Edward Dicey - Rome in 1860
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Edward Dicey >> Rome in 1860
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12 ROME IN 1860.
By
EDWARD DICEY.
Cambridge:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN,
London.
1861.
[The right of Translation is reserved.]
* * * * *
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
* * * * *
TO
MR. AND MRS ROBERT BROWNING
CHAPTER I. THE ROME OF REAL LIFE.
My first recollections of Rome date from too long ago, and from too early
an age, for me to be able to recall with ease the impression caused by
its first aspect. It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of
Rome fairly. Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman
travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal
City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim's reverence for the
shrine of his worship. The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we
breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery. A
kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase
each other. Heroes and martyrs, sages and saints and sinners, consuls
and popes and emperors, people the weird pageant which to our mind's eye
hovers ever mistily amidst the scenes around us. Here above all places
in God's earth it is hard to forget the past and think only of the
present. This, however, is what I now want to do. Laying aside all
memory of what Rome has been, I would again describe what Rome is now.
And thus, in my solitary wanderings about the city, I have often sought
to picture to myself what would be the feelings of a stranger who, caring
nothing and knowing nothing of the past, should enter Rome with only that
listless curiosity which all travellers feel perforce, when for the first
time they approach a great capital. Let me fancy that such a traveller--a
very Gallio among travellers--is standing by my side. Let me try and
tell him what, under my mentorship, he would mark and see.
It shall not be on a bright, cloudless day that we enter Rome. To our
northern eyes the rich Italian sun-light gives to everything, even to
ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is
not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such
a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the
year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky above is covered with
colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine
hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by
what gate or from what quarter we enter. On every side the scene is much
the same. The Campagna surrounds the city. A wide, waste, broken,
hillock-covered plain, half common, half pasture land, and altogether
desolate; a few stunted trees, a deserted house or two, here and there a
crumbling mass of shapeless brickwork: such is the foreground through
which you travel for many a weary mile. As you approach the city there
is no change in the desolation, no sign of life. Every now and then a
string of some half-dozen peasant-carts, laden with wine-barrels or wood
faggots, comes jingling by. The carts so-called, rather by courtesy than
right, consist of three rough planks and two high ricketty wheels. The
broken-kneed horses sway to and fro beneath their unwieldy load, and the
drivers, clad in their heavy sheepskin jackets, crouch sleepily beneath
the clumsy, hide-bound framework, placed so as to shelter them from the
chill Tramontana blasts. A solitary cart is rare, for the neighbourhood
of Rome is not the safest of places, and those small piles of stone, with
the wooden cross surmounting them, bear witness to the fact that a murder
took place not long ago on the very spot you are passing now. Then,
perhaps, you come across a drove of wild, shaggy buffaloes, or a
travelling carriage rattling and jilting along, or a stray priest or so,
trudging homewards from some outlying chapel. That red-bodied funereal-
looking two-horse-coach, crawling at a snail's pace, belongs to his
Excellency the Cardinal, whom Papal etiquette forbids to walk on foot
within the city, and whom you can see a little further on pottering
feebly along the road in his violet stockings, supported by his clerical
secretary, and followed at a respectful distance by his two attendant
footmen with their threadbare liveries. At last, out of the dreary
waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long
line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily. A few cannon-shot
would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too
well. However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor
building extension of any kind to be checked; the city has shrunk up
until its precincts are a world too wide; and the walls, if they are
useless, are harmless also; more, by the way, than you can say for most
things here. There is no stir or bustle at the gates. Two French
soldiers, striding across a bench, are playing at picquet with a pack of
greasy cards. A pack-horse or two nibble the blades of grass between the
stones, while their owners haggle with the solitary guard about the
"octroi" duties. A sentinel on duty stares listlessly at you as you
pass,--and you have entered Rome.
