Visited Rome four times

In the space of some thirty years I have visited Rome four times, at long intervals, and each time I groan anew. I was Italianissimo in my hot youth, and I am assuredly, not Papalino in my maturer age. I rejoice with the new life of the Italian people; I know that for the regenerated nation Rome is essential as its capital; I know that a growing modern city must wear the aspect of modern civilisation. I repudiate the whining of sentimentalists over the conditions of modern progress; and the advice which Napoleon’s creatures gave to the Romans, ‘to be content with the contemplation of their ruins,’ has the true ring of an oppressor. We acknowledge all that, and are no obscurantists to shudder at a railroad with Ruskinian affectation. But yet, to those who loved the poetry of old Papal Rome, the prose of the modernised new Rome is a sad and instructive memory.

When I first saw Rome, it was not connected by any railway with Northern Italy. We had to travel by the road, and I cannot forget the weird effect of that Roman Maremma, purple and crimson with an autumn sunset; the buffaloes, and the wild cattlemen and pecorari in sheepskins; the old-world coaches and postilions; the desolate plain broken by ruins and castles; the mediaeval absurdities of Papal officialism; the suffumigations and the visas; the cumbrous pomposity of some Roman returning from villeggiatura — it was as though one had passed by enchantment into the seventeenth century, with its picturesque barbarism, and one quite expected a guerilla band of horsemen to issue from the castle of Montalto coastal bulgaria holidays.

Rome itself

And then Rome itself, so perfectly familiar that it seemed like a mere returning to the old haunt of childhood, with its fern-clad ruins standing in open spaces, gardens, or vineyards; the huge solitudes within the walls; the cattle and the stalls beneath the trees on the Campo Vaccino, forty feet above the spot where now professors lecture to crowds in the recent excavations; the grotesque parade of cardinals and monsignori; the narrow, ill-lighted streets; the swarm of monks, friars, and prelates of every order and race; the air of mouldering abandonment in the ancient city, as of some corner of mediaeval Europe left forgotten and untouched by modern progress, with all the historic glamour, the pictorial squalor, the Turkish routine, all the magnificence of obsolete forms of civilisation which clung round the Vatican and were seen there only in Western Europe.

It had to go, and it is gone; and Rome, in twenty or thirty years, has become like any other European city big, noisy, vulgar, overgrown, Frenchified, and syndicate-ridden, hardly to be distinguished from Lyons or Turin, except that it has in the middle of its streets some enormous masses of ruin, many huge, empty convents, and some vast churches, apparently abandoned by the Church.

But the ruins, which used to stand in a rural solitude like Stonehenge or Rievaulx, are now mere piles of stone in crowded streets, like the Palais des Therme’s at Paris. The sacred sites of Forum and Roma Quadrata are now objects in a museum. The Cloaca are embedded in the new stone quay, and are become a mere ‘exhibit,’ like York House Water-Gate in our own embankment. The wild foliage and the memorial altars have been torn out of the Colosseum, and the Allian Bridge is overshadowed by a new iron enormity. Rome, which, thirty years ago, was a vision of the past, is to-day a busy Italian town, with a dozen museums, striving to become a third-rate Paris.

The mediaeval halo is gone, but the hard facts remain. For to the historian Rome must always be the central city of this earth — the spot towards which all earlier history of mankind must in the end converge — from which all modern history must issue. Rome is the true microcosm, wherein the vast panorama of human civilisation is reflected as on a mirror. It is this diversity, continuity, and world-wide range of interest which place it apart above all other cities of men. This one is more lovely, that one is more complete; another city is vaster, or another has some unique and special glory. But no other city of the world approaches Rome in the enormous span of its history, and in this character of being the centre, as the Greeks said the if not of this planet at least europe.