He Said The Ladies, Whose
Names He Gave, Were From Boston; He Balked At Adding Massachusetts, But
I Am Sure
The horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to
carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would
Have gladly paid them five
dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was
charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even
upon his brother and his brother's horse: one of those perfect Italian
temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so
that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.
We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as
at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again,
we had the applause of the children in streets now growing familiar, and
a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and blithe matrons of all ages
rhythmically washing in the public laundry, who recognized us in our new
equipage. The public laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian
town, and probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous
comment throughout the day which was now passing only too rapidly for
us. We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our
brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is perhaps
as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri and the Villa
Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in Frascati. We did, indeed,
penetrate the chill interior of the local cathedral, but as we did not
know at the time that we were sharing it with the memory of the young
Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose
brother, Cardinal York, placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we
were conscious of no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of
course, to have visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella
and the Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to
the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in person,
and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing the Atlantic for.
Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum unvisited,
just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to Hadrian's Villa - the
two things supremely worthy to be seen in their respective regions. But,
if I had seen only half as much as I saw at Frascati - the Villa
Falconieri, namely - I should feel forever over-enriched by the
experience.
Slowly an ancient servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the
Falconieri for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united
years and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild
boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild violets,
and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of the repairs and
changes going on near the casino, led us first to the fish-pond, in the
untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and silently showed us the
magnificent view which the top commanded, if commanded is not too proud
a word for a place so pathetic in its endearing neglect. It had once
been the haunt of many a gay picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and
all the faded fashion of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a
wilder escapade than the grove before the casino invited, with its
tables of moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet,
or more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished forth
the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about me, who can
only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and cloud-shadowed, swam
round the upland in the colors of a tropic sea.
Our mild boy waited a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then
led down to the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were
some men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in
terms. "What are they shooting?" "They are shooting larks, signore."
"What a pity!" "But the larks are leaving Italy, now, and going north."
It was a reason, like many another that humanity is put to it in giving,
and I do not know that I missed any larks, later, from an English meadow
where I saw them spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their
friends had been shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see
those fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not
very good shots.
The workmen who were putting the place in repair were lunching near the
casino, in a litter of lumber and other structural material, but the
casino itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we
had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool, bare,
still spaces. If there was a great deal to see, there was not much to
remember, or to remember so much as the satirical frescos of Pier Leone
Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well as others in them. They are
not bitter satires, but, on the contrary, very charming; and still more
charming are the family portraits frescoed round the principal room.
Under one curve of the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time
is shown, half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the
unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited, or at
least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even than this
most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother, and daughter are
the figures of friends or acquaintances or kinsfolk: figures not only
life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of
stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess
from the other walls.
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