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Updated: May 13, 2025
The flight of steps to the west door is very long, and she climbed slowly, stopping once or twice to take breath and look back at the crowded roofs and many church domes of Rome, and at the green heights of the Janiculan hill beyond, with the bronze figure of Garibaldi on his horse, dominant, and very clear against the sky.
His interest in her led him gradually to other thoughts partly disagreeable, partly philosophical. He had once and only once found himself involved in a serious love-affair, which, as it had left him a bachelor, had clearly come to no good. It was with a woman much older than himself gifted more or less famous a kind of modern Corinne whom he had met for a month in Rome in his first youth. Corinne had laid siege to him, and he had eagerly, whole-heartedly succumbed. He saw himself, looking back, as the typically befooled and bamboozled mortal; for Corinne, in the end, had thrown him over for a German professor, who admired her books and had a villa on the Janiculum. During the eighteen years which had elapsed since their adventure, he had quite made it up with her, and had often called at the Janiculan villa, with its antiques, its window to the view, and the great Judas tree between it and Rome. His sense of escape which grew upon him was always tempered by a keen respect for the lady's disinterestedness, and those high ideals which must have led her for what else could? to prefer the German professor, who had so soon become decrepit, to himself. But the result of it all had been that the period of highest susceptibility and effervescence had passed by, leaving him still unmarried. Since then he had had many women-friends, following harmlessly a score of 'chance desires'! But he had never wanted to marry anybody; and the idea of surrendering the solitude and independence of his pleasant existence had now become distasteful to him. Renan in some late book speaks of his life as 'cette charmante promenade
A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' sake over to San Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here almost like pearls in a dunghill are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite of Italian minds.
Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch tower behind Bello Squardo.
At half-an-hour's walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its clear- sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan.
It lay on a gentle slope above the river, at the foot of the Janiculan Hill; around it spread public porticoes, much decayed, and what had once been ornamental gardens, now the pasture of goats. As Basil had expected, he was kept waiting without the doors until the porter had received orders regarding him.
Belisarius, as soon as the Goths retreated, ordered the repairing of an aqueduct, that which served the transtiberine district, and was indispensable to the working of the Janiculan mills, where corn was ground; but, after his departure, there was neither enough energy nor sufficient sense of security in Rome for the restoration of even one of the greater conduits.
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