MATILDE SERAO THE CONQUEST OF ROME

MATILDE SERAO

THE CONQUEST OF

ROME

Edited by ANN CAESAR

PICKERING S^CHATTO 1991 Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH

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Copyright © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 1991 Introduction and notes to this edition copyright © Ann Caesar 1991

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Converted to digital print, 2002 INTRODUCTION

The Neapolitan writer, Matilde Serao, began to work on The Conquest of Rome in 1884 when she was 27 years old. She had left Naples for Rome in the autumn of 1881, when she was offered a post as journalist for one of the capital's major newspapers. She had high hopes that this, her fourth novel, but the first to be set in Rome, would bring her recognition as a writer of national importance. Moreover by developing her tale of unrequited love in the context of the city's social and parliamentary life, she was free to draw on her experience as a journalist and observer of Roman life. Her choice of protagonist, Francesco Sangiorgio, an aspiring young politician from the Basilicata (one of the poorest regions of Southern Italy), and of subject-matter, his brief but eventful parliamentary career, allowed her to recast within a fictional framework her own impressions of the city that she had moved to as an outsider three years earlier. For Sangiorgio, an ambitious young man without social connections or private means, a parliamentary career offers a way of escaping a narrow and stultifying background. Serao, with the additional burden of being born female, eschewed the idea that she should become a school-teacher, in favour of the less orthodox profession of journalism. Throughout her life journalism was to remain her principal source of income, for although she was to be one of Italy's first best-selling novelists with over forty volumes of stories and novels to her name, publishing did not provide a livelihood. The Conquest of Rome, which was serialized in a magazine called Don Chisciotte before appearing as a book in 1885, received a mixed press, but as the title implies, Serao's determination to make literary and cultural Rome sit up and take note was vindicated. Where in her novel, Francesco Sangiorgio vi Matilde Serao lets his emotional life play havoc with his aspirations and dreams, Matilde Serao's own gritty determination, appetite for hard work and spirited fight ensured the personal success that she denied her protagonist.

1. MATILDE SERAO: HER LIFE AND WRITING

Matilde Serao was born in Patras, Greece in 1857, only child of an exiled Italian father and a Greek mother. Her father, along with many Italian patriots hostile to the Bourbon dynasty, had been forced to flee his home-town, Naples, after its autocratic ruler Ferdinand II had successfully suppressed the popular liberal uprising of 1848. The dynasty was finally overthrown in 1861 when Italy (with the exception of Venice and Papal Rome, the latter not incorporated until 1870) became a unified state with King Vittorio Emanuele II as its constitutional head. It was in that same year that Matilde, aged three, returned to Italy with her parents. Her childhood was spent in relative poverty in a working-class district of Naples. As her journalist father worked only occasionally, the struggle to support the family fell on her mother's shoulders. A well-educated Greek woman of (idlcate health, she gave private language lessons at home. The relation- ship between mother and daughter was very close; Matilde remembered her mother as an 'extremely cultured, intelligent, angelic' woman,' and she was devastated by her early death in 1879 which left Matilde with the added responsibility of main- taining her idle and somewhat feckless father. Matilde took a diploma that qualified her as a primary school-teacher, but it was a career she did not pursue. She chose instead to work at the offices of the State Telegraph Service where from 1876 to 1878, between despatching one telegraph and the next, she managed to write a collection of stories and her first novel. In this period she was also working as a free-lance journalist using whatever contacts her father could provide. Her fighting spirit and deter- mination to succeed as both journalist and novelist emerge clearly in the following extract from a letter written in this period. Introduction vii

I am in good physical health. As for morale, I am in a period of such feverish production that it is alarming: I am writing everywhere and on everything, with an extraordinary audacity, I am winning my place by dint of pushing and shoving, with the absolute burning determination to get there without anybody helping me, or hardly anybody. But you know that I don't listen to the weaknesses of my sex and I keep going as if I were a young man.1

The move to Rome in 1881 signified much more than a change of city, it meant a change in status and, with it, some financial security. From being one journalist among thousands, scrabbling around for poorly-paid work she was offered a place on the editorial board of the Roman newspaper Capitan Fracassa, a post offering status and a salary. Capitan Fracassa was the most professional and polemical of the numerous papers that appeared on the streets as a response to Rome's new-found status as Italy's political and administrative centre. For Matilde, it was also a personal triumph that a position with some security and prestige was offered to a woman. The quality of her work and the professionalism with which she approached her assign- ments ensured that she had few difficulties in establishing herself as a journalist, and as the salary was not adequate to keep her and her father, she freelanced for other periodicals at the same time. Her brief at Capitan Fracassa was to Write two thousand lines a month on anything and everything - Franco- Russian relationships, town-planning, book reviews, the monar- chy, fashion and furnishings, social Darwinism. She loved the hurly-burly of journalism: 'I have the spirit of a gladiator, I need the circus'. Nonetheless her main motive behind the move to Rome was to establish herself nationally as a novelist. One effect of Italy's history was the extent to which cultural life was still regionally based, so although Serao was beginning to acquire a reputation as a novelist in Naples, two hundred and twenty kilometres away in Rome her name was unknown. It was with this ambition in mind that she began work on La conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome). The importance she gave the project is clear from the care with which she prepared the ground. viii Matilde Serao

At the beginning of June 1884, Matilde wrote to a close friend and admirer Count Primoli (from whom she had once hoped for an offer of marriage), requesting a loan of one thousand lire to be repaid in October. The money would allow her a sabbatical from her other commitments so that she could work on her manuscript without interruption. In her letter to Primoli she points out that 'my literary reputation and much of my future depends5 on this book. The money was forthcoming and a week later Serao was to be found in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament 'letting the ambience seep into me'. The field-work completed, in late July of the same year she left Rome for Francavilla al Mare in the Abbruzzi, where in the company of other writers and artists she began work. Her description of the circle she found herself in, 'the youngest, the strongest, the most intellectual centre of Italy', suggests in its exuberance (it bore little relationship to reality), that she felt she was now accepted in the circles to which she had once aspired. Her letters to Primoli describe an idyllic life of writing, swimming, eating, reading and talking, but she had private preoccupations. A cholera epidemic was sweeping through Naples and Primoli helped her organise her father's departure from the city and found somewhere for him to live. More worrying, however, for her was the fact that she was pregnant and suffering acute nausea. The father of the baby was fellow-journalist and writer, Edoardo Scarfoglio, who was one of the company at Francavilla al Mare that summer. Characteris- tically, with iron resolve, despite sickness and anxiety about her future, she completed her manuscript on time. A few months later Matilde Serao and Edoardo Scarfoglio married. Their wedding and the furnishings for their future home, decorated according to Gabriele D'Annunzio in the style 'd'un artiste au siecle XIXe' left them penniless, Scarfoglio himself was 24 when they married, an opposition journalist from the South, with good looks, charm and charisma. In private life his numerous infidelities never ceased to be a source of anguish for Serao, but in public life they worked together and made a formidable team. Later that year they set up their own Introduction ix paper Corriere di Roma and although it brought with it many headaches — dealing with the debtors, printers, suppliers and journalists while continuing to write and raise four children — it did nonetheless also bring Matilde the gratification of knowing that she was now a newspaper proprietress. On the 16 Septem- ber, 1886, she launched a personal column called Api, mosconi e vespe (Bees, Bluebottles and Wasps) written under the pseudonym Gibus, a mix of society-gossip, advice-column and commentary, which acquired a considerable following. By the end of 1887, however, the paper was in a state of such financial crisis that not even Serao's formidable tenacity could keep it afloat. When a Livornese banker, Matteo Schilizzi, offered to pay off their debts and back them, on condition that they transferred to Naples to set up a similar newspaper to be called Corriere di Napoli, they accepted with alacrity. Their philanthropic banker, himself a resident of Naples, had been inspired to make this gesture in the hope that the newspaper would speak out against the appalling lack of hygiene in the city, which, combined with poverty and over-crowding, had contributed directly to the devastating cholera epidemic. In the event, they brought little to the politi- cal debate, and in 1892 the couple broke with Schilizzi and began another newspaper of their own called II Mattino. Matilde transferred her column, Api, mosconi e vespe to their new paper, but its popularity was such that Schilizzi insisted that the column, its title and the pseudonym of its author belonged to the newspaper and not to Serao. The matter went to court where Schilizzi won the case and won again on appeal. The world of newspapers and journalism provided the sub- ject for Vita e avventura di Riccardo Joanna (The Life and Adventures of Riccardo Joanna), published in 1887 and Serao's next novel after The Conquest of Rome. A pessimistic reflection on her own experi- ences, including a thinly disguised portrait of her husband, the novel explores the pull of journalism with its combination of harsh exploitation and curious addictiveness. Shortly before leaving Rome for the coast to write The Conquest of Rome Serao had published a collection of articles on Naples called /] venire di Napoli (The Belly of Naples) (1884). A x Matilde Serao tense and powerful defence of the city ;and its people, the articles were written in response to the then prime minister's uninformed view that the only way of dealing with the misery and squalor of inner Naples was to raze it to the ground and start again. In his words 'Bisogna sventrare Napoli' ('We must gut Naples'). Serao's response stemmed directly from her own experiences as a young girl growing up in a working-class district in the city and she wrote with the authority of experi- ence. These articles, which include some of the best of her writing, describe in an impassioned, spare prose, people's lives, their work, their superstitions, what they eat, how they live and how they die. After her return to Naples, Serao wrote the novel for which she is perhaps best known, II paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockaigne) (1891), a novel which introduces the reader to the entire gamut of Neapolitan society through an obsession uniting all social classes — the chance of a win on the weekly lottery. In the words of one critic, Pietro Pancrazi, 'in a hundred years' time, when nobody knew anything about Naples, this novel would be enough to bring it back to life'. Serao's best novels and short stories are those in which she combines the portrayal of human emotion with social analysis, particularly where the theme touches her very personally. Just as in her fictions and articles she became a passionate spokes- woman for the people of Naples, in similar spirit she became a voice for working women, women driven into \york by econo- mic need and trapped in traditional women's work — servants, seamstresses, telephonists, telegraphists and elementary school teachers. Above all else her sympathy goes to teachers, a career she herself trained for but did not take up and the quite appalling circumstances they often found themselves in. These young women, usually of genteel and protected background, were obliged to work wherever the Ministry of Education sent them. Often they found themselves isolated in profoundly alien communities where they were exposed to attack from the poor and the powerful alike. The purpose behind it was honourable enough, to try to bring a rudimentary literacy and numeracy to regions where it was normal to grow up illiterate, but no Introduction xi

thought was given to the plight of the young women who were despatched to these hostile environments. At the end of June 1886, Serao began to publish a series of articles on the subject, provoked by the case of a young girl who killed herself after resisting the seduction of a local government worker, only to find herself publicly vilified by a community that preferred to believe his slanders over her protestations. But Matilde's defence of working women embraced only those women for whom paid work was a necessity, in all other cases, she argued, women should be maintained by their husbands. Not only was Serao not a feminist but she also held, and often expressed, very forceful anti-feminist views. Her pronounced conformism on social matters conflicts with her own life, and it is possible, as her biographer Anna Banti charitably proposed, that this afforded her some kind of protection in a man's world. In the opinion of Edoardo Scarfoglio, Matilde's husband, the English suffragettes were 'grotesque', and she, like him, argued that women should not be given the vote or enter politics. Her antipathy, endorsed by the then current positivist thinking, emerges in The Conquest of Rome when she attributes a 'frigid' son to 'Italy's most prominent female politician', the fictitious Prin- cess Campofranco. According to Serao, women should also be debarred from professions such as law and medicine, and one of her more offensive pieces was written in support of the success- ful move to expel the tireless doctor and campaigner, Anna Kuliscioff, from her post at the Hospital of Milan. She opposed divorce on grounds that only the wives of murderers and thieves would benefit. It can be argued that she was not a political animal, her profoundly conservative views ^yere based on prag- matism and experience, a belief, from the example provided in the first instance by her mother, that women have an inner strength. Her position stems too from her own profound pes- simism which led her to argue that 'there is no possible happi- ness for woman in whatever condition she finds herself: married or unmarried, legitimate or illegitimate'.2 Deeply sympathetic and alert to the financial plight and material conditions of life and work experienced by many women, Serao was also sensitive xii Matilde Serao to the psychological and emotional turmoil of growing up female. When in 1855 she published a collection of stories about girls' lives, II romanzo della Janciulla (A Young Girl's Romance), she commented on how little had been written about those years that separate the child from the adult woman.

The young girl grows up in very difficult moral circumstances. She has to live in contact with men without there opening up a channel for understanding between herself and them; she must guess everything, after having suspected everything, and she must appear ignorant; she must have a deep, searing ambition, a tremendous desire, an unbreakable will to catch hold of a man; and she must appear cold and she must be indifferent.3 In The Conquest of Rome the narrator refers to the way girls must communicate silently on matters they are not permitted to speak of; 'the girls exchanged the mute, expressive looks into which society compels girls to condense their meaning'.4 In 1902 the deteriorating relationship with her husband was marked by Matilde's decision to set up her own literary journal called La Settimana; a review that was not above publishing articles with titles such as 'What moral qualities do you want to find in the man - or woman - who is to be your husband - or wife? And what defects would lead you to reject him or her?' Two years later came their definitive separation when Serao took over the daily paper II Giorno which she kept running under her own management until the Fascists raided the offices and destroyed the machinery on the 22 December, 1922 as part of a nationwide attack on the independent press. It was not to be her last brush with fascism. Her hopes of receiving the Nobel prize for literature in 1926 were dashed when it went instead to the Sardinian writer, Grazia Deledda, because, it was suspected, of the anti-fascist spirit of Serao's novel published that year, Mors tua which had provoked Mussolini's personal hostility. The same year saw the death of the man who had been her compan- ion since her separation, a lawyer called Giuseppe Natale, and by whom she had a child at the age of 48. Matilde Serao died on 27 July, 1927 of a heart attack; characteristically, she was found at her desk. Introduction xiii

When Edith Wharton met Matilde Serao, she was struck first by her flamboyant and somewhat eccentric appearance, and then by her conversation, as she records in A Backward Glance. She recalled Paul Bourget's description of her as 4a Dr Johnson in ball-gown' and concluded:

. . . her monologues rose to greater heights than the talk of any other woman I have known. The novelist's eager imagination (two or three of her novels are masterly) was nourished on wide reading, and on the varied experience of classes and types supplied by her journalistic career; and culture and experience were fused in the glow of her powerful intelligence.5

2. ROME AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY

When Matilde Serao left Naples for Rome in 1881, the city had been the capital of a united Italy for just a decade. In 1861 King Vittorio Emanuele II gained control of all of Italy with the exception of the Veneto and Rome, which remained in the hands of the Papacy. On 17 March that year the first Italian Parliament, established in Turin, proclaimed Vittorio Emanuele King of Italy, and declared Rome to be the capital of the new Kingdom, even though it was still under Papal control. The French ambassador hastened to assure the Pope that the 6,000 troops stationed in Rome would oppose any attempts to capture the city, and additional protection was provided by an inter- national force paid for by the Vatican. But in 1870 the inter- national situation had changed. France had declared war on Prussia and the French troops protecting Rome were with- drawn. King Vittorio Emanuele's soldiers immediately took their place, and when they advanced on the city, on the Pope's orders they met only a symbolic resistance, intended to show the world that Rome was being taken by force. The King was in fact most reluctant to incur the Pope's displeasure and indeed communicated to the Pope that he was being forced into annexing Rome against his own wishes. The following year Rome became the capital of the newly unified Italy and its xiv Matilde Serao

Piedmontese King transferred his court to the Quirinale, a Renaissance palace formerly the Pope's official residence in the city. The Pope withdrew into the Vatican where he remained until his death in 1878, At the time of Unification Rome was a small city of some 200,000 people, smaller than Serao's hometown, Naples, or Milan. It had no industry, no stock exchange and was sur- rounded by countryside, the Campagna, which was in the grip of malaria. The first visible sign of change came with the press. Uncler Papal rule, censorship had been extremely strict, but now new journals and newspapers appeared on the news-stands, and Rome became an important centre for the Italian book- trade, attracting editors and publishers from other cities includ- ing Florence and Milan. Henry James returning to Rome to discover for himself what that 'great breach with the past' had brought to his favourite city, noted:

My first warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic line but the Osservatore Romano and the Voce della Verita used to seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide vendors of the Capitale, the Liberia and the Fanjulla', and Rome reading unexpurgated news is another Rome indeed.6

Where Henry James the visitor would happily return to Rome to the tranquillity of its past, Serao's protagonist in The Conquest of Rome experiences the sights and sounds of the modern city as a release from the 'heavy oppression' that Rome's 2,000 years of history exercises on him.

The gas-jets on the Piazza Sciarra, however, brought him to. A newsboy was calling out the Fanjulla and the Bersagliere for sale. People were standing in groups on the pavement. The bustle of life once more stimulated his blood.7 Introduction xv

Pre-Unification Rome was also renowned as a city of remark- able beauty; more than half of the land that lay within its walls was made up of villas and parks. But by the time Matilde Serao arrived in 1881, she found a city that resembled nothing less than a vast building-site. When Sangiorgio steps out of the railway station on his arrival at the beginning of The Conquest of Rome, he is met with the sight of the rubble and rubbish piled up from the new avenue under construction outside. In the novel Serao refers on several occasions to the destruction accompany- ing the building-programme, which was on the whole an un- imaginative attempt to transfer the northern architectural style of Turin to the southern city, cost-cutting wherever possible on materials and finish. In a private letter Serao refers to what she dubs a 'reactionary article' of hers on 'the building-fever' that had possessed Rome. Some of the changes were positive. The construction of the embankment walls along the river Tiber may have involved the disappearance of fine buildings, but it also spared future generations the consequences of the terrible floods that had periodically swept through the ghetto and the working-class quarters close to the river. For the most part though, the new city, purpose-built to accomodate the expected invasion of civil servants, ministers, ambassadors and their staff, was constructed cheaply and in a hurry. Villas and parks were sold off in lots, property speculation was at fever-pitch and when in the event the projected numbers did not materialize, the desolation was only increased by the visible signs of the slump; the unfinished buildings and an absence of services. George Gissing, on visiting the city in 1888, commented that 'modern Rome is extremely ugly'. In the first part of The Conquest of Rome Serao recreates, through her protagonist, her own outsider's impressions of the city — on a grim and pro- tracted tour of the 'sights' of Rome what remains is an over- whelmingly pervasive sense of damp, decay, dirt, and disease. Matilde Serao arrived in Rome at an interesting time politi- cally. The division between Church and State, Pope and King remained as wide as ever. It permeated through society; a number of the aristocratic families remained loyal to the Pope xvi Matilde Serao and refused to acknowledge the House of Savoy, and the Pope himself continued with the practice of granting separate audi- ences to these families until as late as 1896. To many the monarchy appeared irredemiably ordinary, as Henry James explains:

When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed- But the Pope never stopped to listen to opera turns, and he had no little popelings under the charge of superior nurse-maids whom you might take liberties with.8

