Читать книгу Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties - Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Страница 20

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If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome. There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the Campagna, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price, which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except if, by asking, we could prevail upon the Padrona's son-in-law to go and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I was quite content to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for themselves—or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave them a thought.

But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant, and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the padrona's biggest scaldino, and called it an experience. After a few evenings we decided it was an experience we could do without and, like all miserable Romans who have no fireplace, we settled down to spending our nights in the restaurants and cafés of Rome.

I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a shadow of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six o'clock and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia second-story back-building dining-room, if not of my family, then of one or another of my friends. In Rome it became a delightful uncertainty that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms into the "Road to Anywhere". That road was by no means an easy one to climb up again and if we could help it, we never climbed down more than once a day, usually a little before dusk, a few hours earlier when we were in a rare holiday mood, and always in time for a long or short tramp before dinner. If we came to a church we dropped into it, or a gallery, or a palace, or a garden, when we were in time. We followed the streets wherever they might lead—along the brand-new Via Nazionale to the Forum or the narrow alleys to St. Peter's, beyond the gates to the Campagna—seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out deliberately to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the first Trattoria we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was the biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.

Etching by Joseph Pennell OLD AND NEW ROME

One night the Trattoria happened to be the Posta in a narrow street back of the Piazza Colonna. It was small: not more than twenty could have dined there together in any comfort. It was beautifully clean. And the padrone, his son, and the one waiter—all the establishment—greeted us with that enchanting smile to which, during my first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a victim. Once we had dined at the Posta, we found it so pleasant that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighbourhood.

I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants, but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman trattoria where we had to consider the centesimi in the price of every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap Chianti shared between us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in none I thought so well decorated as the Posta with its bare walls and coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any restaurant, crowded with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more brilliant than the Posta filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the Posta I saw hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it always went in uniform—on condition, I might now add, that this uniform is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with cake and finish it with soup.

Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article or received a cheque, we went to the Falcone and celebrated the event by feasting on Maccheroni alla Napolitana, Cinghale all'Agra Dolce and wine of Orvieto. The Falcone was another accident of our tramps, though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished of itself as a haunt of the Cæsars, and was prepared to believe the waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion can never again be imperilled at the Falcone, for they tell me it has gone with the Ghetto and so many other things in the Rome I knew and loved.

By the middle of the winter we gave up the Posta and went to the Cavour instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the Cavour never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and the padrone and his waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome. But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the menu to us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a scaldino at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it, freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the padrone spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the compliments of the season, a plate of torrone and a bottle of old wine from his vineyard.