Introduction to the Fountains of Papal Rome

A coin of the period gives a representation of this fountain, and in it can be traced a certain resemblance to the Fontana Paola which stands at the present day on the Janiculum, and which in its size and quantity of water reproduces faintly the fountains of the past.

That fine phrase, "la nostalgie de la civilisation," nowhere finds a more perfect illustration than in the attitude of the Western world toward Rome. Some homing instinct of the human heart has for centuries carried thither men of every nation and of every sort of belief or unbelief; and the conviction that it will bring them thither in the future as in the past is implied in that other name by which we know her. She is the Eternal City. Every one can feel but no one can explain the charm which she has over the spirits of men. Here the psychic forces of the world's great past are stored in imperishable memories. Here each individual finds spiritual influences which seem to have been waiting through the ages for his own peculiar appropriation. King Theodoric, in the sixth century, spoke not only for himself but for all succeeding generations of North­men when he said that Rome was indifferent to none because foreign to none. It seems as if the feeling for Rome were an instinct congenital with our appetites and our passions. It requires no justification and it admits of no substitute. It is dateless and universal. The Gothic king of the past finds a spiritual brother in the schoolboy of today who caught his mother's arm on the Terrace at Frascati to say, with an uncontrol­lable tremor in his voice: "See there; that little spot over there! That is Rome, and she was once the whole world!" King and schoolboy might have met familiarly in some sunny portico of the classic city. Both were members of the great freemasonry of the lovers of Rome, which stretches its network far and wide over our civilization.

In this company there are not a few who find themselves in Rome, yet not able to see Rome - to see it, that is, as the historians, artists, archaeologists, and their own minds call upon them to see it. Their right to tread the Roman streets depends upon their obedience to some law compelling an existence lived entirely in the open air and in the broad sunshine. To such the gates of Paradise seem closed. To be forbidden the galleries and churches and catacombs and the hid­den recesses of the old ruins appears an intolerable fate.