An awning was stretched, too, over the top, to screen the old man
from the hot rays of the sun. As noon approached, all eyes were
turned up to this window. In due time, the chair was seen
approaching to the front, with the gigantic fans of peacock’s
feathers, close behind. The doll within it (for the balcony is
very high) then rose up, and stretched out its tiny arms, while all
the male spectators in the square uncovered, and some, but not by
any means the greater part, kneeled down. The guns upon the
ramparts of the Castle of St. Angelo proclaimed, next moment, that
the benediction was given; drums beat; trumpets sounded; arms
clashed; and the great mass below, suddenly breaking into smaller
heaps, and scattering here and there in rills, was stirred like
parti-coloured sand.
What a bright noon it was, as we rode away! The Tiber was no
longer yellow, but blue. There was a blush on the old bridges,
that made them fresh and hale again. The Pantheon, with its
majestic front, all seamed and furrowed like an old face, had
summer light upon its battered walls. Every squalid and desolate
hut in the Eternal City (bear witness every grim old palace, to the
filth and misery of the plebeian neighbour that elbows it, as
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certain as Time has laid its grip on its patrician head!) was fresh
and new with some ray of the sun. The very prison in the crowded
street, a whirl of carriages and people, had some stray sense of
the day, dropping through its chinks and crevices: and dismal
prisoners who could not wind their faces round the barricading of
the blocked-up windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to
the rusty bars, turned THEM towards the overflowing street: as if
it were a cheerful fire, and could be shared in, that way.
But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the full moon,
what a sight it was to see the Great Square full once more, and the
whole church, from the cross to the ground, lighted with
innumerable lanterns, tracing out the architecture, and winking and
shining all round the colonnade of the piazza! And what a sense of
exultation, joy, delight, it was, when the great bell struck halfpast
seven – on the instant – to behold one bright red mass of
fire, soar gallantly from the top of the cupola to the extremest
summit of the cross, and the moment it leaped into its place,
become the signal of a bursting out of countless lights, as great,
and red, and blazing as itself, from every part of the gigantic
church; so that every cornice, capital, and smallest ornament of
stone, expressed itself in fire: and the black, solid groundwork
of the enormous dome seemed to grow transparent as an egg-shell!
A train of gunpowder, an electric chain – nothing could be fired,
more suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumination; and when
we had got away, and gone upon a distant height, and looked towards
it two hours afterwards, there it still stood, shining and
glittering in the calm night like a jewel! Not a line of its
proportions wanting; not an angle blunted; not an atom of its
radiance lost.
The next night – Easter Monday – there was a great display of
fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo. We hired a room in an
opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time,
through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and
all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which
the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the
rapid Tiber below. There are statues on this bridge (execrable
works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were
placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less
strangely on the stone counterfeits above them.
The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant
sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour,