Italian Hours by Henry James

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Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in
the cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians.
These are less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might
more properly lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of
Theocritus. Among them is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers
and shrubs, and the whole place has such a charming woodland air,
that, casting about me the other day for a compliment, I
declared that it. reminded me of New Hampshire. My compliment had
a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I smiled--or
sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me
the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone,
the natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of
making one love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those
features of one's own country toward which nature's small
allowance doubles that of one's own affection. For this effect of
casting a spell no rides have more value than those you take in
Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don't take, possibly, if you
prefer to reserve these particular regions--the latter in
especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however, in
both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard.
Villa Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great
groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its
lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely
disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a
brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more
elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups than to trudge on
even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese the walkers have
the best of it; for they are free of those adorable outlying
corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never
reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the
spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of
the disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter's
intimation of verdure; and before you are quite conscious of the
tender streaks and patches in the great quaint grassy arena round
which the Propaganda students, in their long skirts, wander
slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of Paradise, you
spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows beneath
the high-stemmed pines. One's walks here would take us too far,
and one's pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts
under the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-
boys in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their
play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a
tree, watches them over the top of his book. It sounds like
nothing, but the force behind it and the frame round it, the
setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a hundred wonderful
things.

1873.

ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS

I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that
I had been talking of the "picturesque" all my life, but that now
for a change I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across
the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with
its half-dozen towns shining on its purple side even as vague
sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an
agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that
during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground,
have been suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small
mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily
through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find
the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The
walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward
the neighbouring town of L'Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty
years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of
calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine
which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to
fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct--
in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there in a pensive
posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the
Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances
we make to vanished powers. An ardent nero then would have
had his own way with me and obtained a frank admission that the
Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the
charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the
Chigis into the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road
at the bottom of which, in the good old days, tourists in no
great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for
the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist might
have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look
out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into
the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of
quaintness, as to the best "bit" hereabouts, I should certainly
name the way in which the crumbling black houses of these
ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery edges of
all the steepest chasms. Before you enter one of them you
invariably find yourself lingering outside its pretentious old
gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony hillside by
this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that grow.
Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between
their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and
violet fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the
viaduct at the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the
full force of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The
pillars and arches of pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with
a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no
better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their
sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the
antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate.
Will those they give their descendants be as good?

At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a
couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-
faced Palazzo Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an
imposing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is
adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the
seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this fine old
decoration that preparations were going forward for a local
festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain
mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults.
The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a
group of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe.
I regarded it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered
remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again
of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such
venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any
more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds
and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy
you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken
proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into
on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of
it. One finds one's self at last--without fatuity, I hope--
feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as
if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social
sense, and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in
size out of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the
only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste they collectively
form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures on all the
altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I
suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by
worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the
Ariccia, rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance
temple whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the
population of a capital. But where is the taste of the
Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for whom
Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred
clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there,
from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her
devotions with more profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant
on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a
bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his blue breeches.
But where is the connecting link between Guido and Caravaggio and
those poor souls for whom an undoubted original is only a
something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning
save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at
best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be
looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented
foundations alone remain, with the carved and painted shell that
bends above them, while the central substance has utterly
crumbled away.

I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a
brisk constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before
the shabby facade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow
in its grey forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated
expression of the opposite church; and indeed in any condition
what self-respecting cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a
little romancing in the shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the
face of the matter, I know, there is often no very salient peg to
hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the
establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But a
hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the
Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the
most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like
the beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered
with massive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I
saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, and I made much,
for the effect of the roof, of a great covered loggia or
belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing or mended with paper.
Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an
ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby
little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an
impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to
American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade mean
nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the most invidious)
on the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked
street, with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad
smells, by the braying of asses and by human intonations hardly
more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you
with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there are
still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted
constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark
over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and
guarded gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a
mental image of the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the
peace with the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough,
the votary of this ideal may well occasionally turn over such
values with the wonder of what one takes them as paying for. They
pay sometimes for such sorry "facts of life." At Genzano, out of
the very midst of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo
Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between
peasant and prince the, contact is unbroken, and one would
suppose Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual
allowances; that the prince in especial must cultivate a firm
impervious shell. There are no comfortable townsfolk about him to
remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune.
When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant
against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black
bread.

I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused me to find
the little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no
manner an exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon
being cool, many of the villagers were contentedly muffled in
those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, which, when tossed
over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of
the few lingering remnants of "costume" in Italy; others were
tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the grass outside
the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone archway
thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms.
Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are
groaning serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many
of the roads hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their
size than for their picturesque contortions and posturings. The
woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw green
light of early spring, a jour vastly becoming to the
various complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides.
I have never seen these untended parterres in such lovely
exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if
he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with
its hood thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds;
and here and there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-
me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the commonest
plants; there are dozens more I know no name for--a rich
profusion in especial of a beautiful five-petalled flower whose
white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes certain fair
copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate. An
Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its English
brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even more
effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches
its hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles
its bark into strange rugosities from which its first scattered
sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid fungus.
But the tree which has the greatest charm to northern eyes is the
cold grey-green ilex, whose clear crepuscular shade drops against
a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not oppressive. The ilex has
even less colour than the cypress, but it is much less funereal,
and a landscape in which it is frequent may still be said to
smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in old
Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked
into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the
niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare
at you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely
intense. A humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better
things than help broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the
olive, which covers many of the neighbouring hillsides with its
little smoky puffs of foliage. A stroke of composition I never
weary of is that long blue stretch of the Campagna which makes a
high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of olive-tops. A
reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean seen
above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand.

To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I
ought to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I
passed. But the reader would find my rhapsody as poor
entertainment as the programme of a concert he had been unable to
attend. I have no more learning about bird-music than would help
me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the
wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter
of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only
hope it was the nightingale. I have listened for the
nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song
would have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty,
and have never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a
prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge,
however, I generously believe him a great artist or at least a
great genius--a creature who despises any prompting short of
absolute inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody
around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the prodigal
spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it
was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good
things and various others besides that I relished so keenly my
visit to the Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-
hour in the wood. It stands above the town on the slope of the
Alban Mount, and its wild garden climbs away behind it and
extends its melancholy influence. Before it is a small stiff
avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts you to a grotesque
little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just
here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may take a
very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the
grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and
livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he
stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in
life. Horror of horrors, you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance?
You discover of course in a moment that it is only a Capuchin
joke, that the monk is a pious dummy and his spectral visage a
matter of the paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the
surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand
entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very
foolish fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by
the conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the
cloister in obedience to my knock and, on learning my errand,
demurred about admitting me at so late an hour. If I would return
on the morrow morning he'd be most happy. He broke into a blank
grin when I assured him that this was the very hour of my desire
and that the garish morning light would do no justice to the
view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his
good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination that
was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and
out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother
standing with folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable
harmony with the scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for
which he is still most precious. This, however, was surely too
much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for gratitude that,
though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with
an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was support to my
idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was in
its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-
set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light
mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--
occupies the crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup,
shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising
high and densely wooded round the placid stone-blue water, has a
sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of the long
circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly lodged. It
is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water
seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it
has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. The
winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its
deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you
fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous
forces of nature. Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue
as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and
wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very
type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I
had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of
classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me
with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are haunted with
these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen there
to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look
across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is
not less romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may
have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great
trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these
hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if
there ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the
deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas struggling away into
impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the sake of climbing
upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions that rise
from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and
lovelier view of lake and hills and sky.

I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with
which I started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a
walk. It may be a different walk each day, moreover, and not
resemble its predecessors save by its keeping in the shade.
"Galleries" the roads are prettily called, and with the justice
that they are vaulted and draped overhead and hung with an
immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few miles from
Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna
framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which
completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I
compared it just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth,
for it has the same incalculable lights and shades, the same
confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have seen it at moments--
chiefly in the misty twilight--when it resembled less the waste
of waters than something more portentous, the land itself in
fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly surging
and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one's very
last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however,
which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems,
is that of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller
hastens to compare with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in
this case is particularly odious, for in order to prefer one lake
to the other you have to discover faults where there are none.
Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies in a deeper cup, and if with
no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody shores, at least, in
the same position, the little high-perched black town to which it
gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite
shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the
Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a
certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch
away under a double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke
Cesarini has a villa at Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose
gardens overhang the lake; but he has also a porter in a faded
rakish-looking livery who shakes his head at your proffered franc
unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at Rome.
For this annoying complication of dignities he is justly to be
denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in
the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a
prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-
chequered corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you
for a town of rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits.
It has quite the usual allowance, the common cynicism, of
accepted decay, and looks dismally as if its best families had
all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping
anything better than donkeys in their great dark, vaulted
basements and mending their broken window-panes with anything
better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano
that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained
that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a
pretty New England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher
of quaintness on the face of it inacceptable; but calmly
considered it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of chalk-
white painted planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones
of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb on occasion to the
charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias glowing in
the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs bending
over a white paling to brush your cheek.

"I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend; "but I prefer
Farmington to such a thing as this." In fact an Italian village
is simply a miniature Italian city, and its various parts imply a
town of fifty times the size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor
lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. Flowers and other graces are
all confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, to
which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The houses on
the other hand would generally lodge a New England cottage,
porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their
cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a
fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve
nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when
Italy was either not shabby or could at least "carry off" her
shabbiness. For what follies are they doing penance? Through what
melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed? You ask these
questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street
and watch the hot sun glare upon the dust-coloured walls and
pause before the fetid gloom of open doors.

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