All Roads Lead to Rome . . .

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 637, 13 April 1929, Page 18

All Roads Lead to Rome . . .

MRS. A. GLADYS KERNOT WHOSE BRILLIANT ARTICLES ON EUROPEAN CITIES HAVE ATTRACTED MUCH ATTENTION NOW PENS HER IMPRESSIONS OF THE ETERNAL CITY FOR READERS OF THE SUN.

B JROUGHOITT several exciting and legend-laden, centuries, concerning which the historians of later ages have been so discursive, we are told that all roads led to Rome. Did anyone doubt the somewhat wholesale statement, the most cursory glance at the old part of the city as it stands, largely unaltered to-day, would prove its essential truthfulness. If you bring a road into a town it automatically ceases its wild wanderings and settles down, respectably, into being just a street; and surely the endings of all the roads of all the ■world are gathered together in that tangle of streets that weaves a heavy pattern across the heart of Rome. Without troubling the historian at all, we can recall the names, old as time itself, of many of those illustrious people who contributed a road, later to become a street. We can see them arriving over one or another of the Seven Hills. We can picture , them entering the city through a gate-. way that was as tall as an Emperor's dream could make it, and throwing the unused bit of road down anywhere,' leaving it to the classic builders of the period—whichever that happened to be —to embellish it on either side with buildings that would be at once imposing and appropriate. This, one is bound to admit, was done as perfectly as possible, and the casual roads became haughty and important. if unusually hemmed-in, streets. One could have hoped, perhaps, for a little more lateral expansiveness and a little less perpendicular aus- | terity; but there they are for ever, i the narrow streets that wind and | wind, and the immense stone structures that define their windings. The few inches of pavement with which they are bordered are of small practical use to pedestrians, and. anyway, the cheerful intimacy of the middle of the road is much to be preferred. There is adventure there, and variety. One should not have a dull moment, traversing the worn mosaic over whose diamond-shaped cobbles the equipages of Imperial Caesars may have rolled, and along which, at any curving corner, Rome’s present Caesar may swiftly pass in the model de luxe of the moment. Jt is. too. rather Intriguing to be even an unimportant unit of a procession whose human and dramatic arG 50 var^e d and so enthralling. Entering one the great

blocks of shadow, above which a strip of sky, between grey buildings, runs like a peacock-coloured ribbon, one encounters a diversity of creatures and things hardly likely to be met with elsewhere. The moving medley is composed of trams and omnibuses; mild little companies of Capuchin monks from whose humble sandals protrude somewhat needlessly pink toes; men standing over chestnut braziers; “crocodiles” of divinity students in geranium-coloured robes; I English visitors with the vapidities of E. V. I.ucas folded beneath tone arm; American ones, going deeper Into this business of seeing Rome, carrying Baedekers; gaily-painted wine cars drawn by mules; redwheeled carriages drawn by horses that look like rather faded etchings, and which appear to be moving in their sleep. Highly-enamelled limousines; many irresponsible hand barrows. one of which always proudly bears a green and gold brocaded chair; an unheeded street musician; men selling brooms; women with baskets of washing on their heads; beautiful young Italian gentlemen with provocative glances and "sideboards” that look as if they were painted on their slim, brown cheeks; men carrying plaster casts; soldiers in every kind of picturesque uniform and every manner of hat: officers with bales of blue cloth wound around them; officers trimmed with astrakhan; officers —most gqrgeous—with plumed golden helmets; mounted police wearing voluminous capes and tricorne hats; dozen of different orders of priests, moving silently yet swiftly in spite of their cumbersome petticoats. With the possible exception of the Capuchins, whose bare toes studiedly irradiate a certain amount of holiness, everyone is welldressed, everyone apparently moderately prosperous, everyone most certainly occupied. Above all, everything is orderly. Occasionally a handcart gets out of control and, if the street inclines downward, runs away with its human propeller; but even the irrelevant and irresponsible perambulations of the brocaded chair come to a definite mooring somewhere, one supposes. If you love the equine race as much as I do, it will never disconcert you to find that you have walked, unexpectedly, into the thoughtful face of a horse, or to discover that, in evading the sudden onrush of a taxicab, you have sheltered against the flat grey flank of a mule. Mules, you may think, do not sound wildly progressive or quite in keeping with the spirit of New Italy and the best Mussolini tradition. But though the mule undoubtedly belongs more to the archaeological period of Rome than to the modern one, you must not think of him as a primitive or an archaic creature. He is as native to the city as are any of the crippled columns that time has strewn about the Forum; Indeed, he might have walked off any of the scarcely decipherable friezes from which a mule is missing. He may be amusing, witi, his long,

leathery ears and hide the colour of an elephant—but remember, he is not all buffoon. Half of him, any way, is quite good horse. Besides, the Italians with their love of colour aryl their dramatic" instinct, have made him pictorial. They have put scarlet tassels on the poor love's nose and hung little brass bells on his neck and around his ears. It is singularly pleasant to waken in the morning to the sound of these musical bells, and to know that the brightly-painted wine carts are arriving from Frasctti, and that the great city’s milk and vegetable supply is steadily coming in from the outlying farms. For Rome ends abruptly, just as it did in the days when high city walls sought to make its preciousness inviolable; and where there might be ignoble or straggling suburbs stretch the gentle Campagna, and fields full of cows, and —since recently—acres under cultivation. “Since recently” in Italy, almost inevitably means since the c fining of Mussolini. I am no student, myself, of foreign politics. In affairs of State, Signor Mussolini may be a modern M.achiavelli for all I immediately know, or may presently care. But I at least am able to compare the Italy of today with the Italy I remember before the war, and if my small tribute of praise is of any use to the Duce, I offer it with all my heart. For to bis efforts must be attributed the extraordinary cleanliness that has superseded all the picturesque dirt; the modern methods of the municipalities; the efficiency of the police force; the absence of unemployment and of public beggars; the suppression of foolish and profitless anarchy; the enforcement of laws relating to the proper treatment of animals, and the cheerfulness and good behaviour of the general population. Italy's. present Dictator has indeed been like one of those greatly advertised soaps that “banish dirt”; but he has also banished a great many other things that were fully as disagreeable. Naturally there are some people who do not care for the modernised, revitalised Italy, but surely everyone must admit the greatness of the man who has accomplished so much, and who. in addition, can write aji excellent autobiography in his spare moments; the man who can crown the Pope to-day, and bring out a new novel to-morrow. If I might make a suggestion that Italy, as a country only slowly recovering from the financial disabilities of the war, might effect some small economy, I should say that the voluminous, ornate and rather theatrical uniforms of all soldiers and public officials might be somewhat modified. It would be a thousand pities, of course, and one respects a renaissance that leaves the colour and poetry of its national life intact. But such miles of excellent and expensive cloth are draped, drooped or carelessly i thrown around masculine figures whose generally superb good appearance needs no enhancing. (Continued on page 19)