THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
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which three torrents of water gush out into the large and similarly
curving basin, belongs to it honestly; faith and the dream have as–
sumed one image, in which the orphans next door do their washing
and through whose three gaping frames, the church doors, you see
an incongruous house wall and a collection of carpenter's rubbish, and
nothing else could so properly stand over that landscape. The popes
knew what they were doing when they engraved themselves as most
of them did on fountains; for the mind bred on tension and principle
nothing could be so disturbing.
But this is at the rim, up a way from the thick of things. It is
in Pasquin's district, down across the Tiber in the neighborhood of
another great fountain, that you find the truest Romans, though
some will tell you that none are left in that category but the statue–
wits Pasquin, Marforio and The Foot.
uNoialtri siamo dei fessi.
All
the rest of us are horses' asses." The central fountain of this district
is Bernini's one of the four rivers in Piazza Navona. Many of the
streets around are named for guilds; they are of the butchers, the
bakers, and so on, and at the
trattorie
you are likely to come on a
tableful of carpenters or iron-workers having their evening wine. A
peculiar thing is how often they are talking about Rome and them–
selves its inhabitants, in those terms;
i romani, noialtri romani
are
like this or that, behave this way or that; there never was a city at
the same time so unexclusive and so fascinated by its own character,
although if it were threatened like Paris at the Marne it is hard to
imagine that many Romans would willingly give up their motorcycles
to help defend it. It would not seem very vital, and by the same
token the recent German occupation, which was as vicious as any–
where else though in some ways no more galling than the French
ones of the last century, has left no sense of human breakage, none
of that cracking and splintering that occurred in some places; and so
the city was saved better than most after all; there were not even
many collaborationists; it must have been maddening, more than
Horatio to Lars Porsena.
The most conspicuous public character in the quarter is a
woman-a newspaper vendor named Carolina. It may be that the
real power is another woman, her friend, who runs a small cafe–
restaurant on a much more secretive little piazza, triangular and hilly,
back of Navona. This woman is massive in every way, having some
