THIRTEEN
‘I would rather describe the rest of Italy four times over than give one account of Rome,’ the French magistrate, Charles de Brosses, wrote home to a friend in the early years of the eighteenth century. ‘Rome is beautiful – so beautiful that all the rest of Italy seems to me little in comparison.’
He had been enchanted from the beginning, for he thought that no other city he had ever seen had ‘such a fine approach as Rome’. Having crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle, he passed through the Porta del Popolo which
forms the entrance of a quadrilateral space, in the centre of which rises an obelisk of granite that stood formerly in the great circus. At the base of this obelisk is a fountain. Opposite the gate the square is pierced by three long and narrow streets, like crow's feet, the ends of which are separated from each other by the porticoes and colonnades of two handsome, domed, twin churches [S. Maria di Montesanto and S. Maria dei Miracoli]. Of these three streets, the one on the left side [the Via del Babuino] leads to the Piazza di Spagna; the other to the port of the Tiber, called Ripetta [the Via di Ripetta]; the one in the middle, and by far the longest [the Corso] runs as straight as the letter I as far as the Palace of St Mark [the Palazzo Venezia], nearly in the centre of the town… Nothing can give a finer idea of the grandeur of Rome than this first sight of the city.
Later travellers agreed with him, even Tobias Smollett, the cantankerous Scottish writer who was ready to find fault with everything and was certainly exasperated on his visit in 1765 by the touts in the custom-house, formerly the hall of Antoninus Pius, where baggage was opened and its contents strewn about the floor, as a search was made for contraband goods until the customary bribes had changed hands. Smollett's coach was ‘surrounded by a number of servitori di piazza, offering their services with the most disagreeable importunity’. Although he told them several times he ‘had no occasion for any, three of them took possession of the coach, one mounting before and two of them behind’. Yet, once he had overcome his exasperation, Smollett had to agree with Charles de Brosses that the ‘noble’ Piazza del Popolo was such an ‘august entrance’ into Rome that it could ‘not fail to impress a stranger with a sublime idea of this venerable city’. And this first sight was but a foretaste of the delights to come.
De Brosses found that the Corso was ‘much too narrow for its length and was made still more so by the trottoirs for the use of pedestrians’. And he had to confess that he could not bear the everlasting drive of carriages along it, the tiresome
51 The Ripetta, the river port of the Tiber, which stood where the Ponte Cavour now crosses the river.
‘fashion of the Italians of promenading’ in their coaches in the midst of a town ‘suffocated by the heat and dust’. Yet there were fine buildings on both sides, and finer ones still as one approached the heart of the city and then crossed over the river again towards St Peter's.
St Peter's itself was ‘the finest thing in the universe… all is simple, natural, and august, consequently sublime… You might come to it every day without being bored. There is always something new to observe and it is only after many visits that one gets to know it at all… It is more amazing the oftener you see it.’ As for the fountains in the piazza, nothing had ever given de Brosses so much pleasure as these ‘two watery fireworks which play night and day without ceasing’. Indeed, like Smollett, he was more enraptured by the fountains of Rome – ‘this profusion of water and rushing streams’ – than by all the other wonders of the city, even the view from the Janiculum at sunset when one could look down upon ‘that stupendous panorama of domes, towers, and golden cupolas, churches, palaces, green trees and sparkling waters’.
The Roman people, too, were so pleasant and civil, ‘full of good breeding and more obliging than in any other part of Italy.’ ‘In short, to tell you in one word my impression of Rome,’ de Brosses concluded, ‘it is this – that it is the most beautiful city in the world… and the most agreeable and comfortable in Europe. I would sooner live here even than in Paris.’
There were certain drawbacks, of course, a principal one being the extraordinary indolence of the population, the greater part of whom spent their time avoiding work, doing ‘absolutely nothing’, living on charity and the money which found its way to Rome from all over Christian Europe. There was ‘no agriculture, no commerce, no manufactures'; and it was not in the least uncommon to be told in a shop, with complacent equability, that the goods required were available but were rather awkward to get at, so would the customer please come back another day.
The population of the city, which had numbered about 80,000 in 1563 and 118,356 in 1621, had now risen to about 150,000, according to a census taken in 1709, and was to rise again to 167,000 before the century was over. The residents were almost outnumbered by the tourists and pilgrims. It was estimated, on the basis of the extra bread baked in the city's ovens, that there were some 100,000 visitors in 1700. And a census kept by the large hospice of S. Trinità dei Pellegrini1 indicates that in the Holy Year of 1750 no less than 134,603 pilgrims stayed at that hospice alone. Many of Rome's residents were officials, many more were priests: the 1709 census listed 2,646 priests and 5,370 monks, nuns and other religious; and there seemed more than this, since it was fashionable for men to dress as though they were in holy orders even when they were not. ‘Everyone in Rome,’ said Casanova, himself persuaded to adopt the attire, ‘was either a priest or trying to look like one.’ Nor did it seem, great though their numbers were, that there were too many ecclesiastics to serve the extraordinary number of religious houses in Rome. There were 240 monasteries, 73 convents, 23 seminaries and nearly 400 churches including those used by foreigners, the Germans' church of S. Maria dell' Anima, the Poles' S. Stanislao,2 the Spaniards’ S. Maria in Monserrato,3 the Portuguese S. Antonio4 and the French S. Luigi dei Francesi.5
To most visitors it seemed astonishing that so many of those who were evidently not priests appeared to be quite content to pass their lives in utter idleness, thanks to the official Board of Charities and the sustenance provided by religious foundations and the richer families. If homeless, they could enter papal workshops where, between meals, they ‘sat with their arms folded’, or they could seek shelter in one of the city's many refuges where, provided they moved on after one night, their clothes were mended and their shoes cobbled. If ill, they would be visited, nursed and brought food by the Fatebenefratelli of S. Giovanni di Dio,6 or they would be given a bed in one of Rome's numerous hospitals, perhaps the vast S. Spirito where, beside walls hung with paintings, they would be entertained with
52. The Basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, whose sixteenth-century portico by Martino Longhi the Elder was destroyed when Fuga built the present façade for Pope Clement XII in 1741. The column was brought from the Basilica of Maxentius by Pope Paul V.
musical concerts. If leprous, they would be cared for at S. Gallicano in Trastevere,7 if mad at S. Maria della Pietá,8 if too young or too old to look after themselves at the Ospizio di San Michele, where orphaned girls were given a dowry when they left.9 Injured children were looked after at S. Maria della Consolazione,10 pregnant women at the S. Rocco where their names would be kept secret if they so wished.11
The unemployed could always earn ample pocket-money by begging, particularly in the streets around Piazza di Spagna where foreigners could most easily be waylaid. Mendicants, supplied with begging-letters by the scriveners who could be seen sitting beneath umbrellas in every square, were constantly to be observed hovering at the doors of palaces, sitting on the steps of churches ready to act as unwanted and incompetent guides, waiting in the streets at dusk with lanterns for the hesitant passer-by. The least service, from the opening of a door to the unnecessary brushing of a coat and the imparting of unsolicited information, was considered worthy of reward; a man could live well in Rome from the buona mancia elicited from pestered tourists and from the commissions received as touts, pimps and middlemen.
Servants in private houses and palaces were as ready to ask for a tip from their masters’ guests as they would have been from some stranger in the street. ‘You go to see a man,’ Montesquieu complained. ‘Immediately his servants come to ask you for money, often even before you have seen him.’ This was to a certain extent understandable, Charles de Brosses thought, since the palaces were more like hotels or picture galleries than homes.
All these great apartments which are so vast and so superb are only there for foreigners [he wrote of the Borghese Palace]. The master of the house cannot live in them, since they contain neither lavatories, comfort nor adequate furniture; and there is hardly any of the latter, even in the upper-storey apartments which are inhabited… The sole decoration in the rooms consists of pictures with which the four walls are covered from top to bottom in such profusion and with so little space between them that, to tell the truth, they are more tiring than attractive to the eye.
Romans who did work never worked hard. The hours of the siesta were long; and during those hours, so Father Labat said, the only living creatures to be seen in the streets were dogs, lunatics and Frenchmen. Even before and after the siesta, the seven hundred workshops of the masons and smiths, the painters and engravers, wood-carvers and potters were frequently closed and shuttered. Feast days and festivals were so common that almost every other day was a holiday; there were 150 religious festivals at the beginning of the century and only thirty less than this by 1770. There were, in addition, occasional pageants, such as the Sacro Possesso in which, after Pope Clement XIV had fallen off his palfrey in 1769, the Pope took part by riding in a coach; annual events like the incursion in December of peasants from the Abruzzi who, dressed in sheepskin coats and brigandish hats, would parade through the streets, playing bagpipes before the shrines; weekly summer festivals including the naumachia – the water jousts and mock sea-battles in the
53. The Piazza S. Maria della Rotonda with the Pantheon in the background. Despite the dedicatory inscription on the trabeation of the portico – M. AGRIPPA L. F. COS. TERTIUM FECIT (Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, Consul for the third time, built this) – the Pantheon was built in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117–38).
flooded Piazza Navona; local processions, fêtes and fairs in which each rione bid to outdo the next in the magnificence of its decorations, the loudness of its band, the originality of its floats and fancy dresses, and the brilliance of its fireworks; and, as a climax to the Feast of St Peter, there was the world-famous illumination of the basilica by the 365 marvellously agile and expert technicians of the Fabbrica who, clinging to ropes, leaping across the leads but remaining always out of sight, miraculously outlined the building with six thousand paper lanterns and flaring fire-lamps.
Every year, just before Lent, came the eight days of the Roman Carnival, a wild, tumultuous celebration that ended on Ash Wednesday. The festivities, heralded by the ringing of a bell on the Capitol which was otherwise sounded only for the death of a pope, were opened with a ceremony in which the Jews of Rome, excused by Clement IX from their former customary races, handed over a payment to meet the cost of the prizes to be awarded to the winners of the horse-races and were thanked by a pretended kick in the small of the Chief Rabbi's back. The lay and
54. A panoramic view of Rome in 1765 by Giuseppe Vasi.
ecclesiastical authorities of Rome, escorted by halberdiers in black and violet uniforms, then proceeded down the Corso which was decorated with banners, foliage and flowers and thronged with people in masks and strange disguise. They were dressed as Cossacks and English sailors, Chinese mandarins and Barbary pirates, Scottish Highlanders, giants on stilts, and characters in the commedia dell'arte. There were men dressed as women, and women disguised as boys or army officers. In fact every conceivable costume was to be seen. Confetti and paper streamers, darts and pellets made of pozzolana and plaster, handfuls of flour and showers of water flew through the air as the people sang and danced, shouted and hugged each other, jumping out of the way of carriages, or clambering up on to their running-boards and shouting greetings through the windows.
There were parades of extravagantly decorated floats drawn by gaily caparisoned horses with silver bells, flowers and gorgeous plumes, the most admired often fabricated by the inventive students of the French Academy;12 there were tournaments in palace courtyards; and every afternoon there was the longed-for race of the Barbary horses which began in the Piazza del Popolo. Filled with oats and often with stimulants, the excited animals had cords laid over their backs covered with sharp nails or rowels to act as spurs. Often they were only with difficulty prevented from jumping over the barriers. When all was ready, a party of dragoons rode down the sand-covered Corso making sure that all carriages had been moved off into side streets; then other cavalrymen rode at breakneck speed down the street, the crowds of spectators pressing against the walls on either side. As the horses thundered past towards the Piazza Venezia, sand spattering at their hooves, blood running down their backs, fireworks exploding around them, the noise of cheering was tumultuous. The owner of the winner was presented with a prize of money and a palio, a banner of gold brocade embroidered with the emblem of a galloping horse and fixed to a brightly painted pole.
On the last night of the Carnival the revellers poured out into the streets, carrying tapers, jostling and pushing, trying to blow out each other's flickering flames while keeping their own alight, climbing on to the tops of carriages to keep their lights out of reach, or holding them aloft on long sticks, crying the traditional threat, ‘May he who does not carry a candle be knocked senseless!’ On this night, as on others, there were dances in the palaces, in the theatres, in assembly rooms, and in the streets, where music and laughter filled the air until the sun came up.
On Sundays during the Carnival the churches, lit by brilliant candles and tapers, were decorated with flowers and velvet hangings, their statues and ubiquitous effigies of the Madonna bedecked with ornaments. Their naves and aisles, filled with the music of orchestras and the hubbub of the congregation, seemed more like theatres than places of worship; and so in a sense they were.
During Lent, services in the churches took on a more sombre note, with queues of women dressed in black outside the confessionals. But when Easter came, all was cheerfulness once more. Fireworks exploded in the sky and there was dancing in the streets. The religion of Rome, indeed, was much more characteristically reflected in the midnight revels around the porphyry obelisk in the Lateran piazza on the Festival of St John than in the services held amidst representations of suffering in San Stefano Rotondo on the anniversary of the martyrdom of St Stephen. Many of these festivals were of pagan origin as, for instance, the Rappresentazione dei Morti in All Saints, where wax models of the dead were propped against corpses from the hospitals, and the Festival of the Madonna of the Hams when the windows of the food shops were stuffed with cooked meats, pies
55a. A view of the Forum, then known as the Campo Vaccino (the cow field), by Piranesi. The submerged Arch of Septimius Severus is in the left foreground.
and strings of sausages arranged in fantastic and often gruesome displays. But, whether pagan or Christian in origin, most festivals were celebratory rather than penitential, and all were designed to please the eye as much as to stir the soul. It was entirely in the tradition of Roman religion that a preacher should conclude his sermon on the virtues of fasting with a recipe for grilled cod.
Saints were honoured in the Roman calendar and given credit for such particular powers as had been accorded to the gods of the ancient past. Just as in the days of the old Republic, Rumina was looked to for the protection of farms and Matuta for watching over those in childbirth, so now sufferers from headaches sought the intercession of Santa Bibiena, while sore throats were the responsibility of San Biagio. Portents, too, were regarded with the same deep foreboding as they had been in the days of Augustus, and while statues in the temples had then shed tears and blood so now did the Madonnas and crucifixes of papal Rome.
Yet superstitious as they were, going in dread of the evil eye and imagining all manner of disasters consequent upon such portents as the netting of a two-headed sturgeon in the Tiber, the Romans were essentially a cheerful, easygoing people, happy to abide by their proverb, ‘Chi si contenta gode’, ‘The contented man enjoys himself’, apparently without envy of the rich with whom they mixed upon the most familiar terms. In the palaces of the cardinals and the nobility there was a constant procession of callers going in and out without hindrance. Fishmongers or
55b. Another of Piranesi's views of the Campo Vaccino, looking towards the Arch of Titus with the Orti Farnesiani in the background.
fruit-sellers would set up their stalls beside the front doors without asking permission or requiring it, making themselves at home in the rooms where servants talked to their masters as though they were the most intimate of friends and where one might see a monk gratefully accept a pinch of snuff from a cardinal's proffered box. Even at the Vatican washing was hung out to dry from the windows; while at the Quirinal, relations of the Pope's numerous servants came to meals and sometimes even to live, and hawkers carried their wares along passages and into the crowded saloons. Yet the easy informality did not preclude the observation of the most elaborate protocol when the occasion arose. Ceremonies at the papal Court were regulated by the strictest rules; and few cardinals, however humble their personal tastes, would appear in the streets without a cavalcade of liveried attendants to accompany the black and gilded carriages drawn by horses with red silk ribbons in their manes. If, while driving, a cardinal met a fellow-prelate on foot, he was expected to alight and to greet him with due ceremony. A visitor to Rome once observed this ceremonia and described how ‘after many bows, gracious smiles, and protestations of attachment, the cardinals took leave of one another. But the one who had been in the coach had to walk on some distance instead of reentering it, and keep turning back and bowing to the one on foot. He for his part did the same and so they continued until each was out of sight.’
The cavalcades of Cardinal de Bernis were particularly impressive, for he was the French ambassador and rarely appeared without an immense retinue including thirty-eight footmen, eight couriers, eight valets and two chaplains. At his palace a splendid banquet was given every year on 13 December in commemoration of King Henri IV's conversion to Roman Catholicism. One year Charles de Brosses was invited and discovered that the feast was a ‘real field-day for masters and servants alike, conducted in the boldest and most shocking manner’.
No sooner was food placed before us [de Brosses continued] than a horde of strange footmen bore down carrying empty plates and demanding this and that for their masters. There was one in particular who attached himself to me as the most promising member of the party. I gave him a turkey, then a chicken, a cut of sturgeon, a partridge, a slice of venison, some tongue, some ham, and always he came back. ‘My friend,’ I said to him, ‘we are all getting the same. Why doesn't your master eat what is before him?’ Detroy, sitting not far from me said, ‘Don't be silly. All he asks for his master he's taking for himself.’ And I could see that… lackeys were vying with one another in the amount they could stuff into their pockets, even wrapping the truffled poultry in napkins… for the linen was worth taking too. The cleverest ones were whisking the dishes away. You could see them filing out of the room and taking them home under their ferriacuoli, the big cloaks they wear.
Some servants had wives and children waiting on the staircases to carry the plunder off to their ‘miserable abodes’. And Charles de Brosses ‘was told as a fact’ that their masters indulged in pilfering as well. If any Italian gentleman fancied anything he simply sent his servant home with it, thus appropriating dish and contents together. The ambassador confided in him that he lost between twenty-five and thirty valuable pieces every year at least and, ‘even more annoyingly’, pieces he had borrowed.
