Rome
April 10 / [18]81

My dear Brian *1,
We have been here for the best part of fortnight in this august city:-- & I know you will be kindly glad to hear of our impressions thereupon. I can easily give Hyacinth's *2. She would prefer green fields and flowers & insects a thousand times over to these Ruins, Sculptures, Pictures & Churches with which this place is stuffed & loaded. Our 2 excursions from Rome to Tivoli, & to Albano & Frascati charmed her her. The air & the woods & flowers were to me too a relief after so thorough a drenching with sight--seeing as the "necessities" of travel here impose on one. Then too the finding Mr & Mrs Morgan here has been a great relief & pleasure, & they have been most kind to us.
Rome as a city of ruins is very disappointing to me, so few of them are

in an intelligible state of preservation & such as there are representatives of people & events separated by such a vast interval of time or intercalated with the other so abruptly that they appear to have no more in common than the fossils of widely separated geological beds whose strata had been faulted & dislocated. Here you have something of the Caeser, at the next turn something of Constantines, with perhaps a monument of the Kingly period opposite it, then a vestige of the Republic , then of Volscius & the Goths, & so forth, to which you have to add the memorials innumerable of that complicated era when Heathendom and Christendom took it turn about to vex history. One heartily wishes that some more of those masters of Rome had destroyed every vestige of all his predecessors work, or else let them all alone! as it is, what little History of Rome I had is reduced to the ruinous state in which I find the memorials of it, & the objective vestiges of events not worth recording take a firmer hold on the memory than the

written records of world disturbing events which have left no visible evidence of their identity or efforts. I spent hours at the Palace of the Caesars, & as many in Hadrian's Villa, & I declare that if you were to change their positions & take me blindfold to either, I should not know which I was at! Each have a stadium & its Palestra, & a theatre & a library & so forth, & in both cases these are separated by gigantic mounds of ruins that have no distinguishing character of any sort. I think however that I can picture Rome as it was in the Republic better than before-- a city of no improving character as a whole, formed of a vast multitude of low buildings with slanting roofs belonging to the lower classes, with here & there a magnificent veranda, & scattered public buildings of still greater magnificence contrasting strangely with the hovels around-- In fact a sort of Benares with architecture of a very different type. Judging from the frescoes

the ordinary peasants & townsman's house must have been very like what we see now in & around Rome, & the house with the atrium, peristyle, impluvium & so forth must have been confined to the wealthy & few & far between. Again it appears to me that the vast extent of the public buildings & private ones of the upper classes, the prodigious amount of material put into these, the vast amount of wrought stones of incredible magnitude & hardness, & the lavish decoration of mosaics that required much time for many hands to produce them, all bespeak a prodigious disproportion of a very poor working class whose labour was forced or paid for by the smallest coin & coarsest food. The civilisation that produced such buildings as we have in Italy, Egypt, & Assyria had I suppose this element in common of a prodigality of forced or very cheap labor[sic]. These stupendous buildings are the

Stonehenge, & the monoliths, of a barbarous people in so far as means employed are concerned. It is true that St Peters is as big a thing as any that the ancient Romans produced, but it does not represent the brute strength that the Coliseum does as an expenditure of human labor or muscular power.
The last sage remark turns me to the churches, an endless theme. The first thing that must shock every traveller from the south, is the difference in the style of architecture from the southern gothic, & the fact that one is adapted to pictorial decoration the other not. & this leads to the enquiry how it was that architecture & painting being sister arts should be so culturally divorced in the north! Of the churches here the grandest in my view are the St. Maria degli Angeli & the Pantheon. These surprise you with the vastness of their proportions on entering, which St Peters does not. In fact to appreciate the latter you must see into the galleries of the dome and look down on the human beings like ants below & up to the tier upon tier of gigantic heads of

the mosaics that rear themselves aloft coming inward to the head of the dome. This last, the interior of the dome produces an overpowering effect, heightened perhaps by the height at which you stand & the slimness of the rail that separates you from the gulf below & the infinite space above crowded with great faces glaring at you.
The dome itself seen from outside is very inferior in proportions to St Pauls, which seen from Waterloo bank is exceedingly beautiful, as indeed is the whole building which had the advantage of being the design of one man of surpassing genius in many lines of thought & action.
As to the pictures & sculptures it is dangerous to begin upon them in a letter & so I will draw this epistle to a close.
We leave this tomorrow for Orvieto, Perugia, Chiusi *2, Siena & Florence. & then go to Venice.

Hyacinth is already much the better for her trip, & will I hope return with renewed health. The Grays are most agreeable & most considerate travelling companions.
With united love to you both |Ever affe[ctionatel]y y[ou]rs | Jos D Hooker [signature]