Roma Beata: Letters from the Eternal City

The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again, in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found. We have bought our linen, blankets, batterie de cuisine, and other beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday—am I not my mother’s own child?—I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had much tea, more talk, and most panettone—half bread, half cake, with pignoli and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it is better.

My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse. Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in midsummer chiefly,—has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau—cheerful person that, by the way—says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is hysterical!

Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear the music. At the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of the Blind Institution furnished the music—a good band, though not equal to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took the heavy youngster, the mother took the new-born, and, squatting down, calmly suckled it. The music was marred by the wailing of this and other infants, but no one seemed to mind. After all, it was the only way the women could have heard mass; the little ones were too young to be left alone at home.

The Romans are devoted to their children, although their ways are not our ways; no woman of the upper class nurses her child, baby carriages are unknown, and swaddling is still in vogue, at least with the lower classes. I know a young American lady, married to a Roman, who imported a perambulator for her first baby. The balia (wet-nurse), a superb cow of a woman, refused to trundle it, saying she was not strong enough, although I saw her carry a heavy trunk upstairs on her head while I was calling at the house! The baby is now a big eighteen-months-old boy; every day the balia goes out to give him an airing, carrying him in her arms! Here, leading-strings are facts, not symbols. In Trastavere, where I went sightseeing yesterday with Helen—peering, as she calls it,—the best sight we saw was a darling red-haired baby in leading-strings stumbling along in front of its grandmother. In the division of labor, the care of the children falls upon the grandmother; the mother’s time is too valuable; if she is not actually employed in earning money, there is the heavier work of the household to do. To use the pet phrase of the boarders, “things are different here from what they are at home.”