You are coming, I will suppose, from Ostia, and enter therefore by the
"Porta San Paolo;" the gate where legends tell that Belisarius sat and
begged. I have chosen this out of the dozen entrances as recalling
fewest of past memories and leading most directly to the heart of the
living, working city. You stand then within Rome, and look round in vain
for the signs of a city. Hard by a knot of dark cypress-trees waves
above the lonely burial-ground where Shelley lies at rest. A long,
straight, pollard-lined road stretches before you between high walls far
away; low hills or mounds rise on either side, covered by stunted,
straggling vineyards. You pass on. A beggar, squatting by the roadside,
calls on you for charity; and long after you have passed you can hear the
mumbling, droning cry, "Per l'amore di Dio e della Santa Vergine," dying
in your ears. On the wall, from time to time, you see a rude painting of
Christ upon the cross, and an inscription above the slit beneath bids you
contribute alms for the souls in purgatory. A peasant-woman it may be is
kneeling before the shrine, and a troop of priests pass by on the other
side. A string of carts again, drawn by bullocks, another shrine, and
another troop of priests, and you are come to the river's banks. The
dull, muddy Tiber rolls beneath you, and in front, that shapeless mass of
dingy, weather-stained, discoloured, plaster-covered, tile-roofed
buildings, crowded and jammed together on either side the river, is Rome
itself. You are at the city's port, the "Ripetta" or quay of Rome. In
the stream there are a dozen vessels, something between barges and
coasting smacks, the largest possibly of fifty tons' burden, which have
brought marble from Carrara for the sculptors' studios. There is a
Gravesend-looking steamer too, lying off the quay, but she belongs to the
French government, and is employed to carry troops to and from Civita
Vecchia. This is all, and at this point all traffic on the Tiber ceases.
Though the river is navigable for a long distance above Rome, yet beyond
the bridge, now in sight, not a boat is to be seen except at rare
intervals. It is the Tiber surely, and not the Thames, which should be
called the "silent highway."
A few steps more and the walls on either side are replaced by houses, and
the city has begun. The houses do not improve on a closer acquaintance;
one and all look as if commenced on too grand a scale, they had ruined
their builders before their completion, had been left standing empty for
years, and were now occupied by tenants too poor to keep them from decay.
There are holes in the wall where the scaffolding was fixed, large
blotches where the plaster has peeled away; stones and cornices which
have been left unused lie in the mud before the doors. From the window-
sills and from ropes fastened across the streets flutter half-washed rags
and strange apparel. The height of the houses makes the narrow streets
gloomy even at midday. At night, save in a few main thoroughfares, there
is no light of any kind; but then, after dark at Rome, nobody cares much
about walking in out-of-the-way places. The streets are paved with the
most angular and slippery of stones, placed herringbone fashion, with ups
and downs in every direction. Foot-pavement there is none; and the
ricketty carriages drawn by the tottering horses come swaying round the
endless corners with an utter disregard for the limbs and lives of the
foot-folk. You are out of luck if you come to Rome on a "Festa" day, for
then all the shops are shut, and the town looks drearier than ever.
However, even here the chances are two to one, or somewhat more, in
favour of the day of your arrival being a working-day. When the shops
are open there is at any rate life enough of one kind or other. In most
parts the shops have no window-fronts. Glass, indeed, there is little of
anywhere, and the very name of plate-glass is unknown. The dark, gloomy
shops varying in size between a coach-house and a wine-vault, have their
wide shutter-doors flung open to the streets. A feeble lamp hung at the
back of every shop you pass, before a painted Madonna shrine, makes the
darkness of their interiors visible. The trades of Rome are primitive
and few in number. Those dismembered, disembowelled carcases, suspended
in every variety of posture, denote the butchers' shops; not the
pleasantest of sights at any time, least of all in Rome, where the custom
of washing the meat after killing it seems never to have been introduced.
Next door too is an open stable, crowded with mules and horses. Those
black, mouldy loaves, exposed in a wire-work cage, to protect them from
the clutches of the hungry street vagabonds, stand in front of the
bakers, where the price of bread is regulated by the pontifical tariff.
