LUCA CODIGNOLA FRANCIS PARKMAN'S ROMAN EXPERIENCE (1844) On 5 April 1844, the twenty-year old Francis Parkman (1823-93) wrote to his mother, Caroline Hall Parkman (1794-1871), from Rome.' He had been there for some six weeks and was about to leave for Florence. He had fallen under the charm of the Eternal City. "You may think two months a long time to remain in Rome, but it is not too much to see the place thor- oughly-in fact, it is not half enough. I do not think the time could be more profitably spent. "^ He was careful to reassure her that his extended stay had nothing to do with a new penchant towards Roman Catholicism: "The farce of [Joseph] Coolidge Shaw has not been reenacted in my person." J.C. Shaw (1821-50 ori 851), as we shall see, was a cousin of the Parkmans and had recently converted, vainly trying to persuade Parkman to follow his example. "We are in the midst of the fooleries before the Holy Week," Parkman continued, going on to describe the weeks before Easter and the pagan rites performed by the superstitious faithful in their thousands.^ Almost 46 years later, a historian of great repute, Parkman was still using expressions of the kind to describe his days in Rome to a consider- ably wider public. That had proved a useful, first-hand introduction to the Catholic world he was afterwards to write about so extensively in his books, he explained. However, it had had no particular effect on his philo- sophical or religious convictions, despite the many positive aspects he was forced to acknowledge in so many members of the Catholic Church.'^ One A preliminary and shorter version of this article was published as Luca Codignola, "Francis Parkman. I giorni romani (18 febbraio-9 aprile 1844)," // Veltro. Rivista della Civiltà Italiana, 38:3-4 (maggio-agosto 1994):163-184. The author wishes to thank James M. Muldoon for his most useful comments on the draft of this manuscript. ^Massachusetts Historical Society, Parkman Papers, Francis Parkman to Caroline Hall Parkman in Boston, Rome, 5 Apr. 1844; published in Parkman, Letters, 1:16-17. This was most probably Francis Parkman's answer to the objections contained in a letter, signed by his mother and father, Francis Parkman (1788- 1852), that he had just received. -^Parkman, Letters, 1:16. "^Parkman, "Convent." Quaderni d'italianistica. Volume XXVI, No. 1, 2005, 77 Luca Codignola of Parkman's biographers, American historian Howard N. Doughty (1904- 70), who carefully examined his four months in Italy, maintains that Parkman's Roman experience, though important, "was less direct in its bearings on what he was to do, and was not of a particularly dramatic cast,"^ an opinion on which American literary critic Jenny Franchot dis- agrees.*^ American art historian William L. Vance too is not convinced of the truth of this image of basic uniformity in the "antagonistic attitude towards Catholics" which Parkman tries to give to himself According to Vance, his days in Rome had a significant influence on his perception of Catholicism, despite his profoundly Protestant, Bostonian backgrounds Everything we know about Parkman's stay in Rome comes from three printed sources, all of them his. The first to be published was the autobio- graphical article which appeared in the popular Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1890, three years before his death. After the publication of his journals, "A Convent in Rome" is chiefly interesting as an end-of-life interpretation of his visit to Catholicism's spiritual and political centre, although it con- tains additional information not given in the journals.*^ The second source, the journals themselves, are of course by far the most important. During his European tour (16 November 1843-17 June 1844), Parkman kept a journal, written in ink in two thick notebooks. The first of these, with a leather spine and marbled-paper covers, contains the notes on his Rome visit. These journals were used by Parkman's earliest biographers, Charles Haught Farnham (1841-1929), his personal secretary, and by Henry Dwight Sedgwick (1861-1951).'^ Both underestimated them and actually drew on them very little. To all intents the journals "dropped out of sight and out of memory" from 1904 to 1940, when the American historian Hugh Mason Wade (1913-86) rediscovered them in a drawer in Parkman's old house in Boston, at 50 Chestnut Street. Immediately after publishing his biography of Parkman, Wade edited the entire journals cor- pus (1943-46), publishing them in 1947. The weeks in Rome are docu- mented in almost daily entries, with the exception of the period between 28 February and 23 March. Seemingly written at the end of his stay, the -'Doughty, Parkman, pp. 77-86, quotation at p. 78. Doughty, however, points out that, "in a lesser way," Parkman's Roman days were comparable to his sojourn among the Sioux. "Franchot, Roads, p. 386 n. 59. ^ Vance, America, 2:163. Q Parkman, "Convent. " ^Farnham, Life; Sedgwick, Parkman. — 78 — Francis Parkman's Roman Experience (1844) account allows no precise reconstruction of the sequence of events, although the most significant facts and impressions are given sufficient space. '0 The third source is the above-mentioned letter to Parkman's mother, dated 5 April 1844, published in 1960 in a selection of his letters edited by the American historian Wilbur R. Jacobs, Parkman's most recent biogra- pher. His criteria for selection was based on "literary merit or ... significant information about his life, his work, or his times. " Unfortunately for us, only the letter to his mother contains any reference to the time in Rome." Parkman's biographers have used the above sources basically for a dis- cussion of his Rome stay as a necessary part of his European Grand Tour, a common enough event for such young Americans as could afford the far- from-negligible travel costs. '2 His itinerary is familiar to cultural historians and literary critics researching the presence of Americans in Italy, above all in the nineteenth century. For the latter, however, Parkman is one of many, and their actual focus is on other figures in literary and art history, or in the history of diplomatic relations. No-one has hitherto examined the two months in Rome as anything beyond Parkman's own account of them, and yet it is a mistake to circumscribe them within the usual European Grand Tour. By examining them in detail, this articles tries to assess how and to what extent they have helped to define his position towards Catholics and Catholicism as shown in his multi-volume series, "France and England in North America."'^ Parkman was only nineteen when he informed his Harvard tutor Jared Sparks (1789-1866), the American historian and friend of his father's, that he intended to dedicate himself to research into the Seven Years' War.'^ He soon afterwards extended his field to the North American conflict between France and England. To this end Parkman considered it necessary to "to paint the forest and its tenants in true and vivid colors" and "to realize a ^^Wade, Parkmam Wade, ed., Journals, 1947. The portion relating to 28 February-23 March is 1:179-188. ^ ^Jacobs, Parkman; Parkman, Letters, 1 : Ixi. ^^Jacobs, Parkman, pp. 219-226, has the latest bibliography on Parkman, but omits Eccles, "Parkman," which came out roughly at the same time. Eccles, however, does not even mention Parkman's Grand Tour ^^All quotations from Parkman's works are from their latest two-volume edition (1983-91). ^ "^Harvard College Library Sparks Papers, Parkman to Jared Sparks, Cambridge, 28 April [1842]; published in Parkman, Letters, 1:9. — 79 — Luca Codignola certain ideal of manhood, a litde mediaeval. "^^ To get to know the aborig- inal peoples, Parkman went West along the Oregon Trail. To get to know the Middle Ages, Parkman went to Rome.'^ As Parkman confessed in 1890, his attraction for "phenomena of reli- gious enthusiasm, whether in its active or fossilized state" went hand in hand with "a fancy for mediaevalism," and the desire "to get for a while out of the nineteenth century."^'^ In fact, at the time of Parkman's tour the Middle Ages were romanticized as the golden age of Catholicism—"intel- lectually and aesthetically alive, peace loving, charitable and honest.''^^ In one of her letters from Rome to the New-York Daily Tribune, for example, American literary critic Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-50) described the white-cloaked Italian Risorgimento leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), as the quintessential medieval hero.'^ Garibaldi's medieval image held on for many years: "The man who more than any man of our time has fur- nished modern Europe with a specimen of medieval romance has just died ... His match must be looked for among the Knights of the Round Table or the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne," The Nation reported in 1882.^0 The Eternal City was then much more than a tourist attraction. It could pro- vide Parkman with a vision of a Catholicism that was much different from that circulated in the United States, and especially in New England, in the 1830s and the 1840s. In those decades, when Parkman was a child and then young man, the xenophobia mainly directed at the large waves of migrants from Ireland found its most vocal expression in the anti-Catholic nativist propaganda, as witnessed by the 1834 fire that destroyed the Charlestown, Massachusetts, Ursuline school for girls and the Maria Monk hate literature. -1 Quintessential, "medieval" Catholicism, as provided by -'Massachusetts Historical Society, Parkman Papers, Parkam to Martin Brimmer, [Boston, 1886]; published in Sedgwick, Parkman, p.