragas' stream that nourisheth the flocks, inhabitest 
 a citadel builded pleasantly" (Pindar Pyth. 12). I 
 opened my Theocritus and read bit after bit about the 
 goddesses: the shepherd's prayer to Demeter of the 
 threshing-flour: "Ah, once again may I plant the great 
 fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by, with 
 sheaves and poppies in her hands" (Idyl 7, Andrew 
 Lang's translation) ; the Lityerses song of the reapers, 
 beginning: "Demeter, rich in fruit, and rich in grain, 
 may this corn be easy to win, and fruitful exceedingly !" ; 
 and then the prayer that Hiero may drive the Cartha- 
 ginians from Sicily a passage most Sicilian: "O thou 
 Maiden that with the Mother dost possess the great 
 burg of the rich Ephyreans, by the water of Lusimeleia, 
 would that dire necessity may drive our foemen from 
 the isle, along the Sardinian wave, to tell the doom of 
 their friends to children and to wives — messengers easy 
 to number out of so many warriors! But as for our 
 cities may they again be held by their ancient masters 
 — all the cities that hostile hands have utterly spoiled.
 
 136 Italy Old and New 
 
 May our people till the flowering fields, and may thou- 
 sands of sheep unnumbered fatten 'mid the herbage, 
 and bleat along the plain, while the kine as they come 
 In droves to the stalls warn the belated traveller to 
 hasten on his way. May the fallows be broken for the 
 seed-time, while the cicala, watching the shepherds as 
 they toil in the sun, in the shade of the trees doth sing 
 on the topmost sprays. May spiders weave their deli- 
 cate webs over martial gear, may none any more so 
 much as name the cry of onset!" (Idyl 16.) Once 
 more I took out of my hand-bag a new treasure, a silver 
 coin with the head of Persephone on it, and all the 
 postcards I had found of representations of Demeter 
 and Persephone in art. It was the familiar relief of 
 Demeter, Triptolemus and Persephone in the Athens 
 Museum that started my mind to Eleusis near Athens 
 and to the mysteries that went on there in the great 
 temple. From the little that is known of them we can 
 understand their appeal and their comfort, for the great 
 nature myth of Demeter and Persephone, which grew 
 out of the succession of the seasons, the return of the 
 spring after winter's gloom, came to have a larger sig- 
 nificance of the immortality for which man craves, and 
 the mysteries seem to have presented to the votaries a 
 blessed assurance of life continuing. I never shall forget 
 my day at Eleusis and how as I sat on the steps in the 
 ruins of the great temple I pictured the ceremonies con- 
 nected with the shrine : the procession out from Athens 
 along the Sacred Way, and the baptism in the pools, the 
 night of mourning for the lost Persephone, the day of 
 joy over her return, then the sacred drama of the story 
 and the mystic words of explanation uttered by the 
 hierophant. It was not only the road on which I had 
 walked as far as Daphni that seemed to me sacred, but
 
 Spring in Sicily 137 
 
 all the stones of the great temple and the sculpture from 
 it in the little Museum above. And as if to make a 
 memorable day more significant I witnessed in the town 
 a modern Carrying Off of the Maid. 
 
 The drama was set in front of a little house painted 
 sky-blue, with a huge pink geranium flowering over the 
 door. A group of maidens in holiday dress, white ker- 
 chiefs draped around dark faces, stood at the right in 
 the shade of another house, eagerly waiting. Soon we 
 heard the sound of music and three men playing guitars 
 and mandolins strolled down the road ahead of a mule 
 which drew a long wagon, a sort of hay-rick, painted 
 like the house, light-blue. The mule too was decorated 
 with silk handkerchiefs pendant from his ears, topped 
 by little bouquets of pink flowers. The cart stopped in 
 front of the house and then the ceremony began for out 
 of the house was borne by young girls all the equipment 
 for a bridal bed, each article held sacredly aloft on 
 upstretched arms : first four square pillows with ele- 
 gant covers of linen and lace, two over blue silk, two 
 over pink; then two long bolsters also thus elegantly 
 decked; next linen sheets, woven wool blankets in bril- 
 liant colors, and spreads of white and old rose. Mean- 
 while a huge chest of drawers and a great trunk were 
 laden on the cart and then the Maid (I knew her at 
 once for Persephone) herself got in and with her hus- 
 band, blue-eyed and blind, and the help of three of his 
 war-mates, two sailors and a soldier, arranged all her 
 beautiful bedding on the cart, and saw it tied securely 
 with the pillows atop. Persephone was in spring yel- 
 low, a saffron-colored silk slip over full skirt of pale 
 gold; her stiff outer jacket was black embroidered in 
 silver daisies, and over her head was a tiny creamy 
 scarf, bordered with fine old lace. Under it her eyes
 
 138 Italy Old and New 
 
 shone very dark, her hair very black, her olive-skin 
 very pale. Strangely, it seemed to me, her mother was 
 there helping her, but it was surely Demeter for she 
 was all in corn color and russet and gold. When the 
 ceremony of the cart-loading was finished, the proces- 
 sion started down the road, the musicians ahead play- 
 ing, a sailor leading the mule, all the townspeople es- 
 corting the cart, the husband following and last of all, 
 just behind her girl-friends, on foot on the dusty high- 
 way, walked little, slim Persephone turning back one 
 wistful, friendly smile to me as she was carried off to 
 her new home. 
 
 The old grandparents who stayed by the little blue 
 house, now invited me in, for the old man spoke a little 
 English, having been in Chicago many years before. 
 So there in a bare room where the only decorations were 
 two long white candles, white bridal wreath and veil on 
 the table, I was gravely given candy and mastika and 
 drank the health of Persephone, praying that Pluto 
 might be kind. Then the old grandfather told me that 
 her real name was Sophia Moira 'Wisdom' and 'Des- 
 tiny' ! It was as if for me the Hierophant had spoken 
 the sacred words that explained the drama of spring and 
 of love and of the modern carrying off of the maid. 
 
 Now I must return to Girgenti. The trip from my 
 hotel in Syracuse to the Hotel des Temples lasted from 
 9 :45 A. M. to 1 1 :45 P. M. although I was on a through 
 train, and perhaps the length of that journey was the 
 reason why in my one day I never ascended the Rupe 
 Atenea or visited the modern town, even though I did 
 wish to see the Roman sarcophagus decorated with the 
 Phaedra-Hippolytus story. I think I must confess 
 though that what really kept me away from the city 
 was the intoxicating beauty of the country. I had break-
 
 THE PREHISTORIC RL'IX AT CEFALU 
 
 ELEUSIS— THE <\U KYI X< ; OFF OF THE MAID
 
 Spring in Sicily 139 
 
 fast and tea in the hotel's terraced garden under pepper 
 and mimosa trees, by a wall festooned with saffron 
 roses, and amid beds of calla lilies and white stock, 
 orange wall-flowers, freesia, crimson anemones, pink- 
 tipped daisies, snapdragons, nasturtiums and geraniums 
 and roses of all colors. From the midst of this wealth 
 of flowers I looked down and across to a green ridge 
 crowned with two golden Doric temples and beyond 
 to the shining blue sea. Sitting in that loveliness I 
 thought again of Pindar's apostrophe to Acragas — 
 "lover of splendour, most beautiful among the cities 
 of men." 
 
 So intoxicated by beauty I went off for a day alone 
 with Doric temples. A foot-path winds down from the 
 hotel garden to the Church of S. Nicola, and after en- 
 tering it to see a curious marble font and some quaint 
 little votive paintings, I found in the garden back of 
 the church the "Oratorio of Phalaris," a characterless 
 little ruin which had nothing but the name to suggest 
 the cruel sixth century tyrant and the brazen bull in 
 which he roasted human sacrifices. More attractive is 
 the fragment near of a beautiful rounding section of 
 carved marble cornice above a brown wall. A vigorous 
 little old woman, with the nicest weather-beaten face 
 showed me these ruins and while her eight-year-old 
 grand-daughter picked lavender blossoms for me, she 
 told me about her son lost in the war, "non mai trovato, 
 vivo o morto." 
 
 Then I went to the wonder of the temples. The facts 
 about them are so fully given in the Touring Club Guida 
 that I jotted down only little details and my emotions. 
 (You remember the story of the little girl who wished 
 to have in her diary two pages for each day, one for 
 events and the other for "Feelin's"?)
 
 110 Italy Old and New 
 
 The Temple of Zeus, once the largest Greek temple 
 oi antiquity, seems at first an inchoate mass of huge 
 ruins, then becomes sublime from the great dimen- 
 sions, from the size of one capital lying in two great 
 fragments, and from the Caryatid giant prostrate in 
 the center of the whole as though he were the fallen 
 Titan — Spirit of the building. A courteous old Cus- 
 tode showed me a book of architects' drawings of plan 
 and possible restorations (with the giants inside the 
 nave, supporting the roof) but more — he voiced in 
 eloquent Italian the greatness of the Greek genius that 
 conceived the building, the labor of the Carthaginian 
 prisoners who built and the pity of the vast destruction. 
 
 The Temple of Castor and Pollux was especially 
 beautiful to me because for years I had lived with a 
 photograph of it in my study and now I was face to 
 face with the original, a golden corner of four columns 
 and architrave, exquisite from every point. I was 
 sorry to learn that the corner had been set up, recon- 
 structed from the pile of ruin, for that fact made it 
 somehow less real, and yet I rejoiced inconsistently 
 that it stood there, so perfect amid the olive trees. 
 I sat a long time with it looking at the traces of white 
 stucco on the columns and the rich color of the steps all 
 black and white with a yellow incrustation. 
 
 When I went on, a horribly ragged and unkempt 
 woman enticed me to pass by her miserable home and 
 through a ploughed field under olive-trees to look down 
 into the vast basin of the piscina and across to the two 
 columns that mark the site of the Temple of Hephaestus. 
 I did not take the long walk to that ruin or to the so- 
 called "Tomb of Theron" which I saw below in the 
 plain though I would have gone had I believed the high, 
 heavy structure to be the tomb of the great tyrant who
 
 Spring in Sicily 141 
 
 with Gelon's aid defeated the Carthaginians in the 
 battle of Himera and gave his city such new power that 
 Pindar called him "the pillar of Acragas." In the 
 Temple of Heracles I photographed the one standing 
 column and while tracing the plans thought of Cicero's 
 dramatic story of how Verres' men when they tried to 
 carry off the statue of the god were indignantly re- 
 pulsed by the Acragantini. 
 
 The dusty road led me now to the Temple of Con- 
 cord, but wishing to have its most perfect beauty last 
 after one deep draught of the joy of it I went on to 
 the Temple of Hera Lacinia. The site is the most mag- 
 nificent of all, more isolated and high on the ridge than 
 Concord's and its more utter ruin makes its golden col- 
 umns a frame for pictures of the Temple of Concord 
 against green hills above turquoise sea and of modern 
 Girgenti on the hillside below the Rupe Atenea. The 
 temple is massive in length and height, yet delicate 
 because in its ruin it is so open to sunshine and wide 
 vistas. The color is a deep ochre. Everywhere little 
 flowers were growing in the crevices, candytuft, dande- 
 lions, star of Bethlehem, and the whole hillside under 
 the olives was covered with such a wealth of starry blos- 
 soms that again I thought of rapt Persephone and how 
 it was no wonder that gathering Sicilian flowers, she 
 was easily stolen. 
 
 Going back towards the Temple of Concord, I de- 
 cided to eat my lunch facing the view of it, so camped 
 on a bed of fragrant white clover, in hot sunshine and 
 cool sea-breeze. It is a more perfect Doric wonder 
 than anything I have seen except at Paestum and more 
 magnificently placed. The perfection of it made me 
 reverent so that when I entered later I felt like kneeling 
 in spite of a talkative little old vendor of post-cards on
 
 142 Italy Old and New 
 
 the front steps. The Christians had altered and meta- 
 morphosed it into the church of S. Gregorio delle Rape 
 (so unpoetic!) and traces of their work, are visible in 
 rounded arches cut 'through cella wall, but I could not 
 be bitter since undoubtedly it had been saved by the 
 Saint of the Turnips from being carried off block by 
 block to build the port of Empedocles. I went up one 
 of the old winding stairways in the wall to the superb 
 view at the top, then walked over the cella and the 
 colonnade before dropping down between two columns 
 just to sit a while facing the sea and here I thought of 
 all the history of the city: its tyrants, bad and good, its 
 sixty years of democratic government, its famous phil- 
 osopher Empedocles, its strict neutrality during the 
 Athenian expedition, the terrible sack by the Cartha- 
 ginians, Timoleon's restoration, its fate of capture and 
 recapture in the first Punic War and its final prosperity 
 under the Romans. The crowning beauty of the day 
 came when I had climbed the hill to the hotel-garden, 
 for suddenly a rainbow arched over the green ridge 
 with the temples to the blue sea. 
 
 And now for the last day in Sicily which I wish to 
 record. Sometimes I think that day in Segesta was the 
 best of all the spring. I went out from Palermo (hav- 
 ing returned from Girgenti in a six hour trip in a 
 through train) and it had taken courage to start at five- 
 thirty in a pouring rain alone. But the adventurous 
 spirit finds its own reward and mine was a day of bril- 
 liant sunshine, blowing clouds and marvellous effects of 
 light and shade. One leaves the train at Segesta sta- 
 tion, takes auto-bus to a bridge below the old Acropolis, 
 then walks or rides a donkey, getting l>ack for the re- 
 turn bus at the bridge at one. I chose to walk in spite 
 of deep mud that sucked my rubbers off and so much
 
 Spring in Sicily 143 
 
 water in the Scamander that I had to ford the tiny 
 stream on the Custode's horse, but even in spite of his 
 horror I insisted then on having the day to myself. 
 
 Of old Egesta there is nothing left but a Doric tem- 
 ple and a Greek theater, but that 'nothing' is much: so 
 marvellously are these ruins placed on the mountains. 
 The temple lies gold in a circle of a green hill, and is 
 lovelier and lovelier as one gets nearer views. It has a 
 certain lightness of aspect though Doric from never 
 having been finished, is a mere shell without a cella, 
 four sides and pediments, the columns unfluted, the 
 great stone steps still showing projections used to tie 
 ropes for hauling the blocks in place. Close at hand the 
 color of the travertine shows a variation from rich 
 ochre at the top to gray at the bottom. The interior 
 was peculiarly beautiful, all carpeted with green turf, 
 across which slanted long shadows of the columns and 
 between the columns were framed glorious views of the 
 mountains round about and of the Acropolis hill ! 
 
 That old Acropolis ridge lies opposite the hill of the 
 temple and the theater is on the very top, built with a 
 high retaining wall though the hillside too was utilized 
 for the cavea. What views there are from the top of 
 the seats! The bowl of the theater itself as I looked 
 down seemed small with very steep sides and the orches- 
 tra's arc nearly a circle. There ahead to the north I 
 saw between two promontories the blue sea at Castel- 
 lamare, at the right a hillside of red-brown ploughed 
 fields, to the west the green hill with the golden temple 
 and beyond a dim suggestion of Monte San Giuliano, 
 old Eryx, to the south a hint of Calatafimi. 
 
 Here on the highest seats of the theater, I reviewed 
 the story of Segesta, first of all the Aeneid coming to 
 my mind. If I had had a yacht, I would have rounded
 
 Ill Italy Old and New 
 
 the island as Aeneas did. You may remember his ship's 
 course from Ortygia to the harbor of Drepanum (Aen. 
 3, 692-708), and how coming down from a high hill- 
 top Acestes, born of a Trojan mother to the river-god, 
 Crinisus, welcomed the strangers with rustic wealth. 
 Near this shore Anchises died; here a year later the 
 funeral games were celebrated in his memory; and here 
 when the weary women had burned part of the ships, 
 Aeneas left with Acestes part of his followers to found 
 a city called from his name Acesta (Aen. 5). 
 
 So the Romans in later days proudly claimed the 
 Trojan origin for the Segestans, but another tradition 
 spoke of the prehistoric Elymi as the original inhabi- 
 tants. Whatever their origin, the Egestans early and 
 long were rivals of their neighbors, the Selinuntines, 
 and their appeal to the Athenians for aid against them 
 caused the fateful Sicilian expedition. After its failure 
 Egesta looked to Carthage for aid and found it, but 
 remained for many years a dependent of its new pro- 
 tector. Next it sought an ally in Agathocles of Syra- 
 cuse but was destroyed by his treachery when he was a 
 guest, and had to be repopulated. During the first 
 Punic War it was on the side of the Romans who 
 changed its name to Segesta since the connection of 
 Egesta with poverty seemed a bad omen. Scipio Afri- 
 canus restored to it the bronze statue of Diana which 
 had been removed to Carthage, but later the corrupt 
 Verres carried it off again. 
 
 A rather weak and unheroic history, these struggles 
 of Egesta, I thought as I sat there in the theater, per- 
 haps such as to justify the tradition of the founding 
 from the faint hearts of Aeneas' gallant band, "those 
 who have grown aweary of thy great emprise and of 
 thy fortunes" Nautes bade him leave, "the old men full
 
 Spring in Sicily 145 
 
 of years and sea-worn matrons, and all of thy company 
 who are weak and fearful of peril, and grant that the 
 wearied find their city in this land" (Aen. 5, 712-717, 
 Fairclough's translation). But such romantic judg- 
 ment was stayed by the visible beauty of the Segestans' 
 monuments that have survived them and which attest 
 achievement in art, whatever their political dependen- 
 cies and struggles. Then by one of the mind's kaleido- 
 scopic turns, I suddenly left Trojan legend and ancient 
 history and thought how Garibaldi and the Thousand 
 won their first great Sicilian victory storming the hills 
 of Calatafimi near, and how on the next day after that 
 terrible fighting "many of the Thousand tired as they 
 were with battle," Freeman records, "went three miles 
 out of their way into the wilderness" to admire the 
 lovely temple of Segesta on the hillside. In the face 
 of such Italian reverence for beauty, I too was ready 
 to honor the Segestans for their monuments. 
 
 It was springtime at Segesta again as it was when 
 Garibaldi passed. The Acropolis hill was covered with 
 thousands of orange marigolds under the fennel's feath- 
 ery green leaves. A lark was singing in the air. I took 
 one last look at the gray bowl of the theater, the golden 
 columns of the temple, the distant green hills, the blue 
 sea. Came rushing over me all the history of Sicily 
 from Aeneas to Garibaldi and the high coloring of it, 
 all the epic quality, the springtime freshness made me 
 repeat once more Pindar's song: 
 
 "Sow then some seed of splendid words in honour of 
 this isle, which Zeus, the Lord of Olympus, gave unto 
 Persephone."
 
 XII 
 
 RE-READING CATULLUS AT SIRMIO 
 
 THE place which smiles at me beyond all others 
 when I long to rest is a simple fisherman's town 
 on the Lago di Garda, Catullus's Sirmio. Once 
 when I was spending a night there, the summer before 
 the war, mountains and lake, sky and air, olive-trees 
 and ruins, and the friendly folk so appealed to my imag- 
 ination that I cherished a dream of return and this year 
 I caught my dream and for a week held it captive. It 
 seemed almost impossible that I could really have ar- 
 rived when I found myself sitting on the little balcony 
 of my room in the Grand Hotel Regie Terme, almost 
 in the tops of tall firs and palm-trees, with a glimpse 
 down in the garden of rose-pink oleanders and out be- 
 tween tree-tops to the blue and smiling lake. "What 
 did you do for a week at Sermione?" I hear some 
 amazed tourist query, and then I can hardly answer 
 the question as memory slips off into the vague golden 
 leisure of those slowly gliding, beautiful days. 
 
