Rome in the Footsteps of an XVIIIth Century Traveller

Joseph Forsyth (1763-1815) after having successfully run a school in London wanted to see Rome and he thought the 1801 Peace of Amiens would last. He visited Rome at a very critical period when the city was the capital of a puppet-state under French hegemony. On his way back home he was arrested by the French and placed under house arrest as an enemy alien until Napoleon's fall: I left England in November, 1801, without any intention of sporting my pen on so beaten a field as Italy, and had reached Pisa before I began to commit to paper such remarks as are usual in travelling. Materials of this kind readily accumulate. From these I have been recently prevailed upon to select, and to offer to the Public, what relate to Antiquities, Arts, and Letters. I design my observations chiefly for them who have already examined the objects I review: but not without the anxiety, which the lateness of their appearance is but too well calculated to excite. How far they may have lost their interest, or been anticipated by publications in England during my long captivity, I have no means of knowing. My misfortune denies me all acquaintance with the works of others, and may perhaps claim some indulgence for the many defects of mine. From the short preface he wrote for Remarks on antiquities, arts, and letters, during an excursion in Italy in 1802-1803 which he published in 1813.
Excerpts from Joseph Forsyth's book which are related to Rome (read one of his remarks about Paestum).

• The Walls
• The Palatine
• Giuseppe Vasi's Guidebook
• Temples and churches
• Pantheon
• S. Paolo fuori le mura
• Terme di Caracalla
• Tombs along Via Appia
• Sepolcro di Annia Regilla
• Ninfeo di Egeria
• Colosseo
• Chiesa dei Cappuccini
• Palazzo Colonna
• Casino del Belvedere
• Villa Albani
• Colonna di Traiano

The Walls This circuit will bring into view specimens of every construction from the days of Servius Tullius down to the present; for, to save expense, Aurelian took into his walls whatever he found standing in their line; and they now include some remains of the Tullian wall, the wall of the Praetorian barracks, the facing of a bank, aqueducts, sepulchral monuments, a menagery, an amphitheatre, a pyramid. Thus do they exhibit the uncemented blocks of the Etruscan style, the reticular work of the republic, the travertine preferred by the first emperors, the alternate tufo and brick employed by their successors, and that poverty of materials which marks the declining empire. (..) Since the first dreadful breach made by Totila, the walls have been often and variously repaired; sometimes by a case of brick-work filled up with shattered marbles, rubble, shard, and mortar; in some parts the cementitious work is unfaced: here you find stone and tufo mixt in the "opus incertum" there, tufo alone laid in the Saracenic manner: the latter repairs bear the brick refinement of modern fortification.

The Palatine The most populous part of ancient Rome is now but a landscape. Mount Palatine, which originally contained all the Romans, and was afterwards insufficient to accommodate one tyrant, is inhabited only by a few friars. I have gone over the whole hill, and not seen six human beings on a surface which was once crowded with the assembled orders of Rome and Italy. (..) All round the Palatine, the forum, the Velabrum, and the Sacred Way is the favourite field of antiquarian polemics.

Giuseppe Vasi's Guidebook Vasi, Mannazale (Andrea Manazzale - Rome et ses environs - 1802), and that tribe of vade-mecums, may serve you the first week as mere valets-de-place in print, but you will soon dismiss them as insufficient. Those people parcel out Rome into day's-works, and throw every thing together, ancient or modern, sacred or profane, that lies in the same round. This plan is convenient enough for them who desire only to shew or to see Rome; but whoever would study it must arrange the objects of his study in a different order, deduced either from their kind or their age.

Temples and churches Some of the Roman temples have been fortunately preserved as churches. The catholic religion is surely a friend, but an interested friend, to the fine arts. It rejects nothing that is old or beautiful. (..) The catholics let the temple stand, and gloried in its conversion to Christianity.

Pantheon The cell and the portal of the Pantheon are two beauties independent of their union. The portal shines inimitable on earth. Viewed alone, it is faultless. If the pediment, in following the pediment above, should appear too high from the present vacancy of its tympan; that tympan was originally full of the richest sculpture. If the columns are not all mathematically equal; yet inequalities, which nothing but measurement can detect, are not faults to the eye, which is sole judge. But the portal is more than faultless; it is positively the most sublime result that was ever produced by so little architecture. (..) Here a flood of light falling through one large orb was sufficient for the whole circle of divinities below, and impartially diffused on all. (..) The vast "lacunaria" now overpower us. (..) Vast as they appear, those deep coffers are really not disproportioned to the hemisphere, and diminishing as they ascend, they stop just at the point where they would cease to be noble or entire. (..) Though plundered of all its brass; (..) though exposed to repeated fires, though sometimes flooded by the river, and always open to the rain, no monument of equal antiquity is so well preserved as this rotondo. It passed with little alteration from the Pagan into the present worship.

S. Paolo fuori le mura The columns which support it, particularly those of the nave, are admired for their marble, their proportions, and their purpose. Here indeed they are aliens, removed, it is said, from Adrian's tomb, and forced into these aisles as a matter of convenience. Such beauty as theirs was too natural. (..) The chancel of this church terminates in a large apsis or alcove, which is crowned with a mosaic exhibiting a few grim old saints on an azure and gold ground.

Terme di Caracalla Mosaic was diffused here as a general flooring. I followed it on the steps of a broken stair-case, up to the very summit. I found the tessellation entire even where the pavement had sunk, and had left round the room a vacancy which was filled with a skirting of flowered alabaster. (..) Caracalla's ruins seem to have been well distributed, and stand in a fine advantageous solitude. These baths, coexisting with others of equal extent, will appear too extravagantly large even for "the most high and palmy state of Rome," until we reflect on the various exercises connected with the bath, on the habits of the people, the heat of the climate, the rarity of linen, and the cheapness of bathing, which brought hither the whole population of the city.

Tombs along Via Appia The general form of those tombs on the Appian way is a cylinder or a truncated cone, with a cubic base, and a convex top. This combination conveys the idea of a funeral pyre, and has some tendency to the pyramid, the figure most appropriate to a tomb, as representing the earth heaped on a grave, or the stones piled on a military barrow.

Sepolcro di Annia Regilla Near those tombs is a little temple also assigned to this period, under the name of the God Rediculus. So fresh are its red and yellow bricks, that the thing seems to have been ruined in its youth; so close their adhesion, that each of the puny pilasters appears one piece, and the cornice is sculptured like the finest marble. (..) Whether it be a temple or a tomb, the rich chisselling lavished on so poor a design convinces me that it was fully as late as Septimius Severus.

Ninfeo di Egeria We descended to the valley of Egeria and the grotto, or rather nymphaeum: but instead of the marble magnificence which offended Juvenal here, we found the vault fallen in, the walls mantled with maiden-hair, the statue which passes for the Nymph mutilated, the muses removed from their niches, and the fountain itself a mere trough. Its water, however, was delicious, and, finding a large split reed placed over the drip, I used it as a conduit.

Colosseo Happily for the Coliseum, the shape necessary to an amphitheatre has given it a stability of construction sufficient to resist fires, and earthquakes, and lightning, and sieges. Its elliptical form was the hoop which bound and held it entire till barbarians rent that consolidating ring, Popes widened the breach, and time, not unassisted, continues the work of dilapidation. At this moment the hermitage is threatened with a dreadful crash, and a generation not very remote must be content, I apprehend, with the picture of this stupendous monument.

Chiesa dei Cappuccini Capuchine church. These mendicants found means to preserve their St. Michael from the late visitation. This figure of Guido's, is the Catholic Apollo. Like the Belvedere God, the Archangel breathes that dignified vengeance which animates without distorting; while the very devil derives importance from his august adversary, and escapes the laugh which his figure usually provokes. (..) Under this church is a charnel-house divided, like some of the ancient hypogea, into recesses. Each recess is faced with the marrow-bones and shoulder-blades of disinterred Capuchines, and adorned with lamps, festoons, rosoni, crosses, etc. formed of the same reverend materials. A few skeletons are drest in their tunics, and set in various attitudes, each in a niche built up with reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.

Palazzo Colonna The saloon called the Galleria is itself too brilliant a picture for the pictures which it contains. A gallery should not draw off the attention from its contents by striking architecture or glittering surfaces. This, however, is supported by polished columns of the richest giall'antico. Its storied ceiling displays the battle of Lepanto, which raised a Colonna to the honour of a Roman triumph.

Casino del Belvedere Who, but a Frenchman, can enter the present museum without some regret? I should have thought the very beauty of these galleries and halls a protection to the treasures for which they were erected. Here ancient and modern art seem to contend for pre-eminence - storied pavements assembled from distant ruins, and bordered with the mosaic of the present day - columns, once the ornament of temples, arranged in rotondos which emulate those temples, and lately embellished, like them, with the statues of gods and of deified emperors. Thinned as it is, we may still trace through this museum the sculpture of ancient Rome from its dawn to its decline, from the old Doric tomb of Scipio Barbatus in plain Alban stone, to the porphyry sarcophagi of St. Constantia and St. Helen, where men stand erect under horses' bellies. (..) A natural horror of mutilation leads men to complete whatever they possess; and thus the statues of Belvedere have received so much modern work to restore the ancient, that we can hardly distinguish what is original from what is added. Either the old surface is scraped into the whiteness of the new, or the new has received the yellow ivory gloss of the old; while the cement which unites them is so imperceptibly fine. (..) What this museum has lost it is now too late to deplore. (..) The present pope, has also placed here the Perseus (..) of Canova. The statue of Perseus stands fronting the cast of the departed Apollo, and seems to challenge comparison. Alike in sentiment, in occasion, and in point of time, Apollo has just shot the arrow, Perseus has just cut off the beautiful head of Medusa. Perhaps the hero is too delicate and smooth for a mortal warrior; he' has the soft beauty of a Mercury, or an Antinous. Instead of turning in horror from the petrific head, he eyes it with indignant complacency - but it is criminal to object; for marble has seldom received a form so perfect.

Villa Albani Here is a villa of exquisite design, planned by a profound antiquary. Here Cardinal Alexander Albani, having spent his life in collecting ancient sculpture, formed such porticos and such saloons to receive it, as an old Roman would have done: porticos where the statues stood free on the pavement between columns proportioned to their stature; saloons which were not stocked but embellished with families of allied statues, and seemed full without a crowd. (..) Pius VI had engaged to purchase peace of the French; but the present Cardinal Albani persuaded him to retract, and thus brought their vengeance on all his family. The blow was indeed severe. The spoils of this villa became a magnificent supplement to those of the Vatican and Capitol. Two hundred and ninety-four pieces of ancient sculpture were sent hence to Paris, or lay in cases at Ripagrande ready to be shipped. Some have been fortunately ransomed; and the Prince, though reduced in means, is now courageously beginning to re-combine the wrecks of this celebrated collection. It was affecting to see the statues on their return to the villa. Some lay on the ground shattered by their passage to the river, others remained in their tremendous coffins, and a few were restored to their former pedestals.

Colonna di Traiano This column is an immense field of antiquities, where the emperor appears in a hundred different points, as sovereign, or general, or priest. His dignity he derives from himself or his duties; not from the trappings of power, for he is drest like any of his officers: not from the debasement of others, for the Romans, all save one, kissing his hand, stand bold and erect before him. (..) No monument gives the complete and real costume of its kind so correctly as this column. (..) In relating the two wars, this column sets each nation in contrast: here the Moorish horse all naked and unharnessed; there the Sarmatians in complete mail down to the fingers and the hoofs. It exhibits without embellishment all the tactics of that age.

Travellers covered in this section

• Introductory page
• Gregory Martin's "Roma Sancta", a description of Christian Rome in 1581
• Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary: Containing His Ten Years Travel .. in Italy .. in 1594
• John Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence related to his stay in Rome in 1644
• Francis Mortoft's Journal of his travels in France and Italy in 1659
• John Ray's Observations (..) made in a journey through part of (..) Italy in 1663
• Richard Lassels' The Voyage of Italy, or a Compleat Journey through Italy in ca 1668
• Joseph Addison's Remarks on several parts of Italy, in the years 1701, 1702, 1703
• Jonathan and Jonathan Richardson's Account of Some of the Statues, etc. in Italy - 1722
• Edward Wright's Observations made in France, Italy &c. in the years 1720, 1721 and 1722.
• Excerpts from John Dyer's The Ruins of Rome written in 1740
• Thomas Gray's Letters from France and Italy in 1739-1741
• James Boswell's Letters on the Grand Tour in 1765
• Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy in 1765
• John Moore's View of Society and Manners in Italy (in 1775) - publ. 1781
• John Chetwode Eustace's Classical Tour of Italy (in 1802) - publ. 1813
• Joseph Forsyth's Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters in Italy in 1802-1803
• John Cam Hobhouse's Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome in 1818
• Henry Matthews' Diary of an Invalid (in 1817-1818)
• Anna Jameson's Diary of an Ennuyée (in 1821-1822) - publ. 1826
• Sir Charles Fergusson's Travel Notes a Journey Through Italy in 1824-1825
• William Hazlitt's Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy in 1824-1825
• Samuel Rogers' Italy - publ. in 1830 with illustrations by J.M. William Turner
• Hans Christian Andersen's The Improvisatore - 1834 (Engl. translation 1845)
• William Gardiner's Sights in Italy in 1846-1847
• George Stillman Hillard's Six Months in Italy in ca 1847-1848

Read What Dante Saw.
Read What Goethe Saw.
Read What Lord Byron Saw.
Read What Charles Dickens Saw.
Read What Henry James Saw.
Read What Mark Twain Saw.
Read What William Dean Howells Saw.
Read Dan Brown's Spaghetti Bolognaise (excerpts from Angels and Demons)