Travel
Diary of Mrs. R.P. Eaton:
Europe,
Egypt, and Palestine, ca. 1857
The Palaces of the Caesars is a plowed field. Half buried arches stand out in their grim desolation, and are overgrown with shrubbery and cypress. Where stood the Villa of the Alacenas, the Golden House of Nero, and the Battles of Titus, is a mass of ruins. A part of the halls and chambers have been excavated, and some of the finest sculptures and verses in the Vatican are found in them. You follow a guide with torches into these rooms, and you still see remains of exquisite marbles, mosaic and frescoes. The ruins of the Baths Caracalla are still more ample and stupendous.
Those of Diocletian were remodeled by Michael Angelo and turned into a church, which, out of Rome, would be regarded as a most magnificent edifice, and yet it includes only a portion of the old structure. The cloisters of this church are extensive and fine, and in its court stand some venerable cypress trees planted by Michael Angelo three hundred years ago. In this church we were shown what were said to be the bodies of the martyrs Felicitus and Prosper, with various other relics. The ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct, stretching away over and beyond the Porta Maggiore, are one of the most striking and impressive relics of the old city, which must have been abundantly supplied with water. There are now over a hundred fountains, some of them very elaborate and picturesque in statuary, and other contrivances for throwing columns of water and spray into the air.
Among the most remarkable and interesting objects in Rome, are the ruins of the Forum and the Coliseum. I have made several visits to these localities; but let me sketch an evening ramble amid the shadows of these astonishing relics of a departed age. On a cloudless moonlight evening, a few of us took a stroll from the Piazza de Spagna to the Corso, and from thence by Trajan’s Forum, whose broken pillars of