In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone
in this second attempt, we can never think it half
as charming as the Villa Falconieri. I forget
what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid,
with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor
of the calendar as reformed by the reigning pope,
Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a quadrangle
of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately
colonnade following as far round as the reader likes.
When he passes through all this magnificence he will
come out on a grassy terrace, with a fountain below
it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the
Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird
sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the place
by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the
several corners, with colossal masques carven at the
top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as
the flame of torches must often have shown at night.
But for all the outlandish suggestion of these pillars,
the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college
there, where only the sons of noble families are received
for education. As we rounded a sunny wall in
driving away, we saw a line of people, old and young
of both sexes, but probably not of noble families,
seated with their backs against the warm stone eating
from comfortable bowls a soup which our driver said
was the soup of charity and the daily dole of the
fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day
was now growing colder thaa it had been, and we felt
that the poor needed all the soup, and hot, that they
could get.
After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally
disappointing, in spite of the traces of a recent
country fair and the historical merits of a church
of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming
to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad
to take the tram back to Rome and to get into the
snug inside of it. The roof, which had been so
popular and populous in the morning, was now so little
envied that a fat lady descended from it and wedged
herself into a row of the interior where a sylph would
have fitted better but might not have added so much
to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought
of getting up, though there were plenty of straps
to hang by if one had chosen to stand. This was
quite like home, and so was it like home to have the
conductor ask me to Avait for my change, with all the
ensuing fears that wronged the long-delayed remembrance
of his debt. In some things it appears that at
Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish
we were like them in having such a place as Frascati
within easy tram-reach of our cities.
XV
A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
Copyrights
Roman Holidays, and Others from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
