Roman Vision

 Edward Hutton began his book on Rome with a retrospective account of a personal vision that came to him as he looked over the city from the Janiculum. 

It was on an April evening in my earliest manhood, as I stood on the vast bastion of the Janiculum in the sudden silence of the hour after the sunset—Rome was looking terrible as a crater under the conflagration of the sky—that I seemed to realise for the first time the true aspect of a place so augustly familiar, which, as Dante has perceived, nature herself has formed for universal dominion… and out of which has risen all Europe and our Faith, all that is really worth having in the world.

It was my last evening in Rome. On the morrow I was to return to the North. All day I had wandered aimlessly about looking for my lost illusions, till, weary at last, I had come towards evening to sit beside the parapet of the Janiculum, turning all things over in my heart as I watched the sun set over the City. How will I remember it?

It seems to me that I was but a child then, that I had believed in everything, and was altogether discouraged and dismayed, for Rome had been like a stranger to me. With an incredible loyalty I had dreamed of her in the North (shall I confess it?) as the city of Horatius, of the Gracchi, of Scipio Africanus, of Sulla and Marius, of Caesar, of that spiritual Caesar, too, who for so many ages has appointed there his dwelling, communing with the eternal in an eternal place. And I had found there a new city, spoiled by old things, full of all the meanness and ugliness of modern life, the rush and noise of electric trams, even in the oldest and narrowest ways, a place of change and destruction.

Take heart, I had continually told myself, even on the first morning beside the imprisoned Tiber bridged with iron, among the new slums about the Vatican, in the brickfield of the Forum: take heart, the Capitol remains. Therefore, not without thankfulness… I had made my way along the ruined Corso to the Piazza Venezia.

Well, I had rejoiced too soon. I was prepared for destruction…but for destruction heaped on destruction, for a rascal impudence that might put Phocas to shame, I confess it at once, I was not prepared…. For there, where long and long ago the Temple of Juno passed into the gentler dominion of the Madonna Mary, the modern barbarian had raised indeed a fitting monument to his king, who resembles great Caesar in this alone that in the heaven of the populace he has become divine. Was it a temple or a tomb, that ghastly erection of ghostly stone, that, standing on a ruined convent, seemed to bellow like Behemoth… It has remained, however, I told myself, for the kingdom of Italy to surpass both Caesar and Popes in vulgarity, rapacity, and insolence…

It was these things, I remember, that rose before me at the close of my last day in the City as I waited for the sunset by the parapet of the Janiculum. So that I said in my heart: Rome is not any more immortal; all that is gone for ever. It is finished. Let us pass by and be silent.

Nevertheless, it was in this moment of despair, of denial, that I began to understand.

An incredible majesty had descended upon the City and the hills…. the City loomed out of the night like some mysterious and lovely symbol, a visible gesture of the infinite, decisive and affirmative, never to be recalled or modified.

The material world, that close, impassable prison, seemed just then to be dissolving before my eyes, and it was as though in the silence, I had heard again these words, so full of assurance and all gladness: Sed confidite, Ego vici mundum: be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. And all my heart was changed suddenly, and in a moment I was comforted.

But that was long ago. Today as I look down on Rome in the long summer that is so quiet still within her walls—is it that I have grown wiser, or may be only older? —I find her immortality not alone in the continuity of Nature or in such a vision as that of which I have spoken, but in the City herself, in the life of the City I have come in some dim way to understand and to reconcile with my dreams…. I feel the eternity of Rome as I feel the brief sweetness of every passing moment there; she seems to me as eternal and persistent as life, as strangely various, as mysteriously secret.

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition, pp. 1-4. The first edition appeared in October 1907.