Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more frequent occurrence.  This secular holiday, which every workman has a right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master.  He may not even loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be clandestinely employed.  He must go out of the shop or house or factory or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of employing them in productive industry for hire.  This law has been enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in correction of great abuses.  Neither masters nor men now recognize the old-fashioned festa as they once did.  Whether the men like the new holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say.  Of course, they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary saints’ days, when their comrades were resting, too.  As for the masters, one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man’s place, would merely say:  “It is the new law.  No doubt we shall adjust ourselves to it.”  He did not complain.

X

SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US

Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many different piazzas.  This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters.  Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or obelisk, statue, “storied urn or animated bust” or mere tablet, would be safe from my indirect research.  Before I knew it, I should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had forgotten it.

I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have been coining by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well as the violation of his monastic vows.  I saw it with the thrill which the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was that had moved me so.  Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a second time.  It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages,