Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

MARBLE RELIEF OF THE AMBARVALIA SACRIFICE, IN THE FORUM
The sacrifice of the suovetaurilia took place at the confines of Rome and Alba Longa after the perlustration of the Roman ager. See pages [15], [70].

ROME · PAINTED BY ALBERTO PISA · TEXT BY M. A. R. TUKER AND HOPE MALLESON PUBLISHED BY ADAM & CHARLES BLACK · SOHO SQUARE · LONDON · W.

Published April 1905

The twelve chapters in this book were all written for the present volume, but Chapters III., V., VIII., part of XI., and IX. have already been published in the Monthly Review, Broad Views, Macmillan's Magazine, and the Hibbert Journal.

So much has been written about Rome and Roman subjects within the last decade, good bad and indifferent, that the task of avoiding as far as possible hackneyed ground is not an easy one. We have attempted to present some aspects of Rome as we have ourselves seen it, and we have drawn on our long acquaintance with the city and above all with its inhabitants of the old school and the new.

Each chapter is the work of one writer.

Rome, 1905.

Contents

List of Illustrations

The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved by the
Hentschel Colourtype Process.

ROME

CHAPTER I

ROME

About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became the Roman people. Where did they come from? Had they come across what was later to be known as the ager romanus from the Latin stronghold of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In the confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see Latins in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter to a special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three tribes into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an Etruscan chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of her six kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the political institutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil.

However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of Rome—the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of Troy bringing with him the Palladium, the sacred image of Pallas. His descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are cast adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the shepherd community already established there.

In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine—the original Roma Quadrata—and we see that the nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the Italian shepherds' god, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This cave was just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia; here grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their foster-father.

The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the arts of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the arts of the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the unity of purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the destinies of the known world.

The story is aptly figured in the person of the god Mars, who was the reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman god was at first an agricultural divinity—the "spears of Mars" were the rods with which the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence of Greece, Mars became the god of battles, the boundary marker of the fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword to the plough. The one was never far from the other—they put him in possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never died out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of victory, when the relics of the hastae martis were shown to the triumphant followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the Roman the image of the father of Romulus covering the land with gigantic strides to strike these same hastae into the soil as a sign of possession, the emblem of primitive law.

THE FORUM FROM THE ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS
In the left corner is the lapis niger, the traditional tomb of Romulus. Facing us is the Arch of Titus, and to the right is the Palatine.

Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the one hill were the Latins—or let us call them the Roman people—the site of Roma Quadrata the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces of the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the Sabine arx, that Capitolium so-called, says Montfaucon, "because it was the head of the world, from which the consuls and senators governed the universe." Whenever the marshy ground between them was passable, the Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of their hills and transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these early days they felt the need of a comitium where the rival chiefs could meet to decide upon terms; and in no long space this battle-ground became the nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome.

For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of the common meeting ground—the common sentiments and needs—of human beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life—its common but its noblest business, civic, "civilised," pursuits. It is the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the common necessities to force upon him an ignoble peace. The battle-ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition that the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed to the interests for which men should co-operate. Through the symbolic trait d'union of the Forum, two fortresses of barbarians became the nucleus of the city which ruled the world, and their people the imperial people of history.

The city on the Palatine had been extended so as to include the town of the Sabines or Quirites on the neighbouring Quirinal hill, before the first king, who was born in the Sabine country, was called to rule the Romans. The Capitol at this time was a spur of the Quirinal, and so remained until Trajan dug away a part of the latter to lay the foundations of his forum. The Etruscans lived on the Caelian and the two horns of the Esquiline hills; the former was incorporated in the primitive city, but the Esquiline and Viminal were not enclosed until the time of Servius Tullius when Rome first became "the city on Seven Hills." The Aventine where Remus had wished to build the city was colonised by the conquered Latin towns in the reign of Ancus Martius, and this isolated hill, overlooking the Tiber on one side and the campagna on the other, still haunts the imagination with its melancholy beauty, its pariah history, as though it embodied the undying protest of Remus, an unceasing claim upon Roman justice. The varied and interesting Christian memories here, which begin with the titulus of Priscilla and Aquila, are continued in the Priory of the once international Order of the Knights of Malta, recording the noblest effort of the lay world during the middle ages—the institution of chivalry; and in the modern Benedictine house of Saint Anselm—our English Anselm.

The Janiculum, the site of a fortress built by Ancus Martius against the Etruscans, was not enclosed within the city walls till the time of Aurelian; the Vatican hill was only enclosed in the ninth century by Leo IV. All these hills were once steep defences against enemies in the surrounding country; now that there are no longer any enemies the Romans appear bent on abolishing the hills, and the mania for planing and razing is carried to an extent which must seem nothing less than childish to the visitor. The Viminal has become almost indistinguishable since the Villa Massimo was pulled down, and only the name Via Viminale, which replaces the older Via Strozzi, indicates the hill which lay between the Quirinal and the Esquiline. Some idea may be gained of the original steepness of the hills when we realise that in the memory of the Romans the road past Palazzo Aldobrandini—on a slope of the Quirinal—used to be at the level of the top of the high wall which now surrounds it. The Capitol was only approachable from the Forum, and was never connected with the city on the hither side until the construction of the historic steps of Ara Coeli, one of the rare works undertaken by the Romans during the absence of the popes in Avignon.

The Tiber is now but a narrow stream in the midst of its ancient bed. The Romans had never embanked the swift-flowing river, and the enormous deposits of the yellow sand which give it its traditional colour, and which threaten to completely dam the river by the island of the Tiber, may afford the explanation. The inundations of 1900 in fact reached the same level as those of 1872, as we may see recorded in the neighbouring church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Few spots in Rome exceed in varied interest the isola sacra which with its two historic bridges the pons Fabricius and the pons Cestius spans the Tiber at the heart of the city. Here was the temple to Aesculapius, whose worship had been introduced into Rome during a time of pestilence in obedience to the Sibylline oracles. The island itself thereafter assumed the form of a huge stone ship, faced with travertine, the prow with the sculptured staff and serpent of the god being still clearly visible; and here Greece and Rome met a civilisation and an art still older than their own, for the mast of this great ship is formed by an Egyptian obelisk. Hard by is the district where the Romans, who had borrowed from them their gods and their cult, compelled the "turba impia" ("the impious crowd") of Etruscans to dwell; while the walled enclosure in which, from the eleventh century onwards, Christian Rome obliged the Jews to live, is approached by the Fabrician bridge, as we may gather from the inscription in Hebrew and Latin on the little church of San Giovanni Calibita, beneath a painting of the Crucifixion, which says: "I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not good."

In the early twelfth century Otho III. brought, as he believed, the body of the Hebrew apostle Saint Bartholomew to this island, as 1400 years earlier the cult of Aesculapius had been brought there from Greece. The city of Beneventum had, however, it is supposed, palmed off on the emperor the body of Saint Paulinus of Nola which rests in the church dedicated to the apostle by the side of that of Saint Adelbert the apostle of the Slavs. The Franciscans came to the isola sacra in the sixteenth century, and one of the friars of Saint Bartholomew's is the popular dentist of the poor from all quarters.

THE FORUM, LOOKING TOWARDS THE CAPITOL
The Palatine is to the left. See pages [4], [5], [61].

Here, then, in the midst of the river which determined the site of the cosmopolitan city, is a spot to whose history Egypt, Greece, Etruria, Palestine have contributed—Aesculapius, "one of the Twelve," the Christian Slavs, the Saxon Otho, Francis of Assisi. In Paulinus of Nola we are reminded of the earliest Western monasteries, and the Franciscan friars represent for us the thirteenth-century revival of the religious spirit in Italy. What more? In the red-gowned confraternity of the island we are put in touch with an institution which seems to be as old as human history, with those burial guilds, sanctioned by Roman law, under shelter of which the first Christians obtained a legal footing for themselves and their cemeteries long before their religion was tolerated.

The vicissitudes of the city have made certain features of its life as eternal as itself. Through the middle ages it was the sanctuary and since the renascence of classical learning it has been the museum of Europe. Long before there were any kind of facilities for travelling every one came to Rome. A procession of people from every race under heaven, in every variety—every excess and defect—of costume, has passed along the streets under the observant but unastonished eyes of the blasé Roman; and when a lay pilgrim in a brown tunic, hung with rosaries, and carrying a crucifix taller than himself, walked last year out of Saint Peter's among the Easter crowd, no one noticed him. The modern city in becoming the hostess of the other provinces of Italy is approximating in size to the Rome of the early empire; but the Rome of the popes made no sort of provision for the influx of Europe. The Inn of the Bear, in the street of that name leading to Ponte Sant' Angelo, provided the best accommodation; and here, it is said, Dante himself had lodged. It is but a hundred years ago that a pavement was placed for pedestrians, and then only one side of the Corso boasted a narrow footpath. The streets were encumbered with hucksters' stalls, with refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark as pitch, and hygiene was only hinted at in the marble affiches which may still be seen at certain old street corners announcing that monsignore the way warden would visit with a fine of 25 scudi and divers bodily pains the practice of emptying every kind of refuse into the side streets.

Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages the cry of "Vandals!" goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right to be called "the eternal city" than her survival of the material ruin to which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth and Vandal have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and popes is recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who stripped the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of Saint Peter's:—Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini. It is a curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of as "barbarians," should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace in Rome. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of Rome—barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders, internecine brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each brought the opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of destruction must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from the time of the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings are doomed on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor Emmanuel II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway system—while the House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is dishonoured—the Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those who killed the prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres. But when "new Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given us what the learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never compassed—an excavated Forum.

There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the Ghetto and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence. This brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life—the beggars. Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always had troops of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the Antonines as in that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the latest of the sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced beggar who was licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint Peter lived to the closing years of the century and gave a dowry of 200,000 francs to his daughter on her marriage. The difficulties which met the Roman of the era of Gregory the Great when pest and the transition to the agricultural system of coloni threw the serfs upon the streets, met the government of Italy when after September 1870 the whole motley crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian system of alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the streets of the city. Those who remember the "seventies" or the "eighties" in Rome remember the menacing manner in which "alms" were "asked," how near together were blessing and cursing, and how unfrequented roads and hills were beset by sturdy beggars, lineal descendants of the brigand who placing his hat in the roadway levelled his gun at you as he proffered the request: "For the love of God put something in that hat."

Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on wet days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum; doles of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising members of their congregations. The men women and children who had passed their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viaticum and funeral processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions, were suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern spirit—hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the restaurants, these latest recruits to the commercial spirit exchanged the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade without ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and simple. Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging. The great and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to the excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding—in the San Lorenzo quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with five, six, and even seven families living in one room. The mania for building in the "eighties" led to the "building crisis"; streets of unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the "improvements" of the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help; they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies and dowries come their way.

TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE BASILICA JULIA IN THE FORUM
The Capitol is to the left. The temple is built at the foot of the Capitol hill. See pages [3], [13], [30], [91].

The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The maximum was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors—2 millions, but even in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered 1,300,000. A period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us to the date of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this number by more than a million (a.d. 335). After a thousand years of Christian domination the population of the city had sunk to its minimum, 17,000 (a.d. 1377). Even in the reign of the magnificent Leo X. it was not more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of the seventeenth century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily increased, till in 1800 the population numbered 153,000. But during the "empire," 1812, it fell to 118,000. Ten years after "the Italians" entered Rome it had increased by 79,000, to 305,000. The last census, 1900, shows a resident population of 450,000—not a third of its classical total—and Naples is still the most densely populated city of Italy.

The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of "Pallas"; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune—those liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the gentes and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth century; but the life of the Capitol has never been intermitted; it has never ceased to represent all the moments in the life of the Roman people. This distinction is sharply drawn to-day: the Palatine is a hill of majestic ruins visited only by the tourist, the Capitol is still the seat of the municipality of Rome, ascended by every couple for the celebration of their marriage, and its registers signalise every young life born to the city.

The municipal franchises of Italy have played a large part in her history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of Rome, the heads of each gens from among the original settlers, and the Populus, who be it remembered were the gentes and were never synonymous with the plebs, represented two constant facts and factors—a free Senate and free municipal government by the Populus Romanus. These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished in the classical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to restore them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal letters to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the Senate and people of Rome—a custom which influenced the early government of the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other Christian Churches were written in the name of "the Roman Church," even when, as in the case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual handiwork of the then head of the Christian community. Again, when Pepin obliged the Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to the emperor but to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church and the Roman Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III. the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the Romans again tired of their Senate—as tradition says they had done when they made Numa king—they created in its place a supreme magistrate who was designated "the Senator," one of whose duties was to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps all that now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman people. The municipality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is conterminous with the whole Roman agro, so that its history is inseparably linked with that of the Roman boundaries as well as with the life of the Roman people.

The outward and visible sign of these primæval Roman liberties is the tetragram S.P.Q.R.—Senatus Populus Que Romanus (the Roman Senate and People), which took the place of the earlier formula Populus Romanus et Quirites, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. All down the centuries we may recognise those four letters—surmounted in imperial times by an eagle—crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the earth, but in that religious perlustration of the ager when the ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which separated Rome from Alba Longa, the site of the combat between the Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of the finest remains in the Forum is the marble relief which represents the suovetaurilia, the sow, sheep, and bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman greatness which came to be synonymous with confines as large as the known world, had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which still define the Roman municipality—the symbol of Roman liberties.

The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into Si Peu Que Rien must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism"—it points to an ecclesiastical not a political diminutio capitis. The tract of the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations—the Etruscan, the Roman, the Christian—resulted in the foundation of two world empires. Rome is now entering on a third existence, its existence as the capital of Italy, but has it suffered thereby no diminutio capitis? Is it not a fact that the classical and the ecclesiastical represented her only world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome which penetrated as truly beyond the city as within its classic confines? Has not the papacy, with all its faults, been the actual link connecting ancient and modern Rome, preserving unbroken the tradition which gave her, beyond her ritual boundaries, the government of the world without?

S. PETER'S AND CASTEL SANT' ANGELO FROM THE TIBER
See pages [16], [32], [239], [242].

CHAPTER II

ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION

Shepherds' huts clustered upon a hill top whose base is washed by a swift yellow river rushing to the sea not far distant. This is the first faint foreshadowing of the existence of Rome which reaches us dimly across the centuries. These shepherd settlers had chosen a site propitious for the foundation of the great city which was to be raised upon those grouped hills by the skilful hands of their descendants, for the necessary building materials lay close at hand in lavish profusion. One of the neighbouring hills, known later as the Janiculum, and parts of another, the Pincian, yielded a fine yellow sand. Beneath the surface soil was volcanic rock, which, in a prehistoric age when the campagna was a sea-bed and waves lapped against Monte Cavo, had been poured out in great liquid streams from volcanoes amongst the Alban hills and at Bracciano. Close at hand in the plain lay immense beds of a chocolate-brown earth with which later builders were to manufacture cement.

