The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago

are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more

than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass

through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and

perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round

the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn

fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts

that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay

aside in that unfragrant atmosphere--the nose. Bas-reliefs, the spoil of

some far older palace, are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of

which has been ravished from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin

which earlier barbarism had not already levelled with the earth. Between

two of the pillars, moreover, stands an old sarcophagus without its

lid, and with all its more prominently projecting sculptures broken

off; perhaps it once held famous dust, and the bony framework of some

historic man, although now only a receptacle for the rubbish of the

courtyard, and a half-worn broom.

In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the

hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,

appears a fountain. It brims over from one stone basin to another,

or gushes from a Naiad's urn, or spurts its many little jets from the

mouths of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial

when Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced

them; but now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing

maiden-hair, and all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks

and crevices of moist marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain

back into her great heart, and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a

woodland spring. And hark, the pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash!

You might hear just those tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the

forest, though here they gain a delicious pathos from the stately

echoes that reverberate their natural language. So the fountain is not

altogether glad, after all its three centuries at play!

In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access

to the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up

which, in former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great

Roman family who built this palace. Or they have come down, with still

grander and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal,

there to put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown.

But, in fine, all these illustrious personages have gone down

their hereditary staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the

thoroughfare of ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires,

artists, tradesmen, washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of

whom find such gilded and marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and

luxury demand, or such homely garrets as their necessity can pay for,

within this one multifarious abode. Only, in not a single nook of the

palace (built for splendor, and the accommodation of a vast retinue, but

with no vision of a happy fireside or any mode of domestic enjoyment)

does the humblest or the haughtiest occupant find comfort.




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