 After the noise and rush of Milan and the hundreds 
 of gay people promenading by the cafes, the peace of 
 this tiny town seemed blessed. During my week, I 
 heard no language spoken but Italian. The other 
 guests at the hotel were Italians who were there to take 
 the famous baths, and as my maid said when she wished 
 to reassure me because my door would not lock, "All 
 sick and polite people," "tutti ammalati e gentili." At 
 
 146
 
 CATULLUS' SIRMIO
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 147 
 
 first the inhabitants of the little town as I walked about, 
 seemed to be all children and fishermen, but gradually 
 a few hard-working mothers and maids emerged. The 
 picturesqueness of it all! Between the castle of the 
 Scaligers at the southern end of Sermione and the Ro- 
 man ruins at the northern point of the peninsula there 
 were always scenes to stay my feet and open my cam- 
 era : by the moat of the castle, four bronzed young 
 fishermen piling a great brown seine in their lorry; in 
 the castle courtyard, a group of women in black draw- 
 ing water from the old well to fill great copper jars; 
 on the dock, a woman carrying two water-pails at the 
 ends of a wooden yoke over her neck; a family of chil- 
 dren and baby-ducks scrambling indiscriminately over 
 the door-steps of a house; a pretty cameriera in the 
 door-way of the Albergo Catullo ; an old crone driving 
 three goats down the main street; fruit venders offer- 
 ing from large flat baskets yellow plums and red cher- 
 ries; a glimpse through an open door-way into a kitchen 
 with hearth and oven almost identical with those at 
 Pompeii; suddenly, O horror! an automobile tooting 
 through the town, fairly grazing both sides of the 
 street, dashing out apparently for a glimpse at "the 
 grotta of Catullus!" 
 
 It was out there at the end of the point under the 
 olives above the lake, that I spent my most restful 
 hours, but there were many other diversions. One 
 morning, having persuaded the Custode of the Castle 
 of the Scaligers to let me roam about by myself I 
 crossed the drawbridge over the moat to a fascinating 
 half-day in the thirteenth century, walking on the ram- 
 parts, peering out of small windows as though looking 
 for an enemy, glancing down from dizzying heights at 
 the courtyard with the well, the moat, the two draw-
 
 148 Italy Old and New 
 
 bridges, and then at last at the top of the tower enjoy- 
 ing matchless views of the lake, framed in six Gothic 
 doorways. This was too enchanting a tower to leave 
 so I sat down and began mulling over the history of the 
 Castello in a tiny Italian guida based on notes by the 
 noble Count Girolamo Orti Manara, how in the year 
 1276 Mastino I della Scala sent to Sermione two com- 
 panies of soldiers to chase out the heretic Patarini who 
 were harrying this district, and for their success the 
 della Scalas received from the Pope the rights over the 
 Castle; how in the next century (as legend has it) 
 Dante was a guest in the Castello and standing here on 
 this tower thought of the verses 
 
 "Suso in Italia bella giace un laco 
 A pie' dell' Alpe che serra Lamagna 
 Sopra Tiralli, ed ha nome Benaco." 
 
 It was startling in the midst of such thoughts of past 
 history to hear the lightest of footfalls coming up the 
 tower-stairs. There are one hundred and forty-six 
 steps by stair and ladder and I could hear all the way 
 that unearthly tread. I realized that I was all alone 
 in the castle and was fairly holding my breath when up 
 out of the trap-door came a kitten's head! He was 
 just as terrified as I was, every hair on end, eyes dilated, 
 but curiosity had sent him to the top and somehow 
 steadied him safely down again. And I quickly fol- 
 lowed! 
 
 One evening after dinner, when I had gone out on 
 the pier to see all the sunset, a fisherman asked if I did 
 not wish a ride in his row-boat. To my "quanto?" 
 ("How much?") he gave the usual Sermione answer: 
 "Faccia Lei" ("Anything you wish"), so after mild 
 bargaining, I embarked and got him to let me try row-
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 149 
 
 ing the boat standing as he did. When I could not 
 move the monster at all, he was very much pleased with 
 himself and proud of his strength as he threw his 
 weight on the oars and pushed off and was all for hav- 
 ing me go entirely around the point to see la Boiola, 
 the chloride of sulphur spring which bubbles up in the 
 lake and has been piped to the baths, but I having heard 
 that the odor recalled chemical laboratories or bad 
 eggs convinced him that I foolishly preferred the sun- 
 set to scientific observations. 
 
 A little steamboat makes a day's trip around the 
 whole lake and twice I went off on that in the early 
 morning, once forgetting Touring Club Guida and 
 Baedeker just to enjoy sheer beauty, another time with 
 books, maps, and resolution for knowledge. In either 
 mood the lake is adorable. Kaleidoscopic pictures turn 
 quickly: lemon trees with golden fruit in white arbors 
 on terraced hills; lake-side towns with hotels and villas 
 in pale browns, rose-color, yellow, blue with rows of 
 white and pink oleanders in front of them and about 
 them green gardens with ivy-covered walls; at one land- 
 ing, a picturesque group of people, bare-footed friar 
 in brown cowl, several Alpini with their jaunty hats and 
 feathers, two resplendent Bersaglieri in red and black 
 with cocked hats, an old man selling bunches of lemons 
 hanging in their long green leaves, a company of ragged 
 little dirt-color boys around a small girl in a scarlet 
 dress, women washing clothes, kneeling on slanting 
 boards at the water's edge; views of the lake itself, — a 
 fairy island with towering villa and long narrow stretch 
 of garden pointing upward in cypresses; a long white 
 waterfall rushing down in cascades through deep 
 gorge; tiny churches perched on incredible heights; an 
 island fortress shaped like a great battleship; and then
 
 150 Italy Old and New 
 
 shifting tones on water and mountains. During the 
 day, the colors were very brilliant, the lake the deepest 
 of blues, changing to emerald near the shore, the moun- 
 tains, some bright green with verdure, others clear gray 
 crags, others blue heights that seemed less rock than 
 air as they dissolved into masses of white clouds. Then 
 as we returned in the hot sun of afternoon, the eastern 
 bank was all iridescent blues and lavenders in a warm 
 golden mist and I could not bear to look at the moun- 
 tains long, for a certain ecstasy hanging over them. No 
 Elysian plains for me ! My Paradise must be made of 
 heights and water. 
 
 The other end of the lake was particularly thrilling 
 to one who had been there in 1913, for Riva with the 
 upper point of the Lago di Garda was then Austrian 
 and now part of the Italia Redenta of the Trentino. 
 The beautiful little city of Riva during the whole war 
 was subjected to such violent bombardment that it was 
 almost entirely destroyed. Yet the Italian troops 
 about Riva during the final battle of Vittorio Veneto 
 were able to hold the enemy locked in their position 
 and by hindering the transfer of the reserves to help 
 the rapid and effective action of the troops that coming 
 up the Val Lagarina and descending from Tonale 
 hurled themselves on Trento cutting off completely the 
 retreat of the Austrian troops of the Trentino so that 
 almost all of them were made prisoners. The town 
 showed its war-scars. The old Hotel Riva where I 
 stayed in 1913 had no window-glass left, was full of 
 holes from the bombardment, was only a shell of a 
 building with the beautiful garden dead. Other struc- 
 tures were being repaired. Italian soldiers were on 
 guard in front of La Rocca. Above, the Tricolor 
 floated. Lake Benacus seemed rippling on the shore
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 151 
 
 in endless laughter because all its waves are now 
 Italian. 
 
 Besides such quiet lake trips, I had the excitement of 
 hearing Grand Opera while I was at Sermione ! It was 
 passing strange to go with a company of gay, young 
 Italians on the long automobile ride by Vergil's little 
 Mincius river, to the great Roman amphitheater at 
 Verona and there to witness Boito's "Mefistofele" pre- 
 sented magnificently under the full moon to thousands 
 of Italians who were wild with enthusiasm over beauty 
 of setting and music and dancing. I suppose it was 
 partly the theme of the opera, partly its lyric quality, 
 partly the fact that I had come over from Sermione 
 that made me wish in the midst of the dance of slender 
 girls before a Greek temple in honor of the divine 
 Helen and her eternal beauty, that Catullus could have 
 seen the Opera ! 
 
 The next day was one of those I spent with the poet 
 on the point of the peninsula. The first time I had gone 
 out there, on the dear familiar walk past the view of the 
 white villa on the Cortine hill and the tiny church of S. 
 Pietro, gray in the silver olives, and along the foot- 
 path on the eastern ledge above the cerulean lake, I had 
 received a great shock, for while I was thinking intently 
 of Catullus, suddenly at the end of the peninsula on the 
 very top of the cliffs I came upon two great circular 
 cement foundations for anti-aeroplane guns, the instru- 
 ment for directing their operations, and piles of earth- 
 works and when I descended into the Roman ruins, I 
 found in "Lesbia's bower" an officers' hut so construct- 
 ed of gray stones that it seemed a part of these fourth 
 century remains. As I stood in amazement on the top 
 again looking at these traces of the Great War, two of 
 the town men joined me and the younger one began to
 
 152 Italy Old and New 
 
 talk of the fighting, pointing out the direction in which 
 Trcnto, the Corso and the Piave lay and describing 
 eloquently how near the Austrians came. Indeed it 
 was only great Monte Baldo stretching there its Titan 
 length that protected Sermione, 
 
 "Raldo, patcrno monte, protegge la bella da l'alto 
 Co'l sopracciglio torbido." 
 
 So when I was left alone at last, it was with a very 
 poignant realization of the Great War, intermingled 
 with reminiscences of Catullus, Vergil and Carducci, 
 that I flung myself down under an olive-tree facing the 
 lake and the mountains. Here one inevitably, first of 
 all, rereads three poems, Catullus's 
 
 Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque 
 ocelle, 
 "Half-islet Sirmio, the gem of all 
 The isles," 
 
 Tennyson's 
 
 "Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!" 
 
 and Carducci's 
 
 "Ecco: la verde Sirmio nel lucido lago sorride, 
 fiore de le penisole." 
 
 And with their soothing restraint I left for the time the 
 thoughts of the anti-aeroplane guns and went back to 
 Catullus' life here in the first century before Christ, and 
 the reading his poetry among Italians in the setting of 
 his own Sirmio seemed to give me a new sense of its 
 values and his personality. 
 
 The events of his life are so slight that a few sen-
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 153 
 
 tences compass them. Born at Verona, educated in 
 Rome, he fell in love with a notorious beauty, married 
 and much his senior, who was the subject of his verse 
 until disillusion annihilated passion. Then the sharp- 
 ness of death in the loss of an only brother intensified 
 loneliness, and his musings, doubly melancholy, were 
 broken only by a trip to Bithynia in the suite of Mem- 
 mius which did not bring him great wealth but enabled 
 him to lay pious offerings on his brother's mound in the 
 Troiad. In the east, homesickness awoke ardor for 
 Italy and he returned to console himself with the coun- 
 try and with a friendship for a beautiful boy, and to 
 have a slight hand in politics by flinging virulent lam- 
 poons at Julius Caesar's unworthy minions until some- 
 how a reconciliation was effected between the young 
 poet and the great general, perhaps by Catullus Senior 
 who was Julius Caesar's friend. Certainly invectives 
 ceased, and honor was paid to Caesar in one poem. 
 Then hints of illness began and suddenly there were no 
 more lyrics even, for after thirty or thirty-three years* 
 Catullus' life flared out. 
 
 How vivid a personality is painted by lyric poetry 
 against the simple background of these few happen- 
 ings ! What a boyish and gay spirit dashes across these 
 pages ! Now in mock-seriousness Catullus begs Pollio 
 to send back the napkin which he had carried off from a 
 dinner-party; now he upbraids his dearest Calvus for 
 presenting him with a book of second-rate poetry; now 
 he urges Fabullus to come to dinner bringing along a 
 lady and the wine and the salt and the joy, for the purse 
 of his Catullus is full of cobwebs; now he teases Calvus 
 about being a great lawyer when he's such a tiny per- 
 
 * The dates of his death and birth are uncertain, but this is the 
 consensus of the best authorities.
 
 154 Italy Old and New 
 
 son; and again he satirizes Arrius who would be ele- 
 gant, for the way in which he adds and drops his h's. 
 Such light-hearted teasing and gay humor make us 
 wonder if the boy ever had a serious moment. 
 
 For answer there is the great sequence of the love- 
 poems to Lesbia, more complete and more subtle an 
 inner history than the Shakespeare or the Rossetti son- 
 nets. Sappho he must take for the model of his declara- 
 tion of passion and for once translation, forged from 
 such white-hot metal, assumes perfect shape. Daring 
 taunts follow about that stupid mule, the husband, who 
 does not see that Lesbia's constant criticisms of Catul- 
 lus show her absorbing interest. Then, love acknowl- 
 edged, the boy breaks forth into the maddest arithmetic 
 of multitudinous kisses and discounting all serious re- 
 flections of old age chants in the face of swift-coming 
 death, 
 
 Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, 
 "Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love." 
 
 Out of this early happiness come the two dainty trifles 
 for Lesbia's sparrow, full of the tenderness for little 
 feathery pets that can be such a comfort in their play- 
 fulness and such a sorrow in their loss. Then it is not 
 very long before the time comes when Catullus begins 
 wretchedly to look back at those bright suns when there 
 were many jests flying between the lovers and their one 
 grief was the death of the little bird! For now he 
 knows that Lesbia's favors do not go to him alone. 
 Yet her sudden appearance can still lift him from dark- 
 ness to midday sunshine and he worships again at the 
 shrine of his goddess until her repeated acts of faith- 
 lessness make him vacillate between jealousy and ador- 
 ation. "Odi et amo," 'I hate and I love,' he exclaims
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 155 
 
 in his torture, and then writes his grief in tenderness 
 rather than in bitterness: 
 
 "Once you said, Lesbia, you knew only Catullus, once 
 you said you would not prefer Jove himself as a lover. 
 Then I cherished you not as common men do their mis- 
 tresses but as a father cherishes his sons and his sons-in- 
 law. Now I know you. So though I love thee more, 
 you are to me much cheaper and much lighter. 'How 
 can it be ?' you ask. Because such injury compels a lover 
 to love more, but to honor less." 
 
 That conflict of emotions shortly becomes its own 
 destruction and all the idealism of the poet and the 
 vigor of the youth revolt against the torpor that is 
 creeping over all his senses, expelling joy from his 
 heart, and he prays in the name of his own honor and 
 his own purity that he may cast off the shameful dis- 
 ease which his passion has become. He has seen his 
 Lesbia now as Cicero saw her, "the Medea of the Pala- 
 tine," as the world saw her, the notorious Clodia, 
 her price a copper coin, and in horror at her true 
 character he hurls to his friend Caelius his recognition 
 of the brutal facts : 
 
 "Caelius, my Lesbia, that Lesbia, that Lesbia whom 
 alone Catullus loved more than himself and all his dear 
 ones, now at the crossroads and in the alley-ways de- 
 bauches the descendants of the great-souled Remus." 
 
 After such clear sight, a poet could not again suc- 
 cumb and- when after his return from the east, two 
 friends tried to act as Lesbia's go-betweens for new 
 reconciliation, the message that he sends her is uncom- 
 promisingly stern though ironically set in that Sapphic 
 strophe in which he first declared his love, but never 
 again used: 
 
 "Carry a few words, not pleasant, to 'my lady.' Let
 
 156 Italy Old and New 
 
 her live and flourish with her adulterers, the hundreds 
 whom she embraces and rules together, loving no one 
 truly, ruining all. Let her not look for my love, as 
 before, for through her sin, it has fallen dead like a 
 flower on the edge of a meadow, cut down by the pass- 
 ing plough." 
 
 At the end of the love-story how well we have come 
 to know boy and lover 1 The longer poems add little 
 to our acquaintance with Catullus' personality for they 
 only play variations on the love-motif, — the gay youth- 
 ful love-making of Acme and Septimius, young love 
 consummated in the wedding-hymn for two friends, 
 Julia and Manlius, the ugliness of lust in the famous 
 poem where the House-Door narrates the amours of 
 its mistress, the long mythological epyllion on the mar- 
 riage of Peleus and Thetis. All these show the tech- 
 nique of the poet more than himself. Yet there is one 
 touch of new feeling in a passage which suggests that 
 Catullus had thought of the joys of fatherhood, the 
 wish that Julia and Manlius may have a little Tor- 
 quatus, the image of his sire, who with a smile will 
 stretch out from his mother's breast his tiny hands to 
 his father. Only one who loved children could have 
 written those strophes. 
 
 I was inclined to dally with this thought and with 
 the tragedy of the Lesbia poems, reflecting on what 
 Catullus had missed, but he is not one to evoke pity. 
 He found too much in life and lived with too much 
 ardor for any vain regrets. Friendship was to him as 
 intense a feeling as love to many so that he could go 
 wild with excitement over Veranius' coming home or 
 over the cleverness and charm of Calvus' verses. Such 
 was his devotion to his brother that the loss of him 
 buried all his home, wrecked all joys, and banished
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 157 
 
 love's sweet-bitterness. He knew Libitina, that two- 
 faced goddess of life and death whom the Romans 
 served and in proportion as life was intense to him was 
 death bitter. No religion consoled him, for his two 
 marvellous hymns, the chorus to Diana, the goddess 
 of mountains, green woods, hidden glades and singing 
 streams, and the orgiastic threnody of the self-muti- 
 lated Attis, priest of Cybele, are but vicarious experi- 
 ence, not the personal aspiration of a soul to the divine. 
 And when the poet himself falls sick, he does not offer 
 prayers or vows, but wants a friend and a letter in the 
 most human way. And the sympathy which he wished 
 from his friends made him know what to give them in 
 times of need. Could any letter of consolation be more 
 delicate and sensitive than his to Calvus on the death 
 of his wife? 
 
 "If any comfort can go to the mute dead from our 
 sorrow, Calvus, from the longing with which we re- 
 new old loves and weep for friendships once lost, surely 
 Quintilia is feeling not so much sorrow over her early 
 death as joy in your love." 
 
 Catullus had one source of comfort when friends 
 were absent, love proved false and death brought sepa- 
 ration. That was the beauty of the outdoor world. It 
 surely meant something that his villas were in two of 
 the most beautiful spots in Italy, near Tibur, whose 
 rushing river and falling waters Horace has celebrated 
 and on Lake Benacus, whose mountains and water have 
 been the theme of Vergil, Dante and Carducci. Never 
 did poems of home-coming show finer ardor than Catul- 
 lus'. When spring comes upon him in Bithynia, his 
 mind fairly shivers in its eagerness to be travelling; 
 his happy feet thrill with desire. Back at Sirmio, he 
 dedicates a little model of the yacht that bore him home
 
 158 Italy Old and New 
 
 (or could it have been the vessel itself?) with praise 
 for its safe convoy from the remote Pontus even to this 
 limpid lake. Then, at rest, with what love and ecstasy 
 he salutes his Sirmio : 
 
 Pacne insularum, Sirmio, insularumque 
 ocelle, quascumque in liquentibus stagnis 
 marique vasto fert uterque Neptunus, 
 quam te libenter quamque laetus inviso, 
 vix mi ipse credens Thyniam atque Bithynos 
 liquisse campos et videre te in tuto. 
 o, quid solutis est beatius curis, 
 cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino 
 labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum 
 desideratoque acquiescimus lecto! 
 hoc est, quod unumst pro laboribus tantis. 
 salve, o venusta Sirmio, atque ero gaude: 
 gaudete vosque, o liquidae lacus undae; 
 ridete, quidquid est domi cachinnorum. 
 
 "Half-islet Sirmio, the gem of all 
 
 The isles, which god of sea or god of mere 
 Upholds in glossy lake or ocean drear, 
 On thee with heart and soul my glances fall. 
 
 "Scarce can I think me safe when I recall 
 Bithynia's plains afar and see thee near: 
 Ah, what more joyous than the mind to clear 
 Of care, and burdens lay aside that gall? 
 
 "By distant travail worn we win our hearth 
 And on the long-wished couch siesta take: 
 This is the one reward for those who roam. 
 Hail, Sirmio, the fair! Greet me with mirth; 
 
 "Be mirthful, Lydian waters of the lake! 
 
 Laugh out, ye realms of merriment at home !" * 
 
 » Translated by J. W. Duff.
 
 Re-Reading Catullus at Sirmio 159 
 
 Life is not over for a poet who can so rejoice in the 
 beauty of his own place. 
 
 As Catullus had his disillusions about Lesbia, so we 
 have our disappointments about him when after all this 
 he diverts himself with the boy, Juventius, and writes 
 verses of unspeakable openness against the vices of his 
 enemies, but it is hard for one age to tolerate the dif- 
 ferent standards of another and Catullus alive might 
 defend his frankness and lampoon much refined hypoc- 
 risy in the twentieth century. Probably he would be 
 willing to see the men of today at their best as well as 
 their worst, and in his own Italy he would still find 
 poet-friends who would understand all his ardor, all 
 his passion, all his pain. Just across the lake at Gar- 
 done, D'Annunzio even now is writing new lyrics. 
 
 One day and another as out on the point of Sirmio 
 I lifted my eyes from Catullus' poetry to the mountains 
 and the lake, I thought of the great Italians who had 
 been here : Vergil, listening to Benacus rising with the 
 surf and the roar of the sea, and naming her in the most 
 magnificent praise of his native land that ever poet 
 wrote, Dante on the Gothic tower, seeing his vision of 
 Italy's future, Garibaldi, halted at Salo's curving bay 
 across the lake and allowed no share in the battle of 
 Solferino but biding his time of service for his country, 
 Carducci meditating here on Catullus and Vergil and 
 Dante and so carrying on the great literary tradition of 
 his race, then D'Annunzio over at Gardone recuperat- 
 ing from the passion for the Great War with which 
 he had fired Italy and written his finest poems. Sirmio 
 took me near the heart of her greatest sons. 
 
 And re-reading Catullus here under the olives near 
 the anti-aeroplane gun foundations made me under- 
 stand better the Young Italy that died in the Great War
 
 160 Italy Old and New 
 
 tn the number of five hundred thousand and the Young 
 Italy that is trying to help reconstruct the country to- 
 day. P'or the young Italian intellectual, like Catullus, 
 has in him something of the boy and something of the 
 poet, something of old-world disillusion and something 
 of southern ardor, a delicate sense of subtle shades of 
 feeling, a revolt against brutal vulgarity, a fondness for 
 children, a belief in the meaning of home, a passionate 
 devotion to the beauty of his country, and the power of 
 rising from personal loss and disillusion to new creative 
 work and to a carrying-on of great literary or national 
 traditions. It was verily the eternal spirit of Italian 
 youth that I felt on re-reading Catullus at Sirmio.
 
 XIII 
 
 THE ROME THAT HORACE KNEW 
 
 THERE is a certain haunting quality in a place 
 that comes from association with a person. 
 Some particular name rushes into memory and 
 a vast throng of ideas and feelings whirl after the name 
 until for us that special individual becomes in a very 
 real sense the genius of the place, genius loci, the im- 
 manent spirit to whom the Romans used to erect their 
 altars. For me in Rome and in the country near Rome, 
 the thought of Quintus Horatius Flaccus has been so 
 constantly with me that my altar of the genius loci here 
 I raise to him and burn on it the incense of these memo- 
 ries. I do not wish to try to give a complete picture 
 of the Augustan Rome that Horace knew, but rather 
 to run over the definite allusions to special parts of 
 Rome in Horace's poems, to picture the life of the city 
 as he saw it, and finally to show something of his days 
 in the country near Rome. 
 
 Of the seven hills which Horace says found favor in 
 the eyes of the gods (C. S. 7) he mentions Palatine, 
 Capitol, Esquiline, Aventine, the hill of Quirinus and 
 the Mons Vaticanus. The Palatine is in Horace the 
 precinct of Palatine Apollo and in an ode (C. 1, 31) 
 he alludes to the dedication of the great marble temple 
 which Augustus erected to his patron god, asking: 
 "What does the bard demand of Apollo now that he is 
 enshrined? For what does he pray as he pours forth 
 new wine from the patera?" (C. 1, 31, 1-3), and after 
 
 161
 
 162 Italy Old and New 
 
 that poet's prayer, he refers again and again to the 
 Palatine Apollo who with just eyes regards his altars 
 on the hill, and to the library connected with the temple 
 in which Roman poets longed to have a place. The 
 temple site on the southwestern part of the Palatine is 
 now regarded by many scholars as not the Temple of 
 Jupiter Victor, but the foundation of the Augustan 
 Temple of Apollo. However, the whole problem of 
 the Palatine is now more than ever complicated be- 
 cause the remarkable discoveries made in recent years 
 of Republican and Augustan buildings under the upper 
 Imperial palaces are still unpublished. 
 
 The Capitol, where stood the Temple of Jupiter, is 
 in Horace a symbol of Rome's power, so it should for- 
 ever stand refulgent (C. 33, 42-3) and thither forever 
 should ascend in religious procession the pontifex max- 
 imus and the silent Vestal (C. 3, 30, 7-9). To the 
 Capitol it is that the Romans should send their gems 
 and stones and useless gold (C. 3, 24, 45-8). It was 
 for the Capitol that Cleopatra was preparing mad ruin 
 (C. I. 37, 6) and it was thither that the triumphal 
 processions wound up the hill to display to the god some 
 general crowned with bay, because he had crushed the 
 threats of haughty enemies. Here, too, proud boast of 
 the Augustan Age, hung the Roman standards, once lost 
 to the Parthians and displayed on their proud pillars, 
 now restored to Jupiter through Augustus' power (C. 
 4, 15, 4-8). Though Rome still stands, the temple of 
 Jupiter is gone today, all its past magnificence reduced 
 to old foundations under the modern Palazzo Caffa- 
 relli that have very recently been uncovered, and one 
 great fluted drum of a marble column from a rebuild- 
 ing by Domitian long after Horace's time, but the hill 
 as the Campidoglio is still the symbol of Rome's great-
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 163 
 
 ness and as I walked up its long flight of steps by the 
 live wolf and the live eagle in the garden to the statues 
 of the Dioscuri at the top and the great Republican hall 
 of the Tabularium, I felt that Horace's Capitol still 
 does stand gleaming with the spirit of Rome. 
 
 The Aventine too for Horace was the home of a god, 
 for as Apollo presided over Palatine and Jupiter over 
 Capitol so Diana held her sway on the Aventine and 
 from there regarded the prayers of the quindecimviri 
 and turned friendly ears to the petitions of the young 
 (C. S. 69-72). The temple, rebuilt in the time of Au- 
 gustus, may appear in a fragment of the marble plan 
 of Rome, but we know little of it except its probable 
 site west of Santa Prisca, the little church adjacent to 
 the Castello dei Cesari where you will go for tea on 
 the terrace to watch the sunset gild the Palatine ruins 
 opposite. 
 
 The Esquiline had for Horace associations far more 
 personal, for it was here that Maecenas' lofty palace 
 towered to the stars (Ep. 9, 3-4). Here once there 
 had been a burial ground of the poor and the humble 
 and excavations have shown the sort of necropolis 
 which Horace describes in Sat. 1, 8, whither slaves used 
 to carry the bodies of their fellows in cheap boxes, 
 where once, amid the bones of the dead, thieves made 
 their haunts and witches gathered charms. Maecenas 
 reclaimed all that ugliness so that Horace says now the 
 hill is healthy, its sunny embankment is a favorite prom- 
 enade and here Maecenas' palace is the happy resort 
 of the literary men who enjoy his favor. Horace de- 
 scribed to the envious Bore, who longed to be num- 
 bered in so choice a circle, how free the palace was 
 from the petty rivalries and the jealousies of both in- 
 tellectual and moneyed snobbishness (Sat. 1, 9, 48-52)
 
 164 Italy Old and New 
 
 and in a letter to Maecenas himself (Ep. 1, 7) the poet 
 proved how free Maecenas left the men he patronized, 
 for Horace, in spite of his indebtedness to his great 
 patron, most of all for his peerless Sabine farm, felt 
 free to refuse his urgent invitation to hurry back to 
 Rome and enliven the company on the Esquiline. It is 
 because of Horace's varied and devoted pictures of his 
 patron that one longs to identify something on the Es- 
 quiline with Maecenas' name and finds a certain satis- 
 faction in the so-called Auditorium Maecenatis on the 
 Via Merulana in the probable quarter of the old Ne- 
 cropolis, and of Maecenas' gardens. In this long hall 
 of the early empire, the imagination is caught by the 
 miniature theater at one end, a tiny semi-circle with 
 seven rows of elevated seats and one would like to 
 think that here perhaps Maecenas with Vergil, Varius 
 and his other literary friends sat to listen to Horace's 
 readings of his latest ode. But alas ! the archaeologists 
 will have it that the room is probably not an auditorium 
 at all, but a walled garden and no evidence proves that 
 it belonged to Maecenas. 
 
 Horace only refers to the hill of Quirinus as very in- 
 conveniently distant from the Aventine for those who 
 had to make calls in both places (Ep. 2, 2, 68-9) and 
 so too he barely mentions the Mons Vaticanus (C. 1, 
 20, 7-8), then a name synonymous with all the Jani- 
 culum ridge and only later bequeathed to the level dis- 
 trict between ridge and river where St. Peter's now 
 stands. 
 
 The river Tiber has its associations with Horace 
 and here my eyes felt certain that they had rested on 
 an inscription which he saw, for the Pons Fabricius to 
 which he refers (Sat. 2, 3, 36) still bears over its arches 
 the inscription that the bridge was built by L. Fabricius
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 165 
 
 who was curator viarum in 62 B. C. and that it was 
 restored by M. Lollius and Q. Lepidus (of 21 B. C). 
 Horace pictures for us the tawny Tiber in flood, vio- 
 lently thrown back from the Etruscan shore and rising 
 even to touch the sacred temple of Vesta. Here still 
 in the yellow river, the youths of Rome swim as the old 
 lawyer Trebatius advised Horace to do for sleepless- 
 ness (Sat. 2, 1, 8-9; C. 1, 8, 8; C. 3, 12, 7). Still 
 stately villas tower up over the yellow stream (C. 2, 3, 
 18) and across the river the magnificent park of the 
 Janiculum, where old ilexes frame enchanting vistas of 
 Rome, reminds us of Horace's allusion to Caesar's gar- 
 dens across the Tiber (Sat. 1,9, 18). 
 
 The Campus Martius was to Horace the great pub- 
 lic playground of Rome. The young athlete whom love 
 for Lydia ruined used to be able to stand the dust and 
 the sun of the bright Campus, Horace reflects (C. 1, 
 8, 3-4), but as for himself, the field is so sunny that he 
 has to abandon the game of ball there at midday and 
 seek the bath's shelter (Sat. 1, 6, 126). Today amid 
 the congested business districts of the old Campus 
 Martius one object will recall Horace's time, the in- 
 scription across the face of the Pantheon 
 
 M. AGRIPPA L. F. COS. TERTIUM FECIT, 
 
 the record that Augustus' great general built the orig- 
 inal temple, and although the building standing is of 
 Hadrian's time, this inscription may be the original one 
 of Agrippa's building of 27 B. C, which Horace must 
 have seen. 
 
 I never walk through the Roman forum without 
 thinking of how Horace used to stroll about there at 
 dusk (Sat. 1, 6, 114) and of his most famous walk
 
 166 Italy Old and New 
 
 there when his literary meditations were rudely inter- 
 rupted by the most notorious of Bores and he tried un- 
 successfully to escape his distasteful companion as they 
 halted a moment near Vesta's temple. Take Sat. 1, 9 
 with you and read it while you sit in sight of the round 
 foundation of Vesta's shrine with your feet on the old 
 paving stones of the Sacra Via, for there is no more 
 vivid and humorous character-sketch left us from the 
 old life of the forum and no satire more thoroughly 
 Horatian. 
 
 Two other pictures of human life on the Sacra via 
 Horace gives, one a tiny vignette of the nouveau rtche 
 who swaggering along in a toga far too ample aroused 
 the indignant criticism of the passers-by (Ep. 4, 5-10) ; 
 the other a hint of the great triumphal processions that 
 once swept along the Sacra Via up to the Capitol (Ep. 
 7, 7-8). As I walk from the Temple of Vesta west- 
 ward along the Sacra Via, I wish that the Puteal 
 Libonis could be located since here somewhere near the 
 Temple of Castor must have stood that sacred curb 
 which we know from a marble relief in the Lateran 
 and from Libo's coin (Carter-Hulsen, Rom. For. p. 
 160), but here I have only the amusing memory of 
 Horace's declaration that he will give up the Forum 
 and the Puteal of Libo (with all their legal business) 
 to those who do not drink wine, but for his part as a 
 bard he believes that no poems can give pleasure long 
 or indeed live which are written by drinkers of water 
 (Ep. 1, 19, 1-9). The Forum pleased Horace as a 
 promenade, but he would have none of it as a place of 
 labor and was only too thankful that he could go to 
 sleep at night not anxious because the next morning he 
 must be up betimes to call on Marsyas whose statue 
 stood near the Praetor's tribunal where all law business
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 167 
 
 went on (Sat. 1, 6, 120). In front of the column of 
 Phocas are traces of a praetor's inscription (L. 
 NAEVIUS) which helps identify the location of the 
 Tribunal, but today the only representation of Marsyas 
 in the Forum is on those marble balustrades of Trajan's 
 time where he stands under fig-tree, wine-skin on 
 shoulder. Horace speaks too of the Rostra from 
 which chill rumor starts (Sat. 2, 6, 50) and it is some- 
 thing to know that on the very site of the high long 
 platform across the north end of the Forum stood the 
 Augustan rostra, whatever portions of this present 
 structure are to be dated in the Augustan epoch. In 
 this part of the Forum near the Senate House and at 
 the foot of the street called Argiletum stood the tiny 
 temple of the two-faced god, Janus, — guardian of 
 peace, Horace calls him (Ep. 2, 1, 155), whose doors 
 were open in time of peace and closed in periods of 
 war. Because the temple was of bronze and very small, 
 all trace of it has disappeared. 
 
 We would know that Honace frequented the Circus 
 Maximus even if he did not speak of wandering around 
 the tricky Circus (Sat. 1, 6, 113) because his simile 
 from the race-course is so vivid. For the avaricious 
 man hastening on after wealth a richer man always 
 stands in his way, just as, when the chariot starts in the 
 race, the charioteer presses on after the horses that are 
 passing his, despising the rival he has out-distanced as 
 if he were coming in among the last (Sat. 1,1, 113-6). 
 The Circus Maximus that Horace knew, the huge oval 
 rebuilt by Caesar and Octavianus, has vanished, for the 
 valley of the Circus, between Aventine and Palatine, is 
 now occupied by a Hebrew cemetery and a great fac- 
 tory, but the obelisk which Augustus placed on the cen- 
 tral platform of the Circus now stands in the Piazza
 
 168 Italy Old and New 
 
 del Popolo, a symbol of the building's past magnifi- 
 cence. 
 
 Other haunts of Horace where he sauntered in his 
 walks were the porticoes of Rome and we can picture 
 him strolling slowly under those arcades, philosophiz- 
 ing to himself about his own life, and saying: "This is 
 the more excellent way. If I do so, I will live more 
 nobly" (Sat. 1, 4, 133-4). The porticus of Agrippa to 
 which he refers (Ep. 1, 6, 26), the one, I suppose, with 
 the exploits of the Argonauts painted on the walls, is 
 identified by some archaeologists with the Basilica Nep- 
 tuni, restored by Hadrian, now a part of the Borsa of 
 Rome. But many would make these beautiful Corin- 
 thian columns part of the temple to the deified Hadrian 
 built by Antoninus Pius and if we wish to visualize an 
 Augustan porticus, we will do better to see the frag- 
 ment of the Porticus Octaviae which shows the main 
 entrance though perhaps of a later time. 
 
 The streets of Rome Horace does not often name 
 for us though he refers to the Carinae (Ep. 1, 7, 48), 
 the Subura (Epode 5, 55), and to certain of the great 
 roads going out from Rome, the Via Tiburs (Sat. 1, 6, 
 108),theViaAppia (Sat. 1, 5, Ep. 1, 6, 26, Ep. 1, 18, 
 20). But the life of the streets he describes vividly. 
 His friend Aristius Fuscus may prefer to be down in 
 the city, but Horace praises far more the country with 
 its little streams, its moss-covered rocks, and its woods 
 (Ep. 1, 10, 6-7). Why, when he is dragged off to 
 Rome on business, no matter how bad the weather is, 
 he has to go and struggle through the crowds on the 
 street, elbowing the slow, and his only satisfaction is 
 when some jealous fellow calls out: "What are you do- 
 ing, madman? Would you push aside everybody in 
 your way if you're bent on hurrying to Maecenas?"
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 169 
 
 Such envy pursues the great man's friend whether 
 Maecenas is just giving Horace a lift in his carriage, 
 and passing the time of day, or whether they are watch- 
 ing some celebration together or exercising together on 
 the Campus Martius (Sat. 2, 6, 23-49), and Horace 
 admits good-humoredly his own naive satisfaction and 
 how when a late dinner invitation to the Esquiline ar- 
 rives, he bawls for his lantern and rushes off, neglecting 
 his own callers (Sat. 2, 7, 32-37). But even for his 
 pleasure and pride in Maecenas' society, the poet finds 
 the city no place for writing. "You may say there are 
 open squares so that nothing hinders thought. A hot- 
 headed contractor rushes on with his mules and his por- 
 ters; a derrick, is raising now a stone, now a mighty 
 beam; here runs a mad dog, there rushes a muddy sow. 
 Go to now and think out your musical verses. No, the 
 whole band of writers avoids the city and praises the 
 woods" (Ep. 2, 2, 70-75). 
 
 Yet if you have a good deal of the Bohemian in you 
 and can give yourself up to being entertained, the city 
 streets are very diverting. Think of the delight the old 
 lawyer Philippus received from his conversation with 
 Vulteius Menas, that hawker of cheap wares! (Ep. 
 1, 7). Horace used to poke about often on foot alone 
 (at least in his early days as a quaestor's clerk) inquire 
 at the market the price of cabbages, visit the fortune- 
 tellers, then carry home from the delicatessen shops a 
 little supper of leeks, beans and a cake to enjoy with his 
 wine (Sat. 1, 6, 111-6). Probably during his strolls 
 he would go to the book-shops to look at the latest no- 
 tices of new books posted on the columns, though for 
 his part he could not stand having his books so adver- 
 tised and thumbed by the hot hands of the common 
 crowd (Sat. 1, 4, 71-2). That is really as disgusting
 
 170 Italy Old and New 
 
 to a writer of fine sensibilities as the thought of reading 
 his own poems in the Forum or the public baths to the 
 boredom of reluctant hearers, as certain writers have 
 been known to do (Sat. 1, 4, 73-6). There are many 
 chances of being bored in the city, but with some 
 shrewdness you can avoid banquets given to make you 
 listen to the host's second-rate writings (Ep. 1, 19, 38) 
 and even if you are a great patron, you can slip out of 
 your house by a side-door and be off to a dinner-party 
 while your client waits for you in the atrium (Ep. 1,5, 
 30-1). 
 
 Dinner-parties are very good fun, under almost any 
 conditions if you have a sense of humor. Did you ever 
 hear Fundanius tell about that affair Nasidienus Rufus 
 gave to Maecenas? Why, he even put in a place near 
 the guest of honor a buffoon who had a trick of swal- 
 lowing cheese-cakes whole. All Nasidienus talked 
 about was the food, and finally the tapestries on the 
 ceiling fell down with a cloud of dust on the platter. 
 You should have heard Balatro's wit in consoling the 
 host! Fundanius said he never had a better time in 
 his life (Sat. 2, 8). 
 
 So Horace turns the light of his satire on the diver- 
 sions of the Romans, now picturing a banquet, then 
 giving a glimpse of the races, or of a gladiatorial com- 
 bat, or of the theater, and of the last he has a good 
 deal to say, from his natural literary interest. Admir- 
 ing the dramatic art so much that he considers the play- 
 wright a magician who can transport him now to 
 Thebes, now to Athens, and can always move his feel- 
 ings, he is disheartened by the over-emphasis on spec- 
 tacular production, — that playing to the galleries 
 which brings on the stage squadrons of cavalry and in- 
 fantry, war-chariots, ships, captives, magnificent cos-
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 171 
 
 tumes, until the applause over a beautiful violet robe 
 drowns the actor's words (Ep. 2, 187-213). 
 
 Horace, the bachelor, gives us scant idea of home 
 life in the city. A reference to marriage suggests that 
 his point of view was thoroughly Roman: "One seeks 
 a blessed wife to have children" (Ep. 1, 2, 44-5). 
 And his picture of one great lady, Maecenas' wife, 
 Terentia (C. 2, 12), portrays her beauty and accom- 
 plishments, but above all her coquetry so that she re- 
 sembles in her attitude those lights-of-love who flit so 
 charmingly across the odes. With country wives we 
 shall find that he does better and his snapshots of chil- 
 dren are delightful. You can see a group of them play- 
 ing their games and counting out, chanting: "You'll be 
 king if you act nobly" (Ep. 1, 1, 59-60), and you can 
 see the little slowpoke in school, struggling with mental 
 arithmetic. " 'Let the son of Albius recite. Subtract 
 one-twelfth from five-twelfths, what remains? You 
 ought to have replied at once.' 'A third.' 'Good. 
 You can manage your property. Add one-twelfth. 
 What is the result?' 'A half.'" 
 
 The growing boy too he understands even when love 
 ruins his athletics (C. 1, 8), and most delightful is the 
 picture of himself when his father took him, only a lad, 
 to Rome to have the education which any knight or 
 senator would give his son, furnished him with proper 
 clothing and escort of slaves, then went himself with 
 him to school, to keep him chaste amid city temptations 
 (Sat. 1,6,76-84). 
 
 It was from so wise a father that Horace first learned 
 to observe the people they passed and to form his own 
 standards of life from the successes and the mistakes of 
 others (Sat. 1,4). But the tolerant humor with which 
 he viewed the idiosyncrasies of mankind must have been
 
 172 Italy Old and New 
 
 the result of long experience with many types of men. 
 Satires and epistles are full of miniature portraits 
 painted with master art. 
 
 There is the literal minded old lawyer, Trebatius, 
 who takes Horace so seriously when he declares that 
 he has to write satire because he can't sleep and advises 
 him so concisely to swim the Tiber three times and drink 
 well before retiring (Sat. 2, 1). As much in character 
 is the grandiloquent general with his eloquent exhorta- 
 tion to his soldier to storm a fort, and the matter-of- 
 fact country boy's reply (so in the tone of Shaw's 
 "O'Flaherty, V.C."). Before when he had been 
 robbed in the night, he had become a wild wolf and 
 had taken a fortified position that seemed impregnable 
 so that he was already a hero, but having been well 
 rewarded, he replied now to the praetor: u The man 
 who'll be afther goin' where ye wishe is I'm thinkin' 
 the one who's jist lost his money-belt" (Ep. 2, 2, 
 26-40). 
 
 There are little flings at other professional men, 
 the doctor, Antonius Musa, with his hobby for the 
 cold-bath cure (Ep. 1, 15, 2-9) and at the lecturers to 
 ladies' clubs (or to musical circles!), Demetrius and 
 Tigellius who went droning on in the midst of the arm- 
 chairs of their female hearers (Sat. 1, 10, 90-92). 
 Lucullus' wealth is done up in a neat little tale. "When 
 he was asked, the story goes, if he could lend a hundred 
 robes for a dramatic performance, he replied: 'How 
 can I furnish so many? Still I'll make inquiries and 
 send as many as I have.' A little after, he wrote that 
 he had five thousand robes at home; his friend could 
 take part or all" (Ep. 1,6,40-1). 
 
 Immediately after that satire on the folly of wealth 
 with its motto of nil admirari follows the frank letter
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 173 
 
 to Maecenas on self-dependence with its emphatic 
 climax, "It is right that each man measure himself with 
 his own foot-rule," and in this Horace gives a sketch 
 of a Contented Poor Man, Vulteius Menas, who man- 
 aged his little life in the city so satisfactorily until 
 Philippus for his own amusement tried the unsuccessful 
 experiment of turning him into a farmer. Vulteius' 
 description of himself is multum in parvo: "an auc- 
 tioneer of small means, but out of debt, with a reputa- 
 tion for working and loafing, for getting and spending, 
 happy in a few friends, a home of my own, enjoying 
 public fetes, and the Campus after the day's work is 
 over" (Ep. 1,7, 55-9). 
 
 Other men are painted with fewer strokes. Gargilius 
 who covets the reputation of a great hunter has his 
 slaves early in the morning cross the crowded forum 
 with the nets and all the paraphernalia of the chase in 
 order that, with all the people watching, one mule may 
 carry in the boar — which he had bought! (Ep. 1, 6, 
 58-61). That old sport, Volanerius, was so confirmed 
 a gambler that when the gout he deserved crippled his 
 hands, he hired for regular wages a person to pick up 
 the dice for him and drop them into the box (Sat. 2, 7, 
 15-18). Avidienus was so stingy that not only would 
 he use poor oil for his salad, but even on birthdays and 
 other celebrations he would mix his salad-dressing, 
 using more vinegar than oil (Sat. 2, 2, 55-62). Tillius 
 was in equally bad form from his stinginess, for when 
 he was praetor instead of keeping up some style, when 
 he went out to Tibur, he'd have his slaves carry along 
 a picnic-lunch for him (Sat. 1, 6, 107-9). Of course, 
 these men were at least consistent in their point of 
 view and vacillation has its disadvantages. Think of 
 Priscus! Sometimes he wore three rings, sometimes
 
 174 Italy Old and New 
 
 his left hand was unadorned. He lived so fitfully that 
 he would change his tunic every hour, and he'd rush 
 suddenly from a palace to a hovel from which a freed- 
 man of the better sort would hardly issue without being 
 disgraced. Now he preferred to live as an adulterer 
 at Rome, now as a philosopher at Athens (Sat. 2, 7, 
 8-14). 
 
 The artistic temperament is just as whimsical and 
 Horace's picture of one, though a miniature, rivals Bar- 
 rie's "Sentimental Tommy." "This is a fault common 
 to all singers that they never induce their souls to sing 
 on request for their friends, but if they are not urged, 
 they never leave off. The famous Sardinian Tigellius 
 had that fault. Caesar, who could compel him, if he 
 begged in the name of his father's friendship and his 
 own, would gain no favor. . . . There was nothing 
 consistent about the fellow. Often he ran like a man 
 fleeing an enemy; often he walked with as stately a 
 tread as one carrying the mystic symbols of Juno. 
 Often he had two hundred slaves, often ten. Now his 
 talk was all grandiloquent, of kings and tetrarchs. Now 
 he'd say 'May I have only a three-legged table and a 
 shell of pure salt and a toga, no matter how coarse, 
 to ward off the cold.' If you gave to this humble per- 
 son, contented with little, 100,000 sesterces, in five days 
 there was nothing in his purse. He'd sit up all night 
 and snore all day. Never was anyone so inconsistent" 
 (Sat. 1, 3, 1-19). 
 
 With so keen and amused an eye did Horace observe 
 his fellow-citizens and so well did he know his Rome 
 that we are fain to point the finger at an inconsistency 
 equal to Tigellius' when he writes to his friend Aristius 
 Fuscus: "I, lover of the country, send greetings to 
 Fuscus, lover of the city, for we twain are to be sure
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 175 
 
 very different in this one particular but in all else almost 
 twins with but one thought . . . nodding in time like 
 old familiar doves. You guard the nest, I praise 
 the beloved country's rivulets and moss-grown rocks 
 and wood." But Horace always slyly disarms criticism 
 by anticipating it and already has let his slave Davus 
 with the freedom of the Saturnalia declare: "At Rome 
 you desire the country, rusticated you fickly extol the 
 absent city to the stars" (Sat. 2, 7, 28-29) . And again 
 the poet himself admits : "I veer like a wind, at Rome 
 loving Tibur, at Tibur, Rome" (Ep. 1, 8, 12). So his 
 vivid reactions to nature and to country people give us 
 opportunity to see through his eyes not only the city, 
 but the country near. Just as Horace packed up Plato 
 and Menander to carry with him when he was off to 
 the country, I found that I always wanted my small 
 blue Horace when I went off on day-trips about Rome. 
 I was never fortunate enough to see Soracte stand- 
 ing white with deep snow, but many a time as I looked 
 across the plain north of Rome, Horace's line 
 
 Vides ut alta stet nive candidum 
 Soracte 
 
 came to mind with Byron's more aptly descriptive 
 phrase 
 
 "A long low wave about to break." 
 
 For Soracte rises, wave or island, from the sea of the 
 Campagna, a ridge with three crests, isolated, majestic, 
 and its beauty as well as its famous name calls. 
 
 At Gabii too, I thought of Horace and it was strange 
 to find as we walked across the Campagna from Pan- 
 tano towards Castiglione that Gabii is more deserted 
 than Horace dubbed it (Ep. 1, 1 1, 7) , no slaves to sell
 
 176 Italy Old and New 
 
 now (Ep. 2, 2, 3) , no possibility of treaties with knights 
 (Ep. 2, 1, 25) or refuge for treacherous Sextus Tar- 
 quinius, only the empty basin of a lake, puzzling frag- 
 ments of city walls, traces of a long, winding street 
 with cart-ruts and bases of monuments, the open and 
 broken cella of a great temple. But the color of the 
 temple-walls is a rich golden-brown and we saw it in 
 radiant sunshine, standing above the bright green of 
 young grain with the Sabine hills and Soracte looming 
 blue in the distance. Not altogether deserted was 
 Gabii, for as we sat eating our lunch, in the lea of the 
 wall of Juno's temple, a flock of sheep strayed by with 
 great white dog and shepherd. 
 
 The Campagna for Horace too must have held much 
 the same aspect, the wide level stretches, the back- 
 ground of violet mountains with Monte Cavo's wooded 
 crest. He too watched winter paint the snow upon the 
 Albans (Ep. 1, 7, 10), w r atched the victim growing up 
 in Alban pastures (C. 3, 23, 11) and near the ex- 
 quisite Alban lakes saw fitting place for shrine to the 
 goddess of one's devotion (C. 4, 1, 19-20). When we 
 went out to the lakes from great Rome, Ariccia with 
 its modest inn received us too as it did Horace (Sat. 
 1, 5, 1-2). The Ariccia of today centers in the Piazza 
 with Bernini's Palace and church high above the site 
 of the old town and the ravine which the long aqueduct 
 crosses with its three rows of arches. We followed the 
 road down past groups of contadini and hunting for 
 Roman ruins found in a giardino remains of great 
 arches and a piece of wall which a boy told us was the 
 famous temple. Here too we came upon a piece of the 
 pavement of the old road, perhaps the very stones over 
 which Horace jogged slowly on his journey to Brun- 
 disium. Somewhere near here was discovered the co-
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 177 
 
 lossal statue of a goddess, which is now in the National 
 Museum at Rome. I have seen her magnificent beauty 
 but may not describe it until the Italian archaeologists 
 have published their priceless treasure. 
 
 Tusculum takes another day though its modern de- 
 scendant, Frascati, looks very near from Rome, a white 
 city on a blue mountain shining just as Horace says the 
 old villas shone in lofty Tusculum (Ep. 1, 29-30). 
 Frascati with all its renaissance villas has its own charm, 
 but more exquisite in its beautiful loneliness is ancient 
 Tusculum above, — the old road, lined with scattered 
 tombs, winding up to the green glade of the forum, 
 through which are seen the white marble seats of the 
 perfect little theater on the hillside. 
 
 To another hill town near Rome Horace went, cool 
 Praeneste (C. 3, 4, 22-3) and there he read over his 
 Homer (Ep. 1, 2, 2) who taught him more clearly than 
 the philosophers lessons of life, — what is beautiful, 
 what is base, what is wise. One could now read peace- 
 fully both Homer and Horace on the top of the old 
 Acropolis hill above the town, for its wind-swept pas- 
 tures are cool and uninhabited, and the view is mag- 
 nificent between Alban and Volscian mountains straight 
 to the sea. Such a commanding control of a roadway 
 gave Praeneste her commercial and military power and 
 the fame of her oracle of Fortune drew many visitors. 
 So great was the temple of Fortune that most of the 
 modern town of Palestrina is built in its ruins and one 
 sees still strangely incorporate in the Villa Barberini 
 apse of temple, fine old mosaic floors, rooms where 
 oracles were received and delivered. 
 
 Horace must have seen the great prehistoric wall of 
 Praeneste still outlined magnificently down the hill. 
 He does not speak of consulting the famous oracle, but
 
 178 Italy Old and New 
 
 he wrote an ode to the Goddess of Fortune worshipped 
 at Antium (C. 1, 3S) and we thought of him no less 
 than of Cicero when we went out for a day at Anzio by 
 the sea. Perhaps Horace saw near Anzio at Astura 
 Cicero's villa whose foundations now lie clearly visible 
 under the water by the shore. I wonder if his eyes 
 rested on the Maid of Anzio, that beautiful statue 
 found in niche of wall one day uncovered here by 
 the sea, now one of the treasures of the National Mu- 
 seum in Rome. If, as Parabeni, the Director of the 
 Museum, thinks, she was a humble girl serving as 
 priestess in the temple, her beauty has at least some 
 stray connection with Horace's ode to the goddess who 
 reigns at Antium. 
 
 I thought of Horace at Soracte, Veii, Gabii, Prae- 
 neste, Antium and by the Alban hills and lakes, but no 
 part of the country near Rome is so peculiarly his as 
 the valley of the Anio in the Sabine hills, and his friends 
 inevitably go out the Via Tiburtina in quest of that 
 farm to which he fled as to a citadel far from the 
 
 fumum et opes strepitumque Romae. 
 
 The road crosses the rushing Anio and looks to the 
 Sabine mountains: so much is clear, but the puzzle of 
 the site of Horace's villa are many. In fact we query: 
 did the poet have one villa or two in these hills? We 
 know from his own words how he loved care-fr^e, well- 
 watered Tibur (Tivoli) on the hillside, the rushing 
 Anio, the grove of Tiburnus, the orchards watered by 
 fast-flowing streams; how he gathered thyme for the 
 honey of his poetry near the groves and the banks of 
 well-watered Tibur, for the waters which flow by fertile 
 Tibur and the thick-leaved groves make a man famous
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 179 
 
 for Aeolian song; how finally he prayed that Tibur 
 founded by an Argive colonist might be the home of his 
 old age. All this suggests that at times he lived and 
 wrote near Tibur. Moreover Suetonius' life of the 
 poet seems to confirm this inference : "He lived often in 
 the retreat of his farm, Sabine* or Tiburtine, and his 
 house is shown near the grove of Tiburnus." This grove 
 of Tiburnus, familiar to both Horace and Vergil ( Aen. 
 7, 81-3), may have been across the Anio from Tivoli 
 on the hillside where have been found ruins of several 
 Roman villas, some facing the city and the falls, like 
 that attributed to Catullus, and others looking across 
 the campagna to Rome like the one of Quintilius Varus 
 which stood on that wide artificial terrace eight hun- 
 dred feet above the sea where now gnarled olive-trees 
 frame wonderful views. The ruins now believed by 
 Mr. Hallam and Mr. Thomas Ashby to belong to a 
 villa of Horace are in the grounds under the Frances- 
 can monastery and church of Sant' Antonio, on a ter- 
 raced hill looking across the ravine to the great white 
 waterfall. At the upper level in the monastery itself 
 there are remains of the villa, walls of opus reticulatum, 
 mosaic pavement and at a lower level there is a group 
 of three rooms, the central one a large nymphaeum, 
 once adorned on the sides with rows of columns. Still 
 lower on the hill are substructures with arched and tri- 
 angular niches apparently built to support a terrace for 
 a garden. All these remains are not later than the 
 Augustan age; the location is within hearing distance 
 of the Anio's waters; the beauty is more endearing than 
 that of hardy Lacedaemon and if Horace did have a 
 villa at Tibur where he wished to write and to spend 
 his old age, as I now am inclined to think he did, this 
 traditional site is a very probable one.
 
 180 Italy Old and New 
 
 But tradition claims also another locality for an 
 Horatian farm, Sabine as well as Tiburtine, and we 
 must go on from Tibur along the Via Valeria to the 
 second villa site, noting Horace's own landmarks by 
 the way. Six and three-quarters miles beyond is the 
 little town of Vicovaro, the Varia whither Horace says 
 his five peasant farmers used to go (Ep. 1, 14, 1-3). 
 Of old Varia there remains only a part of the town 
 wall and a portico of ancient columns in a little church, 
 but these add their charm to the town which has a 
 greater treasure in its tiny octagonal church of the fif- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Beyond Vicovaro we turn up the valley of the tiny 
 river Licenza, Horace's Digentia, and presently see on 
 a ridge across Horace's Mandela stretching out long 
 and picturesque with its towers (Ep. 1,18, 104-5). A 
 little further on a road turns to the left where there are 
 two stone bridges over a little stream and zigzags up 
 to Rocca Giovane, a tiny town with the gray and red 
 castle of the Marchese crowning precipitous crags. I 
 ascended for the sake of Horace's tenth epistle of Book 
 One, the line in which he tells Fuscus he is writing be- 
 hind the crumbling shrine of Vacuna. For here em- 
 bedded in the great wall of the Castello is an inscription 
 which tells how Vespasian restored a shrine of Victoria 
 which was falling apart from its antiquity and since the 
 Sabines identified Victoria with their goddess Vacuna, 
 this inscription may very well refer to the shrine near 
 which Horace wrote. Also near the inscription in the 
 wall is set a little relief of limestone about a foot square 
 representing a goddess in chiton and himation, her right 
 hand clasping the forelegs of a deer. Possibly this 
 relief came from the same source as the inscription, as 
 Dr. Van Buren has suggested, and represents Victoria
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 181 
 
 or Vacuna in the guise of Diana. If so, perhaps near 
 this tiny goddess Horace wrote his whimsical and de- 
 lightful letter to Aristius Fuscus. 
 
 About a quarter of a mile from Rocca Giovane, in 
 the plateau below, traces of a Roman villa were dis- 
 covered years ago, mosaic pavement that seems to be 
 covered up again, as last summer our guide could not 
 find them, and this site was acclaimed by scholars like 
 Pietro Rosa and Gaston Boissier as the most suitable 
 for Horace's Sabine farm. More popular, however, 
 has been the location further up the valley near three 
 branching streams of the Licenza. Certainly the lay 
 of the land suits perfectly Horace's enchanting descrip- 
 tion of the dark valley with mountains all around ex- 
 cept where the rising sun looks in on the right and the 
 setting sun casts its gleam across. Mount Lucretilis 
 towers up in the west, olive-covered, and there is a 
 spring too, worthy to give its name to the little stream 
 (Ep. 1, 16, 1-16). Here the whole plan of a small 
 Roman villa has been excavated. You will be guided 
 to it by a footpath's confident signpost: "Villa d'Orazio 
 Flacco." 
 
 Disregard the later ruins of the baths of the time of 
 Vespasian and of the Antonines, and walk around the 
 low foundation walls which outline garden, halls and 
 rooms. A crypto-porticus surrounded the garden in 
 front and there was a fish-pond in the center. From the 
 garden you could ascend to the house by one of three 
 little flights of steps. Across the whole width of the 
 villa extended a front hall out of which a central atrium 
 opened with three rooms on either side and in some of 
 these the old floor is still there, lovely mosaic patterns 
 in black and white stars and rays. Such modest rooms 
 they seem that I am surprised to find critics denying such
 
 182 Italy Old and New 
 
 elegance to the modest poet who would have his motto 
 pervum parva decent. 
 
