The Rome Effect

It is rarely indifference. Nineteenth Century travellers were, more often than not, classically educated, religiously motivated and politically committed. They went to Rome with strong expectations and usually found much to feed their passion or their indignation. They could also have fun.

I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion, and I had a little French painter, a young academician, always vain, always alert, always gay, who served as my jackal. I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets, and I thought that one might well allow oneself a little indulgence in a city where there are prostitutes licensed by the Cardinal Vicar. [James Boswell]

[A]ll that I had been acquainted with through paintings or drawings, engravings or woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models are here collectively presented to my eye. [I]t is all just as I had thought it, but it is all new...[I am attracted to Rome by a] irresistible impulse, indeed for the past few years it has become with me a kind of desease which could only be cured by the sight and presence of the absent object' [Goethe]

I had no idea that an excitement so powerful and agreeable still untried by me was to be found in the world. [Macauley]

[Rome's] enchanted sky, so pure that a sigh rises to God more freely than in any other place on earth. [Alfred de Musset]

[Italy was] mostly an emotion. The month of May, 1860, was divine...The shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. [Henry Adams]

Then there was the other side. First, the romance of decay and then its horror.

The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown away or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home-scenery for any human being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the scope of man's actual possessions. [Nathaniel Hawthorne]

[T]here is a strange horror lying over the whole city, which I can neither describe nor account for; it is a shadow of death, possessing and penetrating all things. The sunlight is lurid and ghastly...the shadows are cold and sepulchral; you feel like an artist in a fever, haunted by every dream of beauty that his imagination has ever dwelt upon, but all mixed with the fever fear. I am sure this is not imagination, for I am not given to such nonsense. and even in illness never remember feeling anything approaching to the horror with which some object here can affect me. [Ruskin]

I collected these quotes from Pick, Daniel (2005), Rome or Death.

The reader of Tasso

This is an excerpt from Lady Sydney Morgan's Italy (1821, Henry Colburn, London, Vol I & II). The section heading given on the Contents page is "On the Mola, Naples". I have been unable to verify this use of "mola'; 'mole' would be the normal word. She is referring to the breakwater in the Bay of Naples along which she walked of a Sunday.

[There were]...several circles, each two or three deep [formed by]...the lowest orders of the Lazzaroni; sometimes seated on wooden benches, sometimes on the ground, according the the price paid to some peripatetic philosopher or READER, who occupied the centre and who read aloud - Tasso or Mastrilla, stories from "La Bibbia", or legends of much less edifying character. The image of one of those academicians will not readily escape my memory...; he was a short, square, grotesque figure with the face moulded on the model of the French Polichinel - all nose, chin and bushy eyebrows; he wore an immense wig, a large but torn cocked hat, the jacket, or the fragments of a jacket, of an Italian courtier and a pair of bright yellow buckskin smallclothes from the cast-off wardrobe of some English groom. He was without shoes or stockings; his spectacles were immense; and he held a filthy tattered Tasso in one hand, and a stick or wand in the other, which he moved with great dignity and variety of gesture. For every line he recited, he gave a commentary of his own that might fill a page; sometimes pathetic, sometimes humourous and always with an air so profoundly oracular as to excite the strongest disposition to laughter. Such, however, was not the effect produced on his auditors: never were countenances more concentrated, or more intensely expressive of the deepest interest - eyebrows were knit, lips distended, cheeks glowed and heads shook, at the feats and fates of the Goffredo and the "Rinaldo" against whom in vain,

S'armo d'Asia e di Libia il popol misto

Some half-rose in their emotion - others uttered a deep ejaculation; and the murmured "Bravo!" circulated with all the restrained emotion of those who feared to interrupt, by their applause, strains that commanded the most enthusiastic admiration!

When the seance broke up, which it did every hour, for the benefit of fresh profits and a new audience, the dismissed auditors flew to an orange-stand, where the fruiterer was busily occupied in cutting up oranges, which swam in juice on the counter before him and were purchased with thirsty avidity for about the value of half a farthing. Others took ice, to the amount of a half penny, from the Acquaiolo and a penny or two pence more, laid out in bread and maccaroni, probably included the whole expense of the day. (II, p389-90)

One of the footnotes offers a little more about the 'auditors'.

Common people call Tasso "il Rinaldo". [They support characters to such a degree as to] give rise to such combats as were formerly fought to prove the worth or beauty of particular Dulcineas. [Listeners] are said to appreciate the poetical merits of their native poet with a tact that would do honour to the critical acumen of the most professed reviewer.

For information about Lady Morgan, see here and here.