M. de Montaigne was annoyed to find such great number of Frenchmen in Rome, so great that almost every person he met in the streets addressed him in his own tongue. He found novelty in the sight of so mighty a court, thronged with prelates and churchmen, and declared that Rome was far fuller of rich men and coaches and horses than any other city he had ever seen, and that the seeming of the streets in various ways, and notably in the crowds of people, reminded him more of Paris than of any other place.…
M. de Montaigne would not admit that liberty existed in Rome equal to that enjoyed in Venice, and would advance by way of arguments the facts that houses were so insecure against robbers that people who might bring home with them a large amount of property usually determined to give their purses in charge of the bankers of the city so as not to find their strongboxes rifled; that it was by no means safe to walk abroad by night; that in this month of December the General of the Cordeliers had been suddenly imprisoned because in his preaching, at which were present the Pope and the cardinals, he had censured the sloth and luxury of the prelates of the Church, and this without mentioning names and simply using commonplace remarks on the subject with a certain harshness of voice; that his own boxes had been searched by the tax officers on entering the city and turned over even to the smallest articles of apparel, while in the other towns of Italy the officers had been satisfied by the presentation of the boxes for search; that in addition they had seized all the books they found there with the view of inspecting them, over which task they spent so much time that any one in different case might well have given up the books as lost.…
Touching the beauty of the Roman ladies, M. de Montaigne affirmed that this was not notable enough to raise the reputation of this city beyond all others; moreover that, as in Paris, the most remarkable beauty belonged to those who made a market of the same.
1764 EDWARD GIBBON
The British historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) famously wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Six Volumes (1776–88). In his Memoirs he described the moment at which, on a visit to Rome in 1764, he conceived the notion for his great work.
My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm which I do not feel, I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city.
After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation. My guide was Mr Byers, a Scotch antiquary of experience and taste; but, in the daily labour of eighteen weeks, the powers of attention were some times fatigued, till I was myself qualified, in a last review, to select and study the capital works of ancient and modern art.…
It was at Rome, on 15 October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire: and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work.
1844 CHARLES DICKENS
Dickens (see page 227) spent several months in Italy in 1844 after the triumph of A Christmas Carol the previous year. His experience of Rome was much influenced by anti-clericalism and his preconceived notions of ancient grandeur.
We entered the Eternal City, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, on the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo, and came immediately – it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain – on the skirts of the Carnival. We did not, then, know that we were only looking at the fag end of the masks, who were driving slowly round and round the Piazza until they could find a promising opportunity for falling into the stream of carriages, and getting, in good time, into the thick of the festivity; and coming among them so abruptly, all travel-stained and weary, was not coming very well prepared to enjoy the scene.
We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles before. It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and hurrying on between its worn-away and miry banks, had a promising aspect of desolation and ruin. The masquerade dresses on the fringe of the Carnival, did great violence to this promise. There were no great ruins, no solemn tokens of antiquity, to be seen; they all lie on the other side of the city. There seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops and houses, such as are to be found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude of chattering strangers. It was no more my Rome: the Rome of anybody’s fancy, man or boy; degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than the Place de la Concorde in Paris is. A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain and muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for this: and I confess to having gone to bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour, and with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm.
Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St Peter’s. It looked immense in the distance, but distinctly and decidedly small, by comparison, on a near approach. The beauty of the Piazza, on which it stands, with its clusters of exquisite columns, and its gushing fountains – so fresh, so broad, and free, and beautiful – nothing can exaggerate. The first burst of the interior, in all its expansive majesty and glory and, most of all, the looking up into the Dome, is a sensation never to be forgotten. But, there were preparations for a Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the subterranean chapel: which is before it in the centre of the church: were like a goldsmith’s shop, or one of the opening scenes in a very lavish pantomime. And though I had as high a sense of the beauty of the building (I hope) as it is possible to entertain, I felt no very strong emotion. I have been infinitely more affected in many English cathedrals when the organ has been playing, and in many English country churches when the congregation have been singing. I had a much greater sense of mystery and wonder, in the Cathedral of San Mark at Venice.
When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour staring up into the dome: and would not have ‘gone over’ the Cathedral then, for any money), we said to the coachman, ‘Go to the Coliseum.’ In a quarter of an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.
It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest truth, to say: so suggestive and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment – actually in passing in – they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there, as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions.
To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, concei
vable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one’s heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin!…
Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine in its full and awful grandeur! We wandered out upon the Appian Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken walls, with here and there a desolate and uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus, where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges, competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old time: past the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclosure, hedge, or stake, wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where on that side of Rome, nothing is to be beheld but Ruin. Except where the distant Apennines bound the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one field of ruin. Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground.
1900 OSCAR WILDE
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), imprisoned 1895–97 for gross indecency, spent the final years of his life a broken man. Impoverished and in exile, he sought consolation in the Catholic church, visiting Rome and receiving the blessing of Pope Leo III. He died seven months later.
16 April We came to Rome on Holy Thursday. H.M. left on Saturday for Gland, and yesterday, to the terror of Grissell and all the Papal Court, I appeared in the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got the blessing of the Holy Father – a blessing they would have denied me.
He was wonderful as he was carried past me on his throne, not of flesh and blood, but a white soul robed in white, and an artist as well as a saint – the only instance in history, if the papers are to be believed.
I have seen nothing like this extraordinary grace of his gesture, as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless – possibly the pilgrims, but certainly me.…
I was deeply impressed, and my walking stick showed signs of budding; would have budded indeed only at the door of the chapel it was taken from me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course, in honour of Tannhäuser.
How did I get the ticket? By a miracle of course. I thought it was hopeless, and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at five o’clock Harold and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l’Europe. Suddenly, as I was eating buttered toast, a man, or what seemed to be one, dressed as a hotel porter, entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope on Easter Day. I bowed my head humbly and said, ‘Non sum dignus’ [I am not worthy] or words to that effect. He at once produced a ticket!
When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no more.
1945 ELEANOR CLARK
Eleanor Clark (1913–1996) was an American poet and novelist, who visited Italy in 1945, and fell in love with Rome, although her pleasure was more in its historical legacy than in the actual modern city, marked as it was by Fascism, war and mass tourism.
The tourist or student or wandering intellectual, the poor seeker after something or other, comes in like a wisp of fog on a fog bank, with his angst and his foggy modern eye, and there are not many words that can help him even a little to find his identity and his way: history, surrealism, faith. The angst is going to get a lot worse: the eye, if he stays long enough, will be pried open week by week as if every lash has been glued down; and meanwhile there are the mess and the blazing sun, the incongruities, the too-muchness of everything. The historian Taine said that really to profit from Rome you would have to be always in a gay mood, ‘or at least a healthy one’; he would not have thought of using the word nowadays.
Ecco Roma…. Something is being presented to the glazed eyeball and paralysed sense of the worrying traveller, who came most often not looking for Rome at all but for love; whose distress about national responsibilities is painfully mixed up with anxiety about his baggage.
He sees a city of bells and hills and walls; of many trees Nordic and tropical together, pines, ilex and palm, and water and a disturbing depth of shadows; of acres of ruins, some handsome, some shabby lumps and dumps of useless masonry, sprinkled through acres of howling modernity – and impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn; of roaring motors and other dreadful noises, where some roaring festa with fireworks is always going on; whose churches are junk shops of idolatrous bric-a-brac; which calls on your awe and is absolutely lacking in any itself; where spaces open out or close up before you suddenly as in dreams, and a tormenting dream-like sexual gaiety seems to rise you cannot tell how from the streets; a place of no grandeur whatever of any kind you expected, ravaged by fascist vulgarities; in which the president’s until recently the royal, palace looks from the outside like an old tobacco barn, and everything you came to revere turns up in a setting as of some huge practical joke; a place beautiful at certain points, at certain moments, but closed to you, repellent, where you are always being reminded of something, you cannot tell what, but it is like the fear of falling down a deep well.…
Foreign visitors swirl in herds through the Vatican Museums, around the Colosseum – you would not think, as Dante said, that there could be so many; or sit in bars for two weeks ‘getting the feel of the place’; or drag about in a dim melancholy of expectation and loneliness, often complicated by Roman stomach trouble; or take up with the variety of little sad fifth-rate adventurers always available along the Via Veneto, especially for homosexuals, because the city has become as much a world magnet in that respect as for Catholic converts or illuminated manuscript-worms.
ST PETERSBURG
St Petersburg was founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703, as his new capital city built at vast cost on the marshes of the Neva River on Russia’s Baltic coast. Unique in 18th-century Europe as a great planned city, it attracted admiration from many visitors.
Renamed Petrograd in 1914, the city was the focus of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; it was renamed Leningrad in 1924. In 1941–44, Leningrad was subject to a 900-day siege by the German army, which brought the city to the verge of starvation and destruction. After its relief, and Soviet victory in the Second World War, it was slowly rebuilt.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city reverted to its original name. In 2003 it lavishly celebrated the 300th anniversary of its foundation.
1774 NATHANIEL WRAXALL
Wealthy British traveller Nathaniel Wraxall (1751–1831) wrote an enthusiastic account of his visit to Catherine the Great’s capital that was well received by the reading public.
I am struck with a pleasing astonishment, while I wander among havens, streets and public buildings, which have risen, as by enchantment, within the memory of men still alive, and have converted the marshy islands of the Neva into one of the most magnificent cities of the earth. The imagination, aided by so many visible objects, rises to the wondrous founder, and beholds in idea the tutelary genius of Peter, yet hovering over the child of his own production, and viewing with a parent’s fondness its rising palaces and temples.
There is not only a magnificence and regal pomp in this court, which far exceed any I have beheld elsewhere, but everything is on a vast and colossal scale, resembling that of the empire itself. The public buildings, churches, monasteries and private palaces of the nobility are of an immense size, and seem as if designed for creatures of a superior height and dimensions to man; to ‘a puny insect shivering at the breeze!’
The statue and pedestal which will soon be set up of Peter the Great, are of the same enormous and gigantic proportions, and may almost rank with the sphynxes and pyramids of Egyptian workmanship…. The palace which the present empress has begun, is designed to be two or three English miles in circumference; and in the mean time they have erected a temporary one of brick, for her reception.…
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The public buildings of different kinds are so prodigiously numerous in this city, that I am inclined to believe, they constitute a fifth or sixth part of the whole capital. Some of them are of stone, but the larger part are only brick, or wood plastered. The Winter Palace is composed of the former materials, and was erected by the late Empress Elizabeth…. It is not yet quite finished, like almost everything else in Russia. The situation is very lovely, on the banks of the Neva, and in the centre of the town. Contiguous to it is a small palace, built by the present empress, and called, why I know not, The Hermitage. It no more resembles our idea of a hermitage, than it does a temple; but when Her Majesty resides in this part of the building, she is in retreat, and there is no drawing room or court. I was admitted a few days ago to see these apartments, which are very elegant, and furnished with great taste.
There are two galleries of paintings, which have been lately purchased at an immense expense in Italy, and among which I would willingly, was it permitted, spend some hours every day during my residence here. The crown, which I saw in the palace itself, is perhaps the richest in Europe. It is shaped like a bonnet, and totally covered with diamonds. In the sceptre is the celebrated one, purchased by Prince Orlov for 500,000 rubles, and presented by him to his sovereign mistress only a few months ago.…
I am more charmed with the river Neva itself, than with anything I see here. The Thames is not comparable to it in beauty; and as the stream sets constantly out of the Lake Ladoga into the Gulf of Finland, it is always full, clear and perfectly clean. Along its banks is beyond all doubt the finest walk in the world. It is not a quay, as vessels never come up to this part, but a parade, running a mile in length; the buildings on which are hardly to be exceeded in elegance. It is yet to be continued to double the length. Over the river in the narrowest part is a bridge on pontoons. From this noble river, canals are cut to all parts of the city; nor could any situation be more favourable to the genius of commerce, if the inclemency of the latitude did not keep it froze up, at least five months annually.…
Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Page 29