 The objects found in the villa are arranged in a room 
 at the very top of the steep hill on which the tiny town 
 of Licenza lies and it is worth the climb to see them, 
 for here are coins, wine-jars, marble fragments, a faun's 
 head from a fountain, lamps, pottery, pieces of mosaics, 
 dice, keys, rings. All these little things, so many from 
 homely everyday use, are interesting, but they did not 
 give me any such sense of Horace's habitation as did 
 the olive-trees and the spring in the retired valley, be- 
 girt by wooded mountains. 
 
 It is for such country that Horace sighed in the midst 
 of the fret of Rome, and we get an idea of the sort of 
 life he led on his Sabine farm when he exclaims: u O 
 country, when shall I behold you? When may I quaff 
 delightful Lethe for the cares of life, now from the 
 books of the ancients, now from sleep and lazy hours. 
 O the nights and the banquets fit for gods which I and 
 mine enjoy before my hearth while I feed my slaves' 
 saucy children bits of the banquet. . . . Each man 
 drinks as he will. . . . Then talk begins, not about the 
 villas and houses of other men or whether Lepos 
 dances well or ill, ... but whether men are happy be- 
 cause of wealth or virtue; what makes friendship, ad- 
 vantage or character; what is good and what is the 
 greatest good" (Sat. 2, 6, 60-75). Then in one ex- 
 quisite ode he pictures the tall pine towering up over 
 his villa which he wishes to dedicate to Diana, goddess 
 of woods and groves (C. 3, 22), and in another he de- 
 scribes his villa in festive array to celebrate Maecenas' 
 birthday, — all the silver shining, the altar decked with 
 fresh boughs ready for the sacrifice, the jar full of
 
 jjp£p 
 
 "■ ■».-., 
 
 THE OLD WALL AT VICOVARO 
 
 Till'. VILLA OF OL'INTl'S IIORATIUS FLACCUS"
 
 The Rome That Horace Knew 183 
 
 Alban wine, the slave-boys and girls running excitedly 
 hither and thither (C. 4, 11, 1-12). 
 
 Horace knew how different his life in the country and 
 the life of Maecenas or Quintilius Varus was from the 
 work and rest of the simple peasant farmer, and per- 
 haps that is the reason why in Epode 2 after so serious 
 and beautiful a picture of a peasant's cares and joys, 
 the poet at the end attributes the whole account of 
 country life to a usurer who, just on the point of becom- 
 ing a farmer, called in all his money on the Ides, but 
 loaned it out again on the Kalends. And this surpris- 
 ing satire-ending to so idyllic an epode, reminds us again 
 of Vulteius Menas who encouraged by Philippus 
 bought a farm in the Sabine hills, only to find, after 
 sheep were stolen, goats died, crops disappointed hopes 
 and the ox was broken plowing, that the country was 
 not for him and that every man should measure himself 
 with his own foot-rule (Ep. 1,7). 
 
 For the real peasant Horace has ready understanding 
 and sympathy, — Sabine mother or sunburned wife of 
 an industrious Apulian who when her husband comes 
 home weary from work at night has the flock milked 
 in the stalls, the fire on the hearth, sweet wine in clean 
 flagon and on the table a dinner that costs nothing 
 (Ep. 2, 41-48), or the youth gathering and cutting 
 firewood at the bidding of stern mother, or some peas- 
 ant father like Horace's own. How affectionately and 
 proudly he relates that from his small possessions his 
 father had the courage to give his son the best education 
 that any knight or senator could give his boy, and then 
 himself escorted him to and from school to keep him 
 chaste in the midst of city dangers, and as they walked, 
 taught him many a lesson from comments on the people 
 they passed (Sat. 1, 6, 71-84; Sat. 1, 4, 105-126).
 
 IS 1 Italy Old and New 
 
 We wonder if Horace had his own father in mind when 
 he wrote the satire about the countryman, Ofellus, that 
 philosopher apart from the schools with a powerful 
 mother-wit (Sat. 2, 2). Very noble is his philosophy 
 of the simple life ; very simple his standard of wealth, — 
 that a man can possess only what he can use ; very cheer- 
 ful his spirit when, dispossessed from his farm, he en- 
 courages his sons as they work as hirelings in the fields 
 which once they owned, bidding them: "Live valiantly 
 and present valiant breasts to Fortune's stings." Cer- 
 tainly that most Horatian satire seems to embody much 
 of the good sense and sturdy spirit which Horace in- 
 herited from his wise freedman father. 
 
 In the Collegio Romano in Rome today on the wall 
 in the lower court there hangs a tablet to the students 
 of the college who perished in the Great War. The 
 marble relief pictures a group of young Italian soldiers 
 sweeping over the top, bayonets sternly set. Below is 
 a pile of books which seem to signify the education that 
 had enabled them to do their terrible and uncompromis- 
 ing duty when the hour struck; and for the Italian stu- 
 dents those books were Horace, Dante, Carducci. I 
 think Horace's name was inscribed there not only be- 
 cause he lauded great civic virtues and chanted 
 
 dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, 
 
 but because in the larger Rome of city and environs he 
 had acquired that catholic knowledge of city life and 
 of country life, of city people and of country people, 
 which enabled him to scale values correctly, to appraise 
 true virtue, and to know what counts for life and death. 
 I commend to you the poet who with a smile on his lips 
 saw life steadily and saw it whole, then dared knock at 
 the stars with his exalted head.
 
 XIV 
 
 SLABSIDES AND THE SABINE FARM 
 
 AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION 
 
 Reprinted from The Classical Journal, Vol. X, No. 5, February 1915. 
 
 (Scene: The living-room of a camp cottage. Doors open 
 opposite each other on the long sides, and a staircase goes up 
 at the back. At the north there is a great fireplace made of 
 rough field stones, in which a bright log fire is burning. At 
 the left of the fireplace are bookshelves, and beside them a 
 window-seat with a red Indian rug over it. In this corner of 
 the room stands a large, pine-wood table with rustic legs, on 
 which are books and papers. A photograph of Walt Whitman 
 is on the wall near. On the other side of the fireplace is a 
 cupboard with dishes and a kitchen table. At the south of the 
 room in a deep alcove stands a rustic bed. Near the foot of 
 the staircase stands a long pine table — evidently the dining- 
 table. Two rocking-chairs are drawn up in front of the fire- 
 place and in one sits a man over seventy, dressed in gray, with 
 white hair and beard, blue eyes, and vigorous frame. As the 
 October rain falls more heavily outside, he stirs the fire. When 
 he looks up, a guest is sitting in the other chair. He is of 
 medium stature; his gray hair waves over a low forehead; 
 his face is smooth; he wears a voluminous white robe of soft 
 wool. The man in gray, who is John Burroughs, speaks.) 
 
 J 
 
 WELCOME, stranger, to Slabsides. It is a 
 bad night on the road, and I know that 
 white garb must need drying at my fire. 
 "My robe is not wet, for I have come through kin- 
 ship to you, not by traveling, so I did not need to be 
 girded high. Bonds of congeniality break down bar- 
 
 185
 
 186 Italy Old and New 
 
 riers, and Quintus Horatius Flaccus, longing for an at- 
 mosphere like his Sabine farm's, has escaped for a little 
 while from the shades." 
 
 "I have often wanted to talk with you, Horatius, 
 and my desire must have helped bring you. I have 
 wondered whether you would like this little place of 
 mine and the independence of my life here." 
 
 "Your fire is very welcome to me. I believe in shut- 
 ting out the cold and heaping high the logs with lavish 
 hand. In its cheer you must tell me more of your 
 house." 
 
 "This is not my real roof-tree. That is a stone house 
 down by the river, built of the native rock. But this 
 one-room shack with the bark of the trees on the out- 
 side, dropped like a bird's nest in the wood, is the study 
 where I live alone for days and write." 
 
 "I had but one house, but it was in the quiet of the 
 Sabine hills, far from the smoke and wealth and noise 
 of Rome. It was larger than this, but quiet enough to 
 give me peace for writing." 
 
 "I have been reading that the Italian archaeologists 
 claim to have found the site of your house, Horatius, 
 and that the place is so elaborate that learned men say 
 either it cannot be your villa or else all your talk about 
 the simple life was mere pretense." 
 
 "You would not have me end their discussion by 
 assertion, would you ? No ! Let every Tigellius drone 
 on his lore to his female pupils from his arm-chair, and 
 all who wish discuss how far distant was Codrus from 
 ancient Inachus. You know from my writing that my 
 house had no columns of African marble supporting 
 architraves from Hymettus, and that inside I cared 
 most about the hearth-fire. The house itself did not 
 mean so much to me as my piece of land and its sur-
 
 An Imaginary Conversation 187 
 
 roundings. Mountains all around it had, John Bur- 
 roughs, but broken, so that the morning and the eve- 
 ning sun warmed the valley. Then there was a piece 
 of woodland, a spring of pure water, berry bushes, 
 oak trees, a great pine over the house, a river below." 
 
 "You had in one place what I have in several. I 
 will take you down presently to my spring here and you 
 will find its water, too, clearer than glass and useful for 
 head and stomach. But for your encircling mountains 
 I have to go back to my birthplace in the heart of the 
 southern Catskills. There the green hills rise on all 
 sides and the little trout stream makes music over the 
 rocks." 
 
 "I should miss that sound of the water here at your 
 Slabsides in summer, for I confess to liking to steal a 
 part of the solid day to lie under the greenwood tree 
 or beside the sacred source of some gently flowing 
 stream. The river near my house was one of those 
 little brooks in whose murmur I delight." 
 
 "Tell me, Horatius, were you only a play-farmer, or 
 did you really cultivate your ground and eat food that 
 you did not have to buy?" 
 
 "My own hands did not do much work, for when I 
 took a pick and turned the glebes, the neighbors all 
 laughed at my awkwardness. The slaves did the farm 
 work. But my wine was made at home and my fare 
 was simple — olives and mallows, leaks, peas, and cakes. 
 Even Maecenas had to be content with my country 
 produce when he came out from his palace towering to 
 the stars." 
 
 "I too have vineyards on the hill sloping to the Hud- 
 son, the great river near my real house, and here in 
 this little valley at Slabsides a farmer who rents the 
 ground of me raises celery in the rich, black soil. But
 
 188 Italy Old and New 
 
 1 have to buy my olives. I envy you that tree of Italy." 
 
 "Still, by Bacchus, you have the vine and, as I told 
 Varus, there is no tree that one would rather set out 
 than that. And then, after all, who would change his 
 own country for tree or aught else of another's? When 
 you came back from October abroad, you said you 'ex- 
 perienced the delight that only the returned traveler 
 can feel — the instant preference of one's own country 
 and countrymen over all the rest of the world.' I, even 
 fresh from Greece, let others praise Apollo's Delphi 
 and Pallas' Athens. Nor did hardy Lacedaemon move 
 me as much as the rushing Anio and the groves of 
 Tibur." 
 
 "You must have lived a happy life in your Sabine 
 valley, even though you never married and never had 
 sturdy sons and little grandchildren to lisp your name. 
 'A childless life is a tree without branches, a house with- 
 out windows.' I could not get along without my grand- 
 son, little John Burroughs. I believe he is going to be 
 a poet, for when he was in his cradle, 'I saw his eye 
 in a fine frenzy rolling' !" 
 
 "Ah ! But no thought of heir kept me from enjoying 
 my little fortune, and women came with laughter and 
 lyre and song — Lalage, Cinara, Tyndaris. As many 
 men, as many tastes. And while I am in my right senses, 
 I would never compare anything with a pleasant 
 friend." 
 
 "There are women now such as you never conceived, 
 Horatius, even with your praise of the sunburned 
 Apulian wife and your admiration of Cleopatra's cour- 
 age. They come to see me from a great college near, 
 strong of body, quick of mind, real comrades, and they 
 quote your poem about your Bandusian spring at my 
 spring."
 
 An Imaginary Conversation 189 
 
 "I always dreaded the fate of being studied by school 
 children in remote country districts, but I never thought 
 that such a lot awaited me in a school for Chloes and 
 Leuconoes !" 
 
 "Well, you knew the worth of friendship with men, 
 and you knew all sorts and enjoyed all, great and small. 
 I've often thought of your going about with Maecenas 
 in his raeda as / do with Mr. Ford in his automobile. 
 The emperor Augustus you were never as closely asso- 
 ciated with as I was with Colonel Roosevelt when we 
 went camping and tramping in the Rockies, yet rumor 
 said that he wished to make you his secretary in his 
 household once." 
 
 "True, he did, but one period of service as a scriba, 
 even for a quaestor, was enough to give me a distaste for 
 such routine work." 
 
 "I know. I held a governmental position once and 
 kept accounts, sitting on a high stool, while it was spring 
 in Washington, and Walt Whitman was out on the open 
 road. I could not stand it long." 
 
 "Walt Whitman! I have only seen his great and 
 vital shade. Tell me more of the man." 
 
 '"Vital' is indeed the word for him. He had in the 
 flesh the wonderful personality that fills his poems. He 
 was as strong as a man and as tender as a woman. He 
 gave up his life to nurse the wounded soldiers in the 
 war, for that work broke down his magnificent physique 
 and his old age was spent in a paralytic's chair, by the 
 window, as you see him there in the picture. His poetry 
 is as great as he was great." 
 
 "I remember about Whitman now. He was the new 
 poet you helped make known to the world in that splen- 
 did defense 'The Flight of the Eagle.' The genera- 
 tions are alike, and still it is hard for the critics to real-
 
 190 Italy Old and New 
 
 ize that any writing is good which does not bear the 
 stamp of antiquity. Every old poem is sacred to them, 
 and they forget that if the Greeks had hated the new 
 as we do, we should now have no classics ! I tried to 
 make the Romans of my time appreciate Vergil and 
 Varius as well as Ennius and Accius, but it was hard 
 work." 
 
 "Your satires and epistles, though poems, are much 
 like my essays, for they let you comment on men and 
 books, on life and literature. Their style is conversa- 
 tional and not learned, and their appeal directly to the 
 reader." 
 
 "I never called my sermones poems, for they were 
 the work of a pedestrian muse and lacked the grand 
 style and the genius of true poesy. No, I had a right 
 to knock at the stars only because of my odes." 
 
 "Such poetry as that I have never written. My 
 verses are simple strains of bird and bough. Some 
 said, 'John, print them,' others said, 'Not so,' but I 
 printed them, for they meant to me the song of the 
 thrush and the call of the bluebird." 
 
 "I have no real nature poems unless you would so call 
 the one on the Bandusian spring. But I loved the 
 country : the sound of running water, the shade of trees, 
 the flowers of the rose and the myrtle, the rocks painted 
 with moss, the startled fawn in the wood. I had it all 
 out with Aristius Fuscus, who was a lover of the city 
 always. I told him that I lived and reigned when once 
 I had left the things which he extolled to heaven." 
 
 "And one needs the country for writing." 
 
 "Yes, how could any man write poems in Rome in 
 the midst of so many anxieties and labors ? There were 
 always calls to make, business to attend, the distracting 
 noises of the street to interrupt tuneful verses. The
 
 An Imaginary Conversation 191 
 
 whole band of poets rightly loves the woods and shuns 
 the city." 
 
 "I do my writing here, often spend long days and 
 nights here entirely by myself, or with perhaps my 
 neighbor's dog for company." 
 
 "You read here, too, I see from these books by the 
 wall." 
 
 "Yes, I do not own many, but I have read them all." 
 
 "It was ever a joy to me when I could pack up Plato 
 and Menander and be off to the country with them. 
 I went to the Greeks for my inspiration." 
 
 "Did you get your philosophy of life, too, from 
 them?" 
 
 "I started out to, but I found that there a man can- 
 not be sworn to follow the word of any master." 
 
 "Two American writers gave me a lift forward — 
 Emerson and Whitman — but I too found that for a 
 philosophy of life, as well as for writing, a man has to 
 leave all models and get down to his real self and his 
 real thought." 
 
 "And then how simple a thing the philosophy that 
 one can use and live by becomes ! To be contented with 
 little and scorn great possessions, to make much of 
 friendship and nothing of office, to live to the full one's 
 own life, and yet somehow (perhaps by writing) to 
 serve others, and then not to be afraid of death, nor 
 become embittered by old age, but to grow happier and 
 more mellow as the years pass 1" 
 
 "That is my philosophy, too, at 'the summit of the 
 years.' 'I have kept apart from the strife and fever of 
 the world, and the maelstrom of business and political 
 life, and have sought the paths by the still waters, and 
 in the quiet fields, and life has been sweet and whole- 
 some to me. ... I say to myself, What is all this
 
 192 Italy Old and New 
 
 rattling machinery of government for, but that men may 
 all have just the sane and contented life that I am liv- 
 ing, and on the same terms that I do? They can find it 
 in the next field, beyond the next hill, in the town or in 
 the country — a land of peace and plenty, if one has 
 peace in his heart.' " 
 
 "How often I have said that! 'What you seek is 
 here, is at Ulubrae, if you have a contented spirit.' " 
 
 "And then I have escaped the greed of wealth; the 
 'mania of owning things,' as Whitman called it." 
 
 "Man really owns only what he can use." 
 
 " 'I have escaped the disappointment of political am- 
 bition, of business ambition, of social ambition; I have 
 never been a cog in anybody's wheel, or an attachment 
 to the tail of anybody's kite. I have never lost myself 
 in the procession of parties or trained with any sect or 
 clique. I have been fortunate in being allowed to go 
 my own way in the world.' " 
 
 " 'It is right that each man should measure himself 
 by his own footrule.' " 
 
 " 'And the longer I live the more my mind dwells 
 upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.' I am a 
 great believer in letting Nature work and send her 
 divine influence through the whole being. It was out of 
 the truth that Nature and experience gave me that I 
 wrote my best poem : 
 
 "Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 
 Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; 
 I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, 
 For, lo ! my own shall come to me." 
 
 "I read those iambi of yours and they helped bring 
 me to you — like to like. I am glad that while the pur- 
 suit of wealth still torments the ambitious and a strenu-
 
 An Imaginary Conversation 193 
 
 ous doing of nothing wears out the restless, at Slabsides 
 you have found the secret of right living. I hope we 
 shall talk again. At least we have had this day, and 
 what once has passed, even Jupiter cannot undo or 
 steal. John Burroughs, I know one more white soul. 
 Live. Farewell." 
 
 Suddenly the second chair by the Slabsides' fire was 
 empty.
 
 XV 
 
 OVID IN SULMONA 
 
 " a MAN'S life is bounded by the triangle of 
 /\ heredity, education and environment." So 
 A \. runs a famous saying which contains some 
 truth for me. Yet I have often wondered how much 
 of the line of environment should be assigned to birth- 
 place. We know something of the effects of topog- 
 raphy and climate on racial and national character- 
 istics, but who has made a careful investigation of the 
 possible results of early surroundings on individual 
 character? Walter Pater has essayed an exquisite 
 imaginative study in his "Child in the House" of those 
 many gossamer filaments attached to our first home 
 that over and over again in after-life brush across the 
 face so delicately. For myself, I surmise that the pe- 
 culiar restfulness for me of small azure lakes sur- 
 rounded by gently curving hills and a glimpse of blue 
 water through stirring leaves goes back to the fact that 
 all my childhood picnics were on the shore of one of 
 the Finger Lakes of Central New York. And if place 
 associations have such hold as they surely do for ani- 
 mals and for ordinary people, how much more must it 
 be significant that Mantua rejoices in Vergil, Verona in 
 Catullus and that Ovid is called the glory of the Paelig- 
 nian race? For poets, surely the sights and sounds of 
 which eyes and ears first become aware must be a crea- 
 tive force in future personality. 
 
 Partly for this, partly because I love the Very Young, 
 
 194
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 195 
 
 I am more interested in beginnings than in endings and 
 I defy old Solon's sententious maxim: "Count no man 
 happy until he dies." For that reckoning, waiting is 
 too dangerous and I would rather rush out with my 
 basket to cull the flowers of childhood. So when I read 
 of "Ovid among the Goths" by that Naturalist of Souls, 
 Gamaliel Bradford, my mind reverted at once from old 
 Ovid beside the Black Sea to young Ovid in the Abruzzi. 
 Some time I am going to spend a few weeks between 
 Pescara and Sulmona, walking in the mountains and 
 reading the poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso and Ga- 
 briele D'Annunzio to see if I can find out why those 
 snow-capped ranges produced two such romantic and 
 hybrid poets. Meanwhile I have journeyed to Sulmona 
 for these snapshot impressions. The way of approach 
 which I happened to select was peculiarly preparative 
 for beauty, as I came up from Brindisi along the eastern 
 coast of Italy to Castellammare-Adriatico and then 
 turned across country towards Rome and the long day 
 had given me first the sea, then the mountains. My 
 mind carries many pictures : the great, fertile, Apulian 
 plain stretching level and unbounded like the Roman 
 Campagna; the surprisingly small and quiet Aufidus 
 which Horace from his child-memories had led me to 
 suppose would be a roaring flood; Horace's Monte 
 Gargano, stretching out into the sea, not a great jutting 
 crag as I had pictured it, but a long level ridge with one 
 crater-like crest slightly elevated; and all the way north 
 here and there olive groves and over their tops (except 
 as we rounded Gargano) glimpses of the divine blue of 
 the Adriatic and flitting across the sea, bright, pointed 
 sails of white and crimson and gold. Then when we 
 turned sharply away from the coast at Castellammare, 
 there were at once the magnificent mountains.
 
 196 Italy Old and New 
 
 And it was here between Pescara and Sulmona that 
 I thought of D'Annunzio's dedication of "La figlia di 
 Iorio," — 'To the land of the Abruzzi ... to all my 
 people between the mountains and the sea' and I remem- 
 bered that here was laid not only the scene of that 
 tragedy but also of another, "La fiaccola sotto il 
 moggio," which I had seen given in Rome, so full of 
 the immemorial traditions of these hills, — the snake- 
 charmer and his witch-daughter going back even to 
 Vergil's epic. From this country too came those strange 
 stories of his birth-place "Le novelle della Pescara," 
 at once so vigorous and so haunting. All these seemed 
 the legitimate children of these rugged and barren 
 rocks — but D'Annunzio's other writings, many of 
 them, and the man! How could this hard and barren 
 district, fit for the dens of lions and for the huts of 
 hardy, simple peasants, have suckled so febrile, com- 
 plex, sensuous and sensitive a highly-strung twentieth 
 century organism as the author of "II Fuoco"? 
 
 And the other poet-son of the Abruzzi, Ovid, had a 
 career no less romantic and spectacular than D'Annun- 
 zio's. Towards the end of the day as the train jogged 
 on through the dim landscape of the twilight, I brooded 
 over these strange anomalies, wondering what Sulmona 
 could have thought of the meteor-like apparition of her 
 son in Rome. Ovid tells us in a poetic letter his own 
 story or at least he tells us all except the Great Mys- 
 tery at which he vaguely hints. "If I were king," as 
 the saying runs, in my benevolent despotism I should 
 decree that all my subjects should be educated enough to 
 write truthful autobiographies, and I should have these 
 constitute the state archives. This would remove all 
 need of a secret service department, would enhance the 
 value of the work of librarians, at least for cataloguing
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 197 
 
 and reference, would check, the careers of professional 
 psycho-analysts, would increase power as each person 
 would have to evaluate his own life while setting it 
 down on paper, and would develop a clear English style 
 from practice in writing on a familiar subject. I am 
 sure that at least Socrates with his dictum "Know thy- 
 self" would approve of my fundamental, national reg- 
 ulation. 
 
 Now Ovid, I think, knew himself and he knew how 
 to tell a story, witness the Metamorphoses, in fact that 
 was, I believe, his greatest literary power, but he chose 
 deliberately to be obscure or mysterious about the cru- 
 cial point of his life. It is as though a drama rose to its 
 denouement and subsided from it, but never explained 
 what the denouement was. 
 
 Ovid lived in a post-war period when, after one hun- 
 dred years of civil struggle had culminated in the death 
 of Julius Caesar, a golden age of peace was achieved, 
 a time of reconstruction, of great building activity, large 
 literary output, growing luxury. Ovid was the child of 
 this age of peace and plenty, a product of a society in 
 which the younger generation, knowing nothing of polit- 
 ical struggle, and little of military service, revelled in 
 amusement, coquetry, and all the joys of the light of 
 heart. 
 
 The autobiography of course begins with his birth- 
 place : "Sulmo is my native place, a district very fertile 
 from its cool streams, and ninety miles distant from 
 Rome." Then very proudly though with feigned indif- 
 ference he shows that he belonged to an important 
 family in the little town, was a knight as a whole line 
 of ancestors had been. The affection of his childhood 
 centered in the brother one year older than himself 
 whose birthday came on the same day, and there is a
 
 198 Italy Old and New 
 
 good deal about their education, — how when very young 
 they were sent by their careful father to the most dis- 
 tinguished teachers in Rome, and how the older boy 
 seemed born to be a lawyer, but young Naso was his 
 father's despair for he would write poetry instead of 
 studying oratory. "Why," demanded his practical 
 parent, "Why do you pursue a useless calling? Homer 
 himself left no wealth!" So Naso tried valiantly to 
 reform, but in the midst of efforts to write rhetorical 
 speeches, like Pope, he lisped in numbers, for the num- 
 bers came. Perhaps he endeavored still more conscien- 
 tiously to please his father after his brother's death at 
 twenty, the shock that stole from him part of himself, 
 for he did hold some minor political offices. But the 
 sight of the senate ahead and a long and honorable 
 career made him certain that neither his body nor his 
 mind could stand so strenuous and ambitious a life, and 
 once for all he made his great decision for dear leisure 
 under the Muse's sway. Now he was one of the com- 
 pany of poets of the day, and soon his own light verses 
 about a certain Corinna set all Rome agog to find out 
 the identity of his fair innamorata. One can imagine 
 what rumors reached Sulmo of his affairs, as his light 
 and elegant poems became the joy of Rome's gayest 
 and most fashionable circles. For thirty years he was 
 the poet-laureate of pleasure for the Roman world. 
 
 Meanwhile, unlike Catullus, Vergil, Horace, he mar- 
 ried, or experimented in marriage, let us say, as he 
 did in office-holding, for he seems to have taken his 
 marital relations as lightly as he did his public career. 
 Three wives he had : the first a woman not worthy of 
 him (he says) and barren, hence divorced; the second, 
 above reproach, but not destined to be with him long 
 (no reason assigned) ; the third a member of the dis-
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 199 
 
 tinguished Fabian family, and always loyal and devoted 
 to him if we can judge from his letters to her, for as 
 Bradford wittily points out, we have none of her let- 
 ters or diaries for the other side of the story. His one 
 daughter, Perilla, he seems to have loved. 
 
 In poetry, at first, as in education, career and mar- 
 riage, Ovid followed his own bent and in the first period 
 of his literary output produced iuvenilia which in vari- 
 ous forms all treated the theme of love : the light and 
 graceful Amoves which celebrated Corinna, the He- 
 roides or love-letters of ancient heroines, the absurd 
 skit on the care of the face with directions fit for a 
 beauty-parlor, and the two didactic poems on the Art 
 of Love and the Remedy of Love which are so bril- 
 liantly unmoral and seductive. If Ovid had stopped 
 writing here, he would have been notorious, but not 
 great, but he did not stop, for either growing up or 
 perhaps receiving a hint of the Emperor's disapproval 
 (and there is abundant evidence of Augustus' indirect 
 yet coercive influence on the poets of the day), Ovid 
 now turned to narrative poetry and wrote the Meta- 
 morphoses, those sparkling stories which retell the old 
 Greek mythology, and the Fasti, a religious calendar 
 with accounts by months of the Roman festivals to the 
 gods. This, his most serious work, was his occupation 
 when the Great Blow fell upon him. 
 
 There are no remarkable events in Ovid's life from 
 43 B. C. to 8 A. D. It is simply the story of a Roman 
 gentleman in comfortable circumstances who had been 
 completely weaned from his simple birthplace in the 
 cold mountains, who had made a stir in the Roman lit- 
 erary world, was a friend of all the writers of the day, 
 and who, moreover, because of the gaiety of his tem- 
 perament and the brilliant immorality of his poetry was
 
 200 Italy Old and New 
 
 a social lion in the fashionable fast young set in the capi- 
 tal. Then suddenly he was sent into exile. 
 
 The blow fell without warning. Ovid was in Elba, 
 when an imperial edict ordered him to Tomi, a small 
 town in a barbarian country on the western coast of the 
 Black Sea, a twelve month journey from Rome. The 
 sentence was technically one of relegatio not exs ilium 
 so that he did not lose his property, nor his rights as a 
 Roman citizen, but these were slight compensations for 
 the separation from the gaiety of Rome. The sen- 
 tence changed the dashing poet to a dejected valitudi- 
 narian, transformed his trifling love verses and his bril- 
 liant narratives into gloomy elegiacs with but three 
 themes, apology for his fault, pictures of his dreary lot, 
 prayers for his restoration. 
 
 Although in his writings Ovid alludes to his banish- 
 ment time and again, he never drops the slightest cue 
 as to the certain reason for it. Once he declares that 
 the reasons for his unhappiness are a poem and a mis- 
 take, and there can hardly be a doubt that his poem was 
 "The Art of Love" although it had been published six 
 years before, but its seductive and immoral instructions 
 in coquetry, directed to both men and women, were 
 against all the principles of Augustus' moral reforms, 
 and the Emperor must have looked long with suspicion 
 upon a poet who could so completely disregard even the 
 conventional morality of the age. To fathom what 'the 
 mistake' was is difficult enough to demand the talents 
 of a Sherlock Holmes or Scotland Yard. Although 
 all manner of conjectures have been made, the most 
 probable theory is that Ovid was involved in some way 
 in the affair of Augustus' grand-daughter, Julia, who 
 was exiled for adultery the very year that Ovid was 
 banished. An Emperor whose sternness spared
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 201 
 
 neither his own daughter, nor his grand-daughter 
 would hardly have forgiven a poet whose lax moral 
 tone had already offended him in case the poet was 
 found guilty of connivance with the lovers. 
 
 Whatever the cause, the sentence of exile fell and 
 after a dreary year of travelling, Ovid reached the des- 
 olate land of his banishment. He was a prey not only 
 to the loneliness of separation from family and friends 
 but also according to his letters to the depression of a 
 severe and exhausting climate. Yet the distinguished 
 Scotch geologist, Sir Archibald Geikie, says he finds it 
 difficult to repress a smile when "the poet writes of 
 Tomi as if it lay in the Arctic regions, and speaks of 
 hard Fate ordering him to die under the icy pole. It 
 is true that the temperature in the coldest part of win- 
 ter falls there below the freezing-point, but so it does 
 in the uplands of the poet's Abruzzi. On the other 
 hand, the summers at Tomi are as warm as in the cen- 
 tre of France." So some of the miseries of exile were 
 perhaps a poet's pose, but still I believe that Ovid 
 never wanted to go back to Sulmo just because of that 
 cold air which he often decries. And here in Tomi the 
 language too was strange, a rugged Getic which re- 
 pelled him as he learned it, so he had no audience who 
 could listen to his poems, worst of fates for a literary 
 egoist. As long as Augustus lived, Ovid hoped for a 
 mitigation of his sentence but with the succession of the 
 harsh, uncompromising Tiberius he gave up hope and 
 in three years died of a broken heart. 
 
 What did Sulmo think of Ovid's exile? It was very 
 human and right that when the blow fell, Ovid thought 
 first of all of his parents and rejoiced that both had died 
 before the pain of this news came to their ears. Then 
 with a sudden fear, he exclaims :
 
 202 Italy Old and New 
 
 "Yet if aught but names remains to the dead, and 
 if the delicate spirit escapes the funeral pyre, if my 
 story has reached you, O shades of my parents, and the 
 charges against me are noised abroad in the forum by 
 the Styx, know, I pray, that the cause of my enforced 
 exile — it is right that you should know — is a mistake, 
 not a crime." So solemnly he swears to the dead. But 
 how in the forum of Sulmo must the country gossips 
 have discussed what could have been "the mistake." I 
 can imagine how at the end of their conjectures some 
 genial old greybeard would say: "Well, Ovid belongs 
 to us. I knew his father and mother and they were 
 very nice people. Too bad the older son, who was such 
 a promising young lawyer, died. Ovid was always a 
 little wild and only a poet, but they say he has made a 
 great stir in Rome. And he always spoke well of 
 Sulmo. I think the Emperor is a trifle severe." 
 
 And little by little, as the years went on, the feeling 
 would grow that the son of the Paelignian country had 
 been made a martyr and the aroused sense of injustice 
 would canonize Ovid in his birthplace. So saints are 
 often made. Hereupon, I took out my Ovid and looked 
 over the echoes of Sulmo in his poetry. Its cool air 
 and its many streams, he sings, and the fertility of well- 
 watered earth for grain and grape and olive and the 
 deep lush grass by the rivers, but in this youthful poem 
 (Amores 2, 16) which purports to have been written 
 in Sulmo and contains his longest description of his 
 birthplace, he has naught good to say of the two mag- 
 nificent mountain-ranges on either side of the valley, 
 only upbraids them as barriers between himself and his 
 absent Lady. When he begs her to mount her pony- 
 carriage and hasten to him, he adds : 
 
 "But you, ye towering mountains, when she shall
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 203 
 
 come, subside and be easy roadways in the sloping 
 vales." 
 
 Some pride in his town Ovid shows, for he boasts 
 that Sulmo is a third part of the whole Paelignian dis- 
 trict and he would give it, as well as Rome and Tibur 
 and Tusculum, a Trojan founder, — "Solymus, Aeneas' 
 one companion from Phrygian Ida, from whom the 
 walls of Sulmo take their name, cool Sulmo, my coun- 
 try. Woe is me ! How far is Sulmo from this Scythian 
 land!" 
 
 One touch of homesickness for the little town ! Usu- 
 ally in his exile it is great Rome, the City for which he 
 longs, and even on his sad birthday-anniversary in 
 Tomi, he thinks of his first birthday in Sulmo only to 
 wish, from his misery, that it might have been his last. 
 But for Ovid's temperament people had more hold 
 than places and with father, mother and brother dead, 
 and wife and daughter in Rome, his thoughts fly to that 
 second home as well as to all his more general satisfac- 
 tions in the life of the great city, and sincere and simple 
 at last, he writes a letter to Perilla (we believe she is 
 his daughter) that is most touching. 
 
 I had in my mind both Ovid's feeling for his 
 daughter and her youth, and his own boyish affection 
 for his brother, and for his Sweetheart across the 
 mountains, as in the light of a full moon the train 
 stopped in the tiny station of Sulmona. I had not 
 gathered from Ovid or from anything I had read that 
 the beauty of the spot would be its own reward, but as 
 I drove up the long road from station to town, I drew 
 an enraptured breath over the two snow-capped ranges 
 and the two poplar-bordered rivers between which the 
 long narrow town stretched out before me in the radi- 
 ant, white moonlight. My delight was prosaically com-
 
 204 Italy Old and New 
 
 plete when I found that the modest hotel Italia had 
 steam-heat to ward off Taelignian chills.' 
 
 It was viol to car at t eristic o of Ovid's birthplace that 
 it seemed full of courteous young Italian men who were 
 ready to act as my guides and answer my inquiries, and 
 I saw the country that first evening in a glorious walk 
 under the kind escort of a Tenente of twenty-three on 
 his way to Aquila, where he had been transferred for 
 the sake of his health, I conjectured, as on the train I 
 watched his worn face and listened to his story of fight- 
 ing at Monte Grappa, the Corso, the Piave, and of his 
 five wounds. Then the next morning a stunning lad 
 in a black cape hunted up for me the house of the Pro- 
 fessor who held the keys of the little Museum and when 
 he saw my disappointment on learning that the Museum 
 could not be opened because the Professor was very ill, 
 he invited me by way of compensation to walk twenty 
 miles over the mountains with him to Scanno. I could 
 hardly bear to postpone that pleasure. 
 
 The town of Sulmona even by daylight is as pictur- 
 esque as its setting is romantic, a city of beautiful doors, 
 I dub it, as I look over my photographs of the Gothic 
 portal of the Cathedral of San Panfilo where two 
 Roman-Ionic columns standing on beasties support 
 bishops, and the Gothic-Renaissance door of the 
 Palazzo S. Maria Annunziata, or the lovely rounded 
 arch of the chiesa of S. Francesco which is only a door 
 now, all the church destroyed except this beautiful por- 
 tal opening into the meat-market, and the door in the 
 Palazzo Tabassi which bears so proudly the maker's 
 name : 
 
 "Mastro Pietro da Como fece questa porta 1448." 
 And as interesting as the doorways and more mag-
 
 SULMONA 
 
 OVID |\ SULMONA
 
 Ovid in Sulmona 205 
 
 nificent is the great Piazza Garibaldi with its aqueduct 
 of the pointed arches across one end, at the other, out- 
 lined against snow-capped mountains, the exquisite lit- 
 tle church of S. Agostino, and in the center the great 
 Renaissance fountain. The Piazza was full of color 
 for on the steps going up to the Aqueduct the market 
 is held and country women in picturesque costumes were 
 selling oranges from piles of brilliant fruit massed on 
 long stands. Yet all the beauty of mountains, rivers 
 and picturesque buildings had not so much charm for 
 me as a rather dilapidated school house with an in- 
 scription above the door that read "Collegio Ovidio." 
 I went into the courtyard and there to my joy found 
 Ovid himself, a fifteenth century Ovid in long straight 
 robe, very prim, virtuous and saintly, clasping to his 
 breast the city's emblem, a tablet with the letters S. M. 
 P. E. for his own words, 
 
 Sulmo mihi patria est. 
 
 I photographed him above a group of vigorous little 
 smiling school-boys, potential Ovids, who might some 
 day go to Rome to make of life success or failure. 
 Would they, I wonder, plunge from the cold, bracing 
 Paelignian air and the hardy life of the Abruzzi into 
 luxury and frivolity and dissipation which would ener- 
 vate them to less than their best? What can Italy, 
 what can America do to protect in city life the vigor 
 and the virtue of her country sons? 
 
 Even in that reflective moment, I seemed to belittle 
 the right that Sulmona has to be proud of her brilliant 
 alumnus who in his greatest work re-vivified the 
 Graeco-Roman myths and through the Metamorphoses 
 was preeminently the Latin poet who influenced the art 
 jand literature of the Renaissance. I will confess that /
 
 206 Italy Old and New 
 
 love best of all in Ovid the traces of the country that 
 remain, — the picture of the river in flood that kept him 
 from his Love, the prayer of the shepherd to the Italian 
 goddess Pales, and the account of the pious old couple 
 who unaware entertained a god. To me none of Ovid's 
 other works has the charm of the Baucis and Philemon 
 story and I think that picture of the simple home, the 
 life-long devotion, and the religious faith of two old 
 peasants was created out of the heart of the Abruzzi 
 mountains. Re-reading that, I am more than willing 
 to fulfill Ovid's wish to confer glory on Sulmona by his 
 fame and to quote his words : 
 
 "May some stranger looking at the walls of well- 
 watered Sulmo which enclose few acres of land exclaim : 
 'O walls which could produce so great a poet, however 
 little you are, I call you great' "
 
 XVI 
 
 VERGIL AS A GUIDE IN ITALY 
 
 IN my year in Italy as I found time to read with 
 leisure and to select among my old literary friends 
 the companionship of those who had most to give 
 me, the one who was oftenest by my side was Vergil. 
 As I lingered by the Italian lakes, walked through olive- 
 groves and vineyards, climbed to ancient walls encir- 
 cling hilltops, looked at prehistoric weapons in mu- 
 seums, stood on the Campidoglio in Rome, the lines 
 of Vergil constantly running through my mind finally 
 made me recognize that for me as for Dante, the poet 
 had become the guide who bearing the golden branch 
 to singing men allowed was leading me to the heart of 
 old and new Italy. Let me show you by rambling jot- 
 tings, light reminiscences, and pictures of the country 
 where I read Vergil, how the Augustan poet is a better 
 guide than Baedeker to the spirit of Italy. 
 
 On August ninth I started from Mantua in search of 
 Vergil's birth-place. The road to Pietole was intoler- 
 ably hot and dusty so that there was little poetry about 
 the train ride and alighting at Pietole I could not see or 
 hear the water of the great Mincius which slowly winds 
 and wanders, fringing his banks with delicate reeds. 
 Yet there in a tiny green enclosure towered a statue of 
 the poet and while a midget of a girl ran to hunt the 
 key to the park's iron gate, I was made welcome in the 
 kitchen of the Albergo Virg'il'io at the roadside. Never 
 
 207
 
 208 Italy Old and New 
 
 before had I been part of such a genre picture. In a 
 great niche-hearth over live coals a huge black, pot 
 hung simmering. The wall cupboard was full of bright 
 wine-bottles. My hostess, the cook, a jolly, fat, swarthy 
 woman was preparing dinner at a long table littered 
 with meat and vegetables and as she threw bits of food 
 to the dog and cat at her feet, she addressed gay frag- 
 ments of Italian to me. All I could think of was Ver- 
 gil's Copa if indeed we may now believe that this 
 and other minor poems are Vergil's early work. Cer- 
 tainly the Copa seemed written there in Andes. 
 
 "Syrisca, the inn-keeper, wearing on her head a 
 Greek kerchief, taught to move her swaying body with 
 the click of her castanets, half-drunk and wholly wan- 
 ton, dances in the smoky tavern, beating her loud- 
 voiced bits of wood against her elbow and crying: 
 'What's the joy of staying outside in summer's dust 
 when you are tired? Why not rather lie on this soft 
 grassy bed?' " 
 
 I did not stay inside to eat her cheeses, waxen plums, 
 chestnuts and sweetly blushing apples, but soon stood 
 alone in the green park before the noble statue of Ver- 
 gil that towers up between two slim poplars. There on 
 the base I read how Pietole had erected this monument 
 in 1884 and the inscriptions they had carved on it: 
 
 Primus idumeas referam tibi Mantua palmas, 
 
 "First I will bring back to thee, Mantua, the palm of Idumasa." 
 
 Et nunc servat honos sedem tuum, 
 
 "And now your own honor guards your home." 
 
 Then, too, I read the magnificent address which Car- 
 ducci delivered here for the unveiling of the statue and
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 209 
 
 heard the Italian poet interpret to the people of the 
 country Vergil's old-new message. 
 
 "I will take the poet," said he, "away from the 
 schools of the learned, from the academies of the schol- 
 ars, from the halls of the powerful, and I will restore 
 him to you, O people of farms and of laborers, O true 
 people of Italy. He is always yours, your spirit: he 
 is a brother of old, a countryman, a farmer, an Italian 
 workman who from the banks of the Mincio ascended 
 to the Campidoglio and from the Campidoglio to 
 Olympus." Then, to those fellow-countrymen of the 
 poet's he poured out Vergil's glorification of labor on 
 the land and of the staunch support for Italy, the great 
 mother, that the countryman can give. 
 
 "Here once," he ended, "here once among the songs 
 of children, among the peaceful lowing of oxen, in 
 scenes of beauty, of strength, of tranquillity, I felt in 
 my heart the spirit of Vergil and I kept saying: 'O Ital- 
 ians, elevate and free agriculture. Bring peace to the 
 country side. Chase famine from the furrows, disease 
 from the bodies, ignorance from the spirit. Bring 
 peace to the countryside and the laborers. And the 
 Roman eagle again shall spread its wings and guide 
 over the mountains and over the seas our power and the 
 victorious arms of Italy.' " 
 
 One cannot find any site for Vergil's farm that sat- 
 isfies the imagination as does the valley of the Licenza 
 for Horace's Sabine refuge. Perhaps the configura- 
 tion of the Mantuan country has changed and indeed 
 Vergil gives but a slight sketch of the spot — "where the 
 hills begin to rise, then lower their ridge in a gentle 
 slope even to the water and the aged beeches, points 
 now shattered." 
 
 But the eclogues which describe the heart-broken mis-
 
 210 Italy Old and New 
 
 ery of the dispossessed peasant are records not only of 
 Vergil's love for his birthplace, but an expression for 
 all time of the devotion of the contadino to the land 
 and the tragedy of war that wrests him from the soil. 
 The first eclogue had a new poignancy read during the 
 Great War when exiles from the Trentino and Friulia 
 were pouring down towards Rome : Meliboeus' lament 
 was so tragically true. 
 
 "Ah ! Shall I ever again in time far distant marvel at 
 my country's bounds, at the turf-covered roof of my 
 poor hut, seeing my realm, — a few harvests? Shall 
 a godless soldier possess these acres, so carefully 
 tended? Shall a barbarian possess these crops?" 
 
 In these recent years as in Vergil's time, the mitigat- 
 ing circumstances of the horrors of war have been the 
 Italian's faith in Rome — "rearing her head as high 
 among other cities as the cypress towers above the low 
 bushes" (Ec. 1, 24-5), and the friendly hospitality of 
 brother to brother. In Italy Tityrus still says to Meli- 
 boeus: 
 
 "This night at least you could rest with me on bed 
 of green leaves. I have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts, 
 pressed cheeses in abundance; and now the smoke rises 
 from the highest roofs of the houses near, and the 
 longer shadows fall from the high mountains" (Ec. 1, 
 79-83). 
 
 The city of Mantua at first seemed to me to have 
 naught to do with our poet. The Mincius spreads out 
 about it in flat, shallow lakes, mud-edged. The build- 
 ings display the magnificence of the d'Estes and Gon- 
 zagas. Yet I knew that a yearly fete in honor of Vergil 
 showed that the city did not forget the ancient asso- 
 ciations of its name, and at last in my walking I came 
 upon Vergil himself in the little Piazza del Broletto, a
 
 VERGIL IX MANTUA
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 211 
 
 thirteenth century niche-monument in the wall of a pal- 
 ace, the quaintest and happiest figure, lifting from his 
 reading a smile to all Mantua. 
 
 I had expected to find Vergil in Mantua. I had not 
 realized that all through Italy his words would be the 
 perfect expression of the country life that I saw in my 
 walks. Yet he was ever with me. When I climbed 
 Soracte on the rocky path under the strong old olives I 
 remembered : 
 
 "Hard lands and unfriendly hills where there is thin 
 clay and a pebbly soil, in fields of low bushes, take de- 
 light in Pallas' grove of long-lived olive-trees." Cumae 
 with its vineyards reminded me of how Bacchus loves 
 the open hills (Georg. 2, 112-3) and as I ate the sweet- 
 est of golden grapes on the curving slope below the 
 town of Nemi above Diana's mirror-water, I read : 
 
 "A rich soil, fortunate in sweet moisture, abounding 
 in verdure, a level richly fertile (such as we often look 
 down on in a mountain nook) where from the rocks 
 above the streams run down, bringing fertile earth, such 
 a soil will make strong vines flowing with the wealth of 
 the grape" (Georg. 2, 184-190). In the irrigated 
 grain-fields of the Lombard plain, I saw the peasant 
 who "after scattering the seed joins in combat with the 
 soil and levels the hillocks of unfertile sand, then brings 
 to his crops the obedient rivulets." And when, near 
 every little Tuscan town, I saw the gardens that Italian 
 thrift works out of a tiny plot of land, I thought of the 
 one where Simylus, the rustic worker of a small farm, 
 gathered the various herbs which he pounded into his 
 famous dish of moretum. I had seen all his store be- 
 hind many a sheltering fence of osiers and slender 
 reeds, the cabbage and the beets, the lettuce and the 
 pointed radish, the swelling gourds, the red onion and
 
 212 Italy Old and New 
 
 the garlic, and I had seen how such a garden, small in 
 extent but rich in various herbs, made its master lack 
 nothing that a poor man's need demands. Then the 
 flowers! How many times near some bright patch of 
 color I thought of the old Corycian gardener in the 
 Georgics (4, 125-146), who in his few acres, not rich 
 enough for plough, or flocks, or vines, made white lilies 
 blossom and the slender poppy, roses and soft hya- 
 cinths, and who with his flowers, his fruit-trees and his 
 honey-bees felt himself as rich as princes. 
 
 The bees! It is not only Hymettus that still yields 
 his honied wealth ! In Italy today where sugar is still 
 scarce and costly, the honey is especially a gift from 
 heaven — 
 
 aerii mellis caelestia dona 
 (Georg. 4, 1). 
 
 But always with the olive and the grape-vine, the honey- 
 bee has been part of Italy's wealth. And it was Vergil 
 who once for all the world, centuries before Maeter- 
 linck, wrote the Epic of the Bees. Who can forget his 
 heroic strains of the little folk, their home-making, 
 their communal life, their industry, their illnesses, their 
 valiant fighting, their loyal devotion to their sovereign? 
 Vergil's life of the bees is an epyllion within an epic, 
 immortalizing the glory of the honey-makers. 
 
 This gift of throwing a golden aureole about the 
 commonplace Vergil used also for the animals. Not 
 that he canonized them, but his vignettes portray them 
 with a sympathy that strikes an answering chord and 
 makes the lines reecho in Italy as we see "the ox groan- 
 ing over the deep-driven plough" (Georg. 1, 45-6), the 
 pitiful mother goat, who, driven into exile with her 
 master, in hard travail had lost twins on bare rocks
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 213 
 
 (Ec. 1, 14-5), the sheep and the goats called by 
 zephyr's breezes in joyous summer to the glades and 
 meadows and cool streams (Georg. 3, 322-3), the slow 
 little donkey, his sides overladen with oil or cheap 
 fruits (Georg. 1, 273-4), who sweats so wearily and 
 should be spared, for he is Vesta's darling (Copa 25- 
 6). There is incorporate the tenderness of the Bibli- 
 cal treatment of the sparrow, — "Not one of them falls 
 to the ground without His knowledge." 
 
 These flashes of sympathy are turned not only on 
 the beasts, but on their master. Take, for example, the 
 part the winds play in a peasant's life. I never thought 
 much about the effect of weather on fortune until in 
 Dalmatia I saw granite mountain sides that had been 
 stripped of vegetation by the terrible Bora and in 
 Fiume witnessed that northern blast suddenly smite 
 the water in the quiet harbor to cause turmoil of wave 
 and air. The Sirocco, too, has its lesser, but nerve- 
 racking horrors. I see now why Vergil wrote of how 
 he himself had seen all the battling of the winds and 
 why he bade the farmer watch the weather-signs. As 
 old Hesiod knew, works in the country now and always 
 must be governed by days and he is a poor farmer who 
 does not protect his crops from the blight and his 
 beasts from the disease that bad weather may bring in 
 its train. 
 
 Vergil makes us see all the difficulties, all the hard 
 labor of the Italian peasant's life, but he shows us more 
 than that in it. "Fortunate," he says, "is he who knows 
 the rural gods, Pan and old Silvanus, and the sister 
 nymphs. Superbly content with his lot, the farmer 
 does not pity the poor man or envy the rich. . . . 
 He breaks the earth with crooked plough. With this 
 is the year's work, with this he supports his country
 
 214 Italy Old and New 
 
 and his little grand-children, with this his herds of cat- 
 tle and his noble bullocks. Always the year yields 
 wealth of apples, younglings of the flock and sheaves of 
 Ceres' grains, loading the furrows with increase and 
 bursting the granaries. Winter comes : the olive is 
 crushed in the stones, the happy swine come in from 
 their acorns, the woods give arbutus-berries, autumn 
 drops varied fruits and high on sunny rocks ripens the 
 luscious grape. Meanwhile dear children come throng- 
 ing for his kisses. His pure home guards its honor. 
 His cows yield rich milk. The fat kids in happy pas- 
 tures playfully contend with butting horns. The farmer 
 himself makes holiday and full length on the grass in 
 a group about a fire where his friends crown the bowl, 
 with a libation he calls on thee, god of the wine-press" 
 (Georg. 2, 493-4, 499, 513-29). 
 
 The worst charge that Vergil has against war is that 
 it destroys such joys as these: "the plow receives no 
 fitting honor, the lands bereft of cultivators lie waste, 
 and the curved pruning-knives are beaten into stiff 
 swords" (Georg. 1, 506-8). This same call to the 
 plow has been coupled with the call of the sea by the 
 great poet of Italy's last war, D'Annunzio: 
 
 "Italia, Italia 
 sacra alia nuova aurora 
 con l'aratro e la prora." 
 
 In Italy one reads Vergil not only for his picture of 
 the Italian peasant's daily life in which the poet's slo- 
 gan 'back to the land' aided Augustus' great work of 
 reconstruction. As the traveller in Italy gives himself 
 up little by little to the spell of the divine and ageless 
 beauty which no scar9 of conflict have marred, no in- 
 dustrial struggles have defaced, he remembers that to
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 215 
 
 Vergil perhaps beyond all other poets the Muses 
 vouchsafed a perfect song of the glories of his native 
 land, and those unforgettable lines from the second 
 Georgic return : 
 
 "This land . . . heavy crops and Bacchus' Massic 
 wine enrich ; this land is the home of the olive-tree and 
 the happy herds. . . . Here is eternal spring and sum- 
 mer in months not her own. Twice a year the sheep 
 give birth to their young, twice a year the apple-tree 
 yields its fruit." I gathered pink cyclamen and straw- 
 berries by Lake Nemi in November, saw baby lambs 
 gamboling in the Campagna in December, and found 
 roses blossoming outdoors for Christmas. 
 
 "Then reflect, too, on the famous cities, the towns 
 piled high by human hands on lofty crags, the rivers 
 flowing under ancient walls." We climbed to the mag- 
 nificent site of Norba, never rebuilt since Sulla's time, 
 to cool Praeneste, to lofty Tusculum, but your minds 
 outstrip my words as you think of all the hill-towns in 
 Italy and the rivers flowing by. 
 
 "Then the seas," Vergil continues. "Shall I sing 
 of the twain that wash the upper and the lower shore?" 
 His words start my mind off on a boat with a golden 
 sail, on which I coasted along the eastern shore from 
 Nero's palace at Anzio to Cicero's villa at Astura. 
 Then my kaleidoscope shifts and I am crossing the 
 Adriatic from the lovely curving harbor of Ancona to 
 Italian Zara with her jewelled islands and her white 
 mountains. Then Vergil rushes me on to other memo- 
 ries, — the great lakes "thee Larius, greatest of all, and 
 thee, Benacus, rising with the waves and the roar of 
 the ocean," and I dream of a day on Como and a week 
 at Lago di Garda where the Lydian laughter of the 
 turquoise water made me glad under the olives that all
 
 216 Italy Old and New 
 
 Benacus is now Italian. Again my guide shifts my 
 memory to the Lucrine and the Avernus, wrought for 
 Julius Caesar into one great harbor. But this wealth 
 of earth's products and this glory of her beauty is not 
 all of Italy's treasure: the strength of Italy then as 
 always is in her people and Vergil ends proudly with 
 her vigorous tribes and her great heroes, greeting his 
 country at last as the eternal mother of earth's bless- 
 ings and of mortal men: 
 
 "Salve magna parens frugum Saturnia tellus, 
 magna virum." 
 
 (Georg. 2, 136-174 in part.) 
 
 A poet is naturally a guide to beauty, but not so often 
 an antiquarian. Yet to Vergil as often as to Livy I 
 turned for the early history of Rome and it was he who 
 led my feet to many a site. It would be a wonderful 
 thing if one could land in Italy at Cumae where the 
 Greeks first came and where Aeneas first glided upon 
 the Hesperian shore. That being impossible I went 
 out from Naples and walked up the narrow foot-path 
 through the terraced vineyards to the height over which 
 Apollo in his lofty seat presided. Little remains of 
 Cumae's historic past: a Roman road, broken pieces of 
 statues and carved marble, a temple platform, but the 
 place has its awe and there is a cave where many steps 
 ascend to a sacred seat and secret passage cut in the 
 dark heart of the mountain. In its atmosphere one 
 thinks only of the frenzied Sibyl, the expectant Trojan, 
 the immanent god. 
 
 We could not follow Aeneas to Avernus, but we saw 
 Misenum and Gaeta to which the death of nurse Caieta 
 gave eternal fame and we went for Aeneas' sake to the 
 shore of Circe's land. Monte Circeo is a day's trip
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 217 
 
 from Terracina. One jogs slowly in carriage over 
 rough country roads, crossing marshes and little rivers, 
 passing the capanne villages where the prehistoric life 
 of Italy is reproduced in the straw huts of today and 
 finally one alights at the tiny walled village of Sant' 
 Oreste, part way up the hill. The walk from there up 
 the mountain was magical though we heard not the 
 ceaseless singing of the daughter of the Sun nor the 
 angry roaring of the lions and the howling of the 
 wolves and the snorting of the swine, her transformed 
 victims. We gathered sprigs of pink heather for amu- 
 lets in lieu of Odysseus' moly and safely reaching the 
 top of the narrow ridge enjoyed its double view of the 
 sea. 
 
 Another height, too, we scaled from Terracina for 
 Vergil's sake, Monte Angelo, where "Jupiter of Anxur 
 watched over the fields" and from that magnificent tem- 
 ple precinct looked down on the green grove where 
 Feronia may have presided and Satura's low-lying black 
 marsh and the chill river Ufens winding its way 
 through the valley to the sea (Aen. 7, 799-802). 
 
 All the last six books of the Aeneid lure to such epic 
 wanderings, for Vergil has illumined by the great white 
 reflector of epic poetry the facts and traditions of 
 Rome's early history. In this first war waged for the 
 founding of Rome, the first struggle towards Italian 
 Unity, Vergil draws his pictures of allies and foes alike 
 with the same vividness and comprehension, playing the 
 light of his imagination over the early history so that 
 we see the ranks go forth to battle with their curious 
 weapons and insignia, we know something of the gods 
 they worship, the towns from which they come, the 
 legends which their families cherish. 
 
 In Aeneid VII, a "magnificent pageant" of war
 
 218 Italy Old and New 
 
 passes before the reader, Mr. Warde Fowler says in 
 his illuminating volume, "The Gathering of the Clans," 
 and he goes on to show that the object of the seventh 
 Aeneid is more than "the obvious motive ... to move 
 the feeling of his Italian reader as he sees the stately 
 procession of Italian warriors pressing before him, or 
 perchance to fill his mind with pride and pleasure at 
 finding among them the ancient representatives of his 
 own city or district" (p. 27). Vergil "set himself to 
 support with all his gifts the definite Italian policy of 
 Augustus, at a time when Italy's need for national satis- 
 faction and hope were greater than they had ever yet 
 been." In the execution of this motive "he was con- 
 fronted by serious difficulties which made his task a 
 complex one. We have to remember that all the peo- 
 ples of the procession were the enemies of the Trojans 
 and summoned to resist the establishment in Italy of 
 Aeneas and his host, and therein also to resist the de- 
 crees of Fate which were to make Rome eventually the 
 mistress of Italy. Here was a difficulty calling for an 
 artist of consummate skill who could find no help in his 
 Iliad. Vergil had to hold firmly together the sym- 
 pathies of Romans and Italians. Some one may ask, 
 where was the difficulty? Surely they were by this time 
 united in feeling. No, if that had really been so, Au- 
 gustus' policy would have been superfluous. Italy is 
 not a country that lends itself easily to unification as 
 Italians know well at the present day; and only twenty 
 years before Vergil was born, the peoples of central 
 Italy had been engaged in deadly strife with Rome, and 
 had forced her to treat them as equals. The Italian 
 policy of Augustus was in truth a new one, and I have 
 no doubt whatever that in this episode Vergil believed 
 himself to be aiding it.
 
 
 H*-: 
 
 PLOWING IX THE SABINE COUNTRY 
 
 
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 ^ y . 5 1.1 
 
 ^^^H 
 
 c 
 
 
 ^^ 
 
 THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER ANXUR ABOVE rERRA( l\\
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 219 
 
 "Vergil meets the difficulties of his plan by empha- 
 sizing the religious destiny of Aeneas and Rome, by 
 showing that the war against him is a bad war, stirred 
 up by the unscrupulous Juno and a reckless leader and 
 by safeguarding the Italian spirit by the proud honors 
 given to local traditions. Cities, rivers, local deities, 
 and many local touches and legends combine to delight 
 the Italian municipalis who will be reminded of the 
 Homeric catalogue he read in his youth and feel that 
 here 'nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.' The poet 
 does all he can to secure variety, to make this city or 
 that with its surrounding region stand out clearly in 
 the picture, and take the right coloring for the delecta- 
 tion of its descendants. Then how splendid and martial 
 is the tone throughout, how perfect the consummation 
 in the figures of Turnus and Camilla, the hero and 
 heroine of these last books ! It is with the perfection 
 of his artistic resources that Vergil solves his greatest 
 difficulty" (pp. 28-31). 
 
 Such living interpretation of the seventh book made 
 me take my tiny blue pocket Aeneid to many a site 
 which Vergil had made memorable for me and perhaps 
 you will indulgently follow my whims of selection as I 
 travel among the Latins, Etruscans, Volscians and 
 Rutulians. Vergil himself in his catalogue followed no 
 geographical order, and we follow him for the spirit, 
 not for topography. 
 
 And what spirit he brings out of some small town 
 by his vignette of a few lines ! At Tibur he makes us 
 recall not only Horace's praeceps Anio and the well- 
 watered orchards in the Sabine hills, but those twin- 
 brothers, Catillus and Coras, who left Tibur's walls, 
 sweeping down in the front ranks amid the dense spears
 
 220 Italy Old and New 
 
 like two cloud-born centaurs, galloping down from 
 some high mountain peak, while great forest trees 
 make way for them and round their gallant heads cir- 
 cle all the stories of great twin brethren, Castor and 
 Pollux, Romulus and Remus. Tivoli-Tibur today shows 
 no prehistoric ruins, but besides the great beauty of 
 the Anio valley the city now displays archaeological 
 finds of Vergil's time, — two rooms with rich marble 
 pavement, one with a newly discovered seated statue 
 of Augustus, its beautiful marble head perfect. 
 
 A different reward is offered by Praeneste's steep 
 heights, — Cyclopean walls and a magnificent acropolis 
 site which shows the power of the city that was a proud 
 rival of Rome in spite of the fact that her legions are 
 stamped by Vergil as rustic, and her founder, King 
 Caeculus, son of Vulcan, was born (legend avers) 
 among the country-herds and found on a hearth (Aen. 
 VII, 678-82). Other similar Roman slurs on the 
 countrymen of provincial Praeneste are explained by a 
 visit to the site and the chance to see how from her 
 superb citadel Praeneste could command the trade 
 route down the valley between the Alban and Volscian 
 mountains. Thus does topography shape jealousies. 
 
 Vergil writes more poetry for Egeria's grove and no 
 one who visits Diana's mirror-lake at Nemi can fail to 
 think of his happy ending to the tragedy of Hippolytus : 
 how after he perished by his step-mother's guile and 
 satisfied a father's vengeance, mangled by terror- 
 stricken steeds, he came again to the starlight and 
 heaven's upper air, recalled by the Healer's herbs and 
 Diana's love. In a secret grove the devoted goddess 
 has hidden her beloved that there alone in Italian 
 woods he may live on unknown under the new name of 
 Virbius (Aen. VII, 761-77). Diana's munificent be-
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 221 
 
 stowal of healing and immortality on her love, is a 
 happy contrast at Nemi for the terrible religious rite of 
 
 "The priest who slew the slayer 
 And must himself be slain." 
 
 Such stories of the Tiburtine twins, Praeneste's Fire- 
 Son, Diana's votary, are slight compared to the tre- 
 mendous pictures of Etruscans, Volscians and Rutu- 
 lians. Mr. Warde Fowler is inclined to wonder why 
 in the pageant of Aeneid VII, Vergil begins the war 
 with Mezentius, but this arrangement for me has sig- 
 nificance. The Etruscans were the greatest rival of 
 Rome. The amalgamation of Etruscan and Roman 
 civilization had to be explained. Livy's account of 
 Tanaquil and Tarquinius coming to the royal power is 
 one method. Vergil uses another, picturing one im- 
 pious and sacrilegious Etruscan chieftain as a powerful 
 enemy of the Romans, but the people in revolt against 
 him joining under Tarchon in alliance with Aeneas, 
 for his future kingdom. The power of the race for 
 evil and for good is thus exhibited. As I visited the 
 great Etruscan sites, Veii, Caere, Orvieto, Faleri, Cor- 
 neto and as I studied the Etruscan collections in the 
 Museo Archeologico of Florence and the Gregoriano 
 and Papa Giulia in Rome, I found that a new humanity 
 was infused for me into massive city walls, dark graves, 
 bronze armor, heavy statues by Vergil's living Etrus- 
 can characters. All that I had found fearful, myste- 
 rious, domineering, repellent in the faces of human be- 
 ings and gods as the Etruscans represented them in 
 their sculpture is reproduced in the Mezentius who had 
 no reverence for gods or men so that finally even his 
 subjects revolted against his barbarities, slew his fol-
 
 222 Italy Old and New 
 
 lowers, iircd his palace. But the magnificence of his 
 type! Lucifer in Milton's hell is not more splendid 
 than this sublime outcast whom Vergil with a wealth 
 of imagery likens to a cliff which endures all the vio- 
 lence of the sky and sea, to a wild boar keeping all ene- 
 mies at bay, to a hungry lion stalking his victim, to vast 
 Orion walking through mid-ocean but towering above 
 the waves. It is this superman who is broken by one 
 simple human loss so that he cries to Aeneas: "Why 
 do you try to terrify me now that my son is taken from 
 me ? That was the only way in which you could destroy 
 me." After that father's lament, he receives the sword 
 in his throat. 
 
 Tarchon, the leader of the opposition in Agylla, 
 Mezentius' city, is almost as powerful, — he is the light- 
 ning flash across the plain, the eagle soaring high in 
 heaven with its victim, — and he has the courage to up- 
 braid his own men with taunts of their pusillanimity and 
 defection and dissipation until he rallies them by his 
 personal courage. How many a tomb fresco in Cor- 
 neto illustrates Tarchon's description of the Etruscan 
 days ! 
 
 "Why do we carry in our hands the sword and these 
 vain weapons? You are not so languorous in love or 
 his nocturnal battles or when the curved pipe calls to 
 Bacchus' dance. Wait then for feasts and goblets on 
 bounteous boards, for this is your love, your passion" 
 (Aen. XI, 735-9). As I thought of these epic stories 
 in Corneto and Cerveteri, the feasts and the dances 
 painted on the tomb-walls became those of living per- 
 sons, and the mighty bronze weapons in the collections 
 were the armor of epic heroes. Vergil had a line even 
 for mortuary musings in the Museums: 
 
 "Yes, and a time shall come when in these lands the
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 223 
 
 farmer cultivating the earth with his crooked plough 
 shall come upon spears corroded with rust and with his 
 heavy hoe shall strike empty helmets and shall wonder 
 at great bones in opened sepulchres" (Georg. 1,493-7). 
 
 It would be too long a tale to tell how in the Rutulian 
 country I followed with Vergil the vicissitudes of great 
 Turnus as with crimson crest upborne by chimera and 
 with polished shield whereon horned Io shone he flew 
 forward on his Thracian steed in advance of his col- 
 umns, or in forced retreat like savage lion kept his foes 
 at bay, or in high council before Latinus' throne 
 proudly rejected the old king's prudence and Drances' 
 pacifism, or in the conflict accepted on equal terms and 
 with princely welcome the maiden-warrior Camilla, or 
 called to his final struggle, his friend the spear that had 
 never failed him, or at last, before his fate, as one who 
 in a dream makes mighty effort but cannot move or 
 speak one word, he sensed his doom under Aeneas' 
 weapon. Ardea becomes more than a name from such 
 a son and 'twere no wonder that a goddess sister left 
 heaven to fly to his aid. 
 
 In the Forum Romanum in the precinct of Juturna, 
 the goddess who watches over pools and singing streams, 
 I turned from her bubbling spring to the little chapel 
 where on fragment of marble entablature one reads 
 IVTVRNAI and where on marble altar in the figures 
 of warrior and of woman side by side imagination pic- 
 tures Turnus and his devoted sister, Juturna. In such 
 comradeship she stood by him as his charioteer, guid- 
 ing his steeds through the midst of the enemy until the 
 raucous cries and whirring wings of the ominous Fury 
 in the air destroyed her hopes and forced from her lips 
 bitter lament because Jupiter would grant no further
 
 224 Italy Old and New 
 
 recompense for her lost virginity than an immortality 
 forever sorrowful without her brother. 
 
 A word about another woman whose fate was inter- 
 woven with Turnus' fortunes and whose fame makes the 
 Volscians live for us. I thought of Camilla as I stood 
 on Norba's superb height within the massive city walls 
 that show the early Volscian power. But this was not 
 her birthplace. It was from Priverno back in the valley 
 of the Amasenus that her father fled into exile, carry- 
 ing his baby girl, and it was across this river that he 
 launched his spear with the babe bound to it, dedicating 
 her forever to Diana if the goddess saved her life. But 
 in these mountains the father reared his tiny Amazon 
 and here in dress of tiger skin she hurled her little 
 darts and with her sling struck down the birds. No 
 wonder, after such an open-air childhood, she was fit 
 to lead the squadron of Volscian horsemen to Turnus' 
 side, a warrior-maid whose fingers had never twirled 
 the distaff or held the needle, a maid strong to endure 
 battles and yet so light of foot that she could have 
 flown over a field of ungarnered grain without bending 
 it and skimmed the wave's crest without sinking. Eas- 
 ily she whirled the battle-axe over her head or sped 
 the arrows from her golden bow. Alas! The pity 
 that the gleam of a foe's golden armor and a woman's 
 love of such booty could lure her to the death that sent 
 an uproar to the golden stars, destroyed Volscians and 
 routed Rutulians. 
 
 Such are some of the varied and proud pictures in 
 Vergil's war pageant by which he made appeal to the 
 imagination of various peoples and supported Au- 
 gustus' work for Italian unity. He had a difficult task 
 when, with enemies made so valiant, he essayed descrip- 
 tion of Aeneas' allies and the early builders of Rome,
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 225 
 
 but his picture of father and son in Palatium has a 
 poignant charm. The place to read the story is on the 
 southwestern part of the Palatine, the Cermalus, where 
 lie the oldest ruins found on the hill, in the very district 
 to which tradition assigned them. This network of old 
 gray-green walls, drains, cisterns, graves, stone circles 
 that perhaps once were foundations for thatched huts 
 cannot be identified, much less labelled today, yet fancy 
 would see in them traces of the site where an Evander 
 ruled and in the ancient roadway up the hill-slope would 
 find the stairs of Cacus, that robber fire-god whose en- 
 counter with Hercules the old king Evander narrated to 
 his guest. To us too here Evander may tell the story 
 and point out the traditional spot of the great grove 
 where Romulus made his Asylum, the Lupercal, the 
 precinct dedicated to Lycaean Pan, the cattle grazing 
 in the Forum, and across the valley the Capitol, a place 
 full of religious awe, not then a temple topped with 
 gold, yet a god's home (Aen. VIII, 343-350). It is 
 with thoughts of Evander too that on the Palatine of 
 today we approach the capanna italica, the little 
 thatched hut which Commendatore Boni has had 
 erected as a model of early Italic life and as we look at 
 its foundation ring of stones, its straw roof, its low 
 door, we hear Evander's words to Aeneas, the eternal 
 expression of Italian rustic hospitality: 
 
 "Dare, my guest, to scorn riches, shape yourself also to be 
 worthy of deity and come graciously to my poor fortune." 
 
 (Aen. VIII, 364-5.) 
 
 It was such a host who sent his adored son, Pallas, 
 to share Aeneas' fortunes in battle and when the brave 
 young warrior fell, it was the thought of that devoted 
 father's loss that dealt the most poignant blow of the
 
 226 Italy Old and New 
 
 war to Aeneas' soul and armed his merciless hand 
 against Turnus, his slayer, in the closing conflict of the 
 Epic. The story of Evander and Pallas stands out in 
 all time — never more clearly than in our last terrible 
 years — as a perfect expression of the glory and the pity 
 of death in war for the Young, the tragedy and the 
 fortitude of the sorrowful Old at home. 
 
 On the Palatine Hill today, it is not only of little 
 Palatium, Evander's fine hospitality and heroic forti- 
 tude that Vergil makes us think. Among the magnifi- 
 cent ruins of the lately uncovered Augustan palace, the 
 thought of the growth of Rome down to Augustus' 
 time is brought before us by the poet who so sincerely 
 and staunchly celebrated the work of his Emperor for 
 the Roman world. Archaeologists cannot certify for 
 us on which of these temple sites Augustus erected the 
 great shrine of solid marble to his patron god Apollo, 
 but perhaps it was here on the south, overlooking that 
 stretch of land where Carducci has pictured Rome her- 
 self, — 
 
 "la dea 
 
 Roma qui dorme. 
 
 Poggiata il capo al Palatino augusto, 
 
 tra'l Celio aperte e l'Aventin le braccia, 
 
 per la Capena i forti omeri stende 
 
 a l'Appia via." 
 
 At any rate, before this temple Vergil pictures, on 
 the shield of Aeneas, Augustus at the beginning of his 
 reign of peace. "Caesar, riding through the walls of 
 Rome in triple triumph, to the gods of Italy offered his 
 immortal votive gift, three hundred great shrines 
 throughout the city. With happiness, with games and 
 with applause the roads reechoed. In all the temples 
 were bands of matrons, in all were altars, and before
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 227 
 
 the altars slain victims strewed the ground. He him- 
 self seated on the white threshold of shining Phoebus 
 received the gifts of the nations and hung them on 
 proud doors. In long pageant advanced the conquered 
 peoples of many tongues, of many garbs and weapons" 
 (Aen. VIII, 714-23). From south and east and west 
 they stand before the victor of Actium in the center of 
 the great picture — shield of Rome's history and here, 
 with the close association of Apollo and Augustus at 
 the shrine, Vergil seems to be elaborating the idea 
 which he stated so simply in the first eclogue : 
 
 Deus nobis haec otfa fecit, 
 "It is a god that brought us this peace." 
 
 Augustus had erected a temple of marble to com- 
 memorate Apollo's aid in establishing that end of all 
 wars which Vergil makes the god predict to Ascanius 
 under the rule of his house (Aen. IX, 642-3). Vergil 
 has built here in the Aeneid that temple of poetry which 
 in the third Georgic he had designed, and in the center 
 he has placed his Caesar and he possesses the shrine. 
 The worship offered to him is to the Sovereign, almost 
 to the god, who has established peace for the Roman 
 world. This is what Jupiter prophesies as his fame in 
 the first Aeneid (286-94) : 
 
 "Trojan Aeneas shall be born of this fair line and he 
 shall bound his Empire by the Ocean, his fame by the 
 stars. . . . Then wars shall cease and the terrible 
 years shall be softened . . . with close-fitting bolts 
 of iron the dread portals of war shall be barred." It 
 is this reign of peace that again is foretold by Anchises 
 in Aeneid six (791-4) : "This is the man, this is he . . . 
 Augustus Caesar, scion of a god, who shall restore the
 
 228 Italy Old and New 
 
 golden age to Latium in the lands where Saturn once 
 reigned." 
 
 We know from the Monumentum Ancyranum, the 
 Emperor's own account of his reign, how anxious he 
 was to be considered an emperor of reconstruction, em- 
 phasizing the fact that he had waged only righteous 
 wars (C. 26), that he had closed the Temple of Janus 
 three times (C. 13), and that the Senate had decreed in 
 his honor the erection of the Altar of Peace (C. 12), 
 and Cassius Dio assures us that of all the honor the 
 Senate bestowed upon him, he was pleased most by the 
 fact that the senators closed the gates of Janus, imply- 
 ing that all their wars had ceased (51, 19-20). To my 
 mind this is further evidence of what I have tried to 
 show in another place ("An Inspired Message in the 
 Augustan Poets" A. J. P. 1918), that Vergil as a loyal 
 supporter of the new regime consciously sought to em- 
 body in his poetry the ideals of the Emperor and as a 
 great and patriotic poet-laureate was no less an asset 
 to Augustus than the warrior Agrippa. The epics of 
 Vergil are a more enduring and magnificent monument 
 to the peace of Augustus than that Ara Pacis Augustae 
 before whose beautiful fragments in the Terme Museo 
 in Rome we stand with such awe. 
 
 For poetry is the monument more lasting than bronze 
 or marble and it is not without significance to my mind 
 that one word in the Latin language, vates, carried the 
 meaning of bard and seer. The true poet who sees 
 into the heart of his nation's life writes with a vision 
 that makes his work prophetic and vital for all time. 
 For Italy today Vergil is deeply true in his songs of an 
 after-war time when the people must go back to the 
 land and make it yield its fruits for the nation, the race 
 must increase, Italian unity must be attained by con-
 
 Vergil as a Guide in Italy 229 
 
 scious effort, and peace, hardly won, must be preserved. 
 In the Piazza Venezia in Rome on November 4, 1920, 
 the anniversary of Vittorio Veneto, Italy's final victory 
 in the World War, I saw the regiments of the army and 
 navy sweep up the white steps of the monument of Vit- 
 torio Emmanuele to present their banners to the King 
 before the Altar of the Country that he for Italy might 
 decorate the victorious tricolor, and as the aeroplanes 
 circled overhead and the mothers of combatants placed 
 a golden wreath upon the altar in memory of the fallen, 
 I felt with the great crowd in the Piazza that the 
 strength of Italy which Vergil pictured before the Em- 
 peror Augustus on the Palatine was here born anew, 
 consecrated by the blood of her dead, and assured by 
 the devotion of her sons. We Americans in our young 
 nation often fail in understanding Italy because we have 
 no conception of the tremendous and steadying power 
 that great traditions of thousands of years of history 
 have upon the descendants of Romulus. 
 
 If I may be pardoned one last vagary, a postscript 
 on the delights of pursuing the idea of the continuity 
 of literary experience, I would hint to you the joys I 
 had with Vergil-lovers of other times. In the Lauren- 
 tian Library in Florence I was allowed to enjoy the 
 priceless treasure of their fourth century manuscript of 
 Vergil, to read its clear black letters and brood over 
 the painstaking devotion that made so fair a copy. In 
 the Vatican Library in Rome I hung over the case 
 where pages from the fourth and fifth century manu- 
 scripts are exhibited, delighting in their clear capitals 
 and quaint illustrations. 
 
 Then in an antiquarian's shop in Rome I found my 
 own Vergil. About the size of a Webster's unabridged 
 dictionary, it contains the major works of Vergil and
 
 230 Italy Old and New 
 
 26 minor poems, some wholly new to me, and the com- 
 mentators, Servius, Donatus, and Ascensius, all listed 
 under a dedication to the Muses. More than the de- 
 light it affords me by its beautiful paging and black 
 print, is the joy of its illustrations, the quaint wood- 
 cuts which attest the delight inspired in some artist of 
 the early fifteenth century by the poems that I too have 
 loved. My ending shall be these links of affection be- 
 tween reader and poet which join generation to genera- 
 tion in the common bond of culture.
 
 DATE DUE 
 
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