Europe in the Looking Glass (9 page)

THE CHARM OF ROME
is a hackneyed subject; but one aspect of it that writers usually fail to mention is the colour with which so many of the buildings are coated. It is difficult to describe this particular shade. The effect is as though a kind of dull burnt orange had been covered with a roseate wash, yet at the same time the whole is flat and restful. Our rooms at the Russie – a hotel which the others affected to dislike as I had recommended it – gave out on to a large, leaded expanse of roof, surrounded on three sides by walls of this colour, against which the now flowerless wistaria climbed in festoons of green. Towards sunset the tints became intensified to an extent that one would have believed impossible outside the limelight of Drury Lane. The Fascisti, impelled by a secret hankering after skyscrapers and municipal Gothic, hold that this colour is incompatible with the dignity of a great capital, and have given orders that it shall be used no more. It is only natural that they should prefer that Italy should live in the present rather than the past. But there is something a little grotesque about the hysterical modernity that has inspired such edicts as this, and the threatened prohibition of the gondolas in Venice.

Letters were waiting for us at Cook’s and at the Embassy. In one of his, David was bidden by a friend to pay a visit to an attaché at the Vatican Legation, named Harold Mott. Fetching Diana from her garage, we set off in search of him. After some difficulty, we unearthed the Vatican Legation from beneath a heap of debris, half-way up a ruined house, apparently in process of demolition. The attaché, we were informed through a grating, lived in an appartment in the Palazzo Doria, at the
far end of the Corso. To the Palazzo Doria we went, and after climbing several long and exhausting flights of shallow stairs, were ushered, not into the expected attic, but into a large suite of rooms, parquet-floored and beautifully furnished, one as big as a London ballroom, the others equally spacious, though not so long. Mr Mott, in London trousers affixed to his waist by a brown leather belt, seemed surprised at the apparition of two young men disturbing his quiet afternoon. He gave us tea and was most hospitable.

That evening we stepped into a taxi, purposing to dine at a certain restaurant known to David. It proved to be shut. We were wondering what to do, when the driver took the bit between his teeth and motored us a long way out into the country to a restaurant overlooking the city. The main feature of the view was the red, white and green electric sign presented to Rome by Italian colonists in South America as a token of their affection. The taxi waited while we had our meal, then drove us back to a cabaret at the Apollo in the Via Nazionale. The last item on the programme was an
apache
dance, rendered with all the fire and passion of the Paris underworld. ‘La Tigresse’, spurned by the man she loves, plunges a knife into his back; the grip upon her throat gradually relaxes; she stands immobile, staring; then falls, a crumpled heap, by the side of him whom she has murdered; and remains, her frame shaken only by convulsive, racking sobs, as the music draws to a close. Curtain. Five minutes later a plump little woman on the wrong side of thirty-five, painted, and wearing a black neckband, trots up to our table and seats herself, with the words:

‘Moi, j’étais “la Tigresse”.’

Upon enquiry she proved to be a German, and, after our first surprise at her arrival, entertained us for the rest of the evening.

At a neighbouring table a loose-knit student of the University College Hospital was having the time of his life. He said his name was Walker. We stayed until late watching his gyrations. On our way home, the sporting spirit, latent in all Englishmen, bubbled to the surface with what might have
proved disastrous results. We decided to run a race down the tunnel beneath the Quirinal. As the white-tiled roof echoes every sound a thousandfold, we made perhaps more noise than we realised in the utter silence of the early morning. I was slightly ahead, when suddenly, by some inexplicable means, a cordon of fifteen police appeared across the middle of the road. With an adroit swerve I negotiated these, to be confronted thirty yards in front by a second line. Not having enough breath to continue, I surrendered quietly. The others, who had not realised what had happened, were astonished at suddenly finding themselves arrested by thirty policemen. Simon produced his card. We walked off to the police station, guarded as though a rescue was expected.

The police station, or rather the room in which we were imprisoned, contained three iron beds covered with coarse brown blankets. On two of these reposed men who had not shaved for several days. We tried to talk to one of them, who resented it. The heat was stifling, so that it made us uncomfortable even to move. We talked to one another, then fell asleep. Eventually, after about two hours, a man with several chins arrived and said in a surly voice that as we were English people we might go. David said that if that was the reason we would not go, and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming, so we did go.

