Pictures From Italy

by Dickens, Chales

  sudden overthrow of the whole line must inevitably ensue.

  The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible. The same

  monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going on; the same

  dark building, darker from the brightness of the street without;

  the same lamps dimly burning; the self-same people kneeling here

  and there; turned towards you, from one altar or other, the same

  priest's back, with the same large cross embroidered on it; however

  different in size, in shape, in wealth, in architecture, this

  church is from that, it is the same thing still. There are the

  same dirty beggars stopping in their muttered prayers to beg; the

  same miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity at the doors;

  the same blind men, rattling little pots like kitchen peppercastors:

  their depositories for alms; the same preposterous crowns

  of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins

  in crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a

  head-dress bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent

  miles of landscape; the same favourite shrine or figure, smothered

  with little silver hearts and crosses, and the like: the staple

  trade and show of all the jewellers; the same odd mixture of

  respect and indecorum, faith and phlegm: kneeling on the stones,

  and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers to beg a

  little, or to pursue some other worldly matter: and then kneeling

  down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the point where

  it was interrupted. In one church, a kneeling lady got up from her

  prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card, as a teacher of Music;

  and in another, a sedate gentleman with a very thick walking-staff,

  arose from his devotions to belabour his dog, who was growling at

  another dog: and whose yelps and howls resounded through the

  church, as his master quietly relapsed into his former train of

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  meditation - keeping his eye upon the dog, at the same time,

  nevertheless.

  Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contributions of

  the Faithful, in some form or other. Sometimes, it is a money-box,

  set up between the worshipper, and the wooden life-size figure of

  the Redeemer; sometimes, it is a little chest for the maintenance

  of the Virgin; sometimes, an appeal on behalf of a popular Bambino;

  sometimes, a bag at the end of a long stick, thrust among the

  people here and there, and vigilantly jingled by an active

  Sacristan; but there it always is, and, very often, in many shapes

  in the same church, and doing pretty well in all. Nor, is it

  wanting in the open air - the streets and roads - for, often as you

  are walking along, thinking about anything rather than a tin

  canister, that object pounces out upon you from a little house by

  the wayside; and on its top is painted, 'For the Souls in

  Purgatory;' an appeal which the bearer repeats a great many times,

  as he rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles the cracked bell

  which his sanguine disposition makes an organ of.

  And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar sanctity,

  bear the inscription, 'Every Mass performed at this altar frees a

  soul from Purgatory.' I have never been able to find out the

  charge for one of these services, but they should needs be

  expensive. There are several Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of

  which, confers indulgences for varying terms. That in the centre

  of the Coliseum, is worth a hundred days; and people may be seen

  kissing it from morning to night. It is curious that some of these

  crosses seem to acquire an arbitrary popularity: this very one

  among them. In another part of the Coliseum there is a cross upon

  a marble slab, with the inscription, 'Who kisses this cross shall

  be entitled to Two hundred and forty days' indulgence.' But I saw

  no one person kiss it, though, day after day, I sat in the arena,

  and saw scores upon scores of peasants pass it, on their way to

  kiss the other.

  To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches, would

  be the wildest occupation in the world. But St. Stefano Rotondo, a

  damp, mildewed vault of an old church in the outskirts of Rome,

  will always struggle uppermost in my mind, by reason of the hideous

  paintings with which its walls are covered. These represent the

  martyrdoms of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of

  horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he

  were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper. Grey-bearded men being

  boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts,

  worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up

  small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron

  pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws

  broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the

  stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the

  mildest subjects. So insisted on, and laboured at, besides, that

  every sufferer gives you the same occasion for wonder as poor old

  Duncan awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his having so

  much blood in him.

  There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what is

  said to have been - and very possibly may have been - the dungeon

  of St. Peter. This chamber is now fitted up as an oratory,

  dedicated to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate

  place, in my recollection, too. It is very small and low-roofed;

  and the dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are

  on it, as if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor.

  Hanging on the walls, among the clustered votive offerings, are

  objects, at once strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance,

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  with the place - rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers

  instruments of violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use,

  and hung up to propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon

  them would drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry

  with. It is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the

  dungeons below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked;

  that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream: and in

  the vision of great churches which come rolling past me like a sea,

  it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and

  does not flow on with the rest.

  It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are

  entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city. Many

  churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which,

  in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples,

  and what not: but I do not speak of them. Beneath the church of

  St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range

  of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have another outlet

  underneath the Coliseum - tremendous darknesses of vast extent,

  half-buried in the earth a
nd unexplorable, where the dull torches,

  flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of distant

  vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a city of

  the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls, dripdrop,

  drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and

  there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the sun. Some

  accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the

  amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some,

  both. But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the

  upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early

  Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the

  wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the

  night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon

  and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,

  their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!

  Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of

  San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs

  of Rome - quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hidingplaces

  of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been

  explored for twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty

  miles in circumference.

  A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only

  guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways

  and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy

  air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track

  by which we had come: and I could not help thinking 'Good Heaven,

  if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or

  if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!' On we

  wandered, among martyrs' graves: passing great subterranean

  vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with

  heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge

  there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which

  lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; Graves of

  men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the

  persecutors, 'We are Christians! We are Christians!' that they

  might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of

  martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little

  niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs' blood; Graves of some

  who lived down here, for years together, ministering to the rest,

  and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude altars,

  that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy

  graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprised,

  were hemmed in and walled up: buried before Death, and killed by

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  slow starvation.

  'The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid

  churches,' said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped to

  rest in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding us

  on every side. 'They are here! Among the Martyrs' Graves!' He

  was a gentle, earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I

  thought how Christian men have dealt with one another; how,

  perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted down and

  tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed

  each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this

  Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it, and

  how these great and constant hearts would have been shaken - how

  they would have quailed and drooped - if a foreknowledge of the

  deeds that professing Christians would commit in the Great Name for

  which they died, could have rent them with its own unutterable

  anguish, on the cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful

  fire.

  Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain

  apart, and keep their separate identity. I have a fainter

  recollection, sometimes of the relics; of the fragments of the

  pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the portion of the

  table that was spread for the Last Supper; of the well at which the

  woman of Samaria gave water to Our Saviour; of two columns from the

  house of Pontius Pilate; of the stone to which the Sacred hands

  were bound, when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of

  Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of

  his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as

  an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as

  they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated

  buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of

  battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and

  forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian

  churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and

  ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells,

  and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ: of Madonne,

  with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle

  like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously

  attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold:

  their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with

  chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round the

  pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and

  preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some high

  window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church,

  to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of

  the roof. Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps,

  where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and

  strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels,

  of an old Italian street.

  On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was beheaded

  here. Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a Bavarian

  countess, travelling as a pilgrim to Rome - alone and on foot, of

  course - and performing, it is said, that act of piety for the

  fourth time. He saw her change a piece of gold at Viterbo, where

  he lived; followed her; bore her company on her journey for some

  forty miles or more, on the treacherous pretext of protecting her;

  attacked her, in the fulfilment of his unrelenting purpose, on the

  Campagna, within a very short distance of Rome, near to what is

  called (but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat her

  to death with her own pilgrim's staff. He was newly married, and

  gave some of her apparel to his wife: saying that he had bought it

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  at a fair. She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess passing

  through their town, recognised some trifle as having belonged to

  her. Her husband then told her what he had done. She, in

  confession, told a priest; and the man was taken, within four days

  after the commission of the murder.

  There are no fixed time
s for the administration of justice, or its

  execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had been in prison

  ever since. On the Friday, as he was dining with the other

  prisoners, they came and told him he was to be beheaded next

  morning, and took him away. It is very unusual to execute in Lent;

  but his crime being a very bad one, it was deemed advisable to make

  an example of him at that time, when great numbers of pilgrims were

  coming towards Rome, from all parts, for the Holy Week. I heard of

  this on the Friday evening, and saw the bills up at the churches,

  calling on the people to pray for the criminal's soul. So, I

  determined to go, and see him executed.

  The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o'clock, Roman

  time: or a quarter before nine in the forenoon. I had two friends

  with me; and as we did not know but that the crowd might be very

  great, we were on the spot by half-past seven. The place of

  execution was near the church of San Giovanni decollato (a doubtful

  compliment to Saint John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back

  streets without any footway, of which a great part of Rome is

  composed - a street of rotten houses, which do not seem to belong

  to anybody, and do not seem to have ever been inhabited, and

  certainly were never built on any plan, or for any particular

  purpose, and have no window-sashes, and are a little like deserted

  breweries, and might be warehouses but for having nothing in them.

  Opposite to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was built.

  An untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking thing of course: some

  seven feet high, perhaps: with a tall, gallows-shaped frame rising

  above it, in which was the knife, charged with a ponderous mass of

  iron, all ready to descend, and glittering brightly in the morning

  sun, whenever it looked out, now and then, from behind a cloud.

  There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at

  a considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope's

  dragoons. Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms,

  standing at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were

  walking up and down in twos and threes, chatting together, and

  smoking cigars.

  At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would be a

  dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of vegetable