The makers of Rome therefore had only to quarry their building stone on the very site of their city, and we can still recognise in the few fragments that have come down to us the rectangular blocks of brown tufa used in the first period of her history. These earliest monuments, the walls of Servius Tullius and the vaults of the Mamertine prisons, were the direct outcome of a period of Etruscan dominion, and one of the first great works undertaken in the growing city, the draining of the swamps of the Forum, Campus Martius and Velabrum, was due to Tarquinius Priscus, the immense cloacae built for the purpose being still in use, and their masonry as strong as when they were constructed about 603 b.c. The two Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, built the first triple shrine on the Capitol dedicated to the three Etruscan gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and the primitive Roman temples, consisting of a simple cella with a peristyle, were doubtless Etruscan in character and were decorated with terra-cotta and bronze in the Etruscan manner.

The Romans were born builders and engineers, and in these branches they quickly outstripped their predecessors and instructors. If they were deficient in artistic originality, they evinced a readiness to imitate and a power of appreciating skill and proficiency in the arts wherever they met with them, and their practical and utilitarian spirit taught them how to adopt and improve upon experience and guided them in the choice of right materials.

TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES
One of the earliest monuments of Rome; originally built in the reign of the last of the Tarquins or the first years of the Republic, but twice reconstructed during the Empire. It served as the Treasury of Rome. The granite columns with marble capitals are of the Ionic order. See pages [30], [181].

A period when the influence of Greece predominated succeeded the first epoch in the building of Rome, and to this time must be ascribed the adoption of the Greek models for public buildings, for circuses, baths, and basilicas. Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric columns were imported into Rome, the latter undergoing some modification to suit the Romans' more florid taste. The temples became Hellenic in style. The small cella was built within an open court surrounded by arcades from which the people assisted at the sacrifices. The altar stood in the open court. Later, windows were introduced into the building, and the openings were filled in with a bronze grating similar to that still in perfect preservation over the door of the Pantheon, or with a perforated marble screen, fragments of coloured glass being inserted in the interstices of the pattern. By the third century there were 400 temples in Rome, but the simple form of the early buildings was hidden with excessive ornamentation, and frieze and cornice were loaded with carving and figures.

The basilica, or kingly hall of justice, was a rectangular building divided into a central portion or nave and side aisles by rows of columns under a horizontal architrave. The columns were in two tiers, the upper one enclosing a gallery which was reached by a flight of stairs springing either within or without the building. The entrances were at the sides, and one extremity, and in some cases both were extended to form a semicircular apse or tribune where stood the judge's seat. A marble screen, the cancellum, separated this portion from the rest of the building, and this constituted the bar to which the accused were brought; just beyond stood the altar, where incense burned; and here, during the persecutions, Christians were arraigned and bidden to throw incense on the fire as a sign of recantation.

These great buildings served as courts of justice and for the transaction of business, and those which stood upon the fora were in some instances so large that several cases could be conducted in them at once. Before the Empire the nave was probably unroofed or covered only with an awning, and the upper galleries were entirely open so that their occupants could at will attend to the proceedings within the basilica or watch the games and events without. Similarly a single rail or low partition only separated the open colonnades below from the Forum. Curtains could be drawn across these to shut out importunate onlookers and to muffle the sounds of street traffic, but it is evident that the basilica precincts were regarded as a place of familiar rendezvous by the idlers in the Forum, as the gaming tables scratched in the flooring of the Julian basilica testify.

A CORNER OF THE FORUM FROM THE BASE OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN
The column of Phocas, erected in honour of the Byzantine emperor who was the contemporary of Gregory the Great, faces us, and to the right are the columns of the temple to Antoninus Pius and Faustina, now the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. The columns are of cippolino marble. See page [32].

The era of thermae or public baths began with Agrippa in 27 b.c., and by the end of the third century eleven such existed in Rome exclusive of the smaller baths or balnae, of which there were 850. Nero, Titus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Diocletian, were all builders of thermae. These huge edifices were a great deal more than public baths. They were a Roman form of the gymnasia of the Greeks, and the colossal ruins that remain can give but the barest idea of what they must have been at their best. They included immense halls and courts for athletic displays, vestibules, concert rooms, picture galleries and libraries, pleasure grounds decorated with statues fountains and shrubs and surrounded by open porticoes. Feasts, concerts, and entertainments were provided, and pleasant hours could be whiled away within their walls by the gilded youth of Rome. The baths of Diocletian, of which the church of S. Maria degli Angeli is a magnificent fragment, could accommodate 3600 bathers at a time, those of Caracalla 2000. An army of slaves and attendants waited upon the bathers and sped upon their errands along underground passages from one end of the building to the other. Ruins of the thermae of Caracalla and of Titus are still standing. Out of the colossal vaults and walls of Diocletian's baths have been constructed two churches, a monastery, a large museum, and a variety of storehouses, warehouses, stables, and cellars.

Equally remarkable was the Roman system for supplying their city, their thermae, and their 1350 street fountains with pure water.

Appius Claudius was the first to collect the water from springs amongst the mountains in the neighbourhood of Rome and to bring it across the campagna. This was in 313 b.c., up to which date the inhabitants of the city had depended for their water supply upon the Tiber and upon sunken wells. Following in the steps of Claudius, fourteen aqueducts whose united length measured 360 miles were built at various times. They varied in length from 11 to 59 miles and their course lay sometimes under ground and sometimes 100 feet above it, while the amount of water they poured daily into Rome has been estimated at 54,000,000 cubic feet.

Four of these ancient aqueducts are still in use. The Virgo, built by Agrippa in 27 b.c., and now known as the Trevi; the Alexandrina, constructed by Alexander Severus (222-235), probably to supply his own baths, and now known as the acqua Felice; the ancient Trajana, now Paola, and the Marcian, restored by Pius IX. The Marcian was always considered the best drinking water, and the Trevi being a softer water was preferred for bathing purposes.

The amphitheatre alone was, perhaps characteristically, a building of purely Roman origin. Intended for shows and fights of gladiators and wild beasts, these were at first temporary wooden structures. The only stone predecessor to the great Flavian amphitheatre was a smaller building in the Campus Martius, the work of Statilius Taurus in 30 b.c. The Colosseum was begun by Vespasian in a.d. 72, was dedicated eight years later by Titus, and was completed by Domitian. It stands upon the site of Nero's artificial lake, is one-third of a mile in circumference, covers some 6 acres of ground, and is 160 feet in height. It could seat 87,000 spectators, and its staircases, galleries, and entrances are so admirably planned that this crowd of sight-seers must have found their seats and filed out when the show was finished with little delay and difficulty. The numbers of the entrances, cut in stone, can still be seen over each of the arches. The Colosseum is built entirely of travertine, the blocks are fitted together without mortar and are studded with holes from which the greedy despoilers of the middle ages wrenched the metal clamps. In spite of its having been used as a fortress and served as a stone quarry for centuries, it is still one of the most magnificent of the monuments of Rome.

The solidity of the public buildings seems to have been in marked contrast to the flimsy nature of the common dwellings or insulae. In the time of Augustus these numbered 46,600, the domui, or houses of the rich, 1790. The former were roofed with timber or thatch. As land was dear, they were often of several stories and perilously high; many of them were built of unbaked bricks with projecting upper floors, and they were constructed with wooden framing filled in with rush and plaster, so that when a fire broke out in the city whole regions were laid waste in a few hours. As a measure of safety Augustus limited the height of the insulae to 70 feet, and Trajan reduced this again to 60 feet, while a distance of 5 feet between each house was prescribed by the law of the Twelve Tables.

The volcanic tufa used by the earliest Roman builders was discarded gradually in favour of better materials. Peperino, a grey-green volcanic stone from the Alban hills, began to take its place, and was used for the construction of the Tabularium in 78 b.c. and for Hadrian's mausoleum. It was cut in the same way in large rectangular blocks, clamped together during the Republican and early Imperial periods with iron. Mortar was not used till later, and at first served only to level the surfaces of the stones; it came into use for binding bricks together only at a later and degenerate period of architecture. Travertine was adopted towards the first century b.c. It is a cream-coloured stone hard and durable though easily calcined by fire, formed by deposit in running water. It was quarried at Tivoli and on the banks of the river Anio, where it is still plentiful. To the present day the quarries are worked at Tivoli, and the stone is brought to Rome on waggons drawn by immense white oxen which pace majestically along the dusty roads beneath the goad of their wild-looking drivers.

The chocolate-brown earth imported from Pozzuoli or dug from beds in the campagna, is known as pozzolana, and early in the history of Rome her builders discovered that when mixed with lime it made a remarkably strong cement. As such they used it for foundations, for the lining of walls and ceilings. With pieces of brick and stone a concrete was formed which was poured in a liquid state between wooden casings, and when set proved to be one of the hardest and most durable of the materials used. It was the strength of this concrete which enabled the Roman builders to give the vaults of their baths and basilicas such an enormous span; and it could be used for the flooring of upper stories without beams or supports. When especial lightness was required, the concrete was made with broken pumice stone.

TEMPLE OF MARS ULTOR
The temple erected by Augustus in his Forum to the God of War under the title of Mars the Avenger. Only the upper part of the ancient arch of the Forum, now known as Arco de' Pantani, is visible. This represents the first imperial building in Rome. See pages [3], [30].

After the first century b.c. concrete became a favourite building material. The walls so made were lined with stucco and faced without in various fashions, the variety of the facing determining with considerable accuracy the date of the fabric. The earliest facing, of the first and second century b.c., was of irregular blocks of tufa set in cement, and is known as the opus incertum. This was replaced in the middle of the first century b.c. by tufa blocks cut in squares and set diagonally giving the appearance of a network and hence known as opus reticulatum. In or after the first century a.d. this fashion was superseded by a facing of triangular bricks set point inwards, and by the end of the third century bricks were mixed with the opus reticulatum, a style known as opus mixtum. To the casual observer the narrow brown bricks of the ruined buildings of ancient Rome seem to play an important part, but, with few exceptions, they are merely a brick facing upon concrete.

Up to the first century b.c. there was little or no splendour or decoration introduced into the buildings of Rome, and the city of Augustus' inheritance was a city of sober-hued, volcanic rock. When marble was first sparingly used, Livy reprobates it as too showy and extravagant. Notwithstanding, the fashion rapidly spread, first in the embellishment of public buildings, then for private houses as well until in the first century of the Empire it became a common building stone.

For nearly three centuries it was imported into the city in a continuous flow from the quarries of Greece and Egypt. The native Luna marble, the modern Carrara, was not at first worked, but thousands of slaves and convicts toiled in the quarries of the Roman provinces. The great blocks were numbered and stamped with the name of the reigning emperor and shipped off in the great triremes across the Mediterranean to Ostia. Thence the trading vessels were towed by oxen up the river to Rome, their slow progress ceasing with nightfall, when they were drawn up and moored to the banks till next morning, bands of vigiles watching over the safety of their cargoes and restraining their lawless crews from acts of brigandage. At their journey's end, the cargoes were unloaded upon the marble wharf beneath the Aventine; here unused blocks still lie upon the site of the once busy Marmoratum, now a deserted quay beside a deserted river; and the harbour of Ostia, built by King Ancus Martius at the river's mouth, is now four miles inland.

Occasionally a granite obelisk was brought from Thebes or Heliopolis to adorn an imperial circus. That now in the Lateran Piazza is 108 feet in height and weighs 400 tons. Ships had to be built on purpose for the task, and one of these was so enormous that after safely conveying the Vatican obelisk to Rome, it was sunk by the Emperor Claudius to serve as a breakwater for the harbour at Porto. When the laden ships arrived at the Marmoratum the obelisks were hauled on shore by men and horses and then dragged and pushed on rollers along the streets by gangs of workmen. Forty-eight obelisks were once erected in Rome, of which thirty have disappeared and left no trace.

TEMPLE OF VESPASIAN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES
Built in honour of the first Flavian Emperor by his sons Titus and Domitian. The three remaining Corinthian columns are of Carrara marble. The Arch of Septimius Severus to the right was dedicated to the emperor and his sons Caracalla and Geta in a.d. 203, to commemorate their Parthian victories. It is of Pentelic marble. The church of Santa Martina in the background is near the site of the Senate House. See pages [31], [32].

While the fashion for marble lasted, no material was considered too rare or too costly. Parian marble, the most beautiful of all white marbles, from the island of Paros; Pentelic marble from Pentelicus; Hymettan marble from the mountains of Attica; rich yellow giallo antico from Numidia; cippolino with its beautiful green waves from Carystos; purple pavonazzo from Phrygia; black marble from Cape Matapan; green and red porphyries from Egypt; alabaster from Thebes; serpentine from Sparta; jasper and fluor-spar from Asia Minor; lapis lazuli, with which Titus paved a chamber in his baths, from Persia, besides countless varieties of the so-called Lumachella marbles and rare and beautiful breccias.

There arose in Rome an army of marble workers, cutters and sawyers, polishers and cleaners, carvers of simple mouldings and of inscriptions, and more skilled sculptors of ornament and of statues and busts.

Coloured marbles were first used in small pieces for making mosaic pavements. This art was introduced from Greece some time in the first century b.c., and in its simplest form was an arrangement of smooth pebbles in a rough pattern on a bed of cement. As the art developed, cubes, lozenges, and hexagons of travertine and grey lava were cut and fitted together in simple patterns. Then cubes of coloured marble were used, and the designs, of figures and flowers, became more elaborate. The floors were prepared with a bed of concrete, covered with several layers of cement; the last layer was carefully smoothed and levelled, and in this the cubes were fitted according to the pattern, and finally liquid cement was poured over the whole to fill in the cracks. When dry and hard the surface was polished with sand and water rubbed on with little marble blocks.

Pavements of the best building period can be recognised by the size of the cubes, about three to the inch, and by the neatness and finish of the work. Two varieties of mosaic can be distinguished, that in which marbles, stones, and coloured glass are cut into cubes only and the so-called sectile mosaic in which elaborate scenes and groups of figures are represented, the coloured pieces being sawn into shapes to fit in with the design. The Tablinum in the house of the vestals and the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol were paved with sectile mosaic. The most brilliant mosaic which came into use during the Empire for the decoration of walls and vaults was made of fragments of coloured marble and glass, the latter specially prepared with acids to make it opaque and to give it a brilliant appearance. The art of mosaic work has never died out entirely in Rome. The Roman mosaic pavements and mosaic wall decoration were copied by the builders of mediæval churches, and even now a mosaic factory is kept up at the Vatican.

Although first used in this way, coloured marbles were gradually employed for the interior decoration of houses, for columns, dados, and friezes. Lucius Crassus, the consul (176 b.c.), was the first so to adorn his house, and Lucullus (151 b.c.) paved his hall with black marble. Later, entire rooms were lined with thin slabs clamped to the concrete wall with iron. Sometimes such marble walls were given a thin coat of stucco and painted. As the passion for sumptuous interiors grew all the decorative arts were put into requisition. Walls were painted in fresco, as we can still see at Pompeii and in the house of Germanicus on the Palatine. Ceilings, walls, and cornices were ornamented in stucco in shallow relief. An extremely hard stucco was made with lime and powdered marble—it was nearly as durable as marble and could take almost as high a polish. It was even used for floors; for internal decoration, plaster of Paris was mixed with it. Mouldings, figures, arabesques, groups and scenes were worked in this stucco and delicately coloured. Examples have been preserved in the Diocletian museum and can be seen in situ in the Latin tombs.

The greatest plans for the building of Rome were conceived by Julius Caesar and Nero. Of Nero's buildings nothing remains except some ruins of his Golden House beneath the baths of Titus, while the designs of Caesar were destined to be carried out by his great successor Augustus. Justly could this emperor boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The republican period succeeding the expulsion of the Tarquins, and which his accession brought to a close, had not been so fruitful in public buildings as the epoch immediately following. Of the former, the Tabularium, the tombs of Bibulus and Cecilia Metella, the temple of Fortuna Virilis, and the ruins of the Fabrician bridge, the modern Ponte Quattro Capi, have come down to us. The city, however, was beginning to assume a more majestic appearance. On the accession of Augustus, the Capitol was crowned by the Tarquins' temple to Jupiter, which was to be restored by Domitian. The valley between the Palatine and the Aventine was occupied by the enormous Circus Maximus, built by Tarquinius Priscus and decorated by Julius Caesar, and which has so entirely disappeared that we can only trace its site along the present Via dei Cerchi. The temples of Concord and Castor and Pollux stood upon the Forum Romanum, while the temple of Saturn bounding the steep Clivus Capitolinus which led upwards to the Capitol—the ancient Mons Saturninus—recorded the golden age when Saturn reigned in Italy.

The streets of the city were paved, and beyond the walls the immense Appian causeway crossed the Pontine marshes and stretched onwards towards Brindisi and the east.

In the forty years following Rome was transformed. There arose in the Campus Martius, the Pantheon with the baths and aqueduct of Agrippa, the portico of Octavia dedicated by Augustus to his sister, the theatre of Marcellus and the great mausoleum where the emperor and his kindred were to lie, and which, almost smothered in poor houses, has in modern times served the ignoble offices of a bull-ring and a third-rate theatre. Temples were restored, the Basilica Julia was completed, another Forum built with the temple of Mars Ultor in its midst. Upon the site of Augustus' birthplace on the Palatine hill a great palace was raised by himself and Tiberius, and this district of Rome became henceforth the abode of the Caesars.

THE COLOSSEUM ON A SPRING DAY
The Flavian amphitheatre, called Colosseum from the colossus or colossal statue of Nero which stood on the velia before it. The picture is taken from an orto belonging to the Barberini on the Palatine, looking across the Arch of Constantine. See pages [22], [23], [31].

Augustus and his immediate successors were to witness the golden age of Roman building. After Hadrian came the period of decadence characterised by florid ornamentation, bad taste and workmanship, which culminated under Constantine and his sons.

Following in the steps of Augustus, Caligula and Nero erected palaces on the Palatine. Caligula connected the hill with the Forum, and Nero opened up an entrance towards the Caelian. Vespasian built there the Flavian house which his son Domitian was to dedicate as the Aedes Publica, a gift to the people. Septimius Severus extended the Palatine towards the south by the construction of his Septizonium.

Of the buildings of Tiberius, the columns of the temple of Ceres built into the church of S. Maria in Cosmedin remain to us; of those of Claudius, the beautiful ruined arches of his aqueduct. The Flavian emperors were great builders, and to this period belong the arch of Titus, built in a.d. 70 to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem, a monument of Rome's best period, the ruined baths erected by this same emperor, and the great amphitheatre and ruins of the temple of Vespasian.

Trajan's great buildings—his forum and triumphal arch, his basilica and library—are represented by a very small excavated portion of the basilica, and the column whose summit marks the height of the hill cut away by this emperor to make a roadway between the Quirinal and Capitol and thus relieve the congested traffic of the city.

The only fragments left of the work of Hadrian are the ruins of a villa near Tivoli, the mausoleum and Pons Aelius, now the castle and bridge of S. Angelo; and behind the church of S. Francesca Romana in the Forum the ruins of the Templum Urbis, the temple of Venus and Rome, with its twin niches for the gods, one turned towards the convent the other looking outwards towards the Colosseum. The gilt bronze tiles from the roof of this temple were removed by Pope Honorius I. to deck the Christian Templum Urbis S. Peter's.

During the following 140 years there arose in Rome, amongst other monuments that have perished, the temple of Antoninus and Faustina built by Antoninus Pius in memory of his wife and now transformed into the church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda, the column of Marcus Aurelius, the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus dedicated to his sons Caracalla and Geta, the baths which bear this eldest son's name, although only begun by him and completed by Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus, the walls of Aurelian which still encompass the city and the thermae of Diocletian. The latest of the imperial buildings were the temple built by Maxentius to his son Romulus, now the church of SS. Cosma and Damian in the Forum, and the baths, basilica, and triumphal arch of Constantine.

A visitor to this city of the Cæsars must have been almost bewildered by what he saw. As he passes through the town great buildings meet his glance on every side, their gilded tiles and white marble walls glistening in the sun and clear atmosphere. Crowds jostle him in the narrow paved roads. He crosses one Forum after another, six in all, and finally reaches the Campus Martius. He pauses upon the steps of temples and basilicas which seem on all sides to surround these busy centres of Roman life. Open spaces are crowded with trees and shrubs, fountains and statues. He can count thirty-six triumphal arches and eight bridges that span the yellow Tiber. He passes theatres and stadia for races and games, columns and obelisks. Occasionally he comes across a giant building, a colossus even in that city of marvels, the amphitheatre of Vespasian or the thermae of Diocletian, or an immense circus where 285,000 spectators are seated waiting for the chariot races to begin; he has noticed groups of charioteers in their distinctive colours, and heavy betting is going on. He has walked from one end of the city to the other sheltered from sun and rain, along covered porticoes, their pavements rich mosaics, and their length decorated throughout with a continuous series of statues and pictures. He has gazed upon the stupendous palaces of the Palatine, and has noticed the streams of people passing in and out of the city gates on their way to the suburbs which extend to Veii Tivoli and Ostia, or to the villas, parks and gardens, villages and farms, which cover the outskirts of Rome to a distance of 15 miles, amongst which great roads lined by marble tombs radiate outwards towards the hills.

With the decay of this mighty city began the era of church building. The origin of the Christian basilica is still a matter of controversy, but the results of careful and recent research[1] go to confirm the view that it was modelled not upon its Pagan namesake the forensic basilica, but upon the private hall found in many of the dwellings of rich Romans of consular or senatorial rank which served for those domestic tribunals for the adjudication of family disputes sanctioned by Roman law. This conclusion has been overlooked from a mistaken belief that the first Christians were recruited from the slaves and poorer classes of the population, but it is now proved that noble Romans and even members of Imperial families early embraced Christianity, and it was more than probable that the domestic basilicas in their houses should be utilised as places of assembly by members of their faith, the gathering of a large body of persons being concealed during times of persecution, by the use of the many entrances common to the Roman house.

The domestic basilica dedicated as a place of Christian assembly, became with the development of the ecclesiastical system, the Roman titulus, the church in the house, and as no public hall was built until after the Peace of the church, these were multiplied as the Christian population grew and numbered 40 by the second century. The Christian basilica was thus in existence and perfected in all its liturgical parts in the first three centuries, and when Constantine built his great extramural churches, he only amplified a type familiar to every Christian.

THE COLOSSEUM AT SUNSET
Taken from the Mons Oppius, one of the two spurs of the Esquiline hill. See pages [5], [11].

S. Maria Maggiore probably existed as a domestic basilica at a time anterior to that of its reputed founders Liberius and Sixtus, and we know that S. Croce and the Lateran were constructed within the Sessorian palace and the house of the Laterani of which they probably formed the halls.

Architecturally also the earliest churches resembled more nearly the domestic hall than the public basilica. The latter were little more than a covered portion of the Forum upon which they stood. They were entered from either side through the open ambulatories which as we have seen were free to all. The extremities were walled up later and prolonged into an apse to increase the space available for legal purposes. The domestic basilica on the other hand was a rectangular building roofed and closed on all sides, its single apse at one extremity facing the main entrance. The central space was surrounded on three sides by porticoes dividing it into portions which became the aisles for the worshippers and the narthex for the use of catechumens. The domestic judge's seat standing in the apse was replaced by the bishop's throne, and the cancellum became the chancel rail dividing this portion, the presbytery of the church, from the rest of the building.

The ruins of the Flavian basilica in Domitian's house on the Palatine (81-96) affords us a ground plan of such a domestic hall, in this instance placed close to the triclinium of the house and not in a direct line with the vestibulum or entrance as was generally the case. Here a fragment of the cancellum can still be seen in situ.

The Christian altar of the earliest churches placed in front of the apse, faced the congregation, and a space before it, beyond the depressed portion or confessio, was reserved for the choir and was surrounded by a marble balustrade. The columns supported a horizontal architrave, above it a flat wall pierced with windows and the plain roof of cedar-wood beams.

The floors were paved with a fine mosaic of marble and green serpentine alternating with slabs of white marble or discs of red porphyry. Tribune, arch, and vault, and sometimes other portions of the walls, were decorated with brilliant mosaics and examples of this work, of the fourth, sixth, ninth, and twelfth centuries, and possibly of the second or third, have happily escaped the ravishing hand of the restorer. In the twelfth century the art of marble working underwent a temporary revival under the influence of a talented family of artists, the Cosmati; and a good deal of their work and that of their school is still to be found in Rome, the carved marble and an inlay of mosaic upon marble being easily recognisable in the decoration of the cloisters of the Lateran and of S. Paul's outside the walls, upon ambones, candelabra, and tombs scattered throughout the churches.

The straight architectural lines of the Christian basilicas and their subdued colouring of floor and apse produce a delicate and harmonious effect, but they were erected during a debased building period and were not designed for strength, and only a few have weathered the storms of the middle ages and escaped destruction beneath the tasteless restorations of the Renaissance.

The new building epoch born in Rome was to be nourished entirely at the expense of the old. Columns and mouldings were transferred bodily from the nearest basilica to furnish the Christian church, and were there arranged haphazard. Simpler still, walls of ancient bricks were quickly run up between the solid columns of a temple; marble casings were torn off to be used as common building stone; statues, carved cornices, and friezes were thrust into lime-kilns which sprang up all over the city wherever the ancient monuments stood thickest; priceless marbles were ground into fragments for making mosaics or were mixed with cement and made into concrete.

When Constantine left Rome to found his new capital the city had already degenerated into a squalid provincial town, and fifty years later Jerome could refer to its gilded squalor and its temples lined with cobweb.

Already the seal had been put upon the old order when Gratian in 383 abolished the privileges of the pagan places of worship, and quickly disaster followed upon the heels of destruction. Twice Alaric despoiled the city and carried off priceless booty. Vitiges tore the marble from the mausoleum of Hadrian and destroyed the aqueducts; Genseric dismantled the temple of Jupiter; Robert Guiscard laid waste the Campus Martius and other parts of the city by fire. Sieges, sacks, earthquakes, fires, and inundations succeeded each other until the old level of the city was in places buried 50 feet beneath accumulated ruin and rubbish.

The scene shifts once more; centuries have slipped by and the city of Rome has become a desolation. Marble columns and granite obelisks lie prone upon the ground, and many more have found graves beneath the soil. Enormous mounds of earth and masonry, disfigured with rude battlements, represent all that is left of the great monuments; crumbling ruins and waste land stretch away to the walls, and without the campagna has become a fever-stricken wilderness.

Military fortresses, watch-towers on the walls, and bell-towers of churches are the only buildings kept in repair. Gaunt wolves snarl and fight over the refuse heaps under the walls of S. Peter's. A gibbet crowns the bare summit of the Capitol, goatherds pasture their flocks on its sides and along the green slopes of the Forum, and thus the hill and the tract of land at its foot have returned once more to their primitive pastoral state and their pastoral names, the "hill of goats" and the "field of cows." Over all broods the ominous silence of terror, bloodshed, and pestilence.

Upon this scene of ruin the Renaissance and modern city of Rome was to come into being, and the mediaeval buildings were in their turn to be destroyed or overlaid with a modern garb, leaving only a few churches and convents, a few towers and palaces, a few cloisters to mark the passing of the centuries.

ARCH OF TITUS
Erected to commemorate this Emperor's destruction of Jerusalem, a.d. 70. It is decorated with reliefs of the seven-branched candlestick and other spoils of the Temple which were carried through the city in the Emperor's triumph. See page [31].

The remains of the imperial city are described by a modern writer[2] lying like a skeleton beneath the modern town, beneath streets, villas, and public buildings; and from the fifteenth century, when Rome, which had only just escaped an extinction as complete as that of her neighbour and ancient rival Tusculum, began once more to rise from the dust, to modern times, all the building materials have been furnished by her ruins. The few monuments that have been preserved owe their safety to their consecration as churches.

Of all the despoilers to which Rome has fallen a victim, none have been so assiduous in their destruction as her own rulers and people. Streets have been paved with building stone, churches and palaces built with ancient materials. Monuments of the utmost artistic and historic value have been destroyed for the purpose, the Colosseum alone being robbed of 2522 cart-loads of travertine in the fifteenth century. The inadequate prohibitions issued at rare intervals proved impotent in presence of a practice so deep rooted and time honoured. Every villa garden and palace staircase is peopled with ancient statues. Fragments of inscriptions, of carved mouldings and cornices, marble pillars and antique fountains, are met with in every courtyard. Even a humble house or shop will have a marble step or a marble lintel to the front door. To the present day no piece of work is ever undertaken in Rome, no house foundation dug or gas-pipe laid, but the workmen come across some ancient masonry, an aqueduct whose underground course is unknown and unexplored, a branch of one of the great cloacae, or the immense concrete vault of a bath or temple whose destruction gives as much trouble as if it were solid rock.

Fortunately for the student and the archaeologist a government official, a "custodian of excavations," now watches all such operations, and all "finds" of importance, fragments of inscriptions and statues, earthenware lamps, bronze or glass vessels, fragments of mosaic, and gold ornaments, are collected and reported.

CHAPTER III

THE ROMAN CATACOMBS

From the catacombs, the subterranean burial-places of the first Roman Christians, to the basilica of S. Peter's, the greatest ecclesiastical building on earth, there is no break in the drama of history. When you come out from the cemetery of Callistus, on to the fields bordering the Appian Way, and look across to the dome of the great church commemorating Peter, you say to yourself "That is the interpretation of this": this may see in its own humble features the lineaments of that; the church which dominates the Roman country—in imperial possession of Rome—may recognise that the silent underground galleries of the Appia had already taken as effective a possession of the capital of the world.

The Roman Church is founded upon three events: the apostolic preaching, the constancy of its martyrs, its position as the heir of Imperial Rome—a position early figured and represented in the persons of its bishops. All these things have their monument in the catacombs; which bear indisputable traces of the sojourn and the preaching of the Apostles, which are the earliest shrines of the Roman martyrs, and which preserve for us in the crypt in the cemetery of Callistus, set apart for the leaders of the Roman Church from Antheros to Eutychian (a.d. 235-275),[3] the veritable nucleus of papal domination. It was the successors of these men who were to fill the rôle left vacant by Constantine's departure for Byzantium; to be forced into a position of overlordship through the uncertainty of the emperor's government by lieutenants—first in Rome and then in Italy; to consolidate this power by constant accretions of Italian territory, and, finally, to acquire by spiritual conquest a universal suzerainty as real as that of the Roman emperor. If those who inscribed the proud words round the dome of S. Peter's had known that hidden in the catacombs there were frescoes representing Peter as the new Moses striking the rock from which flow forth the saving waters of Christ—the name Petrus clearly written above him—even they must have thrilled with wonder and awe: the upholders of Petrine primacy could not have imagined or devised a parable of the first centuries better fitted to their hand.

A PROCESSION IN THE CATACOMB OF CALLISTUS
The nucleus of the great catacomb on the Via Appia was formed by the crypts of Lucina and the hypogaeum of the family of the Caecilii, both pagan and Christian members of which had their burial places on the Appian Way. S. Cecilia was buried here. See pages [42], [45], [46], [29].

The burial-places of the first Christians in Rome were their only certain property. The law allowed to every corporation its religiosus locus, its God's acre, property seldom confiscated even in the worst hours of the great persecutions. It was thus that the Christians, though they never lived in the catacombs, came to regard them as retreats, as places where it was safe to meet for prayer, for mutual encouragement, even for the catechising of neophytes and children. Round them were their dead, their loved ones, nay, round them were their martyrs, the men and women who were to prove that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"; whose heroic deaths had been witnessed by many; the memory of whose heroism was to prove almost as potent as ocular witness when their burial-places became the nuclei of the first Christian churches, and the abounding reverence felt for them inaugurated the Christian cult of the saints.

The catacombs lie for the most part within a three mile radius of the wall of Aurelian. They number forty-five, and it is calculated that the passages, galleries, and chambers of which they consist cover several hundred miles, forming a vast underground city—"subterranean Rome." For the first 300 years, until "the Peace of the Church," this was the ordinary place of burial, certain catacombs being affiliated, from the third century, to the ecclesiastical regions in the city. Even after the "Peace" Christians were sometimes buried here, until the fifth century, after which the catacombs were visited as places of pilgrimage for another 400 years.

From the ninth century they fell into complete neglect; no one visited these sanctuaries of the sufferings, these monuments of the human affections and religious beliefs of the first Christians. Visitors heard that Rome was built upon terrible underground chasms, filled with snakes, some part of which was every now and then revealed to the terrified inhabitants. No one penetrated till the fifteenth century—the first pioneer belongs to the sixteenth—and it was not till the second half of the nineteenth that a new world was laid bare to the student by the excavations of De Rossi, who rediscovered the great cemetery of Callistus, containing the now famous "papal crypt," and whose labours have resulted in restoring to us nearly twenty catacombs.

The terrible underground chasms filled with snakes were found to be galleries of tombs, crypts of all sizes, lighted by shafts, some with seats for catechists, some adapted as miniature basilicas, decorated with frescoes recording biblical scenes, New Testament parables and symbolical representations of New Testament events—(in which the "apocrypha" is not distinguished from the "canon," and the history of Susanna and the Elders sustained the faith and comforted the courage of Christians by the side of the scene of Moses striking the rock or Christ feeding His disciples); eloquent with inscriptions in the epigraphy of the first four centuries, recorded in moments of simple human emotion, intended only for the dead and those who survived them sorrowing; and lastly, covered with graffiti, with prayers, names, acclamations, scratched on the walls of galleries leading to some favourite crypt by pilgrim visitors in later centuries.

FLAVIAN BASILICA ON THE PALATINE
See pages [31], [35], [45], and [fly-leaf, page 252].

In this hidden and quiet place of the dead there is recorded a revolution parallel to a volcanic upheaval of nature. Here we have a permanent record of the meeting of classical Rome with Judaea and Christianity; here the graceful art of Pompeii meets the imagery of the Hebrew bible; here the Flavii met the Jews of the Dispersion; here as in a Titanic workshop, Rome, taking its religion from the Jew, moulded the faith which the Chosen People had discarded into the greatest religious organisation on earth—Catholic Christianity.

The two arch-cemeteries are those of Callistus on the Via Appia and Priscilla on the Salaria. They are arch-cemeteries because their origin and the part they played in the early years of Roman Christianity gave them a pre-eminent importance, and having been bestowed upon the Church by their owners they became the official catacombs of the Christian community. Each bears in its bosom the record of the first Roman converts; each is rich in frescoes and inscriptions; each bears testimony to the fact that from the beginning the Roman Christians counted among them many of patrician and senatorial rank; we meet with the names of the Aurelii, Caecilii, Maximi Caecilii, of Praetextatus Caecilianus and Pomponius Grecinus, and of Cornelius, the first bishop to belong to a Roman gens, in the catacomb of Callistus; and with those of the Prisci, Ulpii, and Acilii Glabriones in that of Priscilla. Priscilla, with her son the Senator Pudens, is the reputed hostess of Peter on his visit to Rome, and in the catacomb which bears her name there occurs repeatedly the Apostle's name—unknown in classical nomenclature—both in its Greek and Latin forms, Petros, Petrus. It is a region of this catacomb which preserves the tradition of the Fons sancti Petri, "the well or font of S. Peter," "the cemetery where Peter baptized" or "where Peter first sat," still unconsciously recorded in the Roman feast of "the Chair of S. Peter" on January 18. Here too was buried the philosopher Justin, martyred under Aurelius in a.d. 165, who lived in the house of Pudens, and here, when Justin was describing the rite itself in his Apology to the emperors, was frescoed the earliest representation of the solemn moment of the breaking of bread at the Eucharist. The mystical number of the guests, seven, the fish on the table, archaic symbol of Christ, the "seven baskets full" in allusion to the miracle of the loaves, and the fact that the agapê was already dissociated from the Eucharist in the time of Justin, mark this out as a typical example of that symbolical treatment of real events which is characteristic of early Christian art. The celebrant stands at one corner of the crescent-shaped table breaking the bread; five men and women sit at the table, the only other standing figure being that of a woman wearing the Jewish married woman's bonnet, filling, apparently, the office of vidua or woman-elder. The catacomb of Callistus—an agglomeration of separate hypogaea, which originated in the crypts of Lucina and the cemetery of those Caecilii who were among the earliest Roman families to embrace Christianity—is no less interesting.

The unique interest of these monuments lies in the fact that they are the incorruptible record of the sentiments, affections, and beliefs of the first Christians. In these frescoes and inscriptions no forgeries or interpolations could creep, no P¹ and P², no "Elohist" or "Jahvist" could confuse the issues and mystify the interpretation. The untouched story appeals to us in mute eloquence.

To what side does the testimony of the Roman catacombs lean? The critical method in history has destroyed the foundations of historical Protestantism: has it laid bare the foundations of historical Catholicism? The people who frequented the catacombs did not feel or think or believe like the men who reformed Christianity in the sixteenth century, but it is as true to say that they did not think or believe like the men of the Catholic reaction. The catacombs record a period when Christian life and Christian discipline still seemed more important than Christian dogma, when this last was not yet fixed, when it was still true that "what can be prayed is the rule of what may be believed"—lex orandi lex credendi; and here in the place of the dead "what could be prayed" became a veritable norm of what Christians were to formulate as precious dogma later.

In the first place then, the frescoes and inscriptions frequently bring before us the notions of rebirth by baptism, and of eternal life by participation in Christ through the mystical commerce of the Eucharist—the Johannine conception; new birth and new life are the keynote ideas in this place of the dead. Sacraments, conceived as material channels conveying grace, already form an integral part of the Christian consciousness; but the assumption that "the seven sacraments" are to be found in the catacombs shows as little knowledge of the history of the Church for the first twelve centuries as of the habits of belief of the Christians of the first, second, and third.

If there had ever been an age of the Church before controversy, we might say that the catacombs recorded it. But there never was such an age: what can be found here, however, are the spontaneous Judaic-Gentile beliefs of Christians who learnt their faith through terrible and comforting experiences almost as much as through the first apostolic preaching or the later ministrations of those visitors between Church and Church called in the New Testament "apostles and prophets." The religion of the catacombs was partly formed in the living; it is the faith, formulated, gauged, and tested by the faithful. Hence there is not only spontaneousness, but boldness, liberty of spirit, the absence of all fear of being misunderstood, misconstrued. They did not think as we do, and centuries were to elapse before the minimisers or the maximisers would torture what they said and did with meanings they would not bear.

Of these bold spontaneous doctrines none is more conspicuous than that of the intercourse between all the members of Christ, "those who have gone before us with the sign of faith" and those "who wait till their change comes, till this corruptible puts on incorruption." A Christian called upon his dead to pray for him in the realms of light, he called upon God to give to his beloved a place of light and refreshment, he besought the confessors gone to their reward to pray for both them and him. So strong was this belief in a holy and indissoluble union between the members of the one Church and the one Body of Christ, that at every celebration of the liturgy the whole body of the faithful were understood to be present—either really or mystically; and thus the Commemoration of the Living in the mass speaks of those (present) who offer and those (absent) for whom they offer the sacrifice of praise, as all equally "standing round about." And as they offered and prayed for those who were with them in the same town, so they offered and prayed for those who were already with Christ—in bono in Christo. The three commemorations of the Roman Canon, the Memento Domine ... omnium circumstantium of the living, the Communicantes et memoriam venerantes of the martyrs, and the Memento ... qui nos praecesserunt of the dead, may be thought of as liturgical features crystallised in the catacombs.

It is easy to see too how the funeral celebrations of the liturgy—given this initial idea of intercommunion and intercession among all Christians living and dead—extended the idea of eucharistic sacrifice. How easily the oblation of Christ—the Christian's one offering—became the means of intercessory prayer for all men and all occasions, and gave rise to the requiem mass, the mass for some special grace, the mass of thanksgiving, the mass in commemoration of a saint.

Bold treatment of sacred things belongs naturally to an age when the sentiments of the faith, aspiration and hope, outrun dogma—before unfaithfulness in doctrine urged upon the early Church and its leaders the necessity for stricter definition, or unfaithfulness in life had made it easier to substitute a hard and fast creed for "the weightier matters of the law." The symbolism and inscriptions of the catacombs testify how freely such elements were at work there. Take as an instance the fresco representing Christ on a throne giving a book to Peter, with the legend, Dominus legem dat, "the Lord gives the law." In other examples of this subject Peter is replaced by some simple but faithful disciple—"the Lord gives the law to Alexander—to Valerius." The allusion is to the "tradition of the Gospel" in baptism; it is not hierarchical.

LIBRARY OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN ON THE PALATINE
Painted on a stormy day. The sombre scene of the ruined Library in the Palace of the Flavian Emperors suggests the ruin of classical learning which followed on the introduction of Christianity. The mother of Domitian's two nephews, whom he had intended to designate as his heirs, was martyred as a Christian, and their cousin of the same name—Flavia Domitilla—founded the catacomb of the Flavian House.

The catacombs influenced the Roman Church in another way. There are none but martyrs' names among the liturgic commemorations of the confessors of the faith (whom we now call "saints"); and these names loudly proclaimed in the Canon—in the solemn portion—of the eucharistic services which were held at their graves, not only on the day of deposition but on many other stated days besides, were the nucleus of that long line of "canonised" saints which figures in the modern calendar. When, after the "Peace," churches began to cover the city, the very grave of the confessor became the nucleus of the Christian edifice—that confession or sunk tomb which is the central point of the Roman basilica. And as the liturgy had been celebrated on the stone slab which closed the grave so when churches were built the altar was placed over the confessor's tomb: "I saw under the altar the souls of those that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held."

Thus subterranean Rome prepared, as in the hidden working of a mine, not only many affirmations of the faith which was to assert itself in the light and replace the religion of classical Rome, but also the sanctuary of those great basilicas which were to spread over the surface of the city as soon as the Christians, in no real but nevertheless in a highly suggestive sense, "came up from the catacombs." The catacombs are the link between pagan Rome "drunk with the blood of the saints" and the Christian Rome which arose in the imperial city from the ashes of her martyrs. The pagan city on the seven hills as truly sunk into the grave with the bodies of the Roman martyrs as Christian Rome eventually took possession of the same urbs septicollis by carrying her dead into it.

CHAPTER IV

ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS

The regions and the guilds of Rome illustrate two contradictory tendencies running parallel throughout the administrative history of the city, the one towards division and separation as first principles of organisation, the other towards union and centralisation as measures of strength. These antagonistic elements which we find at the very dawn of Roman history were at once utilised as factors in the new commonwealth.

It is the tradition that King Numa organised nine guilds of handicrafts amongst the Roman people that they might sink their race animosities in an identity of interests. Similarly one of the first great works for the young community, the city wall projected by Tarquinius Priscus and built by Servius Tullius, was intended to produce a fusion of the tribes which inhabited the seven hills he thus physically linked together, and which he had already united under a common government. Another enterprise, the draining of the marshes and pools which made impassable barriers of the valleys between the hills, had the same aim and result—it was a levelling process, moral as well as physical, to minimise the separation between hill and hill, race and race.

On the other hand, Servius' division of the city into four regions, and these again into six parishes or vici, laid the seeds of an internal disunion which lasted throughout the centuries. These four regions (1) the Suburra or Caelian, (2) the Esquiline and its spurs, (3) the Collina, comprising the Viminal and Quirinal, which were called colles in distinction to the other hills, the montes, and (4) the Palatine, persisted until the reign of Augustus. By that time the city had grown beyond its primitive limits, a thickly populated region had sprung up on the Esquiline beyond the walls and Augustus found a new division necessary. He increased the original number of regions to fourteen, and each of these he subdivided as before into parishes, the number in each region varying from seven to twenty-eight, making 265 in all. A magistrate or curator with a set of officials under him presided over each region. Each parish had its magistrate, its officers, its chapel built upon the boundary road for the public worship of the lares compitales, the protecting spirits of the district.

At this period the poorer quarters of the city—a network of narrow streets with high houses built of inflammable materials—had been again and again devastated by fire. At night the densest darkness descended upon the city, street lighting was unknown, shop doors were shut and barred, and it was unsafe to walk abroad; those who ventured carried lights, or were preceded by servants with staves and torches. The ubiquitous beggars haunted the byways, and brigands raided the outskirts of the town.

As a remedy against these evils Augustus created a force of 7000 men who were to act both as police and firemen. The whole body he placed under the command of a prefect, who acted in conjunction with the curator of the regions in keeping order, and divided it into seven battalions or cohorts, each under a tribune, and so disposed in the city that one battalion watched over the safety of two regions. The cohorts were again subdivided into seven companies under a captain or centurion. The force was distributed over the town in seven different barracks, with outlying detached quarters or excubitoria.

The firemen's duty was to inspect public furnaces and private kitchens, the heating apparatus and the offices where the wardrobes were kept and warmed in the public baths. If a fire broke out in the town it was the subject of an official inquiry, just as it is to-day, and if arson or willful neglect were suspected, punishment was meted out by the proper authorities. Like the modern policeman in Rome, Augustus' vigiles were not a popular force, and to make it more palatable he gradually increased its privileges. He built large and luxurious stations and excubitoria which were beautifully decorated with precious marbles and statues. Members of the force were granted the coveted Roman citizenship, and the captains were permitted to serve ex officio in the Praetorian guard.

FORUM OF NERVA
The picture represents a portion of the ornamental enclosure of the Forum built by Nerva, near Domitian's Temple of Pallas; she is represented on the entablature. This fragment is popularly known as Le Colonacce. See page [33].

At a later period, perhaps sometime in the third century, the regions of Rome were reorganised on an ecclesiastical basis, and seven were formed out of the fourteen by the amalgamation of two into one, each being placed under one of the seven deacons of the city. It is not known at what precise date their number was again increased to fourteen, nor when they assumed their present names and distribution, but probably early in the middle ages. By the thirteenth century only thirteen regions are recorded, and it was not till the year 1586 that the conservators and senators of Rome and the captains of the regions consulted together and decided to include the Leonine city as a fourteenth region, granting it at the same time a captain, a standard, and an heraldic device of a lion upon a red field, his paw planted upon the three mounds of the coat of Sixtus V.

These fourteen regions do not correspond in position, name, or extent with those of Augustus except that the present thirteenth, Trastevere, is identical with the ancient fourteenth, Transtiburtina. The names that they bear to-day represent either their position or some characteristic feature within their limits. Thus the first and largest region, the Monti, formed from the union of the fifth and sixth of Augustus, the Esquilina and the Alta Semita, is so called from the hills, the Esquilina Viminal and Caelian, within its boundaries; the second the Trevi, derives its name from the famous fountain in its midst; the third, Colonna, from the column of Marcus Aurelius; the fourth, Campo Marzo, covers this historic ground; the fifth, Ponte, is named from the old Pons Triumphalis, that united Rome with the Vatican region; the sixth or Parione comprises the ground of which the Chiesa Nuova is the centre, and the name was derived from the ancient wall and tower which stood close to it; the seventh, Regola, inhabited by some of the most wretched of the population, is a corruption of Arenula, the drift sand of the river near which this region lies; the eighth, S. Eustachio, behind the university, takes its name from a parish church; the ninth, Pigna, from the bronze pine cone now at the Vatican and which was once supposed to adorn the Pantheon (this region corresponds to a certain extent with the ancient Via Lata); the tenth region, Campitelli, includes the Capitol and Palatine hills and the Forum; the eleventh, the S. Angelo district, a region inhabited by the very poor, by tanners, and formerly the Jews' quarter, is named after the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria; the twelfth is the Ripa or river bank; and the thirteenth and fourteenth, as we have seen, are Trastevere beyond the river and the Leonine city or Borgo.

FOUNTAIN OF TREVI
One of the numberless fountains of the city; built by Clement XII. in 1735. The red house is the palazzo of the celebrated art jeweller Castellani. Visitors leaving Rome who throw a sou into this fountain are sure to return to the eternal city. See pages [22], [55], [227].

Each region became a little civic and social centre complete in itself. Each had its captain, its sub-officers, its religious organisations, its separate funds for charities and dowries, its separate police and militia recruits. And the importance that accrued to these regions lay in the fact that they represented the plebs, the democracy of Rome. With a people so incapable of co-operation for a common end as the Roman, the spark of their civic liberties would have been trodden out or have remained for ever dormant but for this administrative setting which kept it alive and through which, given the opportunity, it could become once more a living force.

The heads of the regions, the caporioni, heirs to the position of Augustus' tribunes but without their discipline, were the people's leaders and spokesmen, their representatives and the guardians of their liberties. They were elected by ballot and the ballot urn was carried in procession to the Capitol, where the chosen captains received their investiture at the hands of the Senate. In times of difficulty they assembled for consultation in that council chamber of the people, the church of Ara Coeli, but their counsels seldom led to measures of conciliation which were uncongenial to their fierce independence and to the arbitrary authority they assumed. In peace or in war, in sanguinary insurrections or in national rejoicings, the caporioni were always to the front, their banners with the regional device upon a coloured field fluttering in the breeze. It was to them that Cola di Rienzo looked for assistance and support. When a royal visitor or one of the German Emperors of Rome entered the city in state, the caporioni were amongst the officials who received them, their banners carried by their pages on horseback, and themselves clad in their gala tunics of crimson velvet, cloaks of cloth of gold, white stockings and shoes, and black bonnets jewelled and feathered. When Pope Gregory XI. returned to Rome, restoring the papacy to the land of its birth after an exile of seventy years, the caporioni rode in procession to give him welcome, and at his death they hurried to the cardinals assembling in conclave at the Vatican to implore them at all costs to elect a Roman pope, and they emphasised their petition with a fierce menace which would assuredly have been carried through to its sanguinary end but for the intervention of the Colonna forces.

In the carnival processions of the fifteenth century which issued from the Capitol to perambulate the city, the caporioni, surrounded by fifty mounted grooms wearing their distinctive livery, preceded the Senators. Representatives from each region marched with them in the order of their precedence carrying halberds, banners, and lances, and shields emblazoned with their arms, and escorted by grooms on horseback. In the same procession, in front of the regions, were delegates from all the handicraft and trade guilds in the city, shoe-makers, hatters, apothecaries, tavern keepers, and many others, each with their banners captains and sergeants; the guild of ironworkers alone numbered 300, in the midst of whom a team of horses were harnessed to a cannon of their own making. The procession was headed by municipal officers and soldiers, and as an emblem of law and justice a wretched criminal was driven along with blows.

After the Renaissance the caporioni degenerated into mere regional captains, retaining only a shadow of their former power and jurisdiction, and the present government has abolished the office altogether. The organisation and the spirit of the regions are, however, by no means dead.

COLUMN OF MARCUS AURELIUS, PIAZZA COLONNA
The only work of the time of the emperor-philosopher which has come down to us. The column is now crowned by a colossal bronze statue of S. Paul. See pages [32], [55].

Until the racing of riderless horses down the Corso was forbidden, each region entered a horse for the race which was decked in the regional colour, and its success or failure aroused a perfect passion of rivalry between region and region—an antagonism as old as the age of Plutarch, who relates that in the month of October chariot races were run in the Campus Martius; the victorious horse was sacrificed to the god Mars, but its head was borne in procession to the Forum, all the regions fighting for possession of the trophy until nothing was left of it, and the combatants themselves were wounded and disabled.

To this day, on occasions of popular rejoicing or in patriotic demonstrations, representatives from each region form into procession, the regional banner carried by vigili, who march surrounded by a group of the so-called fedeli, inhabitants of the little town of Viturcchino, who for good services rendered to Rome in the past have earned special consideration at the hands of the Roman municipality. Such processions are headed by the standard of the Commune, S.P.Q.R. upon a red and yellow ground, and immediately behind follows the banner of the Monti, the first region, three green hills on a white field.

The different devices of the regions, carved upon marble shields, were affixed to house walls in many parts of the city to mark the boundaries, by order of Benedict XIV., and can still be seen in position. All those who know Rome at all are probably familiar with the Monti escutcheon upon the wall of the Aldobrandini palace, and with the Campo Marzo crescent on a house wall at Capo le Case.

The passage of time has not wholly wiped out the fierce and hereditary enmity between the inhabitants of one portion of the city and another, which has been always fostered and encouraged, though unintentionally, by the regional system.

The Monticiani and the Trasteverini were the most irreconcilable of foes. The Monti was the first region to be inhabited after the barbarian invasions, but it was left in comparative isolation and neglect when the Campo Marzo became the busy centre of papal Rome, and its people have retained something of their untamed native independence. They are proud and passionate, are the quickest with the knife in a quarrel, and will not stoop to domestic service or to menial trades. They choose husbands and wives amongst their own people—they believe S. Maria Maggiore to be the most beautiful church in the world, and will brook no dissent on the subject. Even to-day they will not speak willingly to a Trasteverino. The enmity between these two may have had a Guelph and Ghibelline origin. Certainly Trastevere was a stronghold of the Ghibellines as is shown by an episode which occurred on the day of Pope Callistus III.'s coronation in 1445. A groom in the employ of the Orsinis came to words about a girl with a groom of a rival house, the Anguillara. From words they came to blows, and quickly the quarrel became general, until in a few hours 3000 men were under arms ready to fight in an Orsini cause. The inhabitants of Trastevere, separated from the rest of Rome by the river and comparatively far from its centre, have retained to the present day much of their individuality, their habits, character, and appearance. The sight of a Monticiano arouses in them all the evil passions. Even as late as the year 1838, it was their habit on every holiday to meet the Monticiani for a stoning match on the green swards of the Forum—"the field of cows" as it was then called—the historic fragments lying about serving as missiles of war. Such matches were not to revenge any particular wrong but merely for honour and glory, the victorious region bearing off the palm in triumph until the next occasion. Sometimes they met at the Navicella, sometimes in the ruined courts of Diocletian's baths; sometimes a champion from each side came forward for the contest, sometimes it was a general scrimmage, members of other regions looking on and encouraging their allies. Sometimes when the matches fell upon a market day—a market was held once a week in the Campo Vaccino—the crockery stalls were requisitioned for ammunition, and earthenware pans and pipkins flew across the Forum in company with fragments of classic statues and marble friezes. Only when heads were broken in plenty, and blood poured from wounded faces and limbs, did these fighters desist, or when the cry "al fuoco" warned them of the tardy arrival of the sbirri. Even these agents of law and order were powerless to separate the combatants unless they had had enough, and during Napoleon's occupation of Rome the cavalry had to be called out to disperse them, the gendarmes having entirely failed to do so. These stoning matches between Monticiani and Trasteverini were so recognised an institution in Rome, that the poet Berneri writing two centuries ago, sums up the Forum Romanum in the words:

Campo Vaccino Luogo dove s'impara a fare a sassi.

Field of cows The place where one learns to throw stones.

The movement towards association between members of a craft or of persons of identical interests, seems to be, as we have seen, as old as Rome herself. Whether or no King Numa gave it its first impulse, it is certain that throughout the first years of the Republic trade corporations were multiplied in the city without let or hindrance, and only when their number and importance seemed to menace the tranquillity of the State were measures taken for their control.

The wave of prosperity which spread over the Roman provinces during the early Empire gave a further impetus to trade in every branch, and an industrial class which had been long in the making amongst the people of Rome, awoke to its own interests and claimed if not sympathy at least recognition from the aristocratic ruling caste which held all plebs in contempt.

PANTHEON, A FLANK VIEW
Designed as a Hall of the Baths of Agrippa the contemporary of Augustus, but appears to have been at once dedicated as a temple. The Black Confraternity of S. John Beheaded are seen passing the building, their cross bearer preceding them. See pages [30], [56], [67], [86]; [see also pp. [8], [77], [143]].

The only response given however was to prohibit the formation of trade guilds, exception only being made in favour of a few of the most ancient, and those devoted to purposes of religion and burial. They continued nevertheless to multiply under cover of this latter clause until under Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus they received final encouragement and recognition. At this time they had increased enormously in number wealth and importance throughout Rome and the provinces. Every group of merchants and all those engaged in handicrafts banded themselves together to form a college or university as they were called in Rome, as much for the social pleasures to be derived from such association as for the mutual support and protection afforded against the impositions and aggressions of outsiders. Charioteers, gladiators, disbanded soldiers, itinerant merchants, seamen, Tiber boatmen, grain weighers at Ostia, palace servants, carters and coachmen founded corporations equally with the bakers and innkeepers, dyers weavers and tanners.

Every young community sought a rich patron willing to give a plot of land or the funds necessary for the building of a club-room, promising in return certain anniversary banquets in his honour, or commemorative reunions to keep his memory green after death. Each corporation placed itself under the protection of a god whose name it adopted, and as its wealth and importance increased, by members' testamentary bequests or by gifts from patrons, the club premises were increased, and shrines and chapels were built in honour of the titular deity. Some of the corporations rose to such a position of importance that senatorial and consular families sprang from them; they supported colleges of doctors sculptors and painters of their own, they contributed to the building of public monuments and made loans to the State, while on special occasions the emperor's retinue was increased by a hundred standards and five hundred lances contributed by the trade colleges of Rome from amongst their own retainers.

Although democratic in constitution, in so far as every member, however humble, could serve as one of its officers, the college was founded on the civic pattern, with president, curators, fiscal officer and all the grades of rank down to its slave members. Thus each unit represented in miniature the Roman commune and contributed to its consolidation. Unlike some of the guilds of the North however which became the nurseries of civic freedom, the Roman Colleges were too ready to subject their individuality to the spirit of civil discipline which was characteristic of Roman organisations and we find them submitting to one Imperial decree after another, losing one after another of their rights until they fell altogether under State patronage and became a mere portion of State machinery, a petrifying slavery being thus imposed upon their members whose liberties they were founded to safeguard.

SILVERSMITHS' ARCH IN THE VELABRUM
This arch stands against the Arch of Janus, and was erected to the Emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Pia, and his sons, by the guilds of silversmiths and cattle merchants. When Caracalla murdered his brother the name of the murdered prince was removed from the inscription. The arch, as the inscription proves, is on the site of the Forum Boarium.

As an integral portion of the administrative life of the State, they proved of the greatest use, not only as adding to its stability and prosperity but as affording a sort of scaffolding upon which to build its complicated daily life. To them was given the collection of taxes, the superintendence of public buildings, the development of the military system, the clothing of the militia, the provisioning of the citizens and the supplying of all their daily necessities.

In return for these services they were exempt from all other obligations to the State. The livelihood and wellbeing of members of colleges were thus ensured but at the cost of their liberty. Every member was obliged to sink a portion of his estate in the funds of the college, and to contribute another to its expenses. He was forbidden to will away the remainder except to his sons or nephews who in their turn were bound to enter the same trade; no member could change his own trade for any other, the priesthood alone excepted, in which case he must furnish a substitute. The goods of the corporations were thus inalienable, and whole families were bound to the same occupation in perpetuity.

During the civil wars, barbarian invasions and general disunion following upon the decadence of the Empire, the Roman colleges are lost sight of, but there seems little doubt that their privileges were left intact by the foreign conquerors of Rome and that it was their direct descendants that we find flourishing once more as trade corporations in the middle ages. As early as the eighth century, the Lombards, Saxons and Franks had formed scholae for members of these nationalities resident in Rome, and a little later trade guilds, founded for the mutual support and protection of their members against oppression, had already grown prosperous and strong enough to take an active part in insurrections and civil wars.

We find history repeating herself. The guilds placed under the protection of a Christian saint were constituted with the obligations to bury their dead, to succour the widows and orphans of poorer members, to lend them funds in case of need and to offer masses for their benefactors. All members swore to the articles of enrolment, the statutes were formally drawn up, and many of them are preserved to this day. As funds increased, hospitals were built for sick brethren, and schools for the children; dowries were given to the daughters, and the guild standard-bearers and men-at-arms swelled the ranks of mediæval processions just as those of their pagan predecessors had done. The colleges kept great feasts and festivals, and their messengers paraded the streets two and two bidding householders deck their windows with bunting for the coming festivities. They endowed convents and hospices and built churches, many of which still bear the name of their founders. S. Giuseppe de' Falegnami was built by the carpenters' guild; S. Caterina de' Funari by the ropemakers'; S. Lorenzo in Miranda in the Forum belonged to the apothecaries; S. Maria dell' Orto to the fruiterers and cheesemongers; S. Barbara to the librarians; S. Tommaso a' Cenci to the coachmen. Streets called after the cloakmakers, the ropemakers, the watchmakers and other craftsmen still mark the districts given over to these different industries.

The regulations imposed within the guilds pressed heavily upon the poorer members. The chief of each guild, the Capo d'arte exacted implicit obedience. He was the sole arbiter on all trade questions, on the opening of every new shop, and the examination of every new worker, and played the part of a petty tyrant. An arduous apprenticeship of seven years from the age of thirteen was followed by two or three years as worker, and the payment of heavy fees, before the position of master-worker was reached.

These powerful guilds hampered the development of trade by the establishment of monopolies, and they were more than once suppressed, and finally abolished in the seventeenth century. Many of them, however, survived, taking on the form of religious confraternities. These had coexisted with the trade guilds throughout the later middle ages. They were founded with a purely religious object, were a more spontaneous creation and were not under any State control. One confraternity was founded for succouring the sick, another for feeding pilgrims three days gratuitously, a third begged about the town for the benefit of prisoners, and a fourth prayed with condemned malefactors. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, this confraternity had the right to liberate one prisoner each year, who was afterwards taken in triumph round the town. Another gave dowries to deserving girls, and to this day the chapter of S. Peter's conducts a procession of the zitelle or maidens round the basilica on the octave of Corpus Christi. At the head of the procession the capitular umbrella is carried; those girls who are destined to a convent life wear a crown of flowers, and those to be married are accompanied each by her fiancé.

The confraternity of blacksmiths had the privilege of blessing animals on S. Antony's day (January 17) and the space before their church of S. Eligio, patron of blacksmiths, used to be crowded with horses, mules, dogs, sheep and oxen brought for the purpose. The owners paid large sums to the confraternity, and the Pope's horses and the equipages of Roman patricians arrived decked in flowers, the Piombino and Doria coachmen driving eighteen pairs in hand to the admiration of the crowds.

Since 1870 the confraternities have lost their importance and much of their amassed wealth, while such of the trade guilds as have not become purely religious confraternities, have resolved themselves into the modern trades unions and beneficent clubs.

CONVENT GARDEN OF SAN COSIMATO, VICOVARO
This convent in the Sabine hills stands on a plateau between the river Digentia (now Licenza) and the Anio. Near it is the site of Horace's Sabine farm. See page [169].

CHAPTER V

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA

Rome is set in the campagna romana. The strange beauty of this "Roman country," the birth country of the Latin League, assails the very doors of the Roman citizen, intruding its poetry, its stillness, from point after point of vantage, causing the beholder to lead every now and then a sort of dual existence, to lose his sense of time and place and personality, and with his feet planted in the city which was once the hub of the world to find himself dreaming in a cloister garden. The atmosphere, the combination of colour and light, is characteristically Roman, it suggests what is mystic but never fails in perfect clearness. With its mystic blues, its blue-greens, its silence, its vastness, the campagna presents none of the features of the pays riant of Florence where little olive-crowned hills, so cared for, so laughing, convey a message like its history definite, homogeneous, cultured, charming. But here a dead city has been besieged day and night by a dead campagna, big with its speech of silence, untilled yet a cradle of civilisation, with the complex language suited to a more difficult message, not entering into your humour but taking you into its secret, beautiful, austere, massive and careless of little things, yet yielding you out of its rich secular treasure details of beauty in abundance—here before you lies a history, a power, heedless of your judgment, but century after century looking back at you μειδιασαις' αθανατω προσωπω (meidiasais' athanatô prosôpô), as one of the finest lines in Greek verse says of Aphrodite, and recreating your universe for you.

Latium was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium—as though it were wide and spacious, suggesting the civilisation which was to spread from here, with its largeness, its spaciousness, its contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The ager antiquus, the Roman ager, however, was of much smaller extent, bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the Massa Festi between the seventh and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate—the so-called gentes. The extension of the campagna beyond the ager antiquus to form the ager publicus was the result of conquest, the territory thus acquired being let or assigned to private persons as tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and towns, the castelli romani, are so-called not as is popularly supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were colonised by Romans from the ager under the protection of the great feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus castello, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village which clustered round it.

Something of the dualism which possesses the soul of the Roman, which has I think always conveyed a message to his eyes, his ears, his heart, is derived from the scene before him. Life and death, the va et vient of the world's masters, "the desolation of Tyre and Sidon"—the Roman campagna has looked on both. Chateaubriand describes it as a desolate land, "with roads where no one passes," with "tombs and aqueducts for foliage" usurping the place of trees and life and movement; the stillness is broken by no happy country sounds, the eye sees no smoke ascend from the few ruined farmsteads. No nation it would seem has ventured to succeed the world's masters on their native soil, and the fields of Latium lie "as they were left by the iron spade of Cincinnatus or the last Roman plough." Decimated by plague and pest and deserted by man, malarial, fever-bound, the smiling country-seats of the world's conquerors have given place to tiny scattered colonies—as at Veii—haunted by a people emaciated by fever, where lads of eighteen, looking like boys of twelve, are certified by the parish priest as unable to bear arms. Along the world-famous roads lined by the Romans on either hand with the monuments of their dead, that they might retain a constant place in the thoughts of the living who journeyed on these most frequented ways, the ruined tombs are left in possession of the dead alone. The tombs, the hypogaea and mausolea of the great families who dwelt there, often remain standing when all trace of the villas to which they belonged have disappeared, as though one further proof were needed that this is indeed the land of the dead.

A TRACT OF THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT OUTSIDE THE CITY
The Sabine hills are in the distance. See pages [21]-[22].

Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life—some seventy cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators, made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these villas met the rheda outside the gates, drawn by its pair of fast-stepping horses. These light carriages were gaily painted with some classical subject, as the peasants' carts still are in Naples, and a leather hood with purple hangings protected the owner from the heat. At all the cross-roads are fountains for the use of man and beast, near which a seat shaded by ilex or olive awaits the tired traveller, as we may see it still awaiting him for example at the Porta Furba on the way to Frascati. Excellent roads kept in excellent repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, trees, shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme, but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained English box hedge. The shrubs are tortured into the semblance of beasts and snakes, the name of the owner being sometimes cut in the foliage, a device which may still be seen in the modern grounds of the Villa Pamfili-Doria. The most conspicuous features of the campagna from classical times are the aqueducts, stretching right across the agro to the walls of Rome; gigantic remains of the Claudian aqueduct extend for six miles, and the ancient peperino arches of the favourite acqua Marcia, which cross the Claudian aqueduct at Porta Furba, still bring water to the city. As classic Rome is represented by the aqueducts and mausolea, so feudal Rome is represented by the towers which rose in the campagna between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries—the early semaphores on the coast-line to give warning of the approach of Saracen or Corsair, the vedette towers which figured in the baronial wars, and the later fortified towers of the baron's castle. Last but not least Christianity has strewed the campagna with chapels and shrines, the earliest of which supplanted the cult of the local pagan divinity in the ages when Christianity was gradually driving the religion of imperial Rome into the villages and hill retreats. So S. Sylvester replaced the woodland deities, Michael supplanted the god of war, S. George became the Christian protector against the depredations of ferocious beasts, S. Caesarius replaced the genius of the imperial Caesars. Of the same period are the basilicas erected over the sepulcretum of a martyr at the mouth of a catacomb.

Several causes led to the abandonment of the agro romano. The neglect of the roads and the ruin of the aqueducts, which cut off the water supply, the poverty of the despoiled landlords, and the general insecurity following the incursions of the barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought about a rapid depopulation and gradually turned the agro into a pest-bound desert. It would seem that malarial fever is virtually indigenous to the soil of the agro, besetting every region as soon as man deserts it. It did not make its appearance, we may suppose, in the inhabited towns of the classical period, but that it existed before the middle ages, the popular date for its appearance, is shown by the allusions of classical writers since the time of Augustus and by the existence of several temples to the goddess Fever. In Rome itself it is the persistent belief, which appears to be abundantly confirmed by statistics, that the more building is extended and the horribly noisy paved streets are multiplied, the faster the evil diminishes; for the malarial miasma is held to be an exhalation of the soil, and where earth is freshly turned there is danger. As we all know, it has been quite recently shown that the microbe of malaria is carried by mosquitoes, mosquitoes abound where water abounds, and one of the reasons for the unhealthiness of the agro, one of the greatest obstacles to its reclamation, is that there are not less than ten thousand little water-courses which filter down to the valleys, creating marsh and stagnant pools. The evil may really date from the last years of the republic, which saw the displacement of the small freeholders by the large landowners, of the old free labour by slave labour, and the consequent fatal depopulation of the agro. But during the middle ages, from the sixth century onwards, all the causes were intensified, and the difficulties which now beset the secular problem of the restoration of agriculture in the Roman campagna and the expulsion of malaria, resolve themselves "into a vicious circle"; for men cannot live there until the malaria is exorcised, and until men live there the malaria will remain in possession. No less than seventy-nine measures for what is known in Italy as the bonifica dell' agro romano have from time to time been projected; and whether Italy will succeed where the popes failed is still doubtful. The initial necessity, the drainage of the campagna, seems in itself to be a task too great for Hercules. For the last four years the military Croce Rossa has perambulated the campagna during the summer and autumn months, combating the malaria with doctors and medicines. It is hoped that this will be followed by the establishment of a larger number of permanent sanitary stations. Since 1870 millions of eucalyptus trees have been planted as air purifiers especially at the little railway stations and other inhabited sites. It is not forgotten that the agricultural colonies of the classical age were once the saving of Rome, and within the last few years similar schemes have been devised in the hope that the birth-land of the Roman people may become once more the home of agriculture. Such a colonia agricola for Roman lads, outside the Flaminian gate, was founded by a visitor who has since become the wife of an Italian well known for similar enterprise in Italian Africa.

CAMPAGNA ROMANA, FROM TIVOLI
See page [78].

The moral wants of the agro have appealed to the sympathies and occupied the attention of the excellent society of young Catholics, the Circolo San Pietro, which has opened and furnished thirty-four of the closed and neglected churches and chapels of the agro for the use of the scattered population; mass is also said in the hayfields on Sunday for the haymakers, on a wain drawn by oxen, and a very charming little picture of this scene has been prepared under the auspices of the President, Prince Barberini. There are within the city many hundreds of extra-parochial clergy—monks, friars, clerks regular, missionaries, and members of the various ecclesiastical congregations, with scores of churches and chapels where hundreds of masses are daily celebrated, and where expositions of the Sacrament, novenas, and benedictions are multiplied. But just outside the walls there are people who never hear mass, who live and die without the consolation of religion, "without a priest." When the Circolo San Pietro set their hand to the good work of opening the churches and chapels of the agro their difficulty consisted in finding priests to minister in them without payment. "Your Indies are here" said the Pope of his day when S. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, wished to go abroad as a missionary, and Pius X. has recently echoed the saying. There is only one confraternity in the city which imposes on itself the duty of seeking and burying the bodies of those who die from sudden illness or from violence in the campagna. This well-known black "Confraternity of Prayer and Death" accompanies the funerals of the poor gratuitously. It is affiliated to the Florentine Misericordia.

The agro romano is divided into nearly 400 farms owned by half as many proprietors. The largest of these farms comprise between 8 and 18,000 acres, the two smallest 5 acres each. About half remains ecclesiastical property, while a third belongs to the great Roman families, one-sixth being still owned by peasant holders. The proprietors allow the big estates to be farmed by the so-called mercanti di campagna, who take them on a three or nine years' tenure. These large merchants of country produce keep a fattore on the farm who is the actual manager; he is both farmer and bailiff. The cattle of the agro are, Signor Tomassetti tells us, its most considerable inhabitants. There are 32,000 sheep, 18,000 cows, 10,000 goats, 7000 horses and mules, 6000 oxen, and 1800 buffaloes. The oxen were brought by Trajan from the basin of the Danube, the buffaloes came with the Lombards and were originally natives of India.

Beyond the agro are the castelli romani, the hill towns of the Alban and Sabine district. There above Frascati lies the site of Tusculum, the mighty rival of Rome; to the right is Monte Cavo the highest peak in the Alban range where stood the temple of the "Latian Jupiter," sanctuary and rallying point of the Latin League. Below lies Albano of which See the English Pope, Hadrian IV., was Cardinal Bishop. In the Sabine range is the famous city of Tibur (Tivoli), the villa of Hadrian, and S. Benedict's town of Subiaco. To the east is the rock Soracte, "the pyramid of the campagna" and the meeting place of Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins; while a score of little townships in both ranges of hills record the feudal families of Rome, and harbour the descendants of the Latin rural plebs. The life led here is not the village life of England, but the life of small, primitive townships, with a mayor, a commune, and the customs of the middle ages. There are no manufactories and no crafts, and there are no cottages, the dwellings being divided into floors as in the big towns.

SUBIACO FROM THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT

The great business of the year is the vintage, which takes place in the Roman campagna in October; in land held under manorial rights, however, the tenants must await the lord's pleasure. The vines are trained round short canes set close together, and the grapes are collected in wooden receptacles narrowing towards the base: these are emptied into the tino, whence they are pressed, by the old biblical method of treading with the feet, into an enormous cask below called the botte. Here the grapes are left for several days to ferment, the skins rising to the top. In the little yards of filthy houses one may see the grapes being boiled in a cauldron, an illegitimate substitute for fermentation. The wine of the castelli romani is famous; every district makes both red and white, the latter being generally preferred in Rome itself; the white "Frascati" and white "Genzano" are famous; Albano wine is praised by Horace, and excellent "Marino" is still made in the vineyards of the Scotch college which has its summer quarters there. The Sabines yield the "Velletri," a good red wine but difficult to find pure; Genazzano and Olevano also produce an excellent grape, but the difficulty in some of these small towns is to find a vine grower to take sufficient pains with his wine making. Colouring matter is usually employed for the red wines, the least noxious resource being a plentiful admixture of elderberry. The wine made one year is not as a rule drunk till the next; it is not prepared for exportation, but is kept, or sent to Rome, in barrels, from which it is decanted for retail commerce into flasks where the wine is protected with a few drops of oil in lieu of a cork. The wine is also sold by the barile (sixty litres), mezzo barile, and quartarolo (fifteen litres), the usual price given in Roman households being about seven francs the quartarolo. Every trattoria and restaurant, however, sells wine by the Roman half-litre measure—the fojetta—and the prices 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 may be seen chalked up outside the wine-shops. Outside vineyards and rural trattorie, where wine is sold, a bough is hung out as a sign, reminding one of the origin of the proverb "Good wine needs no bush."