The hotel contained several families of Americans who spent their day in the lounge because it was too hot to go out, while at night they danced with embarrassing vigour on a marble floor to a jazz band that possessed a number of ambitious instruments but no syncopation. Simon, who boasts that he can always pick an acquaintance with anyone in an hotel, picked one with them by winning eighty lire off the gambling machine in the bar and thus attracting their attention. The only good that came of it was that they introduced us to a little man named Petruccicroce, who took us to dine at a restaurant in the slums, where we could none of us eat the pudding that he had ordered. He worked on the Bourse, and was very proud of
his Oxford trousers, made in Rome. His clothes, as imitation English, were satisfactory with the exception of his hat. With him we visited other cabarets. But Roman night life was not entertaining at this time of the year, the Bonbonnière, where everyone habitually goes, being shut.

During our stay, in fact, we did very little. I spent a whole day in bed, until my inside was settled by some Italian pills. We dined one evening in the Borghese Gardens; and we lunched at the Ulpia, a dark disused basilica, accoutred in the Roman ‘warming-pan’ style – the lamps and hat racks being constructed of hammered iron, into the midst of which, where possible, had been introduced modern reproductions of coarse classical pottery. Most of our time was occupied with visits to and from Cook’s, who were making arrangements for shipping the car from Brindisi. They were not obliging.

David and I did succeed one morning in paying a visit to St Peter’s. The late summer sun cast a liquid golden brown light over the sweeping colonnades and their double rows of massive pillars, that contrasted strongly with the staring blue of the sky. Dwarfed beneath the glittering white pyramids of water shot up by the two central fountains, black crowds of Holy Year pilgrims crawled ant-like across the piazza. The stone of Rome is never grey; be it on wall or pavement, it seems somehow to reflect, however faintly, that dull burnt orange, with its flat pink glow.

Now that baroque art is fashionable and Ruskin cast into the pit, it is to be hoped that the obedient public will soon be treated to a book on the monuments of St Peter’s. Why comb the crevices of Apulia and the slums of Naples for gems of architectural ornament, when here popes with black faces and golden crowns are wallowing twice life-size in the titanic folds of marble tablecloths, their ormolu fringes festooning upon the arms of graceful skeletons, to disclose some
Alice-in-Wonderland
door or the grim hinges of some sepulchral grill? Those who have given rebirth to the ceilings of Tiepolo and Solimena remain oblivious of their molten and chiselled
counterparts reposing in the more obvious environment of the largest church in Christendom. The Romans were vulgar before the rest of Europe had even become refined.

Apart from such individual masterpieces as the above, the interior of St Peter’s as an artistic achievement is not impressive. Nor in all its details can the outside be termed faultless. There can seldom have lived a good artist with such capacity for bad art as Bernini. Able, as a sculptor, to produce work of such beauty as the group of Apollo and Daphne in the Villa Borghese, or the bust of William Baker in the South Kensington Museum, he has at the same time descended to posterity as the author of those grotesque apostolic giants that heave their uneasy draperies around the feet of the pillars beneath the dome of St Peter’s. And while, as an architect, he could conceive the magnificent curves of the flanking colonnades, his also is the responsibility for the mean, unconvincing façade, with its ugly row of top-heavy biblical statuary. The result is that at the mention of the Classical style in ecclesiastical architecture there is no unchallenged masterpiece that immediately springs to the mind, as the names of Chârtres or Beauvais inevitably materialize at the suggestion of the Gothic. London has St Paul’s, Vienna the Karlskirche, Paris the Madeleine, Berlin ‘the Cathedral’; yet these are individual rather than international monuments.

But there exists, nevertheless, one cathedral in Europe which has never received recognition at the hands of any reputable section of artistic opinion – a recognition which it deserves, not only for its own intrinsic beauty, but as the foremost extant example of one of the most dignified and harmonious of post-Renaissance styles – that which is generally known as ‘Regency’, or, more accurately, ‘Greek Revival’. This is the cathedral of Esztergom, in Hungary, the foundation stone of which was laid in 1822. In character it can best be compared to the front of the Haymarket Theatre, in London; in size and approximate plan, to St Paul’s. As an instance in stone of style that is, unfortunately, almost invariably found in stucco, it is unique.

Those who have made the journey from Vienna to Budapest upon a Danube steamer will recall the towering outline of this massive temple, dwarfing the straggling town of Esztergom from its eminence of rock and dominating for miles around the flat landscapes of Hungary and Czechoslovakia between which swirls the immense stream of opaque, grey water. It was upon this rock that
‘der heilige Stefan
’, first king of Hungary, had his chapel, which to this day can be identified from the streets below by two little windows cut out of the cliff beneath the foundations of the main building. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the nationalism of Hungary, which was to erupt twenty years later, under Kossuth, was already in process of fomentation, it was decided to construct a cathedral that should surpass in the splendour of its dimensions any which Vienna, or indeed the whole Austrian Empire, could boast. The cusps and crockets of the Gothic Revival had not yet vanquished that regrettably short-lived fashion for simplicity that had lately revolted from the threadbare forms of the Romano-Italian in favour of the severe lines and sparse ornament of the Greek. And a design was chosen, which, but for an elaborate approach of· fountains and avenues, was carried out and consecrated within the space of four years. Thus completed, unlike so many cathedrals, according to the original plan, the church of Esztergom stands alone as the finest single edifice of early nineteenth century architecture in existence.

