DIARY OF AN IDLE WOMAN IN ITALY. I. The Forum by Day-The Coliseum-Golden House of Nero and the Games of the Amphitheatre. YONGREVE makes one of his dramatis personæ de CONGRE clare that his name is Truth, and that he has very few acquaintances." Had I lived nearer his time I should have thought he had an eye to me, for I have all my life steadfastly proposed to tell the truth, and have rendered myself unaccountably unpopular by so doing. I also propose to tell the truth in this rough Diary-its only merit. I will not admire a statue because Winckelman praises it, or fall into raptures over tottering walls and clumsy pillars because they bear high-sounding names. In my character of truthteller I propose to visit the Forum. Now, I am certain that no human being ever visited that far-famed valley of glory and misery, or the first time, without positive disappointment such as I felt; only people will fly into high-flown classical raptures-raptures in which, indeed, I would willingly join, were association alone the question. But the Forum in broad daylight is in reality a bare, dusty, bald-looking place, with very little to see at all, so entirely are all vestiges of its former magnificence destroyed. The Capitoline Hill, crowned by the modern Campidoglio, built over the remains of the Tabularium, stands on a gentle eminence, and presents all the incongruities attendant on the back of an unfinished building. The windows and the walls might belong to any other house, and be considered rather untidy and incomplete; and the small bell-tower in the centre of the roof would appropriately crown a Dissenting meeting-house. Below, among the foundations, yawn some arches formed of uncemented blocks, and solid masses of stone-work in deep-down pits, of which there is just sufficient to recall their fabulous antiquity, and to remind us that in those vaults were religiously preserved the Sibylline books, consulted when there was "anything rotten in the state" of Rome. Very much below the modern road crossing the Forum, on which I take my stand, deep excavations under the base of the hill display the remains of various temples, masses of stone, former foundations, capitals, and broken marble pillars, crowded heterogeneously about the still remaining upright pillars, of which there are not a dozen standing, and those, to the eye of a rationalist, piled in such confusion, that, without the aid of books and antiquarian theories, it would be impossible to trace out any imaginable disposition or arrangement. No spot in the world has so fruitfully employed the learned pens of antiquarians; and because it is a Sphinx-riddle no god will reveal, everybody, with equal reason, calls them by a new name-Canina, Murray, Niebuhr, Braun, all employ their own nomenclature which imposes the scandal of endless aliases on the venerable ruins. At first I was so confused that I never called them by any name; for I was sure to be wrong whatever I said, and to stand corrected, though I might, had I loved disputations, have held my ground, having made antiquity my constant study since arriving in Rome. These temples, then, which must have stood inconveniently close together, are a vexation and a confusion. To the left, on the Tarpeian Rock, where once stood the citadel and the temple of Juno Moneta, houses and courts, dirty, black, and filthy, crowd upon each other. The republican government of ancient Rome, after the stern sentence passed on Manlius, razed his house, and forbade that henceforth any private dwelling should be erected on the Capitol or the citadel. But the long course of ages appears to have weakened this decree; for a fashionable antiquarian once arranged a little roost on the forbidden ground, under the shadow of the Prussian eagle, whose embassy is also perched precisely on the site of the ancient citadel on the Tarpeian Rock. No rock, however, is to be seen. The elevation is very slight, save on one side (overlooking the Piazza del Torre di Specchio), "the Traitor's Leap," where a man might still break his ankle-bone perhaps if he tried, and certainly would die of the suffocating atmosphere and bad smells of the neighbourhood. A steep road descends on this side into the Forum; a valley, oblong in shape, extending about seven hundred and fifty feet; and on the further side of the Campidoglio a flight of steps also leads downwards. Beyond the Campidoglio a further rise, corresponding with the opposite elevation of the citadel, indicates the site of the once famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, now replaced by the formless and really hideous exterior of the church of the Ara Coli, a mass of browned stones, like an architectural chaos, "without form and void;" but the accumulated earth still faithfully evidences where once stood the magnificent temple. Descending the flight of steps towards the Forum, the |