The King was not a popular figure in Rome; he spoke a Piedmontese dialect that few cpuld understand, and he disliked the gloomy papal palace so intensely that he and his family spent most of their first Roman winter in a rented villa away from the heart of the city. The villa's extensive gardens, which according to Stendhal made the Tuileries and Versailles look like a 'feeble imitation', had been open io the public, but they were now closed, incurring further displeasure. For Serao, a passionate monarchist, Rome was a royal city and her portrait in The Conquest of Rome of the unprepossessing royal couple Was flatter- ing in the extreme. More significantly, she passes over the still very evident rift between Church and State in silence. One of the novel's set-pieces occurs at the funeral of King Vittorio Emanuele II, who died at the age of 58 in 1878, a victim of malaria. On hearing that the King's death was imminent, Pope Pius IX lifted the sentence of excommunication that had been placed on him shortly after the annexation of Rome, but at his funeral at the Pantheon, where the King's body was laid in state, the clergy were conspicuous in their absence. The novel makes no reference to this, nor to Pope Pius IX's own death a few weeks later, and his funeral at St Peter's. The absence of any mention whatsoever of the thorny question of the relationship between Church and State is in marked contrast to another parliamentary novel also published in 1881. Antonio Fogazzaro was a best-selling, Catholic writer whose novels pivot on the Introduction xvii struggle between sexual passion and moral piety with the inevit- able victory of the latter. In the figure of the eponymous hero of Daniele Cortis Fogazzaro argues the need for a rapprochement between Church and politics to ensure Catholic guidance in political decision-making. The Unification of Italy brought together 24 million inhabi- tants, but accorded the right to vote to only half a million; then in 1882, a new law was introduced which increased the electoral role to two million. Virtually all the male middle classes were enfranchised. When Serao wrote her novel two years later, she would have drawn her public largely from this class. Parliamen- tary political fiction first appeared in England in the 1840s, but in Italy, Serao's novel was, along with Fogazzaro's, one of the first of the genre to be published. Her descriptions of the city, of parliamentary life, of social functions, were eagerly read by an audience keen to learn more about the rituals and practices associated with their new country. Although Italy was techni- cally one nation, one country, the more formidable task of 'nation-building' had only just begun. In Massimo d'Azeglio's words: 'We have made Italy; now we must make Italians'. For today's readers Matilde Serao's novel is a fascinating testimony to the tenacity with which regional identity persisted, her characters' psychological and even physiological traits are seen as geographical markers, and the idea of a national identity seems a very long way from realisation. As a southerner from Naples living in another southern city whose transformation is in the hands of northerners, where the ideologies of right and left translate more coherently into the division between North and South, Matilde Serao with her own sense of difference, was in an excellent position to register the tensions.

3. THE CONQUEST OF ROME

Where a novelist in nineteenth century England had an estab- lished and respected narrative tradition to draw on, the situa- tion in Italy was markedly different. The great tradition of the xviii Matilde Serao short story initiated by Boccaccio's Decameron had fallen into disrepute after the Renaissance. There had been interesting experimentation with the epistolary novel as represented by Ugo Foscolo's Uhime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The last letters of Jacopo Ortis) (1798), and the historical novel, of which Alessan- dro Manzoni's / promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (1827), was the widely-accepted model, but it was only in the 1870s and 1880s that realist fiction, strongly influenced by French novels, began to find favour with a reading public. Even then, the problems for writers remained legion. A census taken at the end of the first stage of Italian Unification in 1861 revealed a country where 78% of the population was illiterate (reaching 90% in parts of the south), with only a cultural and social minority of about 600,000 able to speak and read in the national language, Italian. After many years as a writer, Matilde Serao described the linguistic problems she herself had to confront and the criticisms that she attracted. Her defence of her position brooks no opposition, but she is also careful not to specify where she stands in relationship to the three languages that, according to her, the writer has to choose from. In practice Serao uses what she calls a 'middle language' without, however purging it of dialect words. Her strength lies in her sober, precise registration of detail, with its bias towards the figurative. Where she deviates away from a realist register towards the romantic- sentimental, the vivacity and immediacy of her language is replaced by an unconvincing and more abstract literary register.

Another reason blocks the formation of the Italian novel, and it is language. Look at Naples. There we have three languages, one that is literary, aulic, dreamy, unreal; a dialect, lively, clear, pictorial, ungrammatical, asyntactical; a middle language, one that I shall call bourgeois, which is used by the newspapers, which cleans up the dialect, thereby losing its vivacity, and tries to imitate the literary language without acquiring its precision. I who have been accused so often of writing in a very imperfect, poor language, I who indeed confess to not knowing how to write well, go down on bended knee before those who can write, those who can set their ideas down in that shining, aulic language. And I tell you that I do not know how to write well Introduction xix

for two reasons. One is a personal reason, that is to say my inadequate and incomplete education (I went to the Scuola Normale), and the other is to do with environment and the existence of those three languages I noted above. But though my language is incorrect, though I do not know how to write, and for all that I admire those who write well, I confess that if by chance I learnt how to write like them I would not do so. I believe the vivacity of that uncertain language and that uneven style gives a warmth to my books, and that warmth not only brings to life the characters but preserves them from the corruption of time. That is what I think. Will those other works (and there are not many) written in a purified, icy language survive? The four of us, I mean Verga, De Roberto, me and a little bit Capuana, who are accused of mistakes, we have a public that reads us and follows us: why should we die? The novel is a recent art form, and there are no historical arguments to the contrary. Let's wait and see.9

