The Fountains of Rome

 No one can visit Rome without falling in love with its fountains. In his chapter on the fountains, Edward Hutton traced their origins back to ancient Rome, described their destruction during the Dark Ages, and their revival by the Papacy during the Renaissance. He then took his readers on a walking tour of his favorites.

Horace tells us somewhere that he is the friend of fountains, and, indeed, no true Roman whether of the ancient or the modern world, can ever have been without some sentiment for them, since, in fact, they are the joy of Rome, her voice, as it were, a pleasant and a joyful voice; for no city in Europe is so truly a city of running waters. All day long they waken in the heart some mystery of delight and refreshment; -- the slender jets of water wavering between the cypresses in the shadow, flashing in the sun, splashing among the statues on the cold marble. And their song in the cool, diaphanous mornings of spring is a song of life, of joy, of the brief joy of life…. 

 

 

In the fifteenth century the Popes of the Renaissance, wishing to return to her the leadership of the world, gave her back her waters, and suddenly, in a moment, as though by enchantment, she arose once more out of the wilderness and the ruins, healed and whole at the sound of that song. 

 

Often very early in those spring mornings which are so fair in Rome, or maybe on an autumn evening, under a moon great and golden as the sun, I have wandered through the city of fountains for the sake of their song. It begins with the strange artificial voice of Bernini’s Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna, where the Acqua Vergine falls humbly at the feet of Madonna, that gallery of war shooting forth from her guns, not death, but refreshment. Then, as I pass into the silence up the beautiful Scala di Spagna, and turn towards the Pincio, presently, still far off, I hear the most beautiful voice in Rome, the single melody, languid and full of mystery, and all enchantment, of the fountain before the Villa Medici, where, under the primeval ilex, a single jet of water towers like some exquisite slender lily, to droop, to fall in unimagined loveliness into the brimming vase of marble, so admirably simple and in place under these sacred trees, before that lofty villa, which, in some sort, dominates the whole City, and whence one may look across the towers and domes to the Capitol, to S. Peter’s, to the Campagna stretching away to the sea.

 

No other fountain in Rome is at once so simple and so beautiful as this, nor is there another which commands so wide and so majestic a prospect. And yet, if one passes down the slope of the Pincio into the Piazza del Popolo, and so crosses the Ponte Margherita, and passes at last under the height of the Vatican, comes at last into the Piazza di S. Pietro, one finds there…two fountains, quite as beautiful in their way, though truly less simple, singing ever before the threshold of the shrine of the Apostle. Rising in the shape, as it were, of fleurs de lys, the water harmonises perfectly, not only with the fountains themselves, but with the beautiful piazza in which they are so marvelously placed, forming together with it the masterpiece of Bernini. 

 

                                              

We come to the Piazza Navona, where stands the most extraordinary, perhaps of all Bernini’s works, the brilliant but bizarre fountain with its obelisk and statues personifying the four great rivers of the world.

 

It is again to a work of Bernini we come, as, passing on through the City, we stand at last before the fountain of Trevi, which resembles the Acqua Paolina, and which may be heard above all the noise of the piazza. And it is fitting that, since Rome is the city of fountains, to make sure of one’s return to her, it should be necessary to make an offering, not at the grave of Romulus, nor at the shrine of S.Peter, but to the greatest and most famous of her fountains, for it is said, whoever, at the hour of departure, drinks a cup of the water of Trevi and pays for it, has not looked on Rome for the last time. ### 

  

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 318-323.

Rome: Spanish Steps and Pincio

Edward Hutton especially liked the Spanish Steps and the nearby Pincio, Rome's beautiful and spacious park. "Eighteenth century work though it be, on how many nights one is content to find that marvelous staircase the most beautiful thing in Rome." Typically, he didn't like the crowds of tourists that just liked to sit on the steps then and now.*

The Piazza di Spagna, that beautiful, irregular square, with its strange fountain before the Palace of the Spanish embassy at the foot of the Spanish steps, remains for the English certainly, the very centre of Rome, though indeed it is just within the Aurelian wall. It is, in fact, one of the most characteristic in the modern city, Papal so long, the key, as it were, to all the strangers’ quarter which still forms so important and even so indispensable a part of the old capitol of the world….(291)

 

When coming on a winter evening along the Via Condotti we see the real beauty of Rome, a beauty really of atmosphere, of colour in the splendor which the sunset has laid upon the whole Piazza, and not least upon that stucco church whose twin towers seem to guard it from the summit of the Spanish Steps. In that fortunate hour the whole place is an acropolis of ivory and precious moonstone, stained with delicate purple and rude gold.

 

But in the twilight and the darkness when it is deserted by all, its grave, artificial lines so cunningly sumptuous, seem almost ascetic, and very quiet in their ample beauty leading one slowly, with dignity, with many well-timed pauses, to the summit. And then, too, the mere stucco of the beautiful church to which it serves as a threshold or atrium is lost in the generous beauty of night. One might think it indeed to be of marble or some precious unheard of stone, chrysoprase or amber, jasper or chalcedony, or of ivory and pallid gold. Built in 1493 by that madman, Charles VIII of France, the SS. Trinita de’ Monti has something of the ecstasy of a great French building restrained by the sanity of the sun…. (294)

 

Something of the fantastic beauty of that church which lends itself so readily to every aspect of the sky is to be found everywhere on the Pincio, which on certain afternoons is the one really gay and irresponsible place in the City, unawares so beggared. There, as it were, above the City, on a summer afternoon, amid the languid fountains, under the evergreen trees whose sharp leaves seem to be all of bronze, that trivial and tirelessly formal or weary world takes its ease, a little harshly and noisily perhaps, as Rome has always done… (294-5)

 

But it is not thus in in the afternoon or at sunset alone that the Pincio has a charm, but early in the morning too, before the sun has southed. It is almost deserted then, and the fountains whisper together in the silence in the shadow and the sun. One wanders there under the trees always returning to the look-out over the City towards S. Peter’s, lingering there for a time before descending to the Piazza del Popolo and the beautiful church of S. Mary. Out of the gate, Porta del Popolo passes the Flaminian way, and by that road our fathers came from England, S. Maria del Popolo being indeed the first Roman church they would see. (296)

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Note: In his extensive description of the art works in S. Maria del Popolo, Hutton did not mention the two famous paintings in the Cerasi Chapel by Caravaggio: The Crucifixion of Peter and the Conversion of Paul. 

Rome: Aventine Hill and Plainsong

 Edward Hutton's description of Rome's Aventine Hill and its churches is typical of his unique mixture of history, art, religion, and folklore. On one of our visits to Rome we stayed at a small hotel in a lovely tree-lined neighborhood right around the block from the churches he described. One of the things he did not mention was the spectacular view of St. Peter's one gets by peering through the large keyhole in the gate of the headquarters of the Knights of Malta.

 

Of all the hills of Rome the Aventine alone, precipitous and almost uninhabited as it is, still impresses us with its own beauty and serenity. It is as though the ancient curse of the Patricians were still heavy upon it. Something certainly of those far-off days seems to linger even yet about its shadowy, deserted ways, among the gardens there, where in spring the almond trees are so strangely lovely and in summer the cicada wearies us with its song; where many an ancient church still counts the Ave Maria through the centuries, half-forgotten in a world of silence and flowers…. Later there were temples there, too, for the shadowy Aventine had always been, as was supposed, the abode of some deity…. ‘God is there,’ said the noisy Roman world, awed by the silence of the woods, and so the hill was crowned with temples, the most renowned and splendid being that of Diana, which stood on its very summit in the midst of a grove where that pale goddess seems to have been worshipped from the time of Servius Tullius to the time of Alaric the Goth.

 

As we pass today from S. Maria in Cosmedin, where the shadow of the Aventine mixes with that of the Palatine hill…we come presently between the long poderi walls to the very place sacred once to Diana, but now to a lesser virgin, S. Sabina, whose church stands in the ruins of the ancient temple…. (270-1)

 

What remains to us of ancient beauty, however, belongs to the doors of Cyprus wood, which are not only the most beautiful things in the church, but among the most precious remains of primitive Christian art. Carved in the fifth century, they are divided into twenty-six panels representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and though these are no longer in their proper order…they remain representative work of the fifth century, the time of the foundation of the church. There we see Elijah borne to heaven in the fiery chariot accompanied by an angel, like a Roman Victory. Then Pharoah crosses the Red Sea, which recalls the great horsemen, the treasures of Monte Cavallo; Christ is adored by the wise kings in Phrygian dress; S. Peter denies his Lord to a damsel like a Roman Empress…. (272-3)

 

Click on image to enlarge

But amid so many diverse memories we are like to forget S. Sabina altogether. And truly we know little about her. Converted, as it is said, by her Greek slave, Seraphia, she was one of Hadrian’s martyrs. She lies now with Seraphia in the Confession before the high altar, the two bodies having been brought hither from the catacombs of Alexandria. (273)

  Hutton liked to hear Mass at  S. Anselmo, a modern church, for the chant or plainsong of the Benedictine monks.

 

So on a Sunday morning in the marvelous Roman summer I would often pass from church to church on my way to hear Mass at S. Anselmo close by.

The great Benedictine College of S. Anselmo, great for Italy at any rate, stands in the midst of its gardens and poderi just opposite S. Alessio. Begun in 1892 and finished in 1896, S. Anselmo was built by Leo XIII, as a college for black Benedictines of all nations. And, here, truly better than anywhere else in Rome, one may hear the very song of the early Church, that long drawn-out, sweet melody, that might seem to have been born with the mystery of the Mass, but is really more universal and more ancient, the very tunes, indeed, instinctive with beauty and humility in which man has always spoken with the gods. For the plainsong is by no means an exclusively Christian music, it seems to have been used by all peoples and all religions, it is indeed an universal hymn of praise, of assurance, plaintive, too, and full of the repetitions of love, the expression of an universal joy, an universal weariness in which man seems about to cast himself for the last time on the earth at the feet of the gods among the flowers.

Coming to us from the East, full of the mystery of the desert, the song indeed of a nomad people often alone with God, the plainsong, as we call it, was first caught up and, as it were, confined by rules for Christian use by the Greek Pope Gregory (not as is generally supposed by Gregory the Great) who contrived out of its mysterious beauty the ‘Gregorian tones,’ thus confiding to it the fundamental truths of the new religion, so that if the creeds and the Gospels should be swept away, still from the assurance of that music in which all the sorrow of the world has found utterance, one might reconstruct the dogmas of the Christian faith resolved into an endless melody…. (274-5)

Note 2: What the plainsong was before it was formed for us by Gregory we may hear any day in Cairo or Tangier or in the desert. Much of it, used for another purpose, remains in the Malagueras of Malaga; and there is the root of it in the Scotch and Irish folk-tunes which can never die. This chant became the music of Italy, the only music really worth hearing or preserving in the Rispetti and Stornelli of the peasants. That it was the music of Greece and Rome, I think, might easily be proved; for to what other tunes and with what other intervals would we have sung so late a thing as the Pervigilium? The Greek songs were doubtless written for it, or under its influence in some less rugged and untutored form that we meet with today in Morocco—where I have heard as it were the Wrath of Achilles chanted as I must suppose Homer once sung. (275) 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Vatican: Sistine Chapel and Stanze della Segnatura

 I agree with Edward Hutton that Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is difficult to comprehend or take in. It's not just the crowds of tourists but the sheer monumentality is overwhelming. I also prefer the relatively small and intimate Stanze della Segnatura where, despite a room full of people, you are free to linger and explore the four walls at leisure before being swept into the Sistine Chapel.

 

Above these, supported by marvelous and gigantic images of sybyls, of prophets, of slaves, and athletes, stretches the roof of Michelangelo, that new heaven which is the old earth, beautiful with the life of man, his love which brought disaster and all joy, the wild story of the world, which ends on that vast wall above the altar where he has painted not the Last Judgment, it might seem, but the Resurrection.

