The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

'Can't we get a glass of wine round here?' asked Rocjean, looking at his watch; 'it is about luncheon-time, and I have a charming little thirst.'

'Oh! yes, there is a wine-shop only three doors from here, pure Roman. Let us go: we can stand out in the street and drink if you are afraid to go in.'

Leaving the studio, they walked a few steps to a house that was literally all front-door; for the entrance was the entire width of the building, and a buffalo-team could have passed in without let. Outside stood a wine-cart, from which they were unloading several small casks of wine. The driver's seat had a hood over it, protecting him from the sun, as he lazily sleeps there, rumbling over the tufa road, to or from the Campagna, and around the seat were painted in gay colors various patterns of things unknown. In the autumn, vine-branches with pendent, rustling leaves decorate hood and horse, while in spring or summer, a bunch of flowers often ornaments this gay-looking wine-cart.

The interior of the shop was dark, dingy, sombre, and dirty enough to have thrown an old Flemish Interior artist into hysterics of delight. There was an olla podrida browniness about it that would have entranced a native of Seville; and a collection of dirt around, that would have elevated a Chippeway Indian to an ecstasy of delight. The reed-mattings hung against the walls were of a gulden ochre-color, the smoked walls and ceiling the shade of asphaltum and burnt sienna, the unswept stone pavement a warm gray, the old tables and benches very rich in tone and dirt; the back of the shop, even at midday, dark, and the eye caught there glimpses of arches, barrels, earthen jars, tables and benches resting in twilight, and only brought out in relief by the faint light always burning in front of the shrine of the Virgin, that hung on one of the walls.

In a wine-shop this shrine does not seem out of place, it is artistic; but in a lottery-office, open to the light of day, and glaringly common-place, the Virgin hanging there looks much more like the goddess Fortuna than Santa Maria.

But they are inside the wine-shop, and the next instant a black-haired gipsy-looking woman with flashing, black eyes, warming up the sombre color of the shop by the fiery red and golden silk handkerchief which falls from the back of her head, Neapolitan fashion, illuminating that dusky old den like fireworks, asks them what they will order?

'A foglietta of white wine.'

'Sweet or dry?' she asks.

'Dry,' (asciùtto,) said Rocjean.

There it is on the table, in a glass flask, brittle as virtue, light as sin, and fragile as folly. They are called Sixtusses, after that pious old Sixtus V. who hanged a publican and wine-seller sinner in front of his shop for blasphemously expressing his opinion as to the correctness of charging four times as much to put the fluoric-acid government stamp on them as the glass cost. However, taxes must be raised, and the thinner the glass the easier it is broken, so the Papal government compel the wine-sellers to buy these glass bubbles, forbidding the sale of wine out of any thing else save the bottiglie; and as it raises money by touching them up with acid, why, the people have to stand it. These fogliette have round bodies and long, broad necks, on which you notice a white mark made with the before-mentioned chemical preparation; up to this mark the wine should come, but the attendant generally takes thumb-toll, especially in the restaurants where foreigners go, for the Roman citizen is not to be swindled, and will have his rights: the single expression, 'I AM A ROMAN CITIZEN,' will at times save him at least two baiocchi, with which he can buy a cigar. There was a time when these words would have checked the severest decrees of the highest magistrate: now when they fire off 'that gun,' the French soldiers stand at its mouth, laugh, and say; 'Boom! you have no balls for your cartridges!'

The wine finished, our two artists took up their line of march for the object that had outlived so many millions on millions of human beings, and at last reached it, discovering its abode afar off, by the crowd of fair-and unfair, or red-haired Saxons, who were thronging up a staircase of a house near the Ripetta, as if a steamboat were ringing her last bell and the plank were being drawn in.

'And pray, can you tell me, Mister Buller, if it's a positive fact that the man has been so long as they say, at work on the thing?'

'And ah! I haven't the slightest doubt of it, myself. I've been told that he has worked on it, to be sure, for full thirty years; and I may say I am delighted, that he has it done at last, and that it is to be packed up and sent away to St. Petersburg next week. And how do you like the Hotel Minerva? I think it's not a very dirty inn, but the waiters are very demanding, and the fleas—'

'I beg you won't speak of them, it makes my blood run cold. Have you seen the last copy of Galignani? The Americans, I am glad to see, have had trouble with us, and I hope they will be properly punished. Do you know the Duke of Bigghed is in town?'

'Really! and when did he come—and where is the Duchess? oh!—she's a very amiable lady—but here's the picture!'

Ushered in, or preceded by this rattle-headed talk, Caper and Rocjean stood at last before Ivanhof's celebrated painting—finished at last! Thirty years' work, and the result?

A very unsatisfactory stream of water, a crowd of Orientals, and our Saviour descending a hill.

The general impression left on the mind after seeing it, was like that produced by a wax-work show. Nature was travestied; ease, grace, freedom, were wanting: evidently the thirty years might have been better spent collecting beetles or dried grasses.

Around the walls of the studio hung sketches painted during visits the artist had made to the East. Here were studies of Eastern heads, costumes, trees, soil by river-side, sand in the desert, copied with scrupulous care and precise truth, yet, when they were all together in the great painting, the combined effect was a failure.

The artist, they said, had, during this long period, received an annual pension of so many roubles from the Russian government, and had taken his time about it. At last it was completed; the painting that had outlasted a generation was to be sent to St. Petersburg to hibernate after a lifetime spent in sunny Italy. Well! after all, it was better worth the money paid for it than that paid for nine tenths of those kingly toys in the baby-house Green Chambers of Dresden. Le Roi s'amuse!

And the white-haired Saxons came in shoals to the studio to see the painting with thirty years' labor on it, and accordingly as their oracles had judged it, so did they: for behold! gay colors are tabooed in the mythology of the Pokerites, and are classed with perfumes, dance-music, and jollity, and art earns a precarious livelihood in their land, where all knowledge of it is supposed to be tied up with the enjoyers of primogeniture.

ROMAN THEATRES

The Apollo, where grand opera, sandwiched with moral ballets, is given for the benefit of foreigners, principally, would be a fine house if you could only see it; but when Caper was in Rome, the oil-lamps, showing you where to sit down, did not reveal its proportions, or the dresses of the box-beauties, to any advantage; and as oil-lamps will smoke, there settled a veil over the theatre towards the second act, that draped Comedy like Tragedy, and then set her to coughing.

During Carnival a melancholy ball or two was given there: a few wild foreigners venturing in masked, believed they had mistaken the house, for although many women were wandering around in domino, they found the Roman young men unmasked, walking about dressed in canes and those dress-coats, familiarly known as tail-coats, which cause a man to look like a swallow with the legs of a crane, and wearing on their impassive faces the appearance of men waiting for an oyster-supper—or an earthquake.

The commissionaire at the hotel always recommends strangers to go to the Apollo: 'I will git you lôge, sare, first tier—more noble, sare.'

The Capranica Theatre is next in size and importance; it is beyond the Pantheon, out of the foreign quarter of Rome, and you will find in it a Roman audience—to a limited extent. Salvini acted there in Othello, and filled the character admirably; it is needless to say that Iago received even more applause than Othello; Italians know such men profoundly—they are Figaros turned undertakers. Opera was given at the Capranica when the Apollo was closed.

The Valle is a small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, appearing generally in the Sonnambula.

But the Capranica Theatre was the resort for the Roman minenti, decked in all their bravery. Here came the shoemaker, the tailor, and the small artisan, all with their wives or women, and with them the wealthy peasant who had ten cents to pay for entrance. Here the audience wept and laughed, applauded the actors, and talked to each other from one side of the house to the other. Here the plays represented Roman life in the rough, and were full of words and expressions not down in any dictionary or phrase-book; nor in these local displays were forgotten various Roman peculiarities of accentuation of words, and curious intonations of voice. The Roman people indulge in chest-notes, leaving head-notes to the Neapolitans, who certainly do not possess such smoothness of tongue as would classify them among their brethren in the old proverb: 'When the confusion of tongues happened at the building of the Tower of Babel, if the Italian had been there, Nimrod would have made him a plasterer!'

You will do well, if you want to learn from the stage and audience, the Roman plebs, their customs and language, to attend the Capranica Theatre often; to attend it in 'fatigue-dress,' and in gentle mood, being neither shocked nor astonished if a good-looking Roman youth should call your attention to the fact that there is a beautiful girl in the box to the left hand, and inquire if you know whether she is the daughter of Santi Stefoni, the grocer? And should the man on the other side offer you some pumpkin-seeds to eat, by all means accept a few; you can't tell what they may bring forth, if you will only plant them cheerfully.

Do not think it strange if a doctor on the stage recommends conserve of vipers to a consumptive patient; for these poisonous reptiles are caught in large numbers in the mountains back of Rome, and sold to the city apothecaries, who prepare large quantities of them for their customers.

When you see, perhaps the hero of the play, thrown into a paroxysm of anger and fiery wrath by some untoward event, proceed calmly to cut up two lemons, squeeze into a tumbler their juice, and then drink it down—learn that it is a common Roman remedy for anger.

Or if, when a piece of crockery, or other fragile article, may be broken, you notice one of the actors carefully counting the pieces, do not think it is done in order to reconstruct the article, but to guide him in the purchase of a lottery-ticket.

When you notice that on one of his hands the second finger is twined over the first, of the Rightful-heir in presence of the Wrongful-heir, you may know that the first is guarding himself against the Evil Eye supposed to belong to the second.

And—the list could be extended to an indefinite length—you will learn more, by going to the Capranica.

At the Metastasio Theatre there was a French vaudeville company, passably good, attended by a French audience, the majority officers and soldiers. Here were presented such attractive plays as La Femme qui Mord, or 'The Woman who Bites;' Sullivan, the hero of which gets bien gris, very gray, that is, blue, that is, very tipsy, and at the close, astonishes the audience with the moral: To get tight is human! Dalilah, etc., etc. The French are not very well beloved by the Romans pure and simple; it is not astonishing, therefore, that their language should be laughed at. One morning Rome woke up to find placards all over the city, headed:

FRENCH

TAUGHT IN THIRTY-SIX LESSONS!

Apply to Monsieur So-and-so

A few days afterward appeared a fearful wood-cut, the head of a jackass, with his tongue hanging down several inches, and under it, these words, in Italian: 'The only tongue yet learnt in less than thirty-six lessons!'

Caper, seated one night in the parquette of the Metastasio, had at his side a French infantry soldier. In conversation he asked him:

'How long have you been in Rome?'

'Three years, Mossu.'

'Wouldn't you like to return to France?'

'Not at all.'

'Why not?'

'Wine is cheap, here, tobacco not dear, the ladies are extremely kind: voila tout!'

'You have all these in France.'

'Oui, Mossu! but when I return there I shall be a farmer again; and it's a frightful fact that you may plow your heart out without turning up but a very small quantity of these articles there!'

French soldiers still protect Rome—and 'these articles there.'

THE BEARDS OF ART