d forgotten creatures!

_March_ 30.

XI.

PALAZZO ORSINI, FORMERLY SAVELLI.

This is the most Roman house, in my sense, of all Rome. The first
evening, when I came into my room, the sunset streaming in, the lights
beginning below, it was fantastic and overwhelming. What I said of
this being a unique moment in Roman history--the genius of the city
stripped of all veils, visible everywhere, is especially true about
the view from this window. During my childhood Rome was closed,
uniform, without either the detail or the panoramic efforts which
speak to the imagination; and ten or fifteen years hence the great
gaps will be filled up, and the deep historical viscera, so to speak,
of the city closed and grown together. Now, with the torn-down houses,
the swept-away quarters, one has not only views of hills and river and
bridges, and of gardens and palaces and loggias, hidden once and to be
hidden again, but into the very life of the people: the squalor of
back streets revealed, of yards looked into, of the open places turned
into _immondezzaio_ and play and grazing ground, showing the barbarism
and nakedness of the land--showing one that there is here no tradition
of anything more active, decent or human than this present demolition.
And the _Sventramento_ also reveals the past! From my window, under
that sunset behind the trees and fountains and churches of the
Janiculum, I look down on a sort of mediaeval city of the
Trastevere--upon a still stranger, imaginary one made by perspective
and fancy; the old bridge, with its two double _hermes_ leading
between towers, and the long prison-like walls of the inland
buildings, into an imaginary square--an imaginary city with more
towers, more Romanesque belfries. This is a case of the imaginary
place due to perspective, to bird's-eye view, to some reminiscence. (I
trace a resemblance to the arsenal gate at Venice, perhaps also to the
inner town at Castelfranco.) This case is an illustration of how large
a part illusion, even recognised as such, plays in our feeling.

And similarly as regards the _invisible_ view. Here am I, in a house
nesting in the theatre of Marcellus, the little orange and lemon
garden presumably built actually onto those remaining black arches in
which coppersmiths and coopers and saddlers, all the humble trades of
a backward little country town or village, have burrowed: the thought
of Virgil's line with it all. The mangy green grass in front, whe