Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [50]
From Hadrian’s Villa, Morse traveled to Subiaco, about forty-five miles from Rome, bobbing along part of the way on a donkey over the steep twisting rocky paths. As many other artists had, he found the place uniquely picturesque—flocks of goats, twanging guitars, ruined convents, peasants in sugarloaf hats. He sketched in oil a rustic outdoor chapel, from which he made a larger landscape that shows a contadina kneeling before a shrine to the Virgin.
Morse got around Rome, too. He often attended concerts, and took in performances of The Barber of Seville and Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet. He visited the Protestant cemetery, where he copied down the odd inscription on a stone marking the burial of “a young English Poet … whose name was writ in water.” He was entertained one evening at the house of the painter Joseph Severn, but may never have realized that the peculiar grave was that of Severn’s dear friend, John Keats. In some fear of being mugged, he entered the Colosseum on a still night. Surrounded by broken moonlit piers and arcades, he seated himself in the center of the arena, where once stood a colossal statue of the sadistic Nero.
Apart from the superb art and antiquities, most of what Morse saw of Italian life disgusted him. He had arrived in Rome during the carnival season, in time to observe some of the festivities in the Via del Corso. The decorated thoroughfare was mobbed with revelers costumed as bears, harlequins, and even Satan, pelting each other with flowers and imitation sugar plums. Travel writers romanticized the scene, he thought. In reality it represented only degenerate chaos, “where man seems to delight in the opportunity to demonstrate to his fellowman how near he can approach in appearance and manners to the beasts he imitates.” During the previous year’s carnival a murderer had been publicly drawn and quartered; the merrymakers carried on in full view of his severed festering limbs.
Samuel F. B. Morse, Contadina of Nattuno at the Shrine of the Madonna (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)
Morse found evidence of the country’s “low state of moral feeling” not only in Roman decadence but also in the thievery at all levels of society. Customs inspectors extorted money by slapping on imaginary duties. Merchants asked for their goods three or four times what they were willing to take, trying to grab what they could. Morse learned how to handle price-gougers: “treat them like slaves, hold a haughty domineering manner towards them, you will then get civility.” Worst, at the bottom of the social ladder, were the beggars. Everywhere he had to fend off these “squalid and hideous objects,” including children beseeching him for treats. Once he found himself circled by a whole begging swarm—“such devouring eyes such pushing and bawling … so disgusting a sight.”
And farther south the moral climate was still more sordid. Visiting Naples in the fall, Morse enjoyed the gorgeous bay, and ascended the thundering cone of Vesuvius, the sea of hot lava inside sending up suffocating fumes and showers of hot cinders. He also visited the notorious private rooms of the museum, with their pornographic frescoes and statues, “evidence of the most depraved state of morals.” Far more offensive was the public burial place, which every day opened one of its 365 stone-covered pits to receive corpses of the poor. Holding a handkerchief to his nose and peering into the vault he beheld carcasses of men, women, and children of all ages. Thrown together in heaps, they had been stripped naked and left to corrupt in a mass like offal from a slaughterhouse. “So disgusting a spectacle I never witnessed,” he said. “Never I believe in any country Christian or pagan is there an instance of such total want of respect for the remains of the dead.”
What Morse experienced of Neapolitan filth and noise sickened him hardly less. Bored and mindless, people ate macaroni while delousing each other