Other rich men in Rome spared themselves this annoyance by not giving banquets at all and by contenting themselves with conversazioni, at the best of which the guests could not only enjoy good talk on all manner of subjects, but also an orchestra and singers or a game of cards. On these occasions only the lightest snacks were provided, often no more than dishes of ice-cream which was eaten in enormous quantities in Rome at all hours of the day and night, even in church, by rich and poor alike.
Apart from this indulgence, the Romans were not greedy, though foodstuffs were cheap enough. At the tables of those who could afford far more, a meal of pasta and salad, poached fish, cheese and fruit would be deemed quite adequate and, by the poor, ideal. The poor rarely cooked at home, fetching what they needed from the cucina or the pasticceria, going to those places in and around the city where food was prepared in the open, to the Piazza Colonna where cabbages were cooked, to the steps of the Church of S. Marcello where tripe simmered in huge pans, to the big market in Piazza Navona where peasants who had come in from the country with their produce could be persuaded to do a little cooking if pressed, or to the column of Marcus Aurelius in Piazza Colonna where the coffee-sellers roasted their beans, the only place in Rome where they were allowed to do so, the smell being considered offensive.
Indeed, the poor of Rome spent as little time as possible at home except in excessively cold weather when, rarely having fireplaces or even charcoal stoves, they would huddle together, their feet in muffs, passing caldini, pots filled with embers, from hand to hand. They preferred to gossip and gamble in the streets; to dance; to watch their version of football, a rough game with teams of up to thirty on each side, which was accompanied by constant shouts of encouragement and abuse and often ended in fights; to wander up to Monte Testaccio to enjoy the white Castelli wines kept cool in the cellars of the hill; and in the evenings, if they could afford it, to go to the theatre, to the Teatro delle Dame13 near the Piazza di Spagna or the Argentina,14 to the operette at the Capranica,15 the comedies at the Tor di Nona or the marionettes in the Piazza Navona. The performances, however, were not the only attraction perhaps not even the main attraction: people went to meet their friends, to eat ice-cream, have a picnic, or to gamble. ‘It is the fashion here to regard the theatre as a place for meeting people and paying social calls,’ wrote an English visitor. ‘Instead of listening to the music they all laugh and talk as though they were at home. This naturally did not encourage a happy relationship between the audiences, who armed themselves with rotten fruit in the expectation of having to pelt the performers, and the cast who were always ready to retaliate, as the actors at the Capranica did more than once, with broken tiles and stones. In the boxes where the chairs were set around gaming tables and servants stumbled about with wine and refreshments, the uproar was often as continuous as it was in the pit where the audience sat on benches, shouting to each other, eating, drinking and knocking over the candles by which those few who had come for the performance vainly tried to follow the score. But usually when arias began, the whole house fell into silence as the voices of the principal singers filled the theatre. The voices of the singers playing female parts were always those of castrati, for, although actresses had been seen briefly on the Roman stage in the middle of the sixteenth century and, again briefly, under the protection of Queen Christina, they had been banished by Innocent XI. The most popular of the castrati, though, were almost indistinguishable from women. ‘They have hips, buttocks, bosoms and plump round necks,’ a French visitor wrote. ‘You could mistake them for real girls. And, according to Montesquieu, an Englishman did mistake one of them, a transvestite castrato from the Capranica, for a girl and fell ‘madly in love’ with him. Emasculated when children in such surgeries as that near the Vatican whose services were advertised by a signboard proclaiming, ‘The Pope's Chapel Singers Castrated Here’,castrati were to be found in many a fashionable café where, so one English tourist thought, ‘they looked as pretty and tempting as may be’.
For those who could not afford to enter a theatre there were excitements and drama enough in the streets. In the Piazza Navona where mountebanks and acrobats performed their turns, astrologers told fortunes and barbers and tooth-drawers carried on their trades for all to see, in the Corso where the rich paraded in their carriages and on the Quirinal where they strolled in their gardens, in the tortuous streets of the Campo Marzio where grand palaces loomed over tiny houses squeezed into vacant plots, and in the dark, cramped, garlic-flavoured alleys of Trastevere, the life of Rome could be observed in all its wonderful variety. Shop signs hung on every side, so that tailors could be recognized by pairs of scissors or a cardinal's red hat, barbers by a shaving plate, surgeons by a bleeding arm or foot, and tobacconists by a man, usually a Turk, smoking a pipe. And this, combined with the convenience of being able to find most trades concentrated in certain areas – the clock-makers, for instance, in and about Piazza Capranica, the cabinetmakers between Via Arenula and Piazza Campitelli, the booksellers around the Chiesa Nuova, the hatters in Via dei Cappellari, the rosary makers in Via dei Coronari, the carriage-repairers in the Via delle Carrozze, and the locksmiths in Via dei Chiavari – made amends for there being, at least until 1744, no names on the streets or numbers on the houses, nor until 1803, when marble slabs were erected, any indication of rioni boundaries.
Since food was prepared and cooked in the open, and since shopkeepers, artisans and workmen pursued their crafts and labours out of doors, since rubbish was piled against the walls to wait for the highly irregular attention of the refuse-collectors, and since all classes of citizens were as ready to relieve themselves against any convenient wall as they were on the relative privacy of a cardinal's staircase, the streets, choked with dust in summer and clogged with mud in winter, were as filthy and noisome as may well be imagined. They were ‘badly paved and extremely dirty’, wrote Father Labat in 1715. In the evening a few carts were trundled about followed by a man who swung from side to side a leather tube attached to a water barrel. But the Romans did not really ‘know what sweeping means, they leave it to Providence. Heavy rain showers act as brushes in Rome.’ They were to do so for many years to come, and occasioned many a sour and wide-ranging condemnation of Rome in general, as for instance that by Hazlitt in hisNotes of a Journey through France and Italy:
It is not the contrast of pigstyes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offended me not; but what has a greengrocer's stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber's sign, and old clothes or old picture shops or a
56. The Piazza and Palazzo Montecavallo by Kaspar van Vittel (Gaspare Vanvitelli, 1653–1736), who emigrated to Rome and painted views of the city and Campagna in a classicizing, idealized manner.
Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome?
Yet most foreign visitors in the eighteenth century wrote home not so much to complain of the squalor of the city as to commend its delightful vistas, such as those to be enjoyed from the Piazza delle Quatro Fontane to the Porta Pia and the obelisks on the Quirinal, the Pincio and the Esquiline, and the romantic impression created by Rome's pastoral setting, by the animals that wandered to graze amongst the lichen-covered ruins, by the oxen drawing haycarts across the Forum and the shepherds resting in the shade of ruins, the scenes evoked in the tranquil, nostalgic engravings of Piranesi.
From time to time these peaceful scenes were shattered by violence. The Romans remained a fierily contentious people, quick to flare up in anger and slow to forgive. Murders were frequent, both crimes of passion and premeditated killings carried out in pursuit of revenge or in exasperated impatience with the cumbersome processes of antiquated laws. ‘What astonishes all foreigners and is the talk of the
57. A group of travellers in Rome on the Grand Tour, by Nathaniel Dance. The seated figure, Thomas Robinson, later 2nd Lord Grantham, is shown holding an elevation of the Temple of Jupiter Sator.
town again today,’ wrote Goethe on 24 September 1786, ‘are the murders. Four people have been murdered in our quarter within three weeks.’
The culprits frequently escaped justice, usually with the help of sympathetic friends or bystanders who helped them to reach one of the city's many places of sanctuary; and, when they were condemned, the spectators at their execution regarded them with pity rather than distaste. In some of Rome's prisons there were mechanical crucifixes from which the figure of Christ reached forward with arms outstretched to give the condemned man comfort before his ordeal. And on the scaffold he was expected to play his part in the dramatic ceremony of beheading with heroic fortitude. A drama it certainly was. Describing an execution such as those carried out in Rome, Lord Byron wrote that ‘the ceremony, including the masqued priests; the half-naked executioner; the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the Scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads – is altogether more impressive than the… dog-like agony of affliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence.’
During the Carnival the drama became a grotesque comedy with the headman disguised as Pulcinella and the audience expected to play their parts as at a pantomime. These Carnival executions usually took place in the Piazza del Popolo where criminals could also be seen undergoing the punishment of the cavalletto, a machine in which the miscreants were held face downwards while being flogged with a bull's penis, or being forced to parade through the streets with the nature of their offence and its punishment placarded on their backs. For the most heinous offences, the condemned might still be punished with the martello which ‘is to knock the malefactor on his temples with a hammer while he is on his knees, and almost at the same time to cut his throat and rip open his belly. Lesser crimes are frequently punished by the gallies [which, since the Roman authorities had no galleys, meant working, not too laboriously, in a chain-gang] or the strappado: the latter is hanging the criminals by the arms tied backwards, and thus bound they are drawn up on high, and let down again with a violent swing, which, if used with vigour, unjoins their backs and arms.’
But while punishments, when inflicted, could be savage, and murders, both committed and planned, were as common as the weapons still hanging in S. Maria in Trastevere and other churches even now testify, foreign visitors to Rome were rarely themselves in danger. Even on the darkest night they stood little chance of being robbed, not so much because the streets were patrolled by watchmen armed with long, hooked poles as because it was generally recognized that money, when required, could always be extracted in less troublesome ways from the unwary, particularly from the English.
The English swarm here [wrote Charles de Brosses] and they are the people who spend most money. The Romans like them on account of their open-handedness, but at heart they prefer the Germans, and this is the case all over Italy. I perceive that no nation is so thoroughly detested as ours and this comes from our foolish habit of lauding our manners to the detriment of other nationalities, and finding especial fault with everything that is not done in the French manner.
The money the English spend in Rome, and the custom they have of making this journey a part of their education does not seem to do them much benefit. There are a few who are intelligent and profit by their stay in Rome, but these are the exceptions. Most of them have a carriage ready harnessed stationed in the Piazza d'Espagna, which waits for them all day long, while they play at billiards, or pass the time in some such fashion. There are numbers of these people who leave Rome without having seen anything in it except their countrymen, and do not know where the Colosseum is.
It was certainly true that Rome abounded with English gentlemen on the Grand Tour known to the Romans as ‘milordi pelabili clienti’ (‘a soft touch as customers’),
58. Edmund Gibbon (1737–94), who conceived the first thought of his great history ‘while musing on the Capitol in the gloom of an October evening’.
whose interest in the art and architecture of the city was as severely limited as the young man of Dr John Moore's acquaintance who considered two or three hours a day far too much time to spend ‘on a pursuit in which he felt no pleasure, and saw very little utility’. After six weeks, however, this young man did not want to admit that he had not seen all that his fellow-tourists had seen. So ‘he ordered a post-chaise and four horses to be ready early in the morning, and driving through churches, palaces, villas, and ruins with all possible expedition, he fairly saw, in two days, all that we had beheld during our crawling course of six weeks. I found afterwards, by the list he kept of what he had done, that we had not the advantage of him in a single picture, or the most mutilated remnant of a statue.’
An equally impatient tourist was the inordinately rich Lord Baltimore, ‘proprietor of all Maryland and Virginia, with an annual income of £30,000’. He travelled about with a doctor, two Negro eunuchs and eight women; and when asked by an official to point out which of the ladies was his wife, he replied that he was an Englishman, and it was not his practice to discuss his sexual arrangements: he would settle the matter with his fists. In Rome, so his guide wrote, he ‘went through the Villa Borghese in ten minutes… Nothing pleased him but St Peter's and the Apollo Belvedere… He thinks he has too much brain… and has wearied of everything in the world.’
There was another young tourist in Rome at this time, however, who was far more conscientious. This was James Boswell. He arrived in the city in March 1765 and guided by a fellow Scotsman, Colin Morison, a Jacobite refugee, he immediately embarked upon ‘a study of antiquities, of pictures, of architecture and of the other arts which are found in such great perfection at Rome’. He viewed the Forum and ‘experienced sublime and melancholy emotions’ as he thought of all the great scenes which had been enacted there, and ‘saw the place, now all in ruins, with the wretched huts of carpenters and other artisans occupying the site of that rostrum from which Cicero had flung forth his stunning eloquence’. From the Forum he went to the Colosseum which he was shocked to find full of dung and rented out as sheds for animals; but even so it was ‘hard to tell whether the astonishing massiveness or the exquisite taste of this superb building should be more admired’. He climbed the Palatine hill on which the cypresses seemed to mourn for the ruin of the imperial palaces, and there he saw a statue which so resembled Cicero that he began to talk Latin to Morison with whom he resolved always to speak the language thereafter, throughout his tour. The next day he climbed the Capitoline where, from the roof of the modern Senate, Morison pointed out ancient Rome on its seven hills and read a clear summary of the growth of the city; and he visited San Pietro in Carcere and saw inside it the remains of the ‘famous Tullia prison of which Sallust gives so hideous a picture He went over the Baths of Diocletian; studied the antiquities of the Campus Martius; admired the oriental marble columns in S. Maria Maggiore; walked round the Belvedere, the Borghese Palace and the Vatican Library; judged Michelangelo's Moscs ‘superb’, though the beard was too long and the ‘horns, though sacred, ludicrous as like a satyr’; and he deemed the Lacoön ‘supreme’. He was struck by the sight of ‘a strange fellow sitting in the sun reading Tasso to a group of others in rags like himself’; and by a procession of Roman girls ‘who had received dowries from a public foundation, some to be married, others to become nuns. They marched in separate groups, the nuns coming last and wearing crowns. Only a few of them were pretty and most of the pretty ones were nuns.’
At Santa Maria sopra Minerva on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Boswell saw the Pope, Clement XIII, being carried round the church ‘on a magnificent chair decorated with a figure of the Holy Ghost’. The whole congregation knelt in front of His Holiness who gave them his blessing before
59. Jean Lemaire's painting of the Piazza del Campidoglio, with the statue of Marcus Aurelius standing between the large statues of Castor and Pollux which were found in the theatre of Pompey and placed here in 1583.
taking his place upon a sort of throne so that they could kiss his slipper. At St Peter's on Maundy Thursday, Boswell was present at another, more celebrated ceremony, the mandatum, or washing of the feet. This ceremony began with Mass in the Sistine Chapel followed by a procession to the Pauline Chapel, the Pope carrying the Sacrament; then His Holiness pronounced the benediction from the loggia of St Peter's before washing the feet of twelve priests of various nations. He performed these traditional ablutions with ‘great decency’, Boswell thought, and afterwards, when serving the priests their customary meal, he ‘mingled grandeur and modesty’, looking like ‘a jolly landlord,’ and smiling when he offered them wine.
In the midst of his sightseeing and studies Boswell naturally ‘indulged in sensual relaxations’, as he confessed to Jean Jacques Rousseau: ‘I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion, and I had a little French painter, a young academician, always vain, always alert, always gay, who served as my jackal. I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets, and I thought that one might well allow one's self a little indulgence in a city where there are prostitute licensed by the Cardinal Vicar.’
After ‘much enjoyment’ with a fille charmante’, the sister of a nun, who cost him fourteen paoli (about seven shillings), Boswell resolved to have a girl every day and seems to have succeeded in doing so, taking particular pleasure in the girls employed in a small brothel run by three sisters named Cazenove and indulging himself also with older women, with one of whom, a ‘monstre’ who charged five shillings, he was ‘quite brutish’, until, as Rousseau had warned him he well might, he contracted a venereal disease.
Most tourists found Roman women accommodating as well as deeply attractive, as Goethe did the tavern-keeper's daughter who wrote her name in spilled wine on the table-top, intertwining it with his own and the hour of the night at which they should meet. These Roman girls were renowned for their lovely complexions, their dark and glossy hair, their brilliant eyes and – the result, so it was said, of the clear and sparkling water – their healthy, white teeth. They were also famous for the boldness of their glance: the French writer, Jean Baptiste Dupaty, found it impossible to get them to ‘drop their eyes before yours’. Another French visitor, Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont, wrote in his memoirs, ‘The freedom of the women passes all belief and their husbands permit it, speaking cheerfully and without embarrassment of their wives' lovers. I have heard M. Falconniere talk of his wife in a quite incredible way… In my role of young man and foreigner I was only too glad to benefit by the consequences.’ Husbands, indeed, generally asked of their wives only that they should not be openly promiscuous and that they should not disgrace themselves with their cicisbei.
Apart from whoring and sightseeing and writing those long accounts of his activities which were essential to his enjoyment of them, Boswell spent hours in Rome in the company of those other Scots and Englishmen who were to be encountered everywhere in the city. He had long conversations with Lord Mountstuart, son and heir of George III's friend, the Earl of Bute, and with John Wilkes, the entertaining demagogue exiled for his libel upon the King. He fell ‘quite in love’ with the ‘modest and amiable’ Swiss painter, Angelica Kauffmann, and he saw a good deal of three other painters then living in Rome, Nathaniel Dance, George Willison and Gavin Hamilton. He called upon Peter Grant, a member of the Scots College,16 who acted as his guide in St Peter's. And, although he was anxious not to be suspected of talking politics with traitors, he called at the Palazzo Muti-Papazzurri,17 home of the Old Pretender, the titular King James III, to see the old man's secretary, Andrew Lumisden, who became a close friend.
Boswell does not, however, mention Gibbon who was also in Rome at this time
60. Johann Winckelmann (1717–68), the Prussian cobbler's son, who was appointed Chief Superintendent of antiquities in 1763.
and who could ‘never forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated [his] mind as [he] first approached and entered the Eternal City’. After a sleepless night, Gibbon wandered amidst the ruins of the Forum, ‘each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke or Caesar fell, was at once present to [his] eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before [he] could descend to a cool and minute investigation’. Then, in the gloom of one October evening, as he sat musing on the Capitol, while barefoot friars were chanting their litanies in the church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli, he ‘conceived the first thought’ of his great history.
Few English gentlemen, so Charles de Brosses maintained, shared Gibbon's excited enthusiasm, although other observers contended that it was the young French tourists who were least interested in what they had come, or been sent, to see. In any event, after they had collected a few antiquities to take home with them, picking them up on the site, buying them in dealers’ shops, or acquiring them from one of the numerous cognoscenti who hawked marble fragments as well as more modern ‘masterpieces’ about the streets, many of these young French and English gentlemen decided they had had enough of ruins. Those who set out with maps and guidebooks, magnifying glasses and sketch-pads, mariner's compasses and quadrants, usually expressed themselves as disappointed by what they found: the arches of the Theatre of Marcellus were filled in and occupied by poor families; the Palatine was overrun with weeds; the Arch of Septimius Severus was half-buried and the part that could be discerned was used as a barber's shop. Almost all that could be seen of the Tabularium were the capitals of three columns; the Baths of Caracalla were smothered in foliage, and ‘a few tattered ropemakers working in the shade of a foot or two of ancient wall’ were the only live creatures whom one visitor found on the deserted Palatine. The Caelian hill looked like an abandoned quarry. Twice a week there was a market in the Forum; and animals, as Boswell discovered, also occupied the Colosseum in which the visitor had to pass through a hermitage to reach the crumbling, ivy-clad seats.
Even so, there was still much of interest to be enjoyed by those more conscientious tourists who avoided the charlatans and self-styled antiquarians against whom John Northall warned his readers in his Travels through Italy, and who took the trouble to find a competent guide – preferably Johann Winckelmann.
A Prussian cobbler's son who became Europe's leading authority on classical art, Winckelmann had arrived in Rome in 1755 and had soon afterwards been appointed librarian to the papal Secretary of State and had been given rooms in the Palazzo della Cancelleria. He later became librarian to Cardinal Albani, moving to an apartment in the Palazzo Albani, now the Palazzo del Drago;18 and he helped his patron with the arrangement of his treasures in the Villa Albani, now Villa Torlonia.19 In 1763 he was appointed Chief Supervisor of all antiquities in and around Rome. Openly homosexual and infectiously enthralled by his subject, he was, in John Wilkes's opinion, ‘a gentleman of exquisite taste and sound learning’. He was also extremely tactful. When showing Wilkes and his beautiful mistress, Gertrude Corradini, round Rome, Winckelmann pretended not to notice their absence when, overcome by lust, Wilkes and Corradini, a woman who ‘possessed the divine gift of lewdness’, disappeared for a few moments to make love behind a convenient ruin. ‘This was the more obliging,’ Wilkes commented, ‘because he must necessarily pass such an interval with the mother of Corradini who had as little conversation as beauty.’
Even when guided by Winckelman, many young tourists soon lost interest in Rome's ruins and preferred to visit the convent of the Capuchins where visitors were shown a cross made by the Devil, a painting by St Luke, and macabre grottos decorated entirely with knuckles, kneecaps, ribs, grinning skulls and crossbones.20 In each compartment, standing erect against the wall, were – and still are – skeletons in Capuchin habits, the skin dried tight upon the bones, long beards hanging to the girdles, rosaries clutched in spindly fingers. The monks who conducted visitors through these gruesome caverns cheerfully pointed out the skeletons of former friends and the niches where their own bones would shortly be displayed.
A pleasurable frisson was also to be enjoyed in the catacombs which had altered little since the day when John Evelyn had crept into them on his belly from a cornfield, ‘guided by two torches’, and had descended ‘a good depth in the bowells of the Earth, a strange & fearefull passage for divers miles’.
That which renders the passages dreadfull [Evelyn recorded] is the Skeletons & bodies, that are placed on the sides, in degrees one above the other like shelves, whereof some are shut up with a Course flat Stone, & Pro Christo or p & Palmes ingraven on them, which are supposed to have been Martyrs… As I was prying about I found a glass phiole as was conjectured filld with dried blood, as also two lacrymatories. Many of the bodies, or rather bones (for there appeard nothing else) lay so intire, as if placed so by the art of the Chirugion, which being but touch'd fell all to dust. Thus after two or 3 miles wandring in this subterranean Meander we return'd to our Coach almost blind when we came into the day light againe, & even choked with smoake. A French bishop & his retinue adventurring it seemes too farr in these denns, their lights going out, were never heard of more.
Like Rubens and so many other foreign travellers before and after him, Evelyn had been advised to look for accommodation in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna, so called since the establishment of the Spanish embassy there in the early seventeenth century, and he eventually settled for rooms with a Frenchman who, after bargaining, agreed to accept twenty crowns (just over twenty-five pence) a month. It was in this area, in a room in the Palazzetto Zuccari,21 that Winckelmann lodged when he first came to Rome. Salvator Rosa lived nearby in Via Gregoriana; Piranesi in Via Sistina. The early neo-classical painter, Anton Raphael Mengs, was also a near neighbour, so was Carlo Goldoni in Via Condotti in which stood, and still stands, the Caffè Greco,22 frequented in these and later years by Casanova, Goethe, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Bizet and Berlioz, Gogol and Keats (whose rooms are preserved at the foot of the Spanish Steps),23 Wagner, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Stendhal, Balzac, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Hans Andersen and countless other artists and writers, who came to Rome either to study, like the Scottish architects, Robert Adam and Robert Mylne, or to work, like Fragonard, Vernet, Claude Lorrain, Canova, Houdon and William Kent who had the unique distinction for an Englishman of frescoing the ceiling of a Roman church, S. Giuliano dei Fiamminghi, the national church of the Belgians.24 There were few good hotels apart from the Albergo Londra and the Monte d'Oro where Charles de Brosses did not mind being fleeced because the puddings were so delicious. There were, however, a number of comfortable inns, including the Eagle, the Falcon, the Golden Lion and the Five Moons. Most visitors, in any case, moved into furnished rooms as soon as they found a set that suited them, if possible in the elegant Casa Guarneri. ‘These apartments are generally commodious
61. A young ‘grand tourist’ arrives in Rome at the Villa de Londres, opposite the Caffè degli Inglesi. The Piazza di Spagna was then known as the ‘English ghetto’.
and well furnished,’ wrote Tobias Smollett who was directed to the ‘open, airy and pleasantly situated’ Piazza di Spagna, known in his day as ‘the English ghetto’, as soon as he arrived in Rome. ‘And the lodgers are well supplied with provisions and all necessaries of life… The vitella mongana… is the most delicate veal I ever tasted… Here are the rich wines of Montepulciano, Montefiascone and Monte di Dragone; but what we commonly drink at meals is that of Orvieto, a small white wine of an agreeable flavour.’
Quick as he was to complain of them elsewhere on the Continent, Smollett had to admit that prices in Rome were very reasonable. For a ‘decent first floor and two bed-chambers on the second’ he paid ‘no more than a scudo [twenty-five pence] per day’ and his landlord plentifully supplied his table at a price which was quite as reasonable. A whole house could be secured for no more than six guineas a month; and Robert Adam enjoyed a pleasant apartment as well as the services of a cook, valet, coachman and footman for little more than £ 4a week. week.
Delighted by the cheapness of their accommodation and of their excellent meals, foreign tourists were predisposed to enjoy themselves in Rome and there were few
62. The city in 1748, from the plan of Giambattista Nolli, revised in 1798.
who did not. In earlier times Protestants had found it advisable to enter Rome in disguise and to leave before Easter to avoid the house-to-house search for non-communicants supervised by the Inquisition. Sir Henry Wotton, who began his travels in 1587, came disguised as a German Catholic with ‘a mighty blue feather’ in his black cap, explaining the reasons for the feather as follows: ‘First, I was by it taken for no English. Secondly, I was reputed as light in my mind as in my apparel (they are not dangerous men that are so). And thirdly, no man could think that I desired to be unknown, who, by wearing of that feather, took a course to make myself famous through Rome in a few days.’
But by the eighteenth century, although Sir Thomas Nugent in his The Grand Tour warned his readers to beware of what they said in front of servants, the Inquisition was no longer a threat to the tourist, provided he did not actually practise black magic. Indeed, the Roman Inquisition, even at its most strict, had never been as uncompromisingly severe as the Spanish or the Languedocian. Admittedly, the philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, Giordano Bruno, had been held for seven years in one of the prisons of the Sant' Ufficio and, declining to recant the heresies of which he was accused, had been taken with his tongue in a gag to be burned alive in February 1600 at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori.25 But after Galileo, whose writings about the laws of the universe were deemed by the Jesuits to be as dangerous to the Church as ‘Luther and Calvin put together’, had been brought to face trial by the Inquisition in Rome, he had been allowed to live in a comfortable apartment. And when the Congregation of the Holy Office had insisted upon sentencing him despite the more sympathetic attitude of the Commissary General, the sentence had been immediately commuted by Pope Urban VIII and Galileo had been allowed to return to his estate at Arcetri near Florence. A hundred or so years after Galileo's death the Inquisition's prison in Castel Sant' Angelo held only four men, and the possibility of a traveller being required to join them was extremely remote. Travellers who kept their heretical views to themselves had little to fear from the authorities even when they loudly expostulated, as some did, at ceremonies in which girls took the veil in convents and had their dresses, ornaments and hair cut off. At one of these ceremonies, so
63. Goethe in Italy in 1787. ‘Only now do I begin to live,’ he exclaimed on entering Rome, and confessed that he had not spent an entirely happy day since he left it.
Catharine Wilmot, Lady Mount Cashell's Irish companion, wrote, ‘not only the women, but many of the young Englishmen were in indignant tears’.
One Englishman instinctively layed his hand upon his sword, swearing that such heart-rending superstitious cruelties ought to be extirpated from off the face of the earth [Miss Wilmot continued]. All was in a moment silent as death, and everyone was obliged to see, and everyone obliged to hear, the snapping of the scissors, which separated a hundred glossy braids and curls from [the girl's] head, which fell amongst her bands of Roses at the feet of the Abbess, who continued with unrelenting piety to strip her of every ornament, and then bound her temples with sackcloth and threw over her the black austerities of her holy order, placing a crown of thorns upon her head, a branch of white lilies in her hand, a large crucifix by her side, and all the insignia of a heavenly office.
But, as another Protestant visitor observed, one was not obliged to witness such heart-rending scenes, and the popery of Rome seemed inspiriting rather than oppressive. A Scottish Presbyterian who came to Rome to convert Pope Clement XIV in the 1770s and – by way of preparation for his task – shouted insults at him in St Peter's, calling him a seven-headed beast of nature and mother of harlots, was arrested by the Swiss Guards. But the Pope intervened on the man's behalf, maintaining that he had acted with the best intentions, paying for his return passage to Scotland, and expressing an obligation to him for undertaking such a long journey with a view to doing good.
In Lent it was easy enough to obtain a licence to eat meat; and there were in any case plenty of taverns and butchers’ shops prepared to sell or serve meat without bothering about the licence. Rome, in fact, was an easy, friendly place where the foreigner was soon made to feel at home and where some foreigners felt so much at home that their own countries thereafter seemed somehow strange to them. One of these was Goethe who exclaimed as he entered the city, ‘Only now do I begin to live!’ and who lamented after he had left it, ‘I have not spent an entirely happy day since I crossed the Ponte Molle to come home.’