Transcribed by from the 1861 Macmillan and Co. edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Cambridge:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN,
London.
1861.
[The right of Translation is reserved.]
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Cambridge:
printed by c. j. clay, m.a.
at the university press
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TO
MR. AND MRS ROBERT BROWNING
My first recollections of Rome date from too long ago, and from tooearly an age, for me to be able to recall with ease the impression causedby its first aspect. It is hard indeed for any one at any timeto judge of Rome fairly. Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage,we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to theEternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’sreverence for the shrine of his worship. The ground we tread onis enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound witha strange witchery. A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousandmemories rise up and chase each other. Heroes and martyrs, sagesand saints and sinners, consuls and popes and emperors, people the weirdpageant which to our mind’s eye hovers ever mistily amidst thescenes around us. Here p. 2aboveall places in God’s earth it is hard to forget the past and thinkonly of the present. This, however, is what I now want to do. Laying aside all memory of what Rome has been, I would again describewhat Rome is now. And thus, in my solitary wanderings about thecity, I have often sought to picture to myself what would be the feelingsof a stranger who, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, shouldenter Rome with only that listless curiosity which all travellers feelperforce, when for the first time they approach a great capital. Let me fancy that such a traveller—a very Gallio among travellers—isstanding 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 beautywhich is not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on whichI write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at thisdead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky aboveis covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of theAlban p. 3and the Sabinehills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters littleby what gate or from what quarter we enter. On every side thescene is much the same. The Campagna surrounds the city. A wide, waste, broken, hillock-covered plain, half common, half pastureland, and altogether desolate; a few stunted trees, a deserted houseor two, here and there a crumbling mass of shapeless brickwork: suchis the foreground through which you travel for many a weary mile. As you approach the city there is no change in the desolation, no signof life. Every now and then a string of some half-dozen peasant-carts,laden with wine-barrels or wood faggots, comes jingling by. Thecarts so-called, rather by courtesy than right, consist of three roughplanks and two high ricketty wheels. The broken-kneed horses swayto and fro beneath their unwieldy load, and the drivers, clad in theirheavy sheepskin jackets, crouch sleepily beneath the clumsy, hide-boundframework, placed so as to shelter them from the chill Tramontana blasts. A solitary cart is rare, for the neighbourhood of Rome is not the safestof places, and those small piles of stone, with the wo