Viewed from the front, the plan is simple. In the centre there rises from a flight of steps that stretch the whole length of the middle block a vast pediment as high and as broad as the whole body of the church, supported on eight massive Corinthian pillars. Directly above this, though in fact set back upon the further portion of the building, is the dome, a slightly abbreviated semi-circle, resting on a heavy round and plain double cornice, which, in its turn, is supported by a ring of twenty-four Corinthian pillars set slightly away from the inner shell. To either side, flush with the inner doorways and behind the portico, rise tall square blocks with faceted corners,
which are surmounted by round towers of the same diameter and half the height, also roofed with miniature flattish domes. The masonry joining these flanking towers to the main block is pierced by arches about forty feet in height, though comparatively small. Above each of these are inlet oblong
bas-reliefs
, which, with inconspicuous round plaques on either of the flanking towers, constitute the only external ornament. The stone is still light and in perfect preservation.

On entering, the visitor is confronted by a large oblong bas-relief of bronze, set in a background of dull red marble. The main body of the church is, like St Peter’s, lined with grey marble, finished with flat Corinthian pilasters gilded at the capitals. Above the side altars are inlet large sheets of what appears to be lapis lazuli, with falling garlands of gold in classical designs upon them. The dome is gold and white, and below it are four saints on gold mosaic backgrounds. The stupendous empty expanse of floor beneath, which stretches into the transepts containing the side altars, is tessellated in a radiating design of black and white marble. Over the high altar is the largest altar-piece in the world, painted by Grigoletti; though inoffensive, it embodies the worst characteristics of the Guercino tradition. The chancel is raised.

The treasury contains the coronation copes and mitres of Hungary, and a number of glittering jewelled relics. The Dean, when he learnt that we were Protestants, could scarcely be persuaded to show us round, but was reconciled when we assured him that we were in no way allied with the German Evangelicals, who, in his opinion ‘had no religion’; and that the bishops of the English Church carried crooks. After signing our names in the vestry and receiving his blessing, we returned to our hotel to lunch, where, as the Dean himself had been candid enough to suggest, we suffered considerably from fleas. This was in 1924.

WE SET OUT FROM ROME
at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon, leaving the town by the Lateran Gate and the Appian Way. Aqueducts fretted the horizon, and tombs of forgotten emperors sprouted from the vineyards as we drove along the fringe of the Campagna. A brown tram runs by the side of the road, connecting the capital with Frascati and the Alban Hills. We had not gone fifteen miles before the near hind tyre collapsed with a loud report. The driver of a tram, which was labouring up the slight incline on which we had stopped, drew up beside us, and the passengers leant their heads out of the windows and crowed with pleasure, as they watched us raising Diana’s very heavy load upon an extremely inadequate jack. The road was bad, but improved when it ceased to be the Appian Way. It became unswervingly straight and quite flat for thirty miles, along the side of a completely straight canal and beneath a completely straight range of mountains. The utter straightness of everything began to affect our nerves. We became giddy with rectitude. David could hardly hold the road. At last we came in sight of the sea. This was the first glimpse that we had had of it since we had turned our backs on the stagnant waters of the Hamburg docks.

On a rocky white promontory, jutting out into the dazzling ultramarine of the Mediterranean, stood the town of Gaeta, where Maria of Bavaria had made her last heroic stand for the Neapolitan Bourbons in 1860, holding the town for four months against the Sardinian fleet. As we watched, another tyre slowly flattened. A hundred yards further on we were obliged to wait at a level crossing, where two
Wandervögel
,
caked with dust and sweat, gazed beseechingly at us. As we were now without a spare wheel, David, who is a great believer in the good luck that follows charity, offered them a lift. We did not have another puncture.

Diana now presented an extraordinary appearance, as though of some group of ornamental statuary moving along the southern Italian roads – to the bewilderment of their more regular frequenters. The back being entirely occupied with luggage, the two Germans, garbed with the dishevelled and semi-nude conventionality that characterizes modern sculptures of ‘Youth in Industry’, were obliged to coil themselves on pedestals of cabin-trunks and suitcases in those precarious poses exhibited by Michael Angelo’s ‘Dawn and Twilight’, or the slithering torsos of Robinson and Cleaver’s ‘Linen Hall’ in Regent Street. Gradually, as the carts grew more frequent and the volume of dust increased, they became but vague white forms, scarcely human beneath the livid coating of soft, choky powder. The effect of the municipal ornament was thus completed.

The level crossing at which they had mounted our hospitable step proved to be the first of a series of five in as many miles. The road and the railway seemed intertwined like the serpents round the wand of Hermes. In each case, we successfully arrived some twenty minutes before the train. And each time the gates were closed. When the train did come, the same fat man in a blue, striped shirt invariably leaned from the window next the engine, and guffawed at us.

Late in the afternoon, far away on the left, Vesuvius burst upon the view, surmounted by her little spike of smoke. No sooner had she taken flesh, than the correct
umbrella-pine
, leaning at exactly the angle most suited to this dearest of all the amateur photographer’s compositions, appeared in the corner of the picture, and repeated itself with beautiful precision at every twist of the road, sometimes growing from a neighbouring crag, occasionally rising from a piece of marshy flat. Being a Sunday, the peasant women were out walking in
great flapping starched caps of clean white linen, very bright, tightly-laced magenta bodices, and clogs. The sun began to set, its copper rays shooting fire over a flat mass of brilliant purple cloud. The mountain, the tree, the peasant woman and the glowing discord of the sunset, all combined to transport one into the stippled midst of a Victorian water-colour. One felt as if one was hanging on a wall, surrounded by a pattern of brown and pink chrysanthemums flecked with silver, and one wondered how the peasant woman had escaped from her glass dome.

At length, when nearly dark, we came to Caserta. The palace, as it was in the glory of the past, has lately lived again in the prose of Sacheverell Sitwell. Of its present he has spoken little. Built in 1752 by Vanvitelli, of a delicate brick, the colour of dying rose-petals, finished and coped with a dull white stone, this vast home of Charles III, king of Naples, stands a
seventh-of
-a-mile in length, 182 yards in breadth, and 125 feet in height. So perfectly proportioned is the whole, that at first sight it seems nothing out of the ordinary. Then, as the myriads of windows stretch away into a blur of dots, the immensity of the building strikes the eye with a jerk. Entirely detached from it are two curving wings that flank a wide, open space in front of it.

Far from apparent, as we drove past in the deepening shadow of the airless, August twilight, were the profusion and luxury of the tastes of kings and the vocabularies of authors. An atmosphere of decay, of desolation, a spirit of uselessness, of the body of a giant paralysed and unwanted, of the trunk of a fallen beech, pervaded the silent, uncurtained expanse of brick and window, the grand staircases to the main entrance on the first floor, and the peeling stucco of the empty wings. Situated in the centre of the town, the large open semi-circle in front of the palace was covered with matted, trodden yellow grass, From this there led for several miles a magnificent avenue broad as Whitehall, of dark-leaved planes, interrupted half-way down by a circular opening, whence radiated eight tributary roads. Directly across the spot where the trees began, the railway had
been laid, not five hundred yards from the central entrance of the palace; and in addition, at this exact point, a large roofed station had been constructed, with goods yards and sidings; so that the vista chronicled by many former writers of travel books, as the grandest approach to the grandest palace in Europe, was now confined to shunting rolling stock, which is perhaps less ornamental in Italy than in most countries. As a final vindication of Italian nationalism the open space between the wings had been renamed the ‘Piazza Garibaldi’. It is said, however, that there is still a Bourbon party in Naples.

We hurried past, the
Wandervögel
still clinging, and circumventing the station, drove down the great avenue, despite its holes. A few carts were crawling wearily along the edge. Darkness fell. Our progress became slower and slower as the dust from the harvesting wagons caught and deflected the light of the lamps. Eventually we were brought to a standstill in a small town,
en fête
for some religious ceremony. Squalid and half ruined, it presented the appearance of a Luna Park, with every building outlined in electric bulbs, and a series of tall wooden frames that had been erected in the piazza, spluttering with Catharine-wheels and sacred devices. Instead of the rhythmic exhilaration of the merry-go-round organ, there sounded the bored chanting of men and boys. Round a corner came the procession, the priests marching past with supercilious nonchalance as they swung their censors. Last of all was borne aloft the image, that of a female saint, to the back of whose head was attached a halo of small electric lights. The crowd seemed mainly interested in us.

We had some difficulty in finding our way through Naples. The view of the town from the hills above, a maze of dotted lights stretching far out along the shores of the bay, soon gave place to high houses and small streets, filled with a surging crowd of chattering pedestrians and jangling cabs. David was very tired and was thankful to pull up at the Santa Lucia Hotel on the front, though aware that it was not the best. There was no downstairs accommodation and the hall was filled with
the English professional classes. The
Wandervögel
, looking as though they had been dipped in flour, offered to wash the car out of gratitude for their ride. We suggested that they should go and wash themselves.

The next day we spent in a fever of agitation between Cook’s and the garage. The garage refused to mend the punctures with the requisite despatch, and it was necessary to go once every hour to see that they were being done. Cook’s had heard nothing from Brindisi and were prepared to make no effort for our convenience, until at last we sent for the manager, who proved more amenable than his assistants. We also paid a visit to the museum, but found it shutting as we arrived. I was not sorry. We lunched on the terrace of the Castel del Ova, that frowning pile of dark stone that rises from an island in the bay and dates from the Norman occupation of the twelfth century. It is joined to the mainland by a stone jetty and was not more than 300 yards from the door of our hotel. As we sat on the balcony of the restaurant, digging with delight at freshly caught languste, the view seemed to embody all the traditional features of the Neapolitan existence. Before us stretched the bay, blue and flat, with the huge town straggling away to a line of white houses on its furthest shore; and beyond, the lower slopes and furrowed summit of Vesuvius, rising to a little puff of soft silky smoke that dissolved into the sky like a bored summer cloud. From over the water, a fresh breeze flapped the white curtains above us, and the table cloth. The menu was expensive, the food good. Yet, immediately below us, the stone quays with their fleets of little boats, were proclaiming that fabulous poverty for which the town has always been renowned. The
lazzaroni
, whose lack of clothing was once a cause of ‘
une frayeur extrème
’ to Madame de Genlis, are no longer. Their tradition has fallen on the fishermen and fisherboys, lying about in all directions and in all positions beneath the boiling rays of the midday sun. Old women, seated amongst baskets of marine edibles, piles of nets, coils of rope and rusting anchors, munched lethargically at their indescribable foods,
in the intervals of begging from the passers-by. Groups of men were playing cards over bottles of red wine. Old sailors, their faces crinkled and deformed with disease, lay huddled in their rags upon the coping at the water’s edge. The sound of a song floated up. On the left gleamed the long row of high modern hotels. Far out on the right the dim blue shape, as the ancients saw it, of a recumbent goat, hovered against the sky-line: the island of Capri.

There are few individual spots in the world that can have inspired such a multitude of writings and legends as this tantalizing rock with its inaccessible cliffs and its exquisite confusion of clustering gardens and forbidding mountain peaks. Who has not read of the golden broom, the roses and the wistaria, and the oranges dripping from their dark-leaved trees? Of the grassy vales and wind-blown uplands, the damp deep gorges, the weathered crags, and falling cliffs a thousand feet sheer to the peacock hues of the sea? Of the grottos, the villas and the miniature castles? History has left her touch: the bath of Tiberius, the castle of Barbarossa; the old red coats of the troops of Sir Hudson Lowe, the literary lustres of Compton Mackenzie; Marchesa Casati posed amid her bearskins; Gerard Lee Bevan disguised as Mr Smith; the Queen of Sweden in a green veil; each adds its breath to that siren charm, which so many outcasts, artists, and elderly women in search of adventure in small communities, find impossible to resist. Imagine it in the old days, when the Phoenician steps, cut in precipitous flights up nine hundred feet of cliff, were the only possible approach to Anacapri, when the tourist steamer was the exception rather than the daily rule. The siren of
today
, draped in a kind of aesthetic Union Jack, is the siren isle of yesterday, grown old with wooing.

In the afternoon I felt restless and plunged into the middle of the town. Naples is an alarming place. In the sunlight of the quays it may seem innocuous enough; but amid the dark shadows of the squalid tenement houses, the washing stretched bunting-like from attic window to attic window, the unkempt
crowds jostling through the narrow streets and alleyways, some sinister current seems transmitted through the air. The poverty of the slums is no longer happy-go-lucky, basking in the sun. It is terrifying. The ordinary canons of decency are not observed. The day’s toilet and the day’s cooking are alike performed in the gutter. Many of the windows have no glass, some no frames. Children swarm. The whole population seems to suffer from perpetual sores and inflammations. The streets are paved with blocks of stone, fifteen inches square and six deep. Most are missing and the roads are consequently almost impassable, save when the tramlines serve as bridges.

I wandered on and on at a feverish pace, and at length, as it was growing late, boarded a tram, or rather clung to a handrail, in company with a struggling mass of itinerant humanity. The others thought I had been murdered. We dined at Bertolini’s overlooking the town. During the meal an operatic tenor sang to the homely troughing sound of several families of Germans.