The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "L'olio si sente" (One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "Ojo è sempre ojo, ma strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sarà?" (Oil is always oil, but who knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most beautiful things in the Italian country—and its grey-green colour, with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be over after the middle of February.

The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same Latin plebs, except that they no longer serve the world's masters and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great classical civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the general outlines the same people—but more not less barbarous than of yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised, by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("è il destino" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and coarse as the cruel are coarse. The inhabitants of the castelli romani were described by a compatriot as "pieni di superbia, debiti, e pidocchi" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to hear mass in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house, there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised his gun and calmly shot his brother in the presence of their mother. The mother and son were punctual in their obligations to church and convent, and the arciprete of the parish journeyed to Rome to bear witness at the trial that the murderer was "il fior del paese," (the flower of the flock). When the man was acquitted, the priest had no better lesson to inculcate for the community of which this was the "pearl," than to accompany the local band which went forth to welcome the fratricide back to the village which held the still fresh grave of the brother he had treacherously murdered.

GARDEN OF THE MONASTERY OF SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
This fifth-century monastery (restored five hundred years later) was dedicated to the sister of S. Benedict, the founder of Western Monasticism. The first printing press in Italy was established here.

It is commonly believed, even by the educated, that "things" happen in the campagna which happen nowhere else, possession, obsession, "overlooking," witchery. Hysterical manifestations are indeed common at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical. Some sixteen years ago the government determined to check this source of hysteria, and directed the rural clergy to perform no more exorcisms. I visited a friary in the Sabines at this time and saw the work of the evil spirits in the shape of a packet of hairpins (complete with its sample pin), tresses of hair, or a good fat nail which had been swallowed by the energumen and which under the emotional stress attending the exorcism—the dim light, the monotonous droning of the frati who are saying their office behind the high altar—are brought up again. I enquired of the Father Guardian what happened now that exorcism was forbidden? Well, a woman had been there only the day before, and he had explained to her that he could only pronounce "a simple benediction," which had resulted after a quarter of an hour before the altar in the ejectment of the objects shown me. Such an end to an ancient Christian ministry destined to free poor human beings from the toils of Satan gives food for reflection. The secular conflict between religion and science has set foot even in the Roman campagna. If in England we have our Christian scientists, in Italy the authorities have to cope with a people whose remedy for the bite of a rabid animal is a mass said at the shrine of some special madonna—both put faith before a trust in "dry powder," and there has never yet been an age of the world in which there have not been those who thought them right. The popular sanctuaries in Italy, indeed, help to keep up much that is undesirable. At the April festa at Genazzano a peasant will kneel down before the miraculous image of the Madonna which hangs, like Mohammad's coffin, without visible support, and having made his prayer will rise and shake his fist at the picture, exclaiming "Bada, Maria!" (Beware, Mary!) Many things, thin silver hearts, candles, and other dainties have been promised if the desired favour be granted, but if the Madonna be not tempted by these to accede to the wishes of her worshipper, she must look out for herself. Wax images can be laid out to melt in the sun, there to learn how agreeable is a continued drought, statuettes can be stood in the corner with their faces to the wall, a rival patron saint can be pitched into the river, by the same hand which brings gifts. "See how you like it!" Does not the primitive man create his god by looking into himself? and Caliban with his "So he!" inaugurates theology.

Another Roman picture is afforded us by the lottery. It is to be found, indeed, all over Italy, but we are only concerned with its influence in Roman life, where it has always flourished, first under the popes when a prelate presided to bless the opening of the lottery and now under the State, for the Romans are born gamblers. Seventeen millions a year are raised in this way out of the pockets of the poorest of the poor. The excuse made is that as the people will gamble the only safeguard against gigantic frauds on the gamblers is to make the lottery a department of the State. Certainly it would be absolutely impossible to trust to fair play if the choice of the numbers depended on any private persons; even if they were honest, no Italian would believe it. The "Book of the Art," with its rough hideous drawings of the things represented by the lottery numbers—one to ninety—is the only book which the unlettered Italian can read. Every event national or domestic becomes the subject of play. You "play" the assassination of the King or the death of the Pope, the accident which has happened to your neighbour your master or your mistress, and you play the death of your kinsfolk. In order to get the money the people have recourse to the monte di pietà—the pawnshop—and the women will pawn the mattress off the bed. Sometimes the choice lies between the two chief pleasures of the Roman, eating and the lottery, and it is the best proof of the fascination of the latter that it is so often preferred to the joys of the table. In every tiny village as in every great city throughout Italy there is a banco dell lotto, and the winning numbers are exhibited over its doors every Saturday. Five numbers—for example, 5, 9, 27, 36, 50—appear each week. This is called the cinquina. But you can win the ambo (two correct numbers), the terno (the most usual of all), or the quaterna. Not more than five numbers can be played, but if you "plump" for the cinquina you gain a big sum; or you can declare your intention to play for all four possible combinations. In this case you gain little if the cinquina comes out. It is the same with the terno, if you plump for it you gain much more. But the gain also depends on the amount you put into the lottery, and any sum from six centimes can be played. When Pius IX. died a Roman jeweller won 40,000 scudi (£8000). How can one expect the gambling of the poor to cease when even twelve centimes (less than five farthings) may bring fifty francs?

The Roman goes to the lottery with all the paraphernalia and a good deal of the sentiment of devotion. "Se ci aiuti Iddio e la Madonna," they exclaim—If God and the Madonna will help us—we shall win the terno. There are several "tips" for winning. One which is as awesome as it is efficacious consists in starting the kyrie eleison—hardly recognisable in its popular dress as crielleisonne—and then say on your knees thirteen ave marias to as many madonnas. Having invoked Baldassare, Gasper, and Marchionne (Melchoir)—though what the three wise kings have to do in that galère is not very obvious—you go out of the house, taking care to answer nothing if any one calls you. You go straight to the church of S. John Beheaded, where those who suffered capital punishment used to be interred, and then whatever you see or hear inside or out, look it up in the "Book of the Art" and you are safe to win. Another bella divozione for the same end is to go up the steps of Ara Coeli on your knees reciting a requiem aeternum or a de profundis on each step. A large number of the people praying so devoutly to the Madonna di Sant' Agostino (whose other principal care is the safety of childbirth) are praying for luck in the lottery—praying or threatening, for the one is very kin to the other in the primitive mind as it is in the magic of all primitive peoples. Some of these may have been conducting a solitary nocturnal vigil, having risen from their beds, kindled two candles, and proceeded to carry through one or other of the belle divozioni.

HOLY STAIRS AT THE SAGRO SPECO
The ravine (above the monastery of S. Scholastica) where S. Benedict took refuge from the corruption of Rome, became the site of the Sagro Speco, the sacred cavern, with the ninth-century monastery of San Benedetto. The peasants of Subiaco ascend the stairs here represented on their knees, as the Scala Santa in Rome is ascended, and, occasionally, even the numerous stairs of Ara Coeli. See page [86].

In the country-places the great stand-by is the Capuchin, who has a reputation for suggesting lucky numbers. When he comes collecting alms in village or city the poor man asks him for a likely terno. He is not supposed to suggest these numbers, but he and the people understand each other, and every word, every allusion, which falls from his lips is thereupon eagerly noted. If he mentions a recent assassination, you "play" number 72 morto assassinato, then the numbers indicating the day or some special circumstance, "a quarrel," "the knife" with which it was done, "jealousy," "a man," or "a woman." The element of chance, the ineradicable belief in luck, makes a man sure to play if three numbers come unbidden into his head. No pious person dreams of the "numbers of the Madonna"—6, 8, and 15—without at once "playing" them. The Madonna evidently intends "to do something" for you; indeed "if the Madonna suggests numbers" it is a safe thing, you can put five francs on it. It is popularly said that 2, 3, 5, 6 are numbers which always come out, these and their combinations. Fifty-eight is the number indicating the Pope, and 52, morta che parla, is played by good simple women who have dreamt of their dead mother. The industrious working middle classes and even the better classes "play," though the latter play sub rosa. On Saturday the people collect round the little lottery offices—some of them have waited to pay their bills until they ascertained their luck. On the appearance of the fateful numbers there is a general talk, a general lamentation: "If I had only done so-and-so." "If I had only played morto instead of ferito" (" dead" instead of only "wounded.") For the Roman the whole known world sacred or profane is absorbed in the business of the lottery. Thus one of the popular sonnets in the Roman dialect describes how the flight into Egypt came about. On the 27th of December the Patriarch Joseph is snoring in bed, dreaming of lottery numbers, when an angel appears to him and says: "See here, old man, what a fine festa there is going to be over number 28" (the 28th of December commemorates the massacre of the Innocents). Thereupon S. Joseph wakes like one crazy, hires a young donkey, and takes the Madonna and her child off to Egypt.

Many English travellers to this favoured country of the gods since the days when Vulcan and Minerva vied with each other as to which should bestow the best gift on Italy, must have wished that nothing more sensitive than the olive had been placed in the hands of its countrymen. Signor Gabelli has described the burly Roman carter beating his horses or mules, the red cap which hangs over one ear matching his flaming face, afire with triumphant pride in this exercise of brute force and dominion. No one rebukes him. On the contrary the clergy delight to dwell on the distinction between the duties owed to men and the absence of all obligation towards the brutes. The distinction, of course, works no better in modern than in ancient times, and means nothing less than the systematic brutalisation of the Italian people. The doctrine that animals (like "the sun and moon") were "made for man" is held to justify all mishandling of them, all domineering and callousness. This is frankly immoral; and until priests overcome their reluctance to set forth ethics in a way that does not involve a break with the order and march of all human civilisation, theology will continue to accommodate itself to racial characteristics, and specious theological propositions will still serve as a cloak for bluntness of moral perception. Only this year a marchese told me that he "could not admit that animals feel." The effect of such sentiments in a squire among an illiterate tenantry may be readily imagined; the ignorant Italian gentleman justifies theology by the astounding proposition that all sentient creatures below man have been provided with a set of non-sensitive nerves; the rustic finds in the pleasure which it affords him to know that this proposition is untrue an ampler justification of the ways of Providence.

The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming assistance against them from the government. One of the best known Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi. In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the brigands are the chief herdsmen called butteri, in blue jacket and brass buttons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A primitive and classical feature of campagna labour is the singing with which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the accompaniment—the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights which pass these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour, protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful species known as the lupetto romano—the Roman wolfling—balances himself on the cargo and constitutes himself the protector and companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across the sunburnt plain of the agro the men drop asleep, and it is then easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer salutes as he passes, still exist in some of the untouched parts of Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the butteri and the wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country" but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly reminded, when figures like these with their pastoral divinities took possession of the Palatine hill.

LITTLE GLEANER IN THE CAMPAGNA

Italy has always been the land of Saturn, the nature god. Her festivals were the festivals of the doings and events of nature, the Lupercalia of Lupercus, the Palilia of Pales; she was and she remains pagan, if pagan is to mean the natural as opposed to the supernatural attitude towards life—natural and humanistic as opposed to mystic and ideal. Under the new names lie concealed the old gods. The true Latin goddess is Pales, the earth mother, the source of grace, the real giver of gifts to her devotees—enshrined, dedicated to the gospel under a hundred aspects of what Bonghi has happily called that "gentilissimo fiore del cattolicismo," the cult of the Madonna. Some unseemly tracts and pictures have represented Christ as turning away from the leprosy of the sinner's sin, and it is Mary whose compassion for the prodigal never wavers, who persuades the Christ to have pity. That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the Italian mind. The nature goddess, the mother, the earth and its fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never parted with it.

It is the hour of the god Pan, that midday hour which Pan alone can withstand. The sun is high in the heavens, the earth exhales heat, round about are the great silences. Nothing else stirs, nothing moves, nothing breathes. The great repose is indeed tense with a great activity, but a hush of nature greets this supreme hour of the sun in its glory—the world lies dead at the feet of the giver of life. The hour of the god Pan is the mystery which is daily renewed for the Italian; what has remained constant amid all changes is the nature-myth, and the secrets it is always whispering to the children of its soil.

CHAPTER VI

THE ROMAN MÉNAGE

As in other European towns, the custom in Rome is to live in flats. The houses are high, of no particular style of architecture, and in the older portions of the city they overshadow a labyrinth of narrow streets paved with large uneven slabs of stone. Here are no side walks for pedestrians who with an indifference born of long practice walk habitually in the middle of the roadway, moving leisurely to one side in obedience to the warning cries of the drivers, or patiently waiting and flattening themselves against the shop doors if two vehicles desire to pass one another. Long ragged grooves scraped along the house walls and at street corners by the hubs of heavy cart-wheels, testify to centuries of clumsy driving.

There have always existed in Rome, however, a certain number of villas within the walls, and their timbered parks and terraced gardens ornamented with fountains and statues, have been one of the characteristic features of the city. Their wealthy owners probably possessed a sombre palace as well along the Corso, but the villas were pleasant in the warm weather, and two centuries ago wonderful Arcadian entertainments were given beneath the shade of their ilex groves. Some of these villas still exist in their original state or as public property, many have been crowded out and demolished and their gardens have been cut up into building plots. The taste for villa-building is, however, not yet dead, and of late years small dwellings in a Baroque style have been springing up like mushrooms in the new quarters, and immense rents are asked for them.

Roman flats or apartments as they are called, vary from magnificent suites of thirty or forty rooms to a small domain of three or four. They can be leased even in the most princely of palaces which are so much too large for the requirements of modern life that their owners are glad to let what they cannot use.

SEA-HORSE FOUNTAIN IN THE VILLA BORGHESE
The glades of Roman villas offer us some of the rare green effects, the colouring which prevails being that in [picture 27]. See page [46].

The single entrance-gateway, which is locked at night, is under the charge of a porter whose appearance varies according to the social standing of his employer from an imposing figure in gold lace and a cocked hat, to a surly fellow out at heels and elbows who ekes out a precarious livelihood by cobbling or carpentering while he keeps a vigilant but no friendly eye upon the incomings and outgoings of the inhabitants of the wretched tenement under his care. Often, even in good houses, a single room by the side of the gateway serves the porter with his wife and family for bedroom, kitchen, living room, and workshop, and sometimes the same number of human beings are stowed away at night in a mere hole, windowless and doorless, under the stairs. Yet this employment is so sought after that a cabinet minister's portfolio is said to be easier to obtain than a position as house-porter.

One or more public staircases lead up from the central courtyard. Before 1870 it was not obligatory to light these, and many a crime has been committed on a long dark flight, the only witness the dwindling oil-lamp before an image of the Madonna.

Even now a front door will seldom be opened at once in answer to your ring; a little shutter is pushed back, and you are first inspected through a grating. Or you are greeted with a shrill chi è, and only when you have given the reassuring reply, amici, "friends," will you be admitted. A middle-class Italian household is not very approachable in the morning. Although extremely early risers—no hour seems too early in Rome for people to be up and about—the house remains en déshabillé till the afternoon. The beds are unmade, the mistress shuffles about in dressing-gown and slippers, adjuring her maid-of-all-work in shrill tones; she even goes out to shop unwashed, in an old skirt and jacket. At first sight all the rooms appear to be bedrooms which are used indifferently to sit in. Nevertheless one room, generally the smallest and least attractive, is set aside as the "reception room." The family never sit in it, and never enter it except to receive their visitors. It is kept carefully closed and shuttered, and if you arrive unexpectedly the maid lets in some light for you with pretty apologies while you wait in the doorway afraid of falling in the dark over the innumerable objects, what-nots and small tables, which crowd the room. A jute-covered sofa of the most uncomfortable pattern, with a strip of carpet before it, is de rigueur, and a visitor would consider herself slighted if she were not ushered to this post of honour. There are no carpets on any of the stone floors, and no stoves or fireplaces. If there happens to be a chimney, it is considered unwholesome and is blocked up. There are no comfortable sofas and no lounge chairs. If the weather is fine and warm all is well with such a household. But Rome knows fog, frost, and snow, and though none last for long, wintry days may succeed each other and bitter winds blow down upon the city from the snow-capped Sabine mountains, and then the Romans, forced to stay at home, uncomplainingly wear their coats and jackets within doors to keep body and soul together, and sit warming their fingers over little pans of glowing wood-ash.

Like cats, they have a constitutional horror of rain, and will prefer to remain indoors than risk a wetting in search of some place of amusement, or to keep an engagement. Every carter, every beggar, every peasant carries an umbrella; horses and draught oxen are swathed in flannel and mackintosh in the wet, and the drivers of the little open cabs cower beneath leathern aprons and enormous umbrellas, under the dripping edges of which their "fares" creep in and out as best they can. Brigands only, so it is popularly believed, carry no umbrellas, and by this you may know them.

The Romans' cheerful acquiescence in what we should consider considerable hardship is nothing less than admirable. After long working hours spent in government offices for example, which are for the most part despoiled monasteries and always bitterly cold, they return to their homes where creature comforts as we understand them are unknown, not because they cannot be afforded, but because they are not desired or missed; and their gaiety or their enjoyment of one another's society is in nowise diminished because they spend the evening sitting at a dining-room table on straight-backed chairs.

On the other hand much attention is devoted to the preparation of the meals. Food is daintily prepared and cooked, well flavoured and seasoned. Meat and vegetables are generally cooked in oil- or bacon-fat, and no Roman would look at a dish of food plainly boiled or roasted. Even the poor are skilful in concocting a savoury dish with polenta (ground Indian corn) bread and potatoes flavoured with a dash of onion or tomatoes. All cooking and eating utensils are kept scrupulously clean, and the dirtiest contadino will wipe out his glass carefully before he is satisfied as to its fitness for his use. Romans break their fast with a cup of black coffee and bread without butter, but it is quite usual for them to eat nothing at all until twelve or one o'clock. Their midday dinner begins with either soup or macaroni (minestra or minestra ascuitta). If with the soup, then the meat which has been boiled to make it is served next with vegetable garnishings. The macaroni is served with butter, cheese, and tomatoes and there are numberless tasty ways of preparing it. Half a kilogram (eighteen ounces) is considered the portion for each person. If the meal begins with macaroni, this dish would be followed by meat in umido, a favourite Roman dressing of tomatoes and onions. People who live quite simply will never touch stale bread, and it is no unusual thing for a fresh batch to be delivered at the door three times a day. Salad, cheese, and eggs done in a variety of ways form the staple of the Roman's evening meal.

It is a perpetual wonder to the foreigner what elaborate and excellently cooked dinners can be produced in the unpromising Roman kitchens. Larders and sculleries are almost unknown. A white marble sink—marble fills the lowliest offices in Rome—and a tap in a corner do duty for the latter. The kitchen is often a slip of a room, and the "range" is little more than a table of brick and tiles fitted with small holes for holding charcoal, and with a shaft above for carrying away the unwholesome fumes. Upon these small holes all the cooking is done; the charcoal is fanned into a glow with a feather fan, and if there are many pots and saucepans they must take their turn upon the tiny fires. Scuttles do not exist, and the stock of charcoal for use is kept on the floor beneath the range.

ORNAMENTAL WATER, VILLA BORGHESE

Italians of all classes are very fastidious about the cleanliness of their beds, and in this particular their habits contrast favourably with the antediluvian practices prevalent in England, for not only is every article of bedding aired at the window daily, but all the mattresses are picked to pieces and the wool pulled out and beaten every year. This process is carried on generally on the flat house-roofs when the weather is sunny; a mattress-maker with his assistant, his bench and his combs, coming round to do it for you for the modest fee of one lira and a half the mattress.

Beyond this the Roman's standard of cleanliness fails altogether. Floors are never washed; they serve to tramp about on in thick boots, to spit upon, and to receive matches and cigar-ash. Doors, painted woodwork, walls, are always soiled; if there is a terrace it becomes at once unsightly and the receptacle for hideous refuse. There is complete indifference to cleanliness as a first condition of hygiene, and it is not unusual to find fowls kept in the kitchen of a good bourgeois house, which take their walks abroad on the balcony and pick up their living under the table.

Even in the houses of the great, where many servants are kept, there is often the same Spartan indifference to comfort. Great halls are kept unwarmed except for a brazier of glowing wood-ash, and fireplaces, if they exist, are only sparingly used in the sitting-rooms. Bathrooms are rare, and the habit of the daily bath is almost unknown in a city which once boasted the finest baths the world has seen.

If the Roman does not know how to make himself comfortable indoors, no one knows better how to enjoy himself in the open air. The ragged loafer suns himself in the public squares, the workman dozes away his dinner hour at full length under the shelter of a wall; it is in the streets that a Roman holiday is spent. Parents and children of the working classes, the father carrying the baby, stroll about happily for hours, or they walk out beyond the city gates to rest and refresh themselves at one of the wayside osterie. Here they gather round the rude tables under a shelter of bamboo canes and eat and drink according to their means. The most forbidding country eating-house can rise to the requirements of better-class customers, and at a pinch can furnish a cleanly cooked and quite palatable dish of macaroni or eggs and vegetable fried in oil for forty or fifty centimes the plate, which is abundant for two. All day long on festa in warm spring weather, chairs and benches outside every wine-shop and eating-house are crowded with a changing throng of holiday makers enjoying themselves simply and harmlessly; and on such days, at a likely corner, you may come across a country man or woman in charge of a huge wild boar roasted whole, stuffed with meat and sage and garlanded with green, from which a succulent morsel will be cut for you, then and there should you desire it, for a trifling sum.

VILLAGE STREET AT ANTICOLI, IN THE SABINE HILLS

Out-of-door pleasures appeal no less to the better classes. Fashionable Rome drives daily in the afternoon along the Corso and round the Pincio, the carriages drawing up at intervals near the bandstand. So dear to the Roman heart is the possession of smart clothes and a showy carriage and horses, that entire families will live with parsimony within doors that they may afford these luxuries. During long afternoon hours men will congregate outside the Parliament House and along the Corso to meet and chat with their friends, and chairs and tables with their fashionable occupants block the pavements outside the cafés and restaurants, obliging the passer-by to step out into the roadway.

The Roman of the poorer class carries on as much of his domestic life also as he can in the open air. Chairs, kitchen tables, and wash-tubs are dragged out into the streets. Food is prepared and eaten, clothes are washed, and the occupations of sewing, knitting, cobbling, and carpentering are conducted in the open, subject to a lively attention to what is going on in the street.

Occasionally a basket attached to a string comes bobbing down from an upper window accompanied by a shrill message: Would Sor' Annunziata have the kindness to buy a copy of the Messagero just being cried in the street? she will find a soldo in the basket. Or would she tell that good-for-nothing vagabond Mark Antony or Hannibal (the raggedest urchins always rejoice in some such name), who is playing morra round the corner, to run at once and buy a ha'porth of white beans. The errand accomplished, the basket is drawn up with its burden, and then blissful hours of leisure slip by in desultory talk with neighbours at their doors and windows opposite, chairs tilted back comfortably against the house wall in the mellow Roman sunlight. In the quiet piazzas, and in shady nooks by the city gates, humble folk can be shaved for a small sum by barbers who ply their trade in the open and pay no shop rent. It is even quite usual in the hot weather for fashionable coiffeurs to move their client's chair outside the door and continue shaving operations there without exciting any comment.

Before reading and writing were made obligatory, public letter-writers were common, and they still can be met with in Via Tor de' Specchi, in the shelter of the Salarian gate, and in other quiet places, the group of anxious clients waiting their turn round the table testifying to the inefficiency of a compulsory education Act. Girls used to dictate their love-letters to these scribes, and perhaps still do so, and even the boys did and do write to San Luigi for his festa on 21st June—the letters, tied up with blue ribbon, being subsequently deposited on his altar.

The fashion of open-air washing tanks, once universal, is gradually passing away. Outside the walls, the women wash their clothes in the streams and rivers, and inside the city, by the new Ponte Margherita, one of the old public washing-places may still be seen, protected only by a roof and surrounded by a crowd of women in bright-coloured cotton bodices and skirts, washing clothes in the cold turbid water and scrubbing them vigorously on the stone slabs in order that what is left of them after this heroic treatment may at least be clean.

Owing to the smallness and darkness of all Roman provision shops, most of the inspection of wares and all the talking, bargaining, and quarrelling is perforce done upon the pavement. Many of the Roman shops still consist of a narrow vault, with no outlet of any sort at the further end, the whole front being closed with a shutter at night. In the early morning all the cooks in Rome and all the general servants are afoot in the streets buying provisions, and they crowd around the temporary market stalls set up in the small piazzas under gay umbrellas, filling the air with their noisy disputes. The curb-stones are occupied by peasant women and their baskets of country produce, which from this central position they extol to the passers-by. These women have walked into the city at dawn carrying their baskets on their heads, and at the gates their poor little merchandise has been overhauled with no gentle hand by the Customs officers, every egg and turnip has been counted, and its octroi duty paid.

It takes the foreign resident some time to grasp the idiosyncrasies of Roman shops. A linen draper looks at you with kindly pity if you ask him for ribbons or haberdashery, which can only be obtained at a mercer's devoted to this trade. A grocer only sells dry goods, the numerous shops entitled pizzicherie deal exclusively with cheese, lard, butter, bacon, salted fish, and preserves. Your fishmonger will only sell fish, your butcher closes most inconveniently between twelve and five, and will seldom sell mutton and never lamb, which must be sought at a poulterer's. Macaroni is provided by your baker, or it can be bought in one of the numerous small shops licensed to sell salt and tobacco, where you may also obtain postage stamps, soap, tin tacks, china plates, and mineral waters.

All the transactions of daily life have to be conducted in Rome, as every householder soon learns, at the cost of a continuous and exasperating conflict with a class to whom it is second nature to cheat and deceive, to falsify weights and measures, who have no standard of honesty in small things, and who will always say what will please you or themselves rather than what is. The visitor naturally is their peculiar prey. To exploit him is traditional in Rome. In a town with no resources of its own, there is the foreigner and his purse to look to; and he falls an easy victim to people whose language he imperfectly understands, and who are past-masters of all the deceitful arts. The seasons are short and a plentiful harvest must be raked in while they last. Shops in the best quarters will raise the value of their goods a hundred per cent at the sight of a foreign face. Unless the legend "fixed prices" appears in the window for the benefit of the customer, the shopmen will expect you to bargain over every purchase—to haggle for half an hour over a question of six sous or ten is indeed the only commercial instinct they possess. They will generally ask about twice as much as they mean ultimately to accept, and, to their credit be it said, it is not only for the sake of the francs more or less, but quite as much for the excitement of the sport. "I say 200 lire, now it is for you to say something;" or, "The price is so-and-so, what will you give?" are the preludes to some really enjoyable quarters of an hour. The foreigner who pays unquestioningly what he is asked is a poor-spirited creature not worth fleecing.

Romans still reckon up their rent or their wages in the old papal currency of a scudo (five francs), and food is cried about the streets at so much the paolo (half a franc). Half a paolo (or giulio) the grosso, two paoli the papetto, three paoli a testone, and the halfpenny or baioccho are still the familiar names which come most easily to the tongue. The difference between the old weights and the new, the papal scales and the decimal system of united Italy, is a fruitful source of gain to the tradesman. He clings, partly from sentiment and partly from self-interest, to the old unit of weight, the pound of twelve ounces, and as it appears nowhere on the official scales, he reckons it at one-third of the kilogram (330 grams) or, if you do not watch him carefully, at 300 grams, thus profiting from 1/100 to 1/10 on every kilo (1000 grams) sold. Similarly the Roman measure for firewood is a tightly packed cart-load, but the wood-seller is an adept at making a cart look full when it is not, and your only resource is to buy wood by the weight. Even then, if you desire to receive the quantity you order and pay for, you must not only see it weighed but you must keep an eye upon it on its journey to your house, or it will become beautifully less for the benefit of the carter. The charcoal for kitchen use you buy in a measured sack of a given weight. The first time you bestow your custom you are delighted with quality and quantity, but with each order the sack shrinks in size, and when you expostulate the coal-seller will answer you unblushing that if you insist upon having the coal weighed he cannot supply it at the price!

There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept there is no alternative. The donna di servizio or maid-of-all-work goes out each morning to spend an enjoyable half-hour or more, meeting her friends and making shrill bargains at the shop doors. An Italian's servant will buy a halfpenny worth of bacon-fat or lard or preserved tomato, and as such small quantities cannot be weighed she receives a spoonful of lard or a dab of butter wrapped up in a leaf, and the whole is tied up and carried home in a brilliant cotton handkerchief. The man-cook will not condescend to one of these shopping handkerchiefs. He will carry a few parcels, but he generally returns, a small boy in his wake bearing a basket on his head wherein all his purchases are displayed. The prevalent custom in Rome is for the servant to give the least possible price for all she buys, and to charge her mistress a higher one, the balance going into her own pocket. Servants of unimpeachable honesty in every other respect will succumb to this temptation. If serving foreigners, they can often double their wages, and so well is the practice recognised that the mistress who is too watchful to permit it is spoken of as giving only a mesata secca, a dry wage.