Henry James "Italian Hours"

This is a collection of essay written about Italy written between 1882 and 1899. They are not arranged sequentially but rather regionally. More analytical than Dickens was 40 years earlier, James dissects the Italian way of life more thoroughly, both the beautiful and then sordid. Here are some excerpts from his chapters on Rome:

“And yet do what you will you can’t really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is over the very beggars at church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino.” – p. 125

On Santa Maria Maggiorie…
“The obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave – its perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings and mouldings.” – p. 132

On Roman churches in general…
“They are, as one may say, the churchiest churches in Europe – the fullest of gathered memories, of the experience of their office.” – p. 133

On St. Peter’s…
“Even for the profane “constitutional” it serves where the Boulevards, where Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn’t offer to our use the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor.” – p. 134

On St. Paul’s Outside the Walls…
“The supreme beauty is the splendidly sustained simplicity of the whole.” – p. 135

“Yet a Roman wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe of stouter flowers against the sky – it is as little as possible a blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape.” – p. 142

On the Claudian Acqueduct…
“It stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond – of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte.” –p. 146

On Italians relationship to Nature…
“Man lives more with Nature in Italy that in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives him more holidays than our short-summered climes, and his home is therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, forget her and forgive her.” – p. 147

On Villa Doria Pamphili, Villa Borghese…
“Villa Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, for a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one’s stirrups than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese the walkers have the best of it, for there are free of those adorable outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of spring.” – p. 151

“‘You may like her more or less now,’ I was assured at the height of the season; ‘but you must wait until the month of May, when she’ll give you all she has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place…renait a elle-meme.’” – p. 169

On May…
“The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool, and the whole ancient grayness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid impatient mourning matron – just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, emerging and looking about her again – might pull off and cast aside an oppression of muffling crape…” – p. 170

“The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows with the advancing season till is wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm.” – p. 170

On Keats’ grave…
“Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past.” – p. 172

“…in Rome, in May, everything has an amiable side, even popular uprisings.” – p. 175

On the Pyramid…
“….the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowerly sod, and the sleeper’s mortality feels the contract of all the mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted...” – p. 178

“The great difference between public places in American and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practiced stare. The ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so complacently enough.” – p. 183

“I am for ever being reminded of the “aesthetic luxury,” as I called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter’s and the high precint you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici – counting nothing else – is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it.” – p. 184

On the Tiber…
“the colour of gold, the sentimentalists say, the colour of mustard, the realists.” – p. 187

On the Villa Madama…
“Apartments so decorated can have been meant only for the recreation of people greater that any we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success.” – p. 187

On deserted Renaissance Villas…
“It’s poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the waster of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction, almost with pleasure; for the places seems vaguely crime-haunted - paying at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for the story-seeker the tale.” – p. 187

“The winter aspect of the region about the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy walk to Santa Croce.” – p. 192

On leaving Rome…
“Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one’s experience, one’s gains, the whole adventure of one’s sensibility. But one has really vibrated too much – the addition of so many items isn’t easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many of these have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the other – and one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and “taste,” and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn’t perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the Foutain of Trevi couldn’t make us more ardently sure that we shall at any cost come back.” – p. 193

“across at Fiumicino, which the age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or Coney Island of Rome…” – p. 201

On the approach to St. Peter’s before Mussolini…
“We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter’s…” – p. 202

“…the mild confused romance of Rome…” – p. 204

Henry James, "Italian Hours", edited by John Auchard. 1992, The Pennsylvania State University, Penguin Books, 1995.