Serao puts herself in the company of other contemporary writers from the south (Verga and De Roberto were Sicilian, Capuana was Sardinian) who, like her, were developing an indigenous tradition of realist writing. They held in common a desire to deprovincialize Italian narrative writing without sever- ing their personal and cultural ties. Capuana is distanced a little because of his interest in naturalism, and Zola was a writer Serao disapproved of because of his propensity for the psycholo- gically aberrant. Serao always had a profound antipathy for morbidity, sickness and decadence. Her own literary influences, however, also came from France; Bourget, who was a friend and whose wife translated Serao into French, Daudet, Flaubert and above all Balzac. It has. been suggested, not altogether con- vincingly, that Francesco Sangiorgio was modelled on Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre in La comedie humaine. A contemporary of Serao's, the critic Enrico Nencioni, proposed in a review article he published in 1881 that she would benefit by putting aside the French in favour of the more salubrious influence exercised by English writers such as Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot. Like most of her readers he felt that her strength lay in the depiction of lower-middle class lives and ambiences, and not the more xx Matilde Serao exotic, rarefied world of the aristocracy where her attempts at a psychologically based narrative do not carry conviction. Italian literary tradition offered Matilde Serao as a woman writer little by way of antecedents. The few women who wrote earlier in the nineteenth century limited themselves to the short story or novella, sometimes written in dialect, designed to edu- cate a small public into an awareness of rural poverty. Although the descriptions of conditions of life were analytic and detailed, characters were presented in a purely idealistic frame, arche- types of morality, modesty and piety, designed to be more edifying than informative. Serao's women, by contrast, are down to earth, creatures as much of flesh as of spirit. But her writing does not cut loose from the traditional ideology of femininity and The Conquest of Rome offers an interesting, unresolved exam- ple of her struggle to accommodate the conventional, and therefore acceptable, view of womanhood within the more independent and individual personalities of her own female characters. There are two women in Francesco Sangiorgio's life. His first romantic attachment is unproblematical. Elena Fiammanti is a striking brunette and gifted singer; entry into her salon launches the young deputy on his social career. His subsequent liaison with her will serve to bring him to the attention of the Roman social world and to make his name known. There is a tradition in narrative that reaches back to Boccaccio's Decameron, of conferring on widows a special status which allows them to have affairs without incurring the usual female risks of pregnancy, matrimony or social ostracism. The reason for this is that it frees them to fulfil their narrative function of providing the younger and less experienced man, often the protagonist, with a social and sexual education. Elena's successor, Angelica Vargas, a beautiful, chaste young woman married to a politician very many years her senior, develops into a more complicated and ambiguous figure than first impressions might suggest. We watch her, through the eyes of Sangiorgio, lost in prayer and grief at the funeral of King Vittorio Emanuele, and later, still unobserved, as she gives way Introduction xxi to her private unhappiness by the river Aniene. Through body and gesture she speaks a language of anguish, passion and despair, but when Sangiorgio falls in love with her^ we begin to suspect that the language of the body can, at times, be mislead- ing. Her apparent purity and innocence might be interpreted, by one less besotted, as self-indulgent sadism, her chastity as frigid- ity. For one critic, Angelica Vargas is to be understood as 'a kind of Pre-Raffaelite, Medusa-like Beatrice ... pale and proud, honest and pure, but thanks more to her frigidity or inhibition than inner personal virtue.' If the two women are to be seen to represent the two faces of womanhood - the whore and the angel, the corrupt and the pure — then the opposition is negated from within. The novel is constructed in blocks interspersing spectacular set pieces, choreographed with the same eye for visual effect as a Verdi opera, with private scenes away from the public arena. Technically, Serao adopts very effectively the practice of moving between the external, objective stance of an implied author, 'as if a huge, invisible photographic machine were photographing them', and the more partial, limited point of view of her protagonist, Francesco Sangiorgio. Sangiorgio's great strength lies in his powers of observation — he watches and he learns — Until his love for Angelica takes away that ability to see. The primacy of the gaze is not only a male prerogative. One of the most interesting aspects of Serao's choice of subject- matter, and one which she develops in all its potential, is the theatricality of parliamentary politics. It is theatre, however, with a difference, for men are now the performers and women the spectators. The first of Serao's set scenes is the official opening of Parliament. The build-up to it begins in a haber- dashery where the invitees swarm to buy gloves and neckties, then to the square outside Montecitorio, Parliament House, where the privileged with tickets *walk slowly so as to be better seen, and while conversing together enjoy the envy of those who had no cards'. Commenting on an occasion more spectacular than the first night at the opera, the voice of the foppish Marquis of Santamara is heard to say: 'What a nuisance these xxii - Ma tilde Serao performances are!' Once inside, elegant, expensive women, dressed to be admired, 'are levelling their opera-glasses' upon the more soberly-clothed deputies as they arrive, until the effect of the lighting 'condemned all the colours to a pale monotone'. Indi- viduality and difference are gradually erased, 'the hall seemed to be a huge sanctuary which swallowed up the individual' so trans- forming a parliamentary ritual — the swearing-in and the start of a new parliamentary session — into an almost mystical experience of unity. For the novelist, Parliament has all the ingredients of good theatre with its moments of passion and betrayal, the impression it conveys of actuality and immediacy, its stirring speeches and, in fiction at least, episodes of high drama. In the same way as the detective story, which is the genre it immediately precedes and most closely resembles, its fascination lies in its ability to show us work that is quite unlike the experiences of work of most readers, and in its provision of a context in which characters of different class, culture and background can be brought together without straining the reader's credulity, and where even the most minor character (parliamentary deputy or police suspect) can carry off a colourful cameo role.

Cambridge, 1991 ANN CAESAR

NOTES

1 Giancarlo Buzzi, Invito alia letture di Matilde Serao (Milan, 1981), p. 22. 2 Isabella Pezzini, 'Matilde Serao' in U. Eco et al, Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala (Florence, 1979), p. 64. 3 ibid., p. 64. 4 The Conquest of Rome, p. 109. 5 Edith Wharton, 'Paris' in A Backward Glance (London, 1934), p. 273. 6 Henry James, 'A Roman Holiday*, in Italian Hours (London, 1986), p. 137. 7 The Conquest of Rome, p. 24. 8 Henry Jaines, 'From a Roman Notebook', op. cit., pp. 204-5. 9 Isabella Pezzini, op. cit., p. 63. Introduction xxiii

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

This translation of The Conquest of Rome was first published, by William Heinemann, in 1902. The translation was anonymous and subsequent research has failed to uncover the translator's name. The English text is a reasonably faithful rendering of the original, and is complete but for the exclusion of certain topographical or cultural references which the translator deemed, correctly in my view, too localized to be of interest to an English audience. WORKS BY MATILDE SERAO

Opale, Naples, De Angeli, 1878. Dal vero, Milan, Perussi e Quadrio, 1879. Raccoha minima, Milan, Perussi e Quadrio, 1&81. Leggende napoletane, Milan, Ottino, 1881. Cuore infermo, Turin, Casanova, 1881. Piccole anime, Rome, Sommaruga, 1883. Fantasia, Turin, Casanova, 1883. La virtu di Cecchina, Catania, Giannotta, 1884. II ventre di Napoli, Milan, Treves, 1884. La conquista di Roma, Florence, Barbera, 1885. /] tomanzo dellajanciulla, Milan, Treves, 1886. Vita e avventure di Riccardo Joanna, Milan, Galli, 1887. L'ltalia a Bologna, Milan, Treves, 1888. All'erta sentinella, Milan, Treves, 1889. Fior di passione, Milan, Baldini e Castoldi, 1890. Addio Amorel, Naples, Giannini, 1890. II paese di Cuccagna, Milan, Treves, 1891. Piccolo romanzo, Naples, Pierro, 1895. Castigo, Turin, Casanova, 1893. Le Marie, Naples, Pierro, 1894. Gli amanti, Milan, Treves, 1894. Le amanti, Milan, Treves, 1894. Beatrice, Naples, Pierro, 1895. Telegrafi dello Stato, Rome, Perrino, 1895. L'indifferente, Naples, Pierro, 1896. Carlo Gozzi e lajiaba, in La vita italiana del Settecento, Milan, TreveS,, 1896. Donna Paola, Rome, Voghera, 1897. L'infedele, Milan, Brigola, 1897. Nel sogno, Florence, Paggi, t897. L'ltalia e Standhal, in Vita italiana del Risorgimento, vol. Ill, Florence, 1898 (reissued by Catania, Giannotta in 1904 with the title Un innamorato deiritalia). Introduction xxv

Storia di una monaca, Catania, Giannotta, 1898 (reprint of Per monaca in Romanzo dellajanciulla). Nel paese di Gesu (Ricordi di un viaggio in Palestina), Naples, Tocco, 1899. La ballerina, Catania, Giannotta, 1899. Come unjiore, Florence, Salvatore Landi, 1900. Saper vivere (Norme di buone creanze), Naples, Tocco e Firenze, Landi, 1900. Fascino muliebre, Bergamo, Istituto italiano di arti grafiche, 1901. Suor (jiovanna della Croce, Milan, Treves, 1901. Lettere d'amore, Catania, Giannotta, 1901. La Madonna e i Santi nella Fede e nella vita, Naples, Trani, 1902. Novelli sentimentali, Leghorn, Belforte, 1902. L'anima deijiori, Milan, Libreria editrice Nazionale, 1903. Santa Teresa, Catania, Giannotta, 1906. Storia di due anime, Rome, La Nuova Antologia editrice, 1904. Tre donne, Rome, Voghera, 1905. Sognando, Catania, Giannotta, 1906. Sterminator Vesevo, Naples, Perrella, 1906. Le leggende di Napoli (reprint of Leggende napoletane), Naples, Perrella, 1906. Dopo il perdonc, romanzo, Rome, La Nuova Antologia editrice, 1906. Dopo il perdonc, dramma, Naples, Perrella, 1908. // delitto di via Chiatamone (under the pseudonym Francesco Sangiorgio), Naples, Perrella, 1908. Cristina (reprint of Peppin Fiorillo), Rome, Voghera, 1908. / capelli di Sansone (revised version of Vita e avventure di Riccardd Joanna), Naples, Perrella, 1909. San Gennaro nella leggenda e nella vita, Lanciano, Carabba, 1909. Evviva la vita!, Milan, Treves, 1909. /] pellegrino appassionato, Naples, Perrella, 1911. 0 Giovannino o la morte!, Naples, Perrella, 1912. Evviva la guerra! Primavera italica, Naples, Perrella, 1912. La mano tagliata, Florence, Salani, 1912. Fior di passone (reprint), Piacenza, Rinfreschi, 1914. Ella non rispose, Milan, Treves, 1914. Parla una donna. Diario Jemminile di guerra, Milan, Treves, 1916. La vita e cost lunga, Milan, Treves, 1918. La moglie di un grand'uomo, ed altre novelle scelte dall'autrice, Milan, Quintieri, 1918. Ricordando Neera (conference proceedings), Milan, Treves, 1920. xxvi Matilde Serao

Preghiere, Milan, Treves, 1921. // romanzo delta fanciulla (1st reprint), Florence, Salani, 1921. MOTS tua . . ., Milan, Treves, 1926. Via delle cinque tune, Milan, Garzanti, 1941 (reprinted from 0 Giovannino o la morte! on the occasion of its adaptation for cinema). The Conquest of Rome

PARTI

CHAPTER I

The train stopped. 'Capua! Capua!'1 three or four voices cried monotonously into the night. A clanking of swords dragged on the ground was heard, and some lively muttering that passed between a Lombard and a Piedmontese. It came from a group of subaltern officers, who were ending their evening's amusement in coming to see the night train from Naples to Rome pass through. While the conductor chatted repectfully with the station-master, who gave him a commission for Caianello, and while the postman handed up a mail-sack full of letters to the clerk in the postal van, the officers, talking to each other-and making their spurs ring (from habit), looked to see if anyone got in or out of the train, peeping through the doors which were open for the sight of a fair feminine face or that of a friend. But many of the doors were closed. Blue blinds were stretched over the panes, through which glimmered a faint lamplight, as if coming from a place where lay travellers overpowered by sleep. Bodies curled up in a dark tangle of coats, shawls, and sundry coverings, were dimly discernible. They are all asleep,' said one of the officers; 'let us go to bed.' This is probably a newly-married couple,' suggested another, reading over a door the word 'Reserved.' And since the blind was not drawn, the officer, aflame with youthful curiosity, jumped on the step and flattened his face against the window. But he came down at once, disappointed and shrugging his shoulders. 'It is a man alone,' he said - *a deputy,2 no doubt; he is asleep, too.' 4 Matilde Serao

But the solitary man was not asleep. He was stretched out at full length on the seat, an arm under his neck, and one hand in his hair; the other hand was lost in the bosom of his coat. His eyes were closed, but his face bore not the soft expression of repose, not the deep peace of human lineaments in sleep. Instead, the effort of thought was to be read in those contracted features. When the train had passed the bridge over the X^lturno, and rain into the dark, deserted, open country, the man reopened his eyes, and tried another position more favourable to repose. But the monotonous, everlasting grind, grind of the train racked his head. Now and then a farmhouse, a little villa, a rural cottage, stood out darkly from a dark background; a thin streak of light would ooze out through a crack; a lantern would throw a glimmering, dancing circle in the path of the speeding train. The cold prevented him from sleeping. Accustomed to the mild Southern nights, and not in the habit of travelling, he had set out with a simple light overcoat and neither rug nor shawl; he had a small handbag, and other luggage was following him on the train. Of importance to him were neither clothes, nor maps, nor books, nor linen - nothing but that little gold medal, that precious amulet suspended from his watch-chain. From the day it was his - it had been obtained for him by special request through the quaestor3 of the Chamber — his fingers were perpe- tually running over it with light touch, as if in a mechanical caress. At such times as he was alone he crushed it into the palm of his hand so hard that a red mark would remain on the skin. In order to have the compartment reserved, he had shown this to the station-master, lowering his eyes and com- pressing his lips to fight down a look of triumph and a smile of complacency. And since the beginning of the journey he held it in his hand, as though afraid to lose it, so infusing it with the warmth of the epiderm it was scorching. And so acute was the sensation of pleasure derived from the contact of that possession that he faintly felt every protuberance and every hollow in the face of the metal — felt under his fingers the number and the words: The Conquest of Rome 5

'XIV. Legislature.'4

On the reverse were a Christian name and a surname, indicative of the ownership:

'FRANCESCO SANGIORGIO.'

His hands were hot, yet he shook with the cold. He rose and went to the door. The train was now running through open country, but its noise was subdued. It seemed as though the wheels were anointed with oil as they rolled noiselessly along the rails, accompanying the travellers' sleep without disturbing it. The luminous windows stamped themselves as they fled by on a high, black embankment. Not a shadow behind the panes. The great house of slumbers coursed through the night, driven, as it were, by an iron, fervent will, whirling away with it those wills inert in repose. 'Let us try to sleep,' thought the Honourable Sangiorgio. Stretching out once more, he attempted to do so. But the name of Sparanise, called out softly two or three times at a stoppage, reminded him of a small and obscure place in the Basilicata,5 whence he hailed, and which, together with twenty other wretched villages, had given all their votes to make him a deputy. The little spot, three or four hours distant from an unknown station on the Eboli-Reggio line, seemed very far oft to the Honourable Sangiorgio - far off in a swampy vale, among the noxious mists which in autumn emanate from the streams, whose dried-up beds are stony, arid, and yellow in summertime. On the way to the railway-station from that little lonely place in the dreary tracts of the Basilicata he had passed close to the cemetery - a large, square piece of ground, with black crosses standing up, and two tall, graceful pines. There lay, under the ground, under a single block of marble, his erstwhile opponent, the old deputy who had always been re-elected because of patriotic tradition, and whom he had always fought with the enthusiasm of an ambitious young man ignoring the existence of obstacles. Not once had he defeated him, had this presumptuous young fellow, who was born too late, as the other said, to do 6 Matilde Serao anything for his country. But Death-, as a considerate ally, had secured him a sweeping and easy victory. His triumph was an act of homage to the old, departed patriot. But as he had passed the burial-ground he had felt in his heart neither reverence nor envy in respect to the tired old soldier who had gone down to the great, serene indolence of the tomb. All of this recurred to his mind, as well as the long, odious ten years of his life as a provincial advocate, with the mean, daily task common in the courts, and rare appearance at assizes. Perhaps a land litigation, over an inheritance of three hundred lire, a mere spadeful of ground; a whole miniature world of sordid, paltry affairs, of peasants' rascalities, of complicated lies for a low object, in which the client would suspect his lawyer and try to cheat him, while the lawyer would look upon the client as an unarmed enemy. Amid such surroundings the yourig advocate had felt every instinct of ardour die in his soul; speech, too, had died in his throat. And since the cause he must Defend was barren and trivial, and the men he must address listened with indifference, he at last took refuge in hastening through the defence in a few dry words; therefore his reputation a£ an advocate was not great. Now he was entirely bereft of/ the capacity to regret leaving his home and his old parents, who at seeing him go had wept like all old persons of advanced years when someone departs through that great selfishness which is a trait of old age. Many secret, furious tempests, smothered eruptions that could find no vent, had exhausted the well-springs of tenderness in his heart. Now, during this journey, he remembered it all quite clearly, but without emotion, like an impartial observer. He shut his eyes and attempted to sleep, but could not. In the train, however, everyone else appeared to be wrapped in deep slumber. Through the noise and the increased rocking the Honourable Sangiorgio seemed to hear a long, even respira- tion; he seemed almost to see a gigantic chest slowly rising and falling in the happy, mechanical process of breathing. At Cassino, where there was a stop of five minutes at one in the morning, no one got out. The waiter in the cafe was asleep under the petroleum lamp, motionless, his arms on the marble The Conquest of Rome 7 table and his head on his arms. The station men, huddled up in black capes, with hoods over their eyes and lantern in hand, went by, testing the journals, which gave forth the sound of a metal bell, clear, crystalline in tone. The whistle of the engine, as the train started, was gently shrill; the loud, strident voice was lowered as if by courtesy. Resuming the journey, the movement of the train became a soft rocking, without shocks, without grating, without unevenness, a rapid motion as on velvet, but with ^ dull rumble like the snoring of a giant in the heavy plenitude of his somnolence. Francesco Sangiorgio thought of all those people who were travelling with him: people in sorrow over their recent parting, or glad at nearing their new bourn; people loving without hope, loving tragically, or loving happily; people taken up with work, with business, with anxieties, with idleness; people oppressed by age, by illness, by youth, by felicity; people who knew they were journeying towards a dramatic destiny, and those who were going that way unconsciously. But they all, within half an hour, had one by one yielded to sleep, in full forgetfulness of body and soul. The gentle, pacific, healing balm of rest had come to still the unquiet spirits, had soothed them, had spread over those perturbed mortals, whether too happy or too unhappy, and they were all at ease in their sleep. Irritated nerves, anger, disdain, desires, sickness, cowardice, incurable grief — all the bestiality and grandeur of human nature travelling in that nocturnal train was lost in the great, calm embrace of sleep. The train was hastening to their fate — sad, lucky, or commonplace — those dreaming spirits and those prostrate shapes of beings who were tasting the profound delight of painless annihilation, leaving it to a power outside of themselves to bear them along. 'But why cannot I sleep also?' thought Francesco Sangiorgio. For a moment, as he stood in his solitary compartment under the wavering light of the oil-lamp, with the pitch-black earth scudding by past the windows, with the light vapour that clouded the glass, with the cold of the night that was growing more intense - for a moment he felt alone, irremediably lost and abandoned in the feebleness of his situation. He repented having 8 Matilde Serao so proudly asked for a reserved compartment, wished for the company of a human being, of anyone whomsoever, of anyone of his kind, even the very humblest. He was dismayed and terrified like a child, imprisoned in that cage out of which there was no escape, drawn along by a machine which he was powerless to stop in its course. Seized with unreasoning horror, with parched throat he dropped helplessly on the seat, from which, pricked by a latent reflection, he suddenly jumped up; he began to walk nervously back and forth. 'It is Rome, it is Rome,' he murmured. Yes, it was Rome. Those four letters, round, clear, and resonant as the bugles of a marching army, now rang through his imagination with the persistency of a fixed idea. The name was short and sweet, like one of those flexible, musical names of women which are one of the secrets of their seductions, and he twisted it about in his mind in queer patterns, in contorted curves. He was unable, he did not know how, to shape a notion of what those four letters, cut as it were in granite, actually represented. The fact that it was the name of a city, of a large agglomeration of houses and people, eluded him. He did not know what Rome was. Through want of the leisure and the money to go there, he, the obscure little advocate, the utterly insignificant, had never been to Rome. And never having seen it, he was unable to form any but an abstract conception of it: as a huge, strange vision, as a great fluctuating thing, as a fine thought, as an ideal apparition, as a vast shape with shadowy outlines. Thus all his thoughts about Rome were grand, but indefinite and vague — wild comparisons, fictions that developed into ideas, a tumult of fantasies, a crowded jumble of imagina- tions and conceits. Beneath the cold mask worn by the pensive son of the South burned an active imagination habituated to selfish and solitary meditations. And Rome threw that mind into furious commotion! Oh, he felt Rome — he felt it! He saw it, like a colossal human shade, stretching out immense maternal arms to clasp him in a strenuous embrace, as the earth did Antaeus,6 who was thereby rejuvenated. He seemed to hear, through the night, a woman's The Conquest of Rome 9 voice uttering his name with irresistible tenderness, and a volup- tuous shudder ran over him. The city was expecting him like a well-beloved son far from home, and magnetized him with the mother's desire for her child. How often from the little over- arched, embowered terrace in front of his house, in his Basilicata, had he stared out upon the horizon beyond the hill, thinking how, over there, over there under the bend of the sky, Rome was waiting for him! Like faithful, reverent lovers who have an adored one afar, and who are consumed with the desire to be at her side, he sorrowfully thought of the great distance separating him from Rome; and as in cases of crossed love, men, things, and events interposed between him and his adored. With what deep, self- avowed hatred, all asurge in his heart, did he detest those who put themselves in the way of himself and the city that was calling him! Like lovers, in their inmost thoughts, nothing was present to him but the rapturous vision of the being he loved and was loved by: all those black shadows eclipsing the brightness of his dream enraged him. Bitterness invaded him; rancour, anger, scorn, and desires accumulated in his mind — as with lovers. With Rome ever in his heart, the ten years' strife had changed him. A secret distrust of all others and a sovereign esteem of himself; continued and oft harmful introspection; the steady assumption of outward calm while his heart rioted within; a profound contempt for all human endeavours foreign to ambition; growing experience of the discrepancy between wish and fulfilment; the consequent delusions, kept private, but no less bitter for that; the love of success, success only, nothing else than success — all this had been born in his innermost soul. Yet sometimes, in the dark hours of despair, he was prostrated with unspeakable debility; humiliation drove out pride; he felt himself a poor, miserable, futile creature. Like lovers, when bad fortune overtakes them, he felt unworthy of Rome. Ah! he must possess himself in patience, fortify himself with persistence, temper his strength in adversity, purify his spirit in the cleansing fire, like a saint of old, in order to be worthy of Rome. Sacred as a priestess, mother, bride, Rome must have expiations and sacrifices, must have a heart unalloyed and a will of iron! 10 Matilde Serao

