University of Virginia Library

46. LETTER XLVI.

I left Rome by the magnificent “Porta del Popolo,”
as the flush of a pearly and spotless Italian sunrise
deepened over Soracte. They are so splendid
without clouds—these skies of Italy! so deep to the
eye, so radiantly clear! Clouds make the glory of an
American sky. The “Indian summer” sunsets excepted,
our sun goes down in New England, with the
extravagance of a theatrical scene. The clouds are
massed and heavy, like piles of gold and fire, and day
after day, if you observe them, you are literally astonished
with the brilliant phenomena of the west. Here,
for seven months, we have had no rain. The sun has
risen faultlessly clear, with the same gray, and silver,
and rose teints, succeeding each other as regularly as
the colors in a turning prism, and it has set as constantly
in orange, gold, and purple, with scarce the
variation of a painter's pallet, from one day to another.
It is really most delightful to live under such heavens
as these; to be depressed never by a gloomy sky, nor
ill from a chance exposure to a chill wind, nor out of
humor because the rain or damp keeps you a prisoner
at home. You feel the delicious climate in a thousand
ways. It is a positive blessing, and were worth
more than a fortune, if it were bought and sold. I
would rather be poor in Italy, than rich in any other
country in the world.

We ascended the mountain that shuts in the campagna
on the north, and turned, while the horses
breathed, to take a last look at Rome. My two friends,
the lieutenants, and myself, occupied the interior of
the vetturino, in company with a young Roman woman,
who was making her first journey from home.
She was going to see her husband. I pointed out of
the window to the distant dome of St. Peter's, rising
above the thin smoke hung over the city, and she
looked at it with the tears streaming from her large
black eyes in torrents. She might have cried because
she was going to her husband, but I could not divest
myself of the fact that she was a Roman, and leaving
a home that could be very romantically wept for. She
was a fine specimen of this finest of the races of women—amply
proportioned without grossness, and with
that certain presence or dignity that rises above manners
and rank, common to them all.

We saw beautiful scenery at Narni. The town
stands on the edge of a precipice, and the valley, a
hundred feet or two below, is coursed by a wild stream,
that goes foaming along its bed in a long line of froth
for miles away. We dined here, and drove afterward
to Terni, where the voitnrier stopped for the night, to
give us an opportunity to see the Falls.

We drove to the mountain base, three miles, in an
old post barouche, and made the ascent on foot. A
line of precipices extends along from the summit, and
from the third or fourth of these leaps the Velino,
clear into the valley. We saw it in front as we went
on, and then followed the road round, till we reached
the bed of the river behind. The fountain of Egeria
is not more secludedly beautiful than its current above
the fall. Trees overhang and meet, and flowers spring
in wonderful variety on its banks, and the ripple
against the roots is heard amid the roar of the cataract,
like a sweet, clear voice in a chorus. It is a
place in which you half expect to startle a fawn, it
looks so unvisited and wild. We wound out through
the shrubbery, and gained a projecting point, from
which we could see the sheet of the cascade. It is
“horribly beautiful,” to be sure. Childe Harold's
description of it is as true as a drawing.

I should think the quantity of water at Niagara
would make five hundred such falls as those of Terni,
without exaggeration. It is a “hell of waters,”
however, notwithstanding, and leaps over with a current
all turned into foam by the roughness of its bed
above—a circumstance that gives the sheet more richness
of surface. Two or three lovely little streams
steal off on either side of the fall, as if they shrunk
from the leap, and drop down, from rock to rock, till
they are lost in the rising mist.

The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we
stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet
spray reminded us that the most romantic people may
take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an
hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post-house,
with a motley group of Germans, Swiss,
French, and Italians—a mixture of company universal
in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night.
The coming and going vetturini stop at the same
houses throughout, and the concourse is always amusing.
We sat till the fire burned low, and then wishing
our chance friends a happy night, had the “priests”[4]
taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything
but sleep.

Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful scenery
was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is
recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between
abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness.

We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to breakfast.
It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its
gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed
after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in
timeworn letters.

At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came
to the Clitumnus, a small stream, still, deep, and glassy—the
clearest water I ever saw. It looks almost
like air. On its bank, facing away from the road,
stands the temple, “of small and delicate proportion,”
mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold.

The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a
drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this
little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were
raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes
one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is
a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of
such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream
running still at the base of its façade, just as it did
when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their
visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of
Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest
demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson,

was scarce necessary.[5]

We slept at Foligno. For many miles we had observed
that the houses were propped in every direction,
many of them in ruins apparently recent, and
small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares,
or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The
next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its
gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels,
to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half
standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed,
and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and
rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects
of an earthquake. For eight or ten miles further, we
found every house cracked and deserted, and the people
living like the settlers in a new country, half in the
open air. The beggars were innumerable.

We stopped the next night on the shores of lake
Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time
spent at school on the “dull drilled lesson,” had not
been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal
—the “locus aptus insidiis,” where the consul Flaminius
was snared and beaten by the wily Carthaginian
on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy
of Livy, “much thumbed,” that I might sit on the
hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his
pithy and sententious description, with the reality.

The battle ground, the scene of the principal
slaughter, was beyond the albergo, and the increasing
darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next
morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We
were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a
departed sunset over the other shore, was reflected
glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but
the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten
to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The
heavens seem “died” and steeped in the glory of the
sunset.

We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape
plucked from the battle-ground; and if it was not
better for the Roman blood that had manured its ancestor,
it was better for some other reason.

Early the next morning we were on our way, and
wound down into the narrow pass between the lake
and the hill, as the sun rose. We crossed the Sanguinetto,
a little stream which took its name from the
battle. The principal slaughter was just on its banks,
and the hills are so steep above it, that everybody
which fell near must have rolled into its bed. It crawls
on very quietly across the road, its clear stream scarce interrupted
by the wheels of the vetturino, which in crossing
it, passes from the Roman states into Tuscany.
I ran a little up the stream, knelt and drank at a small
gurgling fall. The blood of the old Flaminian Cohort
spoiled very delicious water, when it mingled
with that brook.

We were six days and a half accomplishing the hundred
and eighty miles from Rome to Florence—slow
travelling—but not too slow in Italy, where every stone
has its story, and every ascent of a hill its twenty
matchless pictures, sprinkled with ruins, as a painter's
eye could not imagine them. We looked down on the
Eden-like valley of the Arno at sunrise, and again my
heart leaped to see the tall dome of Florence, and the
hills all about the queenly city, sparkling with palaces
and bright in a sun that shines nowhere so kindly. If
there is a spot in the world that could wean one from
his native home, it is Florence! “Florence the fair,”
they call her! I have passed four of the seven months
I have been in Italy, here—and I think I shall pass
here as great a proportion of the rest of my life.
There is nothing that can contribute to comfort and
pleasure, that is not within the reach of the smallest
means in Florence. I never saw a place where wealth
made less distinction. The choicest galleries of art in
the world, are open to all comers. The palace of the
monarch may be entered and visited, and enjoyed by
all. The ducal gardens of the Boboli rich in everything
that can refine nature, and commanding views
that no land can equal, cooled by fountains, haunted in
every grove by statuary, are the property of the stranger
and the citizen alike. Museums, laboratories, libraries,
grounds, palaces, are all free as Utopia. You
may take any pleasure that others can command, and
have any means of instruction, as free as the common
air. Where else would one live so pleasantly—so
profitably—so wisely?

The society of Florence is of a very fascinating description.
The Florentine nobles have a casino, or
club-house, to which most of the respectable strangers
are invited, and balls are given there once a week,
frequently by the duke and his court, and the best society
of the place. I attended one on my first arrival
from Rome, at which I saw a proportion of beauty
which astonished me. The female descendants of
the great names in Italian history, seem to me to have
almost without exception the mark of noble beauty by
nature. The loveliest woman in Florence is a Medici.
The two daughters of Capponi, the patriot and
the descendant of patriots, are of the finest order of
beauty. I could instance many others, the mention
of whose names, when I have first seen them, has
made my blood start. I think if Italy is ever to be redeemed,
she must owe it to her daughters. The men,
the brothers of these women, with very rare exceptions,
look like the slaves they are, from one end of
Italy to the other.

One of the most hospitable houses here, is that of
Prince Poniatowski, the brother of the hero of Poland.
He has a large family, and his soirées are
thronged with all that is fair and distinguished. He is a
venerable, grayheaded old man, of perhaps seventy, very
fond of speaking English, of which rare acquisition
abroad he seems a little vain. He gave me the heartiest
welcome as an American, and said he loved the nation.

I had the honor of dining, a day or two since, with
the ex-king of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. He
lives here with the title of Prince Montfort, conferred
on him by his father-in-law, the king of Wurtemburg.
Americans are well received at this house also;
and his queen, as the prince still calls her, can never
say enough in praise of the family of Mr. H., our former
secretary of legation at Paris. It is a constantly
recurring theme, and ends always with “J'aime beaucoup
les Americans.” The prince resembles his
brother, but has a milder face, and his mouth is less
firm and less beautiful than Napolcon's. His second
son is most remarkably like the emperor. He is
about ten years of age; but except his youth, you can
detect no difference between his head and the busts of
his uncle. He has a daughter of about twelve, and
an elder son at the university of Sienna. His family
is large, as his queen still keeps up her state, with the
ladies of honor and suite. He never goes out, but his
house is open every night, and the best society of
Florence may be met there almost at the prima sera,
or early part of the evening.

The grand duke is about to be married, and the
court is to be unusually gay in the carnival. Our
countryman, Mr. Thorn, was presented some time
since, and I am to have that honor in two or three
days. By the way, we feel exceedingly in Italy the
want of a minister. There is no accredited agent of
our government in Tuscany, and there are rarely less
than three hundred Americans within its dominions.
Fortunately the marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain
of the duke, offers to act in the capacity of an ambassador,
and neglects nothing for our advantage in

such matters, but he never fails to express his regret
that we should not have some chargé d'affaires at his
court. We have officers in many parts of the world
where they are much less needed.