 

This ceiling, so heavy with life that it always seems to crush us under the weight of its tremendous story, was painted for Pope Julius II., the condotierre, between the years 1506 and 1512…. (216)

 

But this profound and wonderful vision of life by no means decorates the chapel of the Popes; it dwarfs it. The air is so full of shapes that we can see nothing.  In this space… Michelangelo, whose spirit always seems to be brooding over some immense sorrow, has created a tremendous and a terrible crowd of figures, each one of which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some tragic crime committed upon mankind….  Here we are devoured by insatiable dreams—and how should we answer and satisfy them? (222-223)

 

Raphael: School of Athens.

 

But, after all, what strikes us most in this picture dealing so easily and surely with the greatest matters, is its value as just a picture, its decorative value, that is, its marvelously lovely expression, not of any profound or subtle thought but of its own element, a certain spaciousness, confined as we perceive at last, within very narrow material limits, but that seems infinite. It is the very triumph of decorative art, come at last to perfection in one who had been the pupil of Pietro Perugino. The difficulty of such an achievement, greater here by far than in the ‘Disputa.’ For there all heaven lay open to our eyes, is scarcely felt till in an effort to understand what is really consummate in the art of Raphael—and no man has been praised so much for the wrong things—we perceive here his real triumph. That palace or temple, all of earth, full of the measured beauty of the work of man, is not less infinite in its spaciousness after all than the whole circuit of the world, the limitless kingdom, light on light, of the sky. And this is the real triumph of Raphael, not that he has summed up the ancient and the medieval world and expressed them in the terms of the Renaissance, but that into that narrow, cramped room he has brought an infinite beauty. (227)

 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

St. Peter's: Oratory of Pope Nicholas V.

 

 

Although he disliked the pomp and splendor of the St. Peter's, Edward Hutton loved the chapel of Pope Nicholas V with its frescoes by Far Angelico. ***

Amid all the dying pomp of the Vatican, the Oratory of Nicholas V stands like a little country chapel, as simple as that, and gay as it were with the wildflowers of Tuscany. Of all the sanctuaries of the Eternal City, it alone keeps about it something of the mysticism and charm of the early Renaissance—of S. Francis, for instance. After the material splendor of S.  Peter’s, the cold magnificence of the great palace of the Popes, it offers you a marvelous repose, in which it is possible to forget even the papacy and to pray to God. And, indeed, in all the Vatican it alone is a place of perfect happiness full of sweetness and light. One finds there nothing of Roman somberness and solemnity, but, as it were, an intimate silence and joy. And to cross the threshold unexpectedly in the midst of the immense ghostly palace, so full of unreal and material things, is to come suddenly out of a dream into the sanctuary of home…. 196

 

Fra Angelico;

 

It was in 1445 that Pope Eugenius had invited Fra Giovanni da Fiesole to Rome, where he remained till, Eugenius dying in 1447, Nicholas V besought him to decorate the new chapel he was building at the Vatican…. 

 

There on the walls Angelico has painted the life and death of SS. Stephen and Laurence….

 

As one looks at these living and exquisite pictures, the work of an old man of sixty three, one is chiefly struck, I think, by their freshness, as though the influence of Rome had revealed to a mind, enclosed till then by a country cloister among the wildflowers, the realities of the world, of life, that contemporary life which was about to become so splendid. The gentle friar, who has dreamed his life away among the saints and has walked hand in hand with Jesus, as it were, has become, under the influence of the Eternal City, the most perfect and most satisfying of naturalists, not copying life but creating it, out of a profound realization of it.  Some joy always secretly in his heart has led him, suddenly so observant of men, to just this realism, as we might say, which is so new and so charming a feature of his work here in the Vatican. Consider then that woman who in the ministration of S. Stephen, lightly, lightly holds her child’s hand, oblivious of everything but the emotion which the saint’s words have suddenly awakened in her heart: or that blind man, who, when S. Laurence distributes alms, approaches with so uncertain a step, one hand stretched out before him, the other holding firmly, blindly to the friendly staff: It is as though we had really seen these people, so surely has Angelico drawn them from the mere details of life in the Eternal City. How well they must have loved one another, these two, the Pope who was the greatest humanist in Italy…and the artist who had, long and long ago, mistaken earth for heaven in his joy at its perfection, only to find here at last, it might seem, that it was in some sort the only truth he might really apprehend. (201-202)

 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

*** A reader directed me to a virtual tour of the Pope Nicholas chapel.