'Ceprano! Geprano! Fifteen minutes' stop!' was being shouted outside. The Honourable Sangiorgio looked about him, listened as one dazed. He had been raving.

First a bar of pallid green; then a cold, livid lightness, creeping slowly upward until it reached the top of the heavens. In that chillness of expiring night opened the vast Roman Campagna.7 It was an ample plain, whose colour was as yet indistinct, but which here and there undulated like the dunes of the seashore. This Sangiorgio observed as he stood erect by the window. The dense shadows as yet unconquered by the encroaching white- ness gave the Campagna the aspect of a desert. Not a tree in sight. Only, from time to time, a tall thick hedge, that seemed to make a circular bow and run away. The stations now began to look grey, all wet still with the nocturnal dews, their windows barred and their green shutters closed, these taking on a reddish tint; the mean little oleanders, with their branches hanging down and their blossoms dropping on the ground, looked as though they were weeping; and there was the clock with large, white disc, splashed with moisture, the dark hands and the fat body likening it to a two-legged spider. The station-master, huddled up in his cloak, with a scarf wound about the lower part of his face, marched with lowered cape up and down among the porters. In the cold morning air an insidious, acrid smell of damp earth pierced to the brain. A large place high up on a hill, fortified by a surrounding wall and two towers, stood forth gray and ancient, with a medieval air: it was Velletri. The train seemed to be waking up. In the next compartment there was a scraping on the floor, and two people were talking. Out of a first-class window protruded the head of a Spanish priest, with hard, shaven cheeks of a bluish hue, who was lustily puffing at a cigar. And as the white, frosty dawn irradiated the whole sky, the nakedness of the Campagna appeared in all its grandeur. On those fields, stretching beyond sight and dimly lighted, grew a sparse, short grass of a soft, marshy green; here The Conquest of Rome 11 and there were yellowish stains, blotched with brown, of coarse, rude earth, stony, muddy, uncultivable. It was an imperial desert ungraced by any tree, undarkened by any shadow of man, untraversed by any flight of bird; it was desolation, enormous and solemn. In the contemplation of this landscape, which resembled nothing else whatever, Sangiorgio was seized by a growing surprise that absorbed all his individual dreams. He stood look- ing out, mute and motionless, from the corner of the coach, trembling with cold, conscious that the beating of his temples was abating. Then by degrees his eyelids became heavy, a sensation of lassitude came over his whole body; he felt the full fatigue of his wakeful night. He would have liked to stretch himself out in the railway-carriage with a comfortable ray of sunshine streaming in through an open window, and to get an hour's sleep before reaching Rome; he was envious of the people who had spent the long hours of the night in getting renewed strength from sleep. The journey was now seeming intolerably long to Sangiorgio, and the spectacle of the Campagna in its majestic poverty was oppressive to him. Would it never end? Would he never be in Rome? He was worn out: a sensation of torpor was spreading from his neck through all his limbs, his mouth was pasty and sour, as if he were convalescing from an illness, and his impati- ence became painful, a sort of small torture; he began to pity himself, as though an injustice had been done him. The ordinary passenger trains were too slow; he had done wrong to come in this one, expecting to sleep during the night; this last hour had been unendurable. The reality of his dreams was upon him, close as close could be, and the proximity caused him a shock of gladness. He felt he was hastening towards Rome, like a lover to his lady; he strove to be calm, inwardly ashamed of himself. But the last twenty minutes were a veritable spasrn. With his head out of the window, receiving the damp smoke of the engine in his face, without a further look at the Campagna, without a glance at the fine aqueducts running over the plain, he stared into the distance, believing and fearing that at every moment 12 Matilde Serao

Rome would appear, and was depressed by a vague feeling of terror. The Campagna vanished behind him as if it were drown- ing, going down with the moist fields, the yellow aqueducts, and the little white road-labourers' houses. The locomotive seemed to be increasing its speed, and from time to time gave vent to a long, long, piercing whistle twice and thrice repeated. At nearly all the windows heads were peering out. Where was Rome, then? It was nowhere to be seen. So strong was his trepidation that when the train commenced to slacken the Honourable Sangiorgio sank down on the seat; his heart beat under his throat as though it filled up his whole chest. As he stepped down upon the platform from the footboard, the violent throbbing within him was answered by as many imagin- ary hammer-like blows upon the head. Yet all that the railway officials said was 'Rome.' But he was seized with a slight trembling in the legs; the crowd surrounded him, pushed him, jostled him, without paying any attention to him. He was between two currents of passengers, arrived simultaneously by two trains, from Naples and Florence. The Honourable Sangior- gio was bewildered among so many people; he leaned against the wall, his handbag at his feet, and his eyes wandered through the crowd as if in search of someone. The station was still quite damp and rather dark, smelling horribly, as usual, of coal, of oil, of wet steel, and was full of black waggons and high piles of accumulated luggage. All faces were tired, sleepy, ill-humoured, expanding into a yawn about the mouth; their sole expression was one of indifference, not hostile, but invincible. No one noticed the deputy, who had unfastened his overcoat with the childish motive of displaying his medal. Twice he called to a porter, who went off without listening to him. Instead, the employees of the railroad were gathering round a group of gentlemen in tall hats, with pale, bureaucratic countenances, who had on black tailcoats and white cravats under buttoned-up overcoats, their collars up, and their faces sallow from short sleep. They bore the aspect of persons of position accomplishing a high social formality. When from a coach in the Florence train a tall, slender, fashionable lady alighted they all uncovered. Then