The city has undergone orgies of bloodshed and terror. Think only,
without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German
soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other
mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the
worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating
effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago,
moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria;
that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to
come. And the scorching Campagna beyond the walls, that forbidden land
in whose embrace the city lies gasping, flame-encircled, like the
scorpion in the tale....
A well-known scholar, surveying Rome with the mind's eye, is so
impressed with its "eternal" character that he cannot imagine this site
having ever been occupied otherwise than by a city. To him it seems
inevitable that these walls must always have stood where now they
stand - must have risen, he suggests, out of the earth, unaided by human
hands. Yet somebody laid the foundation-stones, once upon a time;
somebody who lived under conditions quite different from those that
supervened. For who - not five thousand, but, say, five hundred years
ago - who would have thought of building a town on a spot like this? None
but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has
known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No
facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no
harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral
wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river - a dangerous
river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place - every drawback, or
nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled
into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and
poison. Human ingenuity has obviated them so effectually, so
triumphantly that, were green pastures not needful to me as light and
air, I, for one, would nevermore stray beyond those ancient portals....
The country visits you here. It comes in the wake of that evening breeze
which creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most
secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail
bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then
the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great
void - a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet
fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath
invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is
one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; quite a local
speciality, for the phenomenon could never occur if the surrounding
regions were covered with suburbs or tilth or woodland - were aught save
what they are: a desert whose vegetation of coarse herbage is in the act
of withering. The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast
is at an end.
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