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.