SIXTEEN
‘Rome is quite unchanged since you and I were here forty years ago,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had told a friend a few months before the Piedmontese invasion. ‘I said as much to Cardinal Antonelli the other day, and he answered, taking a pinch of snuff, “Yes, thank God.’ The new inventions which had intrigued his master, Pope Pius IX, had scarcely altered at all the essentially pastoral nature of life in the city. There was still no industry and no stock exchange; the main source of wealth was still agriculture. To Edmond About, the French writer and traveller, Rome was like an immense farm in the middle of a great plain of wheat. Each year, before the onset of malaria made the Campagna so perilous, this wheat was brought into store in Rome. It was, even in the 1860s, a common sight to see cows, sheep and goats herded through the streets. As late as 1865 twelve cows were burned to death in a fire in a byre in Via delle Vite, in the very heart of the city.
This aspect of Rome was slow to change, but Cardinal Antonelli could not feel so contented about other differences in the appearance and atmosphere of the city. The papal zouaves had been replaced by regiments of bersaglieri who marched at their rapid pace through the streets in theatrical-looking uniforms and wide-brimmed hats crowned with dark green feathers. Bookstalls were far more numerous and, as well as the familiar Osservatore Romano and Voce della Veritá approved of by the Vatican, passers-by were now offered a variety of other Italian and foreign newspapers and journals. Prelates made far less of a show in the streets, the cardinals’ coaches being painted black and draped as though in mourning; and monks and white-cowled friars, once described as ‘picturesquely poor’ were also far less often to be seen.
These changes were remarked upon and condemned by the Roman-born Augustus Hare whose Walks in Rome was published in 1871.
The absence of Pope, cardinals and monks [Hare wrote]; the shutting up of the convents; the loss of the ceremonies; the misery caused by the terrible taxes and conscription; the voluntary exile of the Borghese and many other noble families; the total destruction of the glorious Villa Negroni1 and so much else of interest and beauty; the ugly new streets in imitation of Paris and New York, all grate upon one's former Roman associations. And to set against these, there is so very little – a gayer Pincio, a live wolf on the Capitol, a mere scrap of excavation in the Forum, and all is said.
Henry James also remarked upon the changes wrought in Rome since the advent of the men from the north. James, who had paid his first visit to Rome in 1869 and, after his first walk through the city, had then decided, like Goethe, that he was fully alive for the first time in his life, returned in 1872 and was sad to find that the cardinals no longer walked on the Pincio and were only occasionally to be seen around the Lateran where they descended from their dismal-looking coaches to exercise their legs. These limbs now alone still testified to the traditional splendour of the Princes of the Church: ‘For as they advanced, the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory of civilization over colour.’ The throngs of smartly dressed young men, James thought,
scarce offered compensation for the monsignori, treading the streets… followed by solemn servants who returned on their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the
83. Floods in the Piazza Navona. The Church of S. Agnese in Agone is on the left adjoining the Palazzo Pamphilj.
mouring gear of the cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you'd not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some idols.
Visitors might also come across various members of the King's family, as James himself did, without being in the least impressed:
Yesterday Prince Humbert's little primogenito [the future King Victor Emmanuel III] was on the Pincio in an open landau with his governess. He's a sturdy little blond man and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticizing under the child's snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity without the slightest manifestation of ‘loyalty’ and it gave me a singular sense of the vulgarization of Rome under the new régime. When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to listen to opera turns, and he had no little popelings under the charge of superior nurse-maids whom you might take liberties with.
Yet James conceded that the essence of Rome, ‘this Paradise of exiles,’ as Shelley had described it, remained immutable. He could still enjoy the lovely view from the top of the Lateran and ride from there down the tree-lined lane to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, or wander through the cork woods on Monte Mario and the fields towards S. Paolo fuori le Mura. Although artists' models had been banished from the Spanish Steps, foreign artists still gathered in the cafés around Piazza di Spagna, in the Via Condotti where the Caffè Greco was more crowded than ever, and in such good cheap restaurants as the Trattoria Lepri where fifteen years before Herman Melville's dinner had cost him fifteen cents. Teams of oxen were still driven through the streets with fruit and casks of wine from the Campagna; pigs still snuffled about for acorns outside the Flaminian Gate; and guides still conducted their groups of tourists around the familiar sights to which were now added the Protestant Cemetery2 which Shelley, when his little son was buried here, thought was so beautiful ‘it might make one in love with death’, and the house by the Spanish Steps in which Keats had died in the arms of his friend, Joseph Severn. And everywhere, as George Gissing complained, tips had still to be given, ‘sometimes as much as five in a morning's walk through the rooms’ of the Vatican.
George Gissing had come from Naples by a train in which the ticket collector went ‘along from door to door outside’, while the other passengers in his carriage repeated excitedly to each other throughout the journey, ‘A Roma! A Roma!’ For them Rome had not lost its fascination, as it never did for Gissing. He returned in 1897 and decided that he preferred it to both Naples and Florence: ‘Florence is the city of the Renaissance, but after all the Renaissance was only a shadow of the great times, and like a shadow it has passed away. There is nothing [in Florence] that impressed me like the poorest of Rome's antiquities.’ There was, as there was for the young artist, Phil May, ‘no place like Rome’.
84. A panoramic view of Rome in about 1870.
Few visitors could stay in Rome long, however, without being aware of the problems caused by the dissensions among the leading families, the quarrels between those who were prepared to accept the King as their sovereign and those who claimed that their loyalty to the Pope prevented them from doing so. Some of these families were as ancient as the Massimo; others, the Orsini, Colonna and Caetani among them, had come to prominence in the Middle Ages. Yet others, including the Farnese, the Boncompagni, the Borghese, the Barberini and the Doria, were descendants of the relations of popes and prelates of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. A few owed their wealth to more recent good fortune or endeavour, such as the Torlonia, descendants of a travelling salesman, whose riches came from banking. Prince Torlonia, the head of the family in 1870, changed his servants' livery so that they should no longer bear the colours of the King, though he contrived thereafter to maintain a comfortable neutrality. Another Torlonia, Duke Leopold, as Mayor of Rome, called upon Cardinal Parocchi to offer civic congratulations to Pope Leo XIII on reaching the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination and was promptly dismissed from office by the Prime Minister.
Some families were more consistent and open supporters of the new régime. These included the Doria, the Boncompagni-Ludovisi, the Ruspoli and, most prominent among them, the Caetani, whose head, Michelangelo Caetani, the liberal Duke of Sermoneta, was a learned Dante scholar, sculptor and craftsman. Having lost his sight when he insisted that his local doctor instead of a specialist should operate upon his eyes for cataracts, he became a deputy in the new Parliament for the plebeian district of Trastevere. At the Caetani Palace in Rome,3 ministers of the new government were as welcome as artists, writers and distinguished foreigners, though a request to visit the family's house in the Pontine Marshes, Sermoneta Castle, was greeted by a response worthy of a Massimo: ‘Pray go by all means. But I am afraid I cannot offer you luncheon there. Our cook at Sermoneta died towards the end of the sixteenth century.’
Although Michelangelo Caetani was an unequivocal advocate of the new regime, he remained on quite friendly terms with several cardinals. But there were some families among the ‘black’ or ‘Guelph’ nobility who refused to have anything to do with the King's government. The Barberini and Chigi, the Borghese and the Aldobrandini, the Sacchetti and the Salviati all turned their backs upon the House of Savoy, and the Lancellotti refused to open the main gates of their palace once the royal family had taken possession of the Quirinal. It was not until 1896, on the grounds of his great age of eighty-six, that Pope Leo XIII abandoned his practice of granting separate audiences for all the ‘black’ families of Rome; and even then they were compensated for this deprivation by being asked to a grand reception once a year. When Oscar Wilde visited Rome in 1900 the divisions in society were as marked as ever. Having obtained a ticket from the hall porter at the Hôtel de l'Europe to see the Pope on Easter Day, he managed to catch a glimpse of his ‘supernatural ugliness’ as he was carried past on a throne, a wonderful figure, ‘not of flesh and blood but a white soul robed in white’. Wilde had never seen anything ‘like the extraordinary grace of his gestures, as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless – possibly the pilgrims, but certainly me’. But then he saw King Victor Emmanuel II's successor, King Umberto I, drive past the Caffè Nazionale where Wilde was drinking coffee: ‘I at once stood and made a low bow, with hat doffed – to the admiration of some officers at the next table. It was only when the King was passed that I remembered I was Papista and Nerissimo! I was greatly upset. However, I hope the Vatican won't hear about it.’
While a proportion of the rich and ancient families of Rome refused to recognize the new regime, the people as a whole welcomed it. Victor Emmanuel had been cheered upon his arrival in the city; and both King Umberto and Queen Margherita were extremely popular. A plebiscite held by the new government revealed that, of those entitled to vote, 133,681 approved of the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy and only 1,507 disapproved. But invasion by the army was followed by an invasion of bureaucrats and officials; and this the people welcomed no more than did the officials themselves who had been comfortably housed in Italy's temporary capital, Florence.
To meet the needs of these civil servants the government requisitioned several large convents in the centre of Rome, including San Silvestro in Capite,4 which was occupied first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by the Central Post Office, and the Minerva which was allocated to the Ministry of Finance. The government also took over various palaces, the Montecitorio for the Chamber of Deputies, the Braschi Palace for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Palazzo
85. Milkmen with goats in the Piazza Flaminio. Rome retained its pastoral atmosphere throughout the nineteenth century.
Madama5 for the Senate. The Villa Madama was allocated for the use of distinguished visitors.