Then comes the "Spaccio di Vino," that gloomiest among the shrines of
Bacchus, where the sour red wine is drunk at dirty tables by the grimiest
of tipplers. Hard by is the "Stannaro," or hardware tinker, who is
always re-bottoming dilapidated pans, and drives a brisk trade in those
clumsy, murderous-looking knives. Further on is the greengrocer, with
the long strings of greens, and sausages, and flabby balls of cheese, and
straw-covered oil-flasks dangling in festoons before his door. Over the
way is the Government depot, where the coarsest of salt and the rankest
of tobacco are sold at monopoly prices. Those gay, parti-coloured
stripes of paper, inscribed with the cabalistic figures, flaunting at the
street corner, proclaim the "Prenditoria di Lotti," or office of the
Papal lottery, where gambling receives the sanction of the Church, and
prospers under clerical auspices to such an extent that in the city of
Rome alone, with a population under two hundred thousand, fifty-five
millions of lottery tickets are said to be taken annually. Cobblers and
carpenters, barbers and old clothes-men, seem to me to carry on their
trades much in the same way all the world over. The peculiarity about
Rome is, that all these trades seem stunted in their development. The
cobbler never emerges as the shoemaker, and the carpenter fails to rise
into the upholstery line of business. Bookselling too is a trade which
does not thrive on Roman soil. Altogether there is a wonderful sameness
about the streets. Time after time, turn after turn, the same scene is
reproduced. So having got used to the first strangeness of the sight you
move on more quickly.
There is no lack of life about you now, at the shop-doors whole families
sit working at their trades, or carrying on the most private occupations
of domestic life; at every corner groups of men stand loitering about,
with hungry looks and ragged garments, reminding one only too forcibly of
the "Seven Dials" on a summer Sunday; French soldiers and beggars, women
and children and priests swarm around you. Indeed, there are priests
everywhere. There with their long black coats and broad-brimmed shovel
hats, come a score of young priests, walking two and two together, with
downcast eyes. How, without looking up, they manage to wend their way
among the crowd, is a constant miracle; the carriages, however, stop to
let them pass, for a Roman driver would sooner run over a dozen children
than knock down a priest. A sturdy, bare-headed, bare-footed monk, not
over clean, nor over savoury, hustles along with his brown robe fastened
round his waist by the knotted scourge of cord; a ghastly-looking figure,
covered in a grey shroud from head to foot, with slits for his mouth and
eyes, shakes a money-box in your face, with scowling importunity; a fat
sleek abbe comes sauntering along, peeping into the open shops or (so
scandal whispers) at the faces of the shop-girls. If you look right or
left, behind or in front, you see priests on every side,--Franciscan
friars and Dominicans, Carmelites and Capuchins, priests in brown cloth
and priests in serge, priests in red and white and grey, priests in
purple and priests in rags, standing on the church-steps, stopping at the
doorways, coming down the bye-streets, looking out of the windows--you
see priests everywhere and always. Their faces are, as a rule, not
pleasant to look upon; and I think, at first, with something of the "old
bogey" belief of childhood, you feel more comfortable when they are not
too close to you; but, ere long, this feeling wears away, and you gaze at
the priests and at the beggars with the same stolid indifference.
You are getting, by this time, into the heart of the city, ever and anon
the streets pass through some square or piazza, each like the other. In
the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the
water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some
grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before
its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to ruin. Grass
grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier, quieter, and
cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter the first
church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and bare
outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have seen one,
you have seen all. A crippled beggar crouching at the door, a few common
people kneeling before the candle-lighted shrines, a priest or two
mumbling at a side-altar, half-a-dozen indifferent pictures and a great
deal of gilt and marble everywhere, an odour of stale incense and mouldy
cloth, and, over all, a dim dust-discoloured light. Fancy all this, and
you will have before you a Roman church. On your way you pass no fine
buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings in
Rome, except St Peter's and the Colosseum, both of which lie away from
the town. Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the wall,
bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from time to
time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down endless
hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches
innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants, soldiers,
priests, and beggars, you journey onwards for two miles or so; you have
got at last to the modern quarter, where hotels are found, and where the
English congregate. There in the "Corso," and in one or two streets
leading out of it, there are foot-pavements, lamps at night, and windows
to the shops. A fair sprinkling of second-rate equipages roll by you,
bearing the Roman ladies, with their gaudy dresses, ill-assorted colours,
and their heavy, handsome, sensual features. The young Italian nobles,
with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly. The peasants
are few in number now, but the soldiers and priests and beggars are never
wanting. These streets and shops, brilliant though they seem by contrast
with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be third-rate ones in
any other European capital, and will not detain you long. On again by
the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows day and night
through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps more, and then
you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed piazzas; on again,
between high walls, along roads leading through desolate ruin-covered
vineyards, and you are come to another gate. The French sentinels are
changing guard. The dreary Campagna lies before you, and you have passed
through Rome.
