Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 86, February, 1875Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 86, February, 1875
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
ground is called the _Pincetto_--as who should say the "Little
Pincian"--a name adapted from that of the celebrated promenade of the
gay and fortunate in life, with a suggestion of meaning so satirical
that it might seem to have been given to the "fashionable" quarter of
the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the
undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of
course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and
some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor,
and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of
numerous weeping willows and other such botanical helps to sentiment.
The great majority of the inscriptions are in Latin, for Pius IX., so
long as his power lasted, absolutely forbade the use of any other
language; which was a measure of very questionable judiciousness, seeing
that a large crop of Latinity by no means creditable to Italian
scholarship has been the result. It would have been better to stick to
good Della-Cruscan Italian, or to have employed some English
school-usher to come here as resident reviser of Roman Latinity.
Inelegant and even ungrammatical inscriptions, however, do not interfere
with the general picturesqueness of the spot, or with its singular
adaptation to show to advantage the remarkable scene enacted there on
the last "Giorno dei Morti."
The cemetery had been visited by great numbers of persons, bringing
chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the
plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and
the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one,
which did not make the scene by any means less strange and
weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially in the poor
quarter of the dead city, were women. Such is always the case, whether
it be that the female mind is more generally accessible to gentle
thoughts of and yearnings over their lost ones, or whether the
explanation be simply that, as is especially the case here, women,
having less to occupy their leisure either in the way of business or
amusement, are more eager to seek any emotion or occasion which may
serve to break the flat monotony of their lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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