CHAPTER XXXIII
THE ART OF SIGNOR TANNI
THE first Sunday I was in Rome I began my local career with a visit to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, that faces the Via Cavour not far from the Continental Hotel where I was stopping, and afterwards San Prassede close beside it. After Canterbury, Amiens, Pisa and St. Peter’s, I confess churches needed to be of great distinction to interest me much; but this church, not so divinely harmonious, exteriorly speaking, left me breathless with its incrustations of marbles, bronzes, carvings, and gold and silver inlay. There is a kind of beauty, or charm, or at least physical excitation, in contemplating sheer gorgeousness which I cannot withstand, even when my sense of proportion and my reason are offended, and this church had that. Many of the churches in Rome have just this and nothing more. At least, what else they may have I am blind to. It did not help me any to learn as I did from Mrs. Barfleur, that it was very old, dating from 352 A. D., and that the blessed Virgin herself had indicated just where this basilica in her honor was to be built by having a small, private fall of snow which covered or outlined the exact dimensions of which the church was to be. I was interested to learn that they had here five boards of the original manger at Bethlehem inclosed in an urn of silver and crystal which is exposed in the sacristy on Christmas Eve and placed over the high altar on Christmas Day, and that here were the tombs and chapels of Sixtus V and Paul V and Clement VIII of the Borghese family and, too, a chapel of the Sforza family. Nevertheless the hodge-podge of history, wealth, illusion and contention, to say nothing of religious and social discovery, which go to make up a church of this kind, is a little wearisome, not to say brain-achey, when contemplated en masse. These churches! Unless you are especially interested in a pope or a saint or a miracle or a picture or a monument or an artist—they are nothing save intricate jewel-boxes; nothing more.
For the first five or six days thereafter I went about with a certain Signor Tanni who was delivering peripatetic lectures at the principal places of interest in Rome. This is a curious development of the modern city, for so numerous are the travelers and so great their interest in the history of Rome that they gladly pay the three to twelve lire each, which is charged by the various lecturers for their discussions and near-by trips. There was a Nashville, Tennessee, chicken-and-egg merchant who, with his wife, was staying at our hotel and who was making the matter of seeing Rome quite as much of a business as that of chickens and eggs in Tennessee. He was a man of medium height, dark, pale, neat, and possessed of that innate courtesy, reserve, large-minded fairness and lively appreciation—within set convictions—which is so characteristic of the native, reasonably successful American. We are such innocent, pure-minded Greeks—most of us Americans. In the face of such tawdry vulgarity and vileness as comprises the underworld café life of Paris, or before such a spectacle of accentuated craft, lust, brutality, and greed as that presented by the Borgias, a man such as my chicken-merchant friend, or any other American of his type, of whom there are millions, would find himself utterly nonplused. It would be so much beyond his ken, or intention, that I question whether he would see or understand it at all if it were taking place before his very eyes. There is something so childlike and pure about the attitude of many strong, able Americans that I marvel sometimes that they do as well as they do. Perhaps their very innocence is their salvation. I could not have told this chicken-merchant and his wife, for instance, anything of the subtleties of the underworld of Paris and Monte Carlo as I encountered them; and if I had he would not have believed me, he would have recoiled from it all as a burned child would recoil from fire. He was as simple and interesting and practical as a man could be, and yet so thoroughly efficient that at the age of forty-five he had laid by a competence and was off on a three years’ tour of the world.
Mrs. Chicken Merchant was a large woman—very stout, very fair, very cautious of her thoughts and her conduct, thoroughly sympathetic and well-meaning. Before leaving her native town, she told me, she had inaugurated a small library, the funds for which she had helped collect. Occasionally she was buying engravings of famous historic buildings, such as the Colosseum and the Temple of Vesta, which would eventually grace the walls of the library. She and her husband felt that they were educating themselves; and that they would return better citizens, more useful to their country, for this exploration of the ancient world. They had been going each day, morning and afternoon, to some lecture or ancient ruin; and after I came they would seek me out of an evening and tell me what they had seen. I took great satisfaction in this, because I really liked them for their naïve point of view and their thoroughly kindly and whole-hearted interest in life. It flattered me to think that I was so acceptable to them and that we should get along so well together. Frequently they invited me to their table to dinner. On these occasions my friend would open a bottle of wine, concerning which he had learned something since he had come abroad.
It was Mr. and Mrs. Chicken Merchant who gave me a full description of the different Roman lecturers, their respective merits, their prices, and what they had to show. They had already been to the Forum, the Palatine, the Colosseum and the House of Nero, St. Peter’s, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Appian Way, the Catacombs and the Villa Frascati. They were just going to the Villa d’Este and to Ostia, the old seaport at the mouth of the Tiber. They were at great pains to get me to join the companies of Signor Tanni who, they were convinced, was the best of them all. “He tells you something. He makes you see it just as it was. By George! when we were in the Colosseum you could just fairly see the lions marching out of those doors; and that House of Nero, as he tells about it, is one of the most wonderful things in the world.”
I decided to join Signor Tanni’s classes at once, and persuaded Mrs. Barfleur and Mrs. Q. to accompany me at different times. I must say that in spite of the commonplaceness of the idea my mornings and afternoons with Signor Tanni and his company of sightseers proved as delightful as anything else that befell me in Rome. He was a most interesting person, born and brought up, as I learned, at Tivoli near the Villa d’Este, where his father controlled a small inn and livery stable. He was very stocky, very dark, very ruddy, and very active. Whenever we came to the appointed rendezvous where his lecture was to begin, he invariably arrived, swinging his coat-tails, glancing smartly around with his big black eyes, rubbing and striking his hands in a friendly manner, and giving every evidence of taking a keen interest in his work. He was always polite and courteous without being officious, and never for a moment either dull or ponderous. He knew his subject thoroughly of course; but what was much better, he had an eye for the dramatic and the spectacular. I shall never forget how in the center of the Forum Romanum he lifted the cap from the ancient manhole that opens into the Cloaca Maxima and allowed us to look in upon the walls of that great sewer that remains as it was built before the dawn of Roman history. Then he exclaimed dramatically: “The water that Cæsar and the emperors took their baths in no doubt flowed through here just as the water of Roman bath-tubs does to-day!”
On the Palatine, when we were looking at the site of the Palace of Elagabalus, he told how that weird worthy had a certain well, paved at the bottom with beautiful mosaic, in order that he might leap down upon it and thus commit suicide, but how he afterwards changed his mind—which won a humorous smile from some of those present and from others a blank look of astonishment. In the House of Nero, in one of those dark underhill chambers, which was once out in the clear sunlight, but now, because of the lapse of time and the crumbling of other structures reared above it, is deep under ground, he told how once, according to an idle legend, Nero had invited some of his friends to dine and when they were well along in their feast, and somewhat intoxicated, no doubt, it began to rain rose leaves from the ceiling. Nothing but delighted cries of approval was heard for this artistic thought until the rose leaves became an inch thick on the floor and then two and three, and four and five inches thick, when the guests tried the doors. They were locked and sealed. Then the shower continued until the rose leaves were a foot deep, two feet deep, three feet deep, and the tables were covered. Later the guests had to climb on tables and chairs to save themselves from their rosy bath; but when they had climbed this high they could climb no higher, for the walls were smooth and the room was thirty feet deep. By the time the leaves were ten feet deep the guests were completely covered; but the shower continued until the smothering weight of them ended all life.—An ingenious but improbable story.
No one of Signor Tanni’s wide-mouthed company seemed to question whether this was plausible or not; and one American standing next to me exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be switched!” My doubting mind set to work to figure out how I could have overcome this difficulty if I had been in the room; and in my mind I had all the associated guests busy tramping down rose leaves in order to make the quantity required as large as possible. My idea was that I could tire Nero out on this rose-leaf proposition. The picture of these noble Romans feverishly trampling down the fall of rose leaves cheered me greatly.
After my first excursion with Signor Tanni I decided to take his whole course; and followed dutifully along behind him, listening to his interesting and good-natured disquisitions, during many delightful mornings and afternoons in the Forum, on the Palatine, in the Catacombs, on the Appian Way and in the Villas at Frascati and Tivoli! I shall never forget how clearly and succinctly the crude early beginnings and characteristics of Christianity came home to me as I walked in the Catacombs and saw the wretched little graves hidden away in order that they might not be desecrated, and the underground churches where converts might worship free from molestation and persecution.
On the Palatine the fact that almost endless palaces were built one on top of the other, the old palace leveled by means of the sledge and the crowbar and the new one erected upon the smoothed-over space, is easily demonstrated. They find the remains of different ruins in different layers as they dig down, coming eventually to the early sanctuaries of the kings and the federated tribes. It is far more interesting to walk through these old ruins and underground chambers accompanied by some one who loves them, and who is interested in them, and who by fees to the state servitors has smoothed the way, so that the ancient forgotten chambers are properly lighted for you, than it is to go alone. And to have a friendly human voice expatiating on the probable arrangement of the ancient culinary department and how it was all furnished, is worth while. I know that the wonder and interest of the series of immense, dark rooms which were once the palace of Nero, and formerly were exposed to the light of day, before the dust and incrustation of centuries had been heaped upon them, but which now underlie a hill covered by trees and grass, came upon me with great force because of these human explanations; and the room in which, in loneliness and darkness for centuries stood the magnificent group of Laocoon and the porphyry vase now in the Vatican, until some adventuring students happened to put a foot through a hole, thrilled me as though I had come upon them myself. Until one goes in this way day by day to the site of the Circus Maximus, the Baths of Caracalla, the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Forum, the Palatine and the Colosseum, one can have no true conception of that ancient world. When you realize, by standing on the ground and contemplating these ancient ruins and their present fragments, that the rumored immensity of them in their heyday and youth is really true, you undergo an ecstasy of wonder; or if you are of a morbid turn you indulge in sad speculations as to the drift of life. I cannot tell you how the mosaics from the palace of Germanicus on the Palatine affected me, or how strange I felt when the intricacies of the houses of Caligula and Tiberius were made clear. To walk through the narrow halls which they trod, to know truly that they ruled in terror and with the force of murder, that Caligula waylaid and assaulted and killed, for his personal entertainment, in these narrow alleys which were then the only streets, and where torches borne by hand furnished the only light, is something. A vision of the hugeness and audacity of Hadrian’s villa which now stretches apparently, one would say, for miles, the vast majority of its rooms still unexcavated and containing what treasures Heaven only knows, is one of the strangest of human experiences. I marveled at this vast series of rooms, envying the power, the subtlety and the genius which could command it. Truly it is unbelievable—one of those things which stagger the imagination. One can hardly conceive how even an emperor of Rome would build so beautifully and so vastly. Rome is so vast in its suggestion that it is really useless to apostrophize. That vast empire that stretched from India to the Arctic was surely fittingly represented here; and while we may rival the force and subtlety and genius and imagination of these men in our day, we will not truly outstrip them. Mind was theirs—vast, ardent imagination; and if they achieved crudely it was because the world was still young and the implements and materials of life were less understood. They were the great ones—the Romans. We must still learn from them.