Letters from Italy/Chapter 13

Upon my honour, I have not omitted a single celebrated monument or arch, nor left out a single museum or mausoleum or baths, and now I will tell you about some more modest places; I have a mania for wandering, and when I wanted to sit down and regard nothing I preferred taking a seat by San Lorenzo, where there is a little fountain, rather than in the shadow of the Colosseum, where a scared guide explains to waterproof Englishmen whence flowed that water and where they have left the historic lions.

I have already written about San Prassede and San Pudenziana; I think of you once more, golden mosaics, for I have found some more beautiful and sanctified in Sts. Cosmas and Damian. No one enters there, and no one was there apart from the organ, upon which invisible hands played preludes. Among the twelve lambs is a thirteenth, Christ Himself, a Lamb on the book with seven seals; that is He, and in celestial glory, for perhaps at this time they did not make a cross with the dead and grim figure of Christ thereon. The saints are lean, with tender hands and terribly large, earnest eyes; Sts. Peter and Paul conduct them to Christ, Who receives them with a gaze ever grand and melancholy. I ​do not know what I should say about S. Maria at Trastevere, because I studied the local population in that quarter: it is a Roman Malá Strana,^[1] a world of little people, little squares, and little children. Folks sit solemnly before the gates, and Romanesque lambs with sweet eyes rub against their knees.

Sant’ Agnese fuori is too far off. There are catacombs, mosaics, and antique columns, but the most charming of all is the interior space and walls with columns, galleries and windows high above, which are wonderfully fine and of wise construction. Then there is the rotunda S. Constanza, with astonishingly beautiful mosaics on white ground, where little angels pluck blue grapes, bear off and tread them out. Here is the complete Roman tradition, but it is somewhat childish, naïvely severe like those early Christian sculptures, where scarcely more than the eye speaks of the new human faith.

But if your soul is melancholy and contemplative, if the day is full of golden gleam, if all is indifferent and you want to yield to the hour or destiny, then go to San Lorenzo fuori. Not because there is a lovely and effectively twofold church, decorated with the most graceful Greek cornices and columns, but there is a monastery area, a little Romanesque area with a small garden ​ ​and waterfall. An aged worthy laboriously makes a poor little water-colour sketch, some frater bores the ground with his finger and talks to himself like this waterfall, and that is all. The walls are covered with tablets from the catacombs; some fragments of relief; a childishly sketched fish or little sheep, and above all a mass of funereal inscriptions. URSUS VIXIT AN XXXXI. Some Ursus lived forty-one years, and you—you are living at thirty-three. IRENE IN PACE. LAVRITIO CONG BENE MERENTI UXOR. The wife had this carved in stone in honour of worthy Lauritius. Bene merens, that sums up the praise: he was honest and meritorious; can more than that be desired of a man? And now be bene merens yourself. CHERENNIUS VETERANUS. He evidently lived a very long life and died in solitude, since no one has ascribed him a dedication. Elsewhere it is merely “children and those enfranchised.” Behold the end of antique splendour. Instead of Cæsars and deities we meet these bene merentes, these bakers, hucksters and butchers, who have left to eternity their names unskilfully carved on stone tablets. Lauritius was neither Cæsar nor hero nor consul, he was only bene merens; but thus Christian simplicity has preserved his deserving and modest name for ever and ever. See, just here I behold more of the sense of Christianity than in the pagan grandeur of St. Peter’s. Therefore, it is so good for a man to be in the red area by San Lorenzo.