They Particularly Abounded In The
Cloistered And Gardened Close Of The Cistercian Convent, Which Three
Hundred Years Ago Ensconsed Itself Within The Ruinous Baths Of
Diocletian.
I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special
preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy,
something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite
resort.
All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would
ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and
tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary
monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped privet and
end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their
like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be
other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not
quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the
Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied
with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely
tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the
custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down
into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may
return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.
They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters
in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them.
Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of
the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and
so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and
to Cook's office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they
are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not
only colossally vast, but they are singularly noble, as well as so
admirably convenient. Because they are so convenient, the modern Romans
have turned their cavernous immensity to account in the trades and
industries, and have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and
plumbers' shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much
better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In
color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the
eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine, which at any distance great
enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive
nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of
that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised
Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of
fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All
round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than
tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills
about it - a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the
varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and
Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in
their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of
local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.
If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the
chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the
Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats
along the shore, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must
not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will
naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as
the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their
dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the
orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven
hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church,
covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the
world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a
bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book,
with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back
on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light,
whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his
devotions.
It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could,
follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the
Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and
finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French
Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so
vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the
easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last
seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the
order's privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions
which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers.
Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor
Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the
unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the
key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could
not manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique character
of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the key-hole also
commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like
to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that the Church of the Priory
stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual
authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed,
being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in
favor of his chosen site.
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