The requisitioning of large buildings, however, provided not nearly enough space for the men from the north. The municipality of Rome was requested to find 40,180 additional rooms for the use of the government; and the city council was able to offer only 500, of which a considerable number were converted haylofts. For, while many churches had been repaired in the long pontificate of Pius IX, very few other buildings had been constructed, apart from the developments around the Ospizio di San Michele in Trastevere6and the Termini railway station.7 The Pope's enterprising Minister for War, the Belgian Monsignor François-Xavier de Mérode, had, however, foreseen that the open country between the Termini Station and the Quirinal was a likely development area. He had bought large tracts of it, and subsequently built several large houses on it. Much of the rest he now sold, at a handsome profit, to building speculators. The wide street which passed through it was known as Via Mérode before being renamed Via Nazionale.
The development of this area was soon after followed by that of several others, the first decade after 1870 witnessing a great expansion of housing from the Colosseum up to Via XX Settembre, the next seven years, until 1887, a further expansion from Via XX Settembre up to the Villa Medici. In 1887 overproduction in the building industry and overextension of credit resulted in a spectacularly sudden crash and numerous bankruptcies: the number of apartments under construction in 1888–9 was only a fifteenth of the number being built in 1886–7. But the damage, in the eyes of many foreign observers, had already been done. For them the new houses and offices, the consulates and embassies, the apartment blocks, hotels and lodging-houses had ruined the appearance of Rome. ‘Twelve years of Sardinian rule have done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than the invasions of the Goths and Vandals,’ Augustus Hare considered. ‘The whole aspect of the city is changed, and the picturesqueness of the old days must now be sought in such obscure corners as have escaped the hand of the spoiler.’
George Gissing agreed with him, as he surveyed the construction work in progress around Castel Sant' Angelo where ‘great ugly barrack-like houses’ were rising thick and fast. ‘Indeed, modern Rome is extremely ugly… its streets are monotonous and wearisome to an incredible degree.’
The crash of 1887 only temporarily disrupted work on public buildings in Rome. The florid and massive Palace of Justice8 was started in 1889, soon after the completion of the ministries of War and Finance in Via XX Settembre.9 The complex of hospitals called the Policlinico10 was built in 1887–9; the vast and cumbersome monument to Victor Emmanuel II11 in 1885–1911; and by the time the river embankments had been finished at the turn of the century, the new district of Prati del Castello had begun to fill in the meadows on the right bank of the river in the space between Castel Sant' Angelo and Monte Mario. All this building was carried out without proper planning or control, so that many lovely villas with their surrounding gardens and parks were swallowed up by the remorseless advance of brick, stone and mortar. The Villa Borghese and the Villa Doria were spared; but the Villa Ludovisi, which Henry James thought the most beautiful in Rome, vanished, together with the Villas Giustiniani-Massimo,12 Montalto,13Albani, Altieri14 and Negroni.
86. The Via Condotti seen from the bottom of the Spanish Steps looking across the Fountain of the Barcaccia. Lemonade sellers congregated here, as well as children hoping for work as artists’ models.
No proper provision was made, either, for the immense number of peasants who were attracted to Rome by the building boom and who, together with the officials and their families, helped to raise the population of the city from 200,000 in 1870 to over 460,000 by the end of the century. The families of these labourers were to be seen sleeping on the steps of churches, under arches or in makeshift shelters, the beginnings of those shanty towns which were to disgrace many Italian
87. The building of the Tiber embankments near the Passeggiata di Ripetta in about 1890.
88. Women in the vegetable market.
cities in the next century. Their poverty-stricken way of life was rendered all the more pitiable by contrast with that of the relatively affluent bureaucrats and army officers and their wives who enjoyed the ora del vermouth in the cafés of the Via Nazionale and the Corso, who frequented the smart new shops and the trattorie which seemed to spring up like mushrooms overnight, who spent their evenings at the opera in the fine Teatro Costanzi, now the Teatro dell’ Opera,15 and who mingled with the foreigners who continued to gather in the Piazza di Spagna.
89. One of the city's numerous shops selling curios and antique oddments.
The number of foreigners who flocked to Rome increased year by year: despite the new building which so many tourists condemned, Rome had lost little of its appeal for the visitor as the nineteenth century drew to its close and the twentieth began. There were those, like the young and poor James Joyce, an ill-paid employee of an Austrian bank living in rooms in Via Frattina, who were unhappy in the city, which seemed to him like a man who made a living ‘by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse’. He longed for someone to talk to about Dublin. But such sentiments were rare. Far more representative were the reactions of Henry James's brother, William, who found Rome ‘just a feast for the eye from the moment you leave your hotel door to the moment you return’, and of Sigmund Freud who went every day to S. Pietro in Vincoli to study Michelangelo's Moses, which he thought was the finest work of art in the world, and who told a friend that Rome had been ‘an overwhelming experience’ for him, ‘one of the summits’ of his life. For Rome, as Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1914 on a return visit to the city to which he had walked years before, Rome goes on, in defiance of building speculators and developers, ‘astonishingly the same’.