Letters from Italy/Chapter 6

Heaven knows, I would much rather write on Rocca di Papa than on Rome. Rocca di Papa is a kind of tiny rocky nest high up on the Alban hills; along the streets there flows from above a dirty little stream in which black goats and still blacker children wallow, a hideous mass of children; the streets are simply steps, and the houses are like black stone cells, which from a distance, say the Vatican windows, look wonderfully like white cubes of sugar. That is Rocca di Papa. But Rocca di Papa actually interests no one. Rocca di Papa is no culture problem, so let us return to Rome.

Machar^[1] found the antique in Rome. That is marvellous. As regards myself, I chiefly found Baroque. The Colosseum is Baroque. The whole of Imperial Rome is clearly Baroque. Then came Christianity and at a stroke put an end to Imperial Baroque. In consequence of this creative art in Rome slumbered, but awoke at the first opportunity as the stiff trappings with which Christianity had restricted it were relaxed, when it could effervesce in a new onset of Baroque, ​this time of Papal character. Papal Rome is simply a continuation of Imperial Rome, at least on the side of architecture; and now I shall perhaps write great nonsense, but leave me to it. I should like to say something like this, that in Italy—let this be granted—there are two tendencies of development: the Roman, Baroque, worldly, Catholic, striving after enormous proportions, luxury, dynamics, and the superficial; the other more primitive, severe, humane, perhaps I may say typically Etrurian, which came to utterance through Christianity, created mosaics, invaded the catacombs, set sculpture and architecture free, and expressed itself as childlike and intimate. But the Baroque tendency always broke out at intervals: it overcame Gothic in Italy and transformed it into overladen, lacework Baroque. Early Renaissance again is severe, in form a pure reaction against the Baroque tendency, which acquired the mastery in Italian Gothic. But the full Renaissance is essentially a new victory for the Baroque idea. Thus Rome systematically toils after Baroque, since Baroque is its mother-tongue; and so Rome has as little in common with the antique as the Mikulašská třida.^[2]

I offer this pseudo-historical exposition, so as not to feel ashamed to say that on the whole Rome does not please me at all. Neither the ​Forum Romanum, nor the hideous brick ruins on the Palatine, nor aught else evoked feelings of reverence; the maniacal proportions of baths, palaces, and circuses, that extraordinary passion for building something more colossal and extensive, that is the real Baroque obsession which afterwards forced Paul V to spoil St. Peter’s. Catholicism joins hands with the heathen Rome of the Cæsars, and Christianity is an episode which assisted Rome to overcome with all possible speed.

The most kindly and agreeable objects in Rome are certain little churches, e.g. St. Prassede, St. Maria in Cosmedin, St. Saba, and St. Clement where is buried our patron St. Cyril.^[3] Tumba di San Cirillo, announced the sacristan as he pointed out a little cracked marble coffin in the crypt of the church, hidden beneath some stone fragments. It is much too plain for the saint, especially when one remembers the ostentatious tombs of the Popes in St. Peter’s.

Among the distinctive features of Rome I should reckon the cats on the Forum of Trajan: this is a grass-plot below the street level surrounded by railings; in the middle stands the Trajan column, one of the most senseless monuments in the world, with broken columns standing round. On these columns I counted the other day no less than sixty cats of all colours. This was a magnificent spectacle. I went again to ​gaze on them on a most lovely moonlight night; they sat back to back and mewed, evidently this was some kind of religious ceremony. I leaned against the railings, folded my hands, and thought of home.

Even the cats have their own deity, to whom they sing on moonlight nights: and why not indeed? Ah, you have not found him in the scorching blaze of the southern Helios, nor in the cold gleam of Catholicism; perhaps, it may be, he has whispered something to you in the purity of an Alberti temple or in the delicious splendour of little Ravenna churches, but you have not understood him well. Above all, because he did not speak Czech.