And when our stroll was over, that sceptic and incurious fellow-traveller
of mine would surely turn to take a last look at the dark heap of roofs
and chimney-pots and domes, which lies mouldering in the valley at his
feet. If I were then to tell him, that in that city of some hundred and
seventy thousand souls, there were ten thousand persons in holy orders,
and between three and four hundred churches, of which nearly half had
convents and schools attached; if I were to add, that taking in novices,
scholars, choristers, servitors, beadles, and whole tribes of clerical
attendants, there were probably not far short of forty thousand persons,
who in some form or other lived upon and by the church, that is, in
plainer words, doing no labour themselves, lived on the labour of others,
he, I think, would answer then, that a city so priest-infested, priest-
ruled and priest-ridden, would be much such a city as he had seen with
me; such a city as Rome is now.
CHAPTER II. THE COST OF THE PAPACY.
In foreign discussions on the Papal question it is always assumed, as an
undisputed fact, that the maintenance of the Papal court at Rome is, in a
material point of view, an immense advantage to the city, whatever it may
be in a moral one. Now my own observations have led me to doubt the
correctness of this assumption, which, if true, forms an important item
in the whole matter under consideration. It is no good saying, as my
"Papalini" friends are wont to do, Rome gains everything and indeed only
exists by the Papacy. The real questions are, What class at Rome gain by
it, and what is it that they gain? There are four classes at Rome: the
priests, the nobles, the bourgeoisie, and the poor. Of course if anybody
gains it is the priesthood. If the Pope were removed from Rome, or if a
lay government were established (the two hypotheses are practically
identical), the number of the Clergy would undoubtedly be much
diminished. A large portion of the convents and clerical endowments
would be suppressed, and the present generation of priests would be heavy
sufferers. This result is inevitable. Under no free government would or
could a city of 170,000 inhabitants support 10,000 unproductive persons
out of the common funds; for this is substantially the case at Rome in
the present day. Every sixteen lay citizens, men, women, and children,
support out of their labour a priest between them. The Papal question
with the Roman priesthood is thus a question of daily bread, and it is
surely no want of charity to suppose that the material aspect influences
their minds quite as much as the spiritual. Still even with regard to
the priests there are two sides to the question. The system of political
and social government inseparable from the Papacy, which closes up almost
every trade and profession, drives vast numbers into the priesthood for
want of any other occupation. The supply of priests is, in consequence,
far greater than the demand, and, as the laws of political economy hold
good even in the Papal States, priest labour is miserably underpaid. It
is a Protestant delusion that the priests in Rome live upon the fat of
the land. What fat there is is certainly theirs, but then there are too
many mouths to eat it. The Roman priests are relatively poorer than
those in any other part of Italy. It is one of the great mysteries in
Rome how all the priests who swarm about the streets manage to live. The
clue to the mystery is to be found inside the churches. In every church
here, and there are 366 of them, some score or two of masses are said
daily at the different altars. The pay for performing a mass varies from
a "Paul" to a "Scudo;" that is, in round numbers, from sixpence to a
crown. The "good" masses, those paid for by private persons for the
souls of their relatives, are naturally reserved for the priests
connected with the particular church; while the poor ones, which are paid
for out of the funds of the church, are given to any priest who happens
to apply for them. So somehow or other, what with a mass or two a day,
or by private tuition, or by charitable assistance, or in some cases by
small handicrafts conducted secretly, the large floating population of
unemployed priests rub on from day to day, in the hope of getting
ultimately some piece of ecclesiastical patronage. Yet the distress and
want amongst them are often pitiable, and, in fact, amongst the many
sufferers from the artificial preponderance given to the priesthood by
the Papal system, the poorer class of priests are not among the least or
lightest.
