Human interests too universal and imperative for the
control of a single race, even so brilliant and so
gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally and
necessarily in possession, centre about her through
history, religion, art, and make every one at home
in the city which is the capital of Christendom.
Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling Japs
going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving
a modest and unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming,
tacitly or explicitly, the right to dispute the Italian
theory and practice in its control. But every
Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is
a stranger in the home of Christianity) I knew to
be there in a mood more or less critical, and in a
disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now
making, or making over.
We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense
or inconvenience to ourselves, and we can easily blame
the Italian conception of the future city which, to
name but one fact, has made it possible for us to
visit her in comfort at every season and to come away
without having come down with the Roman fever.
In spite of the sort of motherly, or at the worst
step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely
or distantly related children of hers; in spite of
her immemorial fame and her immortal beauty; in spite
of her admirable housekeeping, in which she rises
every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole
and corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful
sky, her life-giving air; in spite of the level head
she keeps in her political affairs, and the miraculous
poise she maintains between the antagonism of State
and Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern
improvements; in spite of her admirable hygiene, which
has constituted her one of the healthiest, if not
the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the solvency
which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast
scale of antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises
(a thing to be hereafter studied), we, the ungracious
offspring of her youth, come from our North and West
and censure and criticise and carp. I have seldom
conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome who could
not improve her in some phase or other, who could
not usefully advise her, who, at the best, did not
patronize her. I offer myself as almost the sole
example of a stranger who was contented with her as
she is, or as she is going to be without his help;
and I am the more confident, therefore, in suggesting
to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances
which her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully
mismanaged in her civic schemes. A good round
tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon all sojourners,
if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining in
such a chorus of criticism of Rome would give them
the indefeasible right to their opinions and would
help to replete a treasury which they believe is always
in danger of being exhausted.
III
Copyrights
Roman Holidays, and Others from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
