LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4064066134655

Table of Contents

       ROMA BEATA

       I LOOKING FOR A HOME

       II CADENABBIA—WOERISHOVEN—PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP

       III A VISIT TO QUEEN MARGARET

       IV A PRESENTATION TO LEO THE THIRTEENTH

       V IN THE ABRUZZI MOUNTAINS

       VI SCANNO

       VII VIAREGGIO—LUCCA—RETURN TO ROME

       VIII ROMAN CODGERS AND SOLITARIES

       IX BLACK MAGIC AND WHITE—WITCH’S NIGHT

       X ISCHIA

       XI OLD AND NEW ROME—PALESTRINA

       XII THE ANNO SANTO

       XIII THE QUEEN’S VISIT

       XIV STRAWBERRIES OF NEMI

       XV THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING!

ROMA BEATA

       Table of Contents

I

       LOOKING FOR A HOME

       Table of Contents

      Rome, January 20, 1894.

      Rome, which we reached Thursday, is very much changed since I last saw it; imagine the Fountain of Trevi, all the principal streets, even many of the smaller ones, gleaming with electric lights!

      We at once engaged an apartment bathed with sun in the Piazza di Spagna, sun from early morning till late afternoon. But when we moved into it, the day was overcast. The apartment which had been tropical with the sun when we hired it was arctic without it!

      We interviewed our padrona (landlady), an immense woman, and demanded a fire.

      “But, Excellency, it is not good for the health.”

      We told her we understood our health better than she, and reminded her that fires had been promised.

      “Excellency, yes, if it makes cold; but to-day it makes an immense heat. Diamine! this saloon is a furnace.”

      The thermometer could not have stood above forty-two degrees, but she was not to be bullied or cajoled. Then J. went out and bought wood “unbeknownst” to her and lighted a fire in the parlor grate. All the smoke poured into the room. The padrona charged with fixed bayonets.

      “Gentry, we are ruined! Not is possible to make fire here.”

      “Why did you not say so before?”

      “Who could figure to himself that gentry so instructed would do a thing so strange?”

      These people are so polite that this was an insult, meant as such, taken as such. In the end J. prevailed. A small fireplace was unearthed from behind the wardrobe in our bedroom. He worked like a stoker, but the badly constructed chimney swallowed all the heat. For three days I was never warm, save when in bed. Monday we forfeited three months’ rent, paid in advance, and went, tame and crestfallen, to a pension, a sadder and a wiser pair.

      Palazzo Santo Croce, March 10, 1894.

      The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again, in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found. We have bought our linen, blankets, batterie de cuisine, and other beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday—am I not my mother’s own child?—I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had much tea, more talk, and most panettone—half bread, half cake, with pignoli and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it is better.

      My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse. Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in midsummer chiefly—has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau—cheerful person that, by the way—says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is hysterical!

      Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear the music. At the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of the Blind Institution furnished the music—a good band, though not equal to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took

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