THE VATICAN GARDENS

I suppose there are moments when the Vatican Gardens look as beautiful as you would expect. I have not seen them at such a time. If I were Pope and confined by my policy to a park of a few acres, and a palace of eleven thousand rooms, I should do my best to make that park an earthly paradise; and one could do a great deal with the Hill of Evil Repute, the Mons Vaticanus. It is all ups and downs, and its crest commands on the one side one of the finest views of St. Peter’s and the Palace of the Pope, and on the other looks far away into the open country where the road runs down to Viterbo under an avenue of monumental stone-pines.

The Vatican Gardens, known as the Boscareccio, have little of the architectural nobility which endears the gardens of so many dead and gone Cardinals to us. The Fountain Garden in the Villa Lante, beyond Viterbo, which was the pleasure-house of the famous Cardinal Riario, recalls the Book of the Revelation. It is such a vision of water spread like a glassy sea, divided up into jewels by flourishes of hoary masonry. The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, built for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, the grandson of Pope Alexander VI., and son of the beautiful Lucrezia Borgia, might be the entrance to Paradise, with its magnificent sweeps of broad and ancient steps from terrace to terrace, green with the shade of leaves that never fall, and glittering with the crystal arcs of leaping water.

The sentiment of an earlier and more liberal age allowed the society of fair women to the Princes of the Church. Else, maybe, the Este and Aldobrandini Cardinals had never built those stairways of the gods which grace the slopes of Tivoli and Frascati. The garden of the Vatican lacks the pagan beauty born of a desire to emulate the fairy temple of the blind goddess Fortuna, piled up the hill of Palestrina, the Præneste which rivalled Rome, till it was sacrificed, not to the righteousness, but to the revenge of Pope Boniface VIII., thirteen turbulent centuries after Our Lord had preached His Gospel of Peace.

But here, too, are the footprints of the Classics, for the Popes have loved to remember that they sat on the throne, not only of St. Peter, but of the Cæsars. The twenty-first of April, the birthday of Romulus, the first King of Rome, or, at any rate, of his city, is observed now as it was two thousand years ago.

The Pope’s classical garden is frigid in design, though sunny in aspect. Its chief ornaments are orange trees in tubs; royally prolific of fragrant white blossom and golden orbs of fruit; they are ranged along the lower terrace. The garden itself looks like a puzzle put together with gravel paths, box borders, and patterns of flower-beds. The larger beds have emblems and inscriptions executed in box--a tiara, for example, with “Pio X.” on one side and “Pont. Max.” on the other; or a Cardinal’s hat with tassels and cords, or tortured lions. Here and there is a small aloe or palmetto; here and there a cluster of narcissus looking as if it had been lost, and in one corner one palm tree as solitary as the Pope. Really it is only the oranges which light up the Pope’s garden, as the oranges plucked from sunny groves, and carried over the seas to be piled on a coster’s barrow, illuminate the sad winter streets of the poor people’s London on a Saturday night.

This is the bosom of the garden: it is embraced by more beautiful surroundings. You walk out from the Sculpture Gallery, for instance, on to a fine terrace which looks across this Chinese puzzle to the grandest view of St. Peter’s, where you have the whole figure of the giant dome, down to the bottom of its skirts, instead of just its umbrella. That is all you see from the Piazza, owing to the senseless and tasteless gallery which some Pope, looking about for an addition to his cathedral by which he might immortalize himself, employed Carlo Maderna to build over the noble porch which should have been the climax of the superb colonnade of Bernini.

Through the Sculpture Gallery and along that terrace walks the Pope to the few green acres which are all he has left of the kingdom of this world, except certain sacred buildings in Rome, and one pale villa on the Alban Hills, which looks across the Alban Lake at Alba Longa, the long white town whose inhabitants, flying in terror from the dying volcano above it, were the founders of Rome.

They say that if he has a mind the Pope can walk a mile through his palace before ever he sets foot in the open air. He would have to follow the windings of the paths to walk a mile in his garden kingdom. Along the wall of the classical garden which faces the Vatican are three shrine-like niches with appropriate statues; and there are more statues on the wall silhouetted against the close well-trimmed laurel hedge enclosing the boschetto, the little wood which is the only place where he who has the spiritual charge of Christendom can see the works of God, undistracted by the sight of the works of man. The hedges are grand; the wood is old, but not open enough to show the glory of the wild spring flowers of Italy. Who is there who has walked in April through the woods of the Aldobrandini Villa from Frascati to Tusculum, that can ever forget the fragrant cyclamens spread like palls of crimson velvet, the violets, the anemones, and the shyer peonies?

The Mons Vaticanus has many memories. If it did not derive its name from that Vaticinium or prophecy of Numa Pompilius, Cincinnatus certainly was ploughing the _prata_ below when he was called to lead the armies of his country as Dictator. Though the ashes of Julius Cæsar were never in the bronze globe at the top of the Obelisk, the profuse Caracalla had a palace here. The road which led out of the city and over its crest was bordered on either side with the sepulchral monuments of dead citizens; and among them rose the monument of St. Peter himself (when he had been executed in the Circus at the foot of the hill which formed part of the Gardens of Nero), and the Mausoleum of the daughters of Stilicho. Many a moral has been drawn from the fact that Nero had his pleasaunce on the accursed hill--for as such was the Mons Vaticanus regarded for many centuries. It was a favourite resort also of Nero’s predecessor in the science of outrage, Caligula, and the madman Elagabalus, who, on one occasion, released thousands of poisonous snakes among an audience assembled in the Circus on the Vatican Hill.

On the most conspicuous part of the hill rests a splendid fragment of the Leonine Wall, built by S. Leo IV. in the middle of the ninth century for the protection of the Leonine City from the threatened invasion of the Saracens. The magnificent towers are as fine in their way as the vast circular keep built by the great Lord Talbot of the Hundred Years’ War in the Castle of Falaise. One of them is rather spoiled by having Leo XIII.’s sham fifteenth-century casino built against it. The casino is not shown at all, though I understand that the interior has been dismantled. Leo XIII. had a new window inserted in the first story of the old tower, and a tiny lift fitted to take him up into it. It is said that he used the chamber for a chapel. The wildest part of the garden is round here, but it is not wilder than the Bois de Boulogne.

The other tower is crowned by the Vatican Observatory. “It stands one hundred and eighty-seven feet above the sea,” says Lanciani, “and commands an unlimited view over the Campagna and the road; and is therefore described as the ‘Turris unde mare prospicitur,’ in the early representations of the Vatican group. It is now used as an observatory for photographing the section of the heavens which was allotted to the Holy See by the International Astronomical Congress.”

The mighty bastions of Urban VIII.’s wall recall the Spanish fortifications of Palermo. Far below is a gigantic brick-field, so enormous, with clay cliffs so towering, that it reminded me of nothing so much as the yawning abyss from which slate is hewn at the Delabole Quarries in Cornwall. All the Vatican, and, if tradition may be believed, the greater part of ancient Rome, came from these colossal brick-fields. Beyond them you see the open country.

Almost as noticeable as the fragment of the Leonine Wall, which still crowns the crest of the Vatican Hill, is the beautiful monument put up by the French Catholics over a grotto cut to imitate the Grotto at Lourdes. Over it they have erected a charmingly elegant tower and terrace; inside the cave is a blue-gowned image of the Virgin, with three jets of water in front of her. Pilgrims are invited to rest and drink here. Leo XIII. granted the signal favour of allowing this monument to be erected because of the devotion of the authorities of Lourdes to the Holy See. It is said that their offerings to the Pope amount to a hundred thousand pounds annually.

Leo XIII. had been a sportsman in his mountain home. He kept a few deer, a pair of ostriches, and a pelican (described as having pink wings), to remind him of it. Pius X. has banished them; it is alleged that they reminded him too keenly of his own captivity, and that he often gazes out of his windows with the expression of an exile. A witty Cardinal, who speaks English perfectly, informed me that the only animals kept at the Vatican now are the Papal Bulls.

It is a great shock to turn from the thousand-year-old towers and wall of S. Leo IV., and the tremendous rampart of Urban VIII., whose vast height you can descry by peeping through the loopholes, to the relics of that other Leo’s long pontificate. He was rightly held in a veneration seldom accorded to any human being. Even Queen Victoria was less venerated; but their standards of taste were about the same. His little kingdom in the Boscareccio of the Vatican was further from the kingdom of art than any in Italy. The posts of his _pergola_ were of cast-iron, painted red; his favourite summer-house was made of deal with a corrugated iron roof which Mr. Humphreys would disown. In the summer-house, behind a dilapidated curtain, was a red velvet chair--an undress throne. The Romans used to say that his wine was so sour that it kept up the old tradition about the wine of the Vatican Hill being poisonous. One thing he had good, and that was the view of St. Peter’s. He was high up, and he was close, and he was on the best side--the dome seems to fill the sky.

If it is too early for the fairest of the spring flowers, you will see an undulating line of snow running along the peaks of the pale blue Sabine and Alban Hills. These form the background of the monstrous dome, which is the hive of Christendom--a hive with the bee-cells, those thousands of chambers which form the Vatican Palace, outside. Every queen-bee is a type of the white-robed Pope who dwells in that Palace.

The Pope wears white: when he is being elected three white Papal _soutanes_ are made: of a large size, a small size, and a middle size. So of whatever size the new Pope is he can be temporarily fitted while the Papal tailor is making his clothes. These are much-prized perquisites, and fall to the highest Cardinals.

At the end of the wild part of the gardens are two great fountains; both of them the work of Paul V., the Borghese Pope, who took the marble from the Temple of Minerva in the Forum of Nerva and the great columns of the vestibule of Old St. Peter’s, to decorate his famous Acqua Paola Fountain, the finest head of water in Rome, which you pass on the way to the Villa Doria. Paul V.’s mind seemed to run to fountains.

The upper of his two fountains in the Vatican Gardens, the Fontana dell’ Aquila, gets its name from the Borghese crest, the great eagle of plaster which perches on the top. Everything about it is a sham except the water: the rocks are as shamelessly made of stucco as the dragons which peep out of their caves and the statues which stand up to their necks in water. All the plaster is beginning to disintegrate, half hidden in decayed masses of maidenhair. The whole thing looks like a wreck of the scenery of a Wagnerian opera except the water; that is deep enough to be blue. And, perhaps, once upon a time on hot summer days, when the cheeks of the nymphs were still round and young, and the composition of the caves told no secrets, the fountain may have been attractive from other points of view than that of the bather. It is, in truth, a _chef d’œuvre_ of vulgarity. The lower fountain, built in what Paul V. believed to be mediæval style--the Fontana delle Torri--is not so bad. The towers which gave it its name have, at any rate, the merit of solidity, but are spoiled by the kind of _esedra_ in the typical Cardinal’s style of architecture behind.

One gem there is in the Vatican Gardens, a source of unfailing delight, the casino erected for Pius IV., by Pirro Ligorio, in 1560. And that is because nearly all the materials are ancient Roman. The description of it forms one of the best passages in Hare’s _Walks in Rome_.

“The Casino del Papa, or Villa Pia, built by Pius IV., with material taken from the Stadium of Domitian (Piazza Navona), in the lower and more cultivated portion of the ground, is the _chef d’œuvre_ of the architect, Pirro Ligorio, and is decorated with paintings by Baroccio, Zucchero, and Santi di Tito, and a set of terra-cotta reliefs collected by Agincourt and Canova. The shell decorations are pretty and curious. This villa gives an admirable idea of a small country house under the Roman Empire.

“During the hours which he spent daily in this Villa, its founder, Pius IV., enjoyed that easy and simple life for which he was far better fitted than for the affairs of government; but here, also, he received the counsels of his nephew, S. Carlo Borromeo, who, summoned by him to Rome in 1560, became for several succeeding years the real ruler of the state. Here he assembled around him all those who were distinguished by their virtues or their talents, and held many of the meetings which received the name of Notti Vaticane--at first employed in the pursuit of philosophy and poetry, but after the necessity of Church reform became apparent both to the Pope and S. Carlo, entirely devoted to the discussion of sacred subjects. In this Villa Pius VIII. and Gregory XVI. used frequently to give their audiences.

“The sixteenth century was the golden age for the Vatican, though a leaden one for the Forum. Then the luxurious court of Leo X. was the centre of artistic and literary life, and the witty and pleasure-loving Pope made these gardens the scene of his banquets and concerts; and beneath the shadow of these cypresses in a circle, to which ladies were admitted, as in a secular court, he listened to the recitations of the artificial poets who sprang up, like truffles, under his protection.”

Lanciani calls it “a perfect image of an ancient Roman country house.”

For those who are not privileged to enter the Pope’s Garden, I may say that the Casino Borromeo, or Casino di Pio Quarto, stands on an exquisite little amphitheatre, with an inlaid pavement and a graceful fountain in the centre, oval like itself. It is surrounded by a low parapet whose inner face has stone benches, like the presbytery of a basilica. Its oval form may have been suggested by the Stadium of Domitian, whence the beautiful masonry of which it is composed was taken. On the top of the parapet stand charming vases filled with fine aloes. The whole face of the casino and the alcove opposite are covered with sculpture and other decorations. The only building in Rome whose façade shows such beauty is the garden front of the great Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill, built for Cardinal Ricci da Montepulciano, twenty years earlier--soon likewise to pass into Medici hands; Pius IV. was a Medici. The whole conception of this casino of Pius IV. (which has just the right vegetation round it--solemn stone-pines, half-tropical shrubs) is exquisitely poetical and beautiful, but Leo XIII. considered it malarious, and built himself the new casino attached to the Leonine Tower, which I have described above. Mr. Marion Crawford, a Roman Catholic, and a resident in Italy for many years, writes thus of the old Pope in his garden: “At the last, opposite the iron turnstile by which visitors are counted, there is the closed gate of the garden. It is very hard to get admission to it now, for the Pope himself is often there when the weather is fine. In the Italian manner of gardening the grounds are well laid out, and produce the effect of being much larger than they really are. They are not, perhaps, very remarkable, and Leo XIII. must sometimes long for the hills of Carpineto and the freer air of the mountains as he drives round and round in the narrow limits of his small domain, or walks a little under the shade of the ilex trees, conversing with his gardener or his architect. Yet those who love Italy love its old-fashioned gardens, the shady walks, the deep box hedges, the stiff little summer-houses, the fragments of old statues at the corners, and even the ‘scherzi d’acqua,’ which are little surprises of fine water-jets, that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the faces of the unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical jesting of the eighteenth century.”

The Giardino della Pigna, which forms the northern half of the vast courtyard projected by Bramante, which Sixtus V. cut in half with his building for the Vatican Library, is a cortile rather than a garden, though it contains some flower-beds. It is more interesting as containing the celebrated _Niccio_ or _esedra_ of Bramante, in front of which is mounted the great bronze Pigna, which gives the garden its name, and was the top of the fountain in the _atrium_ of Old St. Peter’s. The bronze peacocks, which flank it, either came from the same fountain or from the western façade of the church. Professor Middleton, who is a very sound guide, gives this latter origin for the peacocks, and says: “This bronze fir cone was placed by Pope Symmachus (498-514) in the centre of a very handsome fountain which he had made to stand in the middle of the open _atrium_ in front of the main entrances into Constantine’s Vatican Basilica of S. Peter. It is shown in this position in one of the frescoes in the Church of S. Martino ai Monti, and probably remained there till the old Basilica was destroyed by Pope Julius II., when he determined to build a new church of still greater magnificence to hold his tomb by Michel Angelo.”

There is no sufficient authority for the fresco which represents the Pigna inside the church. Hare says that Pope Symmachus removed it to the _atrium_ from the Lake of Agrippa in the Campus Martius.

Here, too, is the Garden or Terrace of the Navicella, so called from the bronze ship which stands in it.

With this I must take leave of the Vatican Gardens. I cannot quite echo the enthusiasm of Hare when he wrote: “It is a most delightful retreat for the hot days of May and June, and, before that time, its woods are carpeted with wild violets, anemones, and squills. No one who has not visited them can form an idea of these ancient groves, interspersed with fountains and statues, but otherwise left to nature, and exemplifying sylvan scenery, quite unassociated with the English idea of a garden.” It may be that the gardens have been denaturalizing since his time, or that there was a certain baroquity in his taste, which made him a little undiscriminative.

But I can conceive that the Giardini Vaticani have been allowed to put off beauty from them like a garment since the days when Pius IX. rode on his white mule between these walls of clipped laurel under the canopy of stone-pines.

the Pigna (pine-cone) and peacocks which came from the Atrium of Old St. Peter’s.]