THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
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tiny individual foundries opening onto the same streets, and which
may be the family's windowless kitchen and bedroom as well. What
makes these streets Roman, and not those of any old European city,
is
the demonic energy that goes into everything, and the divine dis–
regard for any other form of life, especially in the football players;
also
an element of miracle in the way the motorcycles and other
traffic get through, shooting straight from hell, without anyone's
changing his expression or pace or direction at all.
If
a Roman does
have to move an inch for your car he looks at you like an affronted
'emperor; but on the whole American cars are objects of as pure a
passion as Romans are capable of. "Oh what a fine machine!" a
woman calls out. "When Baffoni comes that'll be for me!" Baffoni
is
Big Whiskers or Uncle Joe-but it was only a gaiety this time, at the
sight of a Buick in her living-room.
The big spaces are distressing too. There is nothing French about
them, none of that spacious public elegance of the Place de la Con–
corde or the views up past the Tuileries. Big Piazza del Popolo,
where the great political mass meetings are held among trees and
flowing streams and Egyptian lions, was even designed by a French–
man, but the Roman look soon grew over it, like the weeds and wild
flowers in the crevices of its twin churches.
Piazza San Pietro, so splendidly reasonable as architecture, at
least until the recent alteration, is not a place for reasonable in–
dividuals to stroll with a happy sense of partaking of the achievement
and somehow corresponding to it, as they would in such a square
in Paris. It is a place for people to congregate in the terrific force
of their gregariousness, their mass cravings, like cattle around a
water-hole; and when it is empty, when there is no saint being made
or other spectacle, it is lifeless: very admirable in its lines but cold,
with ,a hollow look, like the scene of a dream in which after stand–
ing with a great crowd one has suddenly been left alone. But then
as suddenly you find it filled another way; another sequence has
begun. It is a sunny winter afternoon, and now even this enormous
space has become a living-room, or public nursery. The Dome, an–
nouncing itself for miles around as the center of the world, is actual–
ly presiding like a hen over thousands of babies and mothers and
lovers and very ancient people strewn all over the steps of Bernini's
colonnade and the awesome area it encloses, not as if they owned it