The nobility as a body are sure to be more or less supporters of the
established order of things. Their interests too are very much mixed up
with those of the Papacy. There is not a noble Roman family which has
not one or more of its members among the higher ranks of the priesthood,
and to a considerable degree their distinctions, such as they are, and
their temporal prospects are bound up with the Popedom. Moreover, in
this rank of the social scale the private and personal influence of the
priests, through the women of the family, is very powerful. The more
active, however, and ambitious amongst the aristocracy feel deeply the
exclusion from public life, the absence of any opening for ambition, and
the gradual impoverishment of their property, which are the necessary
evils of an absolute ecclesiastical government.
The "Bourgeoisie" stand on a very different footing. They have neither
the moral influence of the priesthood nor the material wealth of the
nobility to console them for the loss of liberty; they form indeed the
"Pariahs" of Roman society. "In other countries," a Roman once said to
me, "you have one man who lives in wealth and a thousand who live in
comfort. Here the one man lives in comfort, and the thousand live in
misery." I believe this picture is only too true. The middle classes,
who live by trade or mental labour, must have a hard time of it. The
professions of Rome are overstocked and underpaid. The large class of
government officials or "impiegati," to whom admirers of the Papacy point
with such pride as evidence of the secular character of the
administration, are paid on the most niggardly scale; while all the
lucrative and influential posts are reserved for the priestly
administrators. The avowed venality of the courts of justice is a proof
that lawyers are too poorly remunerated to find honesty their best
policy, while the extent to which barbers are still employed as surgeons
shows that the medical profession is not of sufficient repute to be
prosperous. There is no native patronage for art, no public for
literature. The very theatres, which flourish in other despotic states,
are here but losing speculations, owing to the interference of clerical
regulations. There are no commerce and no manufactures in the Eternal
city. In a back street near the Capitol, over a gloomy, stable-looking
door, you may see written up "Borsa di Roma," but I never could discover
any credible evidence of business being transacted on the Roman change.
There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas Company.
What trade there is is huckstering, not commerce. In fact, so Romans
have told me, you may safely conclude that every native you meet walking
in the streets here, in a broadcloth coat, lives from hand to mouth, and
you may pretty surely guess that his next month's salary is already
overdrawn. The crowds of respectably-dressed persons, clerks and
shopkeepers and artizans, whom you see in the lottery offices the night
before the drawing, prove the general existence not only of improvidence
but of distress.
The favourite argument in support of the Papal rule in Rome, is that the
poor gain immensely by it. I quite admit that the argument contains a
certain amount of truth. The priests, the churches, and the convents
give a great deal of employment to the working classes. There are
probably some 30,000 persons who live on the priests, or rather out of
the funds which support them. Then, too, the system of clerical charity
operates favourably for the very poor. Any Roman in distress can get
from his priest a "buono," or certificate, that he is in want of food,
and on presenting this at one of the convents belonging to the mendicant
orders, he will obtain a wholesome meal. No man in Rome therefore need
be reduced to absolute starvation as long as he stands well with his
priest; that is, as long as he goes to confession, never talks of
politics, and kneels down when the Pope passes. Now the evil moral
effects of such a system, its tendency to destroy independent
self-respect and to promote improvidence are obvious enough, and I doubt
whether even the positive gain to the poor is unmixed. The wages paid to
the servants of the Church, and the amount given away in charity, must
come out of somebody's pockets. In fact, the whole country and the poor
themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting
these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour. If prevention
is better than cure, work is any day better than charity. After all,
too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor
more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome. The swarms of beggars
which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger
here, though strangers have no notion of the distress of Rome. The
winter, when visitors are here, is the harvest-time of the Roman poor. It
is the summer, when the strangers are gone and the streets deserted,
which is their season of want and misery.
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