city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as
the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen
miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the
ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at
half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out
upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over
an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.
Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of
columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble;
mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a
spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes, loose walls,
built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our
path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves,
rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to
advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the
old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy
covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In
the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course
along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us,
stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on
miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the
awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen,
clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their
sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate
Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of
an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men
have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have
left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished;
where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their
Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust!
Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from the distance,
on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost feel (as I had
felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never
rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world.
To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
fitting close to such a day. The narrow streets, devoid of footways,
and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dunghillrubbish,
contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and
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their filth, and darkness, with the broad square before some
haughty church: in the centre of which, a hieroglyphic-covered
obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks
strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient
pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supports a Christian
saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St.
Peter. Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from the
spoliation of the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like mountains:
while here and there, are broken arches and rent walls, through
which it gushes freely, as the life comes pouring from a wound.
The little town of miserable houses, walled, and shut in by barred
gates, is the quarter where the Jews are locked up nightly, when
the clock strikes eight – a miserable place, densely populated, and
reeking with bad odours, but where the people are industrious and
money-getting. In the day-time, as you make your way along the
narrow streets, you see them all at work: upon the pavement,
oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing old
clothes, and driving bargains.
Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the moon
once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and
rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear. In the
narrow little throat of street, beyond, a booth, dressed out with
flaring lamps, and boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky