Roman Neighbourhoods - Page 2

of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The
pillars and arches of pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with
a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no
better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their
sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the
antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate.
Will those they give their descendants be as good?

At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a
couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-
faced Palazzo Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an
imposing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is
adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the
seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this fine old
decoration that preparations were going forward for a local
festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain
mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults.
The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a
group of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe.
I regarded it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered
remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again
of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such
venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any
more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds
and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy
you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken
proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into
on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of
it. One finds one's self at last--without fatuity, I hope--
feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as
if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social
sense, and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in
size out of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the
only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste they collectively
form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures on all the
altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I
suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by
worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the
Ariccia, rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance
temple whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the
population of a capital. But where is the taste of the
Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for whom
Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred
clